TRAVELS

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I was born in Egypt; my father worked for USIA as a film officer. While in Egypt, we were evacuated to Italy (Naples and Rome) in 1956-57 because of the Suez Canal crisis.

Our next post was Nigeria; we lived at 45 Glover Rd. in Lagos, and visited Enugu at least once, and perhaps also Ghana, although I don't remember that. We left Nigeria on my 7th birthday, by boat, and sailed to France where we visited some friends (Howard Simpson) and changed ships for the US.

We spent the next two years in Washington DC, where I attended the Phoebe Hearst School for 2-4th grades (we arrived and left in the middle of the year).

Then we moved to Cotonou, in what was then Dahomey and is now Benin. I felt we were coming home, possibly because of the flight back: we left Idlewild (now JFK) in the dark with miserable cold rain, and the next thing I remember is getting off the plane at Monrovia -- it was eight o'clock in the morning, the sun was shining, and the world was alive around us.

At first we lived right over the USIA center, which meant that I had the use of the library. My brother Tim and I were also put into the local French school, the École Montaigne, and I still remember parts of the dictée we had the first day -- we were to copy the text from the blackboard on to our slates and then take the dictation. I did miserably, but caught up eventually. Tim was slowed down by a bout of hepatitis.

Dahomey was a wonderful place to be a child. We went to a beach near a fishing village, and in the evening the village sent out boats with a loop of net and we all joined in pulling the net to shore and then disentangling the fish. We visited Ganvié, the village on stilts, several times -- once with a travelling performer who made balloon animals and shot them out over the water to the near-riot following us -- and we visited Abomey, the palace of the kings (which has now been refurbished) and saw the thrones resting on skulls and the hut said to have been made of mud mixed with human blood. We visited Ouidah, where as I recall it -- but I think I'm wrong -- the center of town had the old Portuguese trading post (a dingy museum of 19^th century artefacts at that point) across from the Catholic Church, and then juxtaposed to these two sites was the temple of the sacred pythons. We visited the temple once -- a thatched hut at the entrance to a compound. The guardian poked into the thatch and removed a small snake -- 18-24 inches -- and placed it in my hands and without much hesitation I immediately placed it on the ground. At we travelled north to Parakou and Natitangou and Savalou and visited a game-park and saw Somba castles...

Then we were assigned to Paris, and we lived on the Rue de Bourgogne, across the river from the Place de la Concorde. We continued in French schools 8^e and 7e and I had a year and half at the Lycée Montaigne. My father worked at the American Center on the Rue du Dragon, down in the heart of the Latin Quarter, and his job was in part to woo African students studying at the Sorbonne, and who were going to be returning to their countries to occupy positions of some responsibility. And since this was also the era of the Civil Rights Movement, we paid a good deal of attention to Black America. Langston Hughes came to our apartment once (during a big party) and so did Julian Bond and another SNCC delegate. One of them slept in the bottom half of Tim's bunk bed. While in France, we travelled around a bit as well: Spain, Germany, Holland, and England.

Then we were assigned to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Our house was magnificent -- at the end of a mile-long crescent of white sandy beach sheltered behind a coral reef, on a rise of old coral formations. Directly across the road (Toure Drive) the beach turned into a series of private coral coves. My parents spent a good deal of time shelling in the tidal pools. I finished ninth grade at the local international school (it was odd to be studying in English) and then had to go to boarding school. I tried a year at the Duke of York School in Nairobi -- an English Public School experience, with the complications of being in multi-racial post-independence Kenya -- and then switched to a wonderful small private school in Rome where I could indulge my interest in Latin (and was immediately put into Greek by a wonderful teacher, Warren Myers).

We visited game parks, of course, and one summer our cousin Chuck came out from Bloomington, IN, as a graduation present, and so we attempted Mt. Kilimanjaro. Other Embassy parents saw an opportunity here, and my father found himself leading an expedition of 14, with the children of three or four families as well as his own (my mother and youngest brother, Chris, stayed at the hotel outside Arusha. Allegedly Ernest Hemingway had stayed there, but if so the decor had changed since his time: the bedspreads were a Squirrel Nutkins pattern). About half of us made it to the crater's rim at 18,600 feet, but the guides didn't think we had time (or energy) to get around to Gilman Peak, the highest point at 19,300.

During spring breaks at the school in Rome I went once to France, to catch up with an old school friend, and once for a skiing trip to Austria with my friend Hanns Pullen, whose father was with the German embassy in Dar es Salaam.

Then back to the States for college. My first year required a good deal of adjustment, but I think I managed. During my sophomore year I heard about and qualified for the State Department Escort Interpreter program, which provides travelling interpreters to accompany USIA's International Visitor Program (people who come to the US on a one-month grant to see activities in their professional fields and to build contacts). This meant that I got to travel around the US, which was something of a foreign country to me. I had about 25 assignments before my contract was cancelled and it was a wonderful and rewarding experience.

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