Free Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux

servants. We were, we felt, independent spirits—English teachers, health workers, answerable only to our students and patients. I regarded the Peace Corps as a sort of sponsoring group and myself as an individual who had only the most tenuous link with it.
    I had met many Peace Corps officials, and it seemed that the higher you went in the organization, the less you knew, the less you accomplished. The officials were ambitious and political, and it often seemed that they hardly knew us and had little idea of what we were doing. I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. After all, we were supposed to use our initiative. And I think we were never more effective as volunteers than when we were convinced that we were operating alone, at the sharp end, putting our own ideas into practice, far from the bureaucrats.
    Because we were on our own, the Peace Corps officials regarded our situation as delicate. They did not want us to be too visible, too friendly, or too involved. Keep a low profile was the advice we were always offered. I did not follow it, so eventually I got the boot. I was insulted when I was sent out of the country. It seemed like the act of an absent parent, someone I hardly knew asserting his authority over me.
    That is why I do not associate my years in the Peace Corps with group photographs, horseplay, heart-to-heart talks with the rep, images of President Kennedy showing me the way, softball games with the other volunteers, and the hands-across-the-sea camaraderie you see on posters. Not "the dream, the vision," but something far more interesting.
    It was to me most of all the reality of being far from home and yet feeling completely at home. It was the slight sense of danger, the smell of wood smoke from burning blue gums, hearing the Beatles for the first time in a bar in the town of Limbe. In the States there was a sort of revolution in progress, but it had started partly as a result of the first Peace Corps group that had gone to Nepal. Those volunteers returning from Katmandu had blazed the hippie trail.
    In Malawi we had all of that, too—good people, wilderness, music, ganja, dusty roads, hard-working students, and a feeling of liberation. Things were on the move, it seemed. In Malawi I saw my first hyena, smoked my first hashish, witnessed my first murder, caught my first dose of gonorrhea. One of my neighbors, an African teacher, had two wives. My gardener had a gardener. Another neighbor and friend was Sir Martin Roseveare, who liked the bush. He was principal at the nearby teachers' college, and he died only in 1985, in Malawi, at the age of eighty-six. (He'd been knighted in 1946 for designing a fraud-proof ration book.) With two servants, I moved into an African township, where I lived in a semi-slum, in a two-room hut—cold running water, cracks in the walls, tin roof, music blasting all day from the other huts; shrieks, dogs, chickens. It was just the thing. The experience greatly shaped my life.
    When I think about those years, I don't think much about the Peace Corps, though Malawi is always on my mind. I do not believe that Africa is a very different place for having played host to the Peace Corps—in fact, Africa is in a much worse state than it was twenty years ago. But America is quite a different place for having had so many returned Peace Corps volunteers, and when they began joining the State Department and working in the embassies, these institutions were the better for it, and had a better-informed and less truculent tone.
    I still do not understand who had been running the show back then, or what they did, or even what the Peace Corps actually was, apart from an enlightened excuse for sending us to poor countries. Those countries remain poor. We were the ones who were enriched, and sometimes I think that we reminded those people—as if they needed such a thing—that they