Carol and Don Hegeman served as Peace Corps Volunteers in Liberia from 1967 – 1971. After attending a Virtual Hangout for Nimba County, Carol said she was inspired to write more about her time in Liberia.
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Just when I was getting totally sick of Zoom conference calls
during Covid19, Don and I received an unexpected offer for one such call: A Zoom get together for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who had served in Nimba County, a rural county of Liberia where Don and I served during part of our three and a half year long Peace Corps experience.
The moderator asked us to send pictures and stories. We did. About 28 people joined the call, even though some had only gotten the notice that morning.
We saw and heard from volunteers we knew, found other volunteers who had served in our town of Tappita at different times, and there were people from different areas of the larger, sprawling county.
As we talked, we laughed. I got teary eyed over the memories. How long had it been since someone greeted us in Gio (one of the two major languages of the county)?
“Bob wa” (“hello”) someone said and I immediately responded with “Ah oh,” my voice rising high at the “oh” part, to say “hello to you too,” as I had done many times over each day of the year we were there. I had almost forgotten how beautiful that tonal language is and how you didn’t ever pass anyone without that charming sing song greeting.
One Zoom participant was a volunteer who had recently returned from Tappita and sent a photo of the town as it looks now. We couldn’t recognize it. Of course, it had been the epicenter of the civil war and who knows what was left of the original town.
His photo showed telephone poles everywhere. When we served, only the town commissioner had such a thing. There is a hospital now. When we were there, there was only a “dresser,” someone who cleaned and dressed wounds. There a was also a clinic run by missionaries, but that is a long story for another time. Our Peace Corps medical kit was put to use many times for our neighbors.
Other pictures made us relive our wonderful year. Pictures of President Tubman in his motorcade passing through the county. We all had those pictures. Pictures of Peace Corps’ neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Children playing with their home made toys. My favorite was a toy truck. Wheels were limes, attached by sticks to each other and to a cardboard box, then pulled by a string. While it was the second of our three posts in Liberia, Tappita was our favorite. Here are some of those memories that flooded back during and after the call.
Our House and Kitchen 
In Western cultures, the kitchen is often the heart of a home. It remained so for us in Tappita. Throughout Liberia, however, kitchens were outdoor places, with wood or charcoal fires on the bare earth and where rice and stews with palm oil or palm butter (the ubiquitous red nut of the African palm) were prepared.
Little girls, often with a baby on their backs, cooked rice to perfection over small charcoal fires. Measurement was by hand; they felt the weight of the rice in their hand and added it to the boiling water, always in the right amount. Visiting neighbors wanting to learn to bake found my use of measuring cups amusing.
Our water filter sat enthroned in pride of place on a little table in our kitchen. It was important. Our PC docs reminded us constantly to boil our water and then filter it. We did, and still occasionally got sick. A tiny two-person table that folded away when not in use served as our dinner table. A tiny fridge—the envy of most people in town, and a sink (a basin it on a table without a hole) rounded out the kitchen.
You might ask, “Where did the water for that sink come from and where did it go?” Initially it came in a bucket from a well in front of our house.
Later, Don built a system in which rainwater that ran off the roof was directed into a barrel with a spigot on its bottom, which served as a model for the townspeople. Don added a hose to bring the rainwater into the basin. Dirty dish and laundry water were simply thrown out the window. There was also a hose outside that Don attached to a shower head. It sure beat the bucket bath we previously used to get the red dust of the roads off our bodies. Lots of people stopped by to see the rain barrel. We were happy that some copied it—adding to the number of houses in town with “running” and cleaner water.
We didn’t need water for the toilet. We had an outhouse.
It was an adjunct job to our main ones to share what was called “appropriate technology” which translates as appropriate for an area that could not rely on what we see as normative technology – running water electricity and plumbing. The rain barrel was our biggest success.
Another vibrant memory was rainy season in our Tappita house. West Africa had two seasons- wet and dry. Traditional houses were round and thatched. More modern houses, such as the ones Peace Corps and other teachers lived in, had corrugated tin roofs. The rain falling on them made a deafening clatter. Once we got used to it, it lulled us to sleep. We sometimes put on classical tapes to accompany the rain. Also, the rain was critical. If it came at the right time, the harvests were secure and the entire town celebrated.
Tappita Jobs
After two years of service as teachers in New Kru Town, a teeming poor suburb of Liberia, we were asked to stay on for another year in Tappita. Don was especially needed to take and develop photographs of the typical work of Liberian people and Liberian industries (farming, logging, smithies) for use in the first Liberian social studies text for elementary students. It was a wonderful assignment for the budding photographer and we both learned so much from it.
For that work, he needed a darkroom. We had a little generator we turned on only for that work. As volunteers, we wanted to live a lifestyle as close to our neighbors as possible, and only a few high government officials and the missionaries had generators. Several men came to the house to learn how a dark room worked and the use of a single lens reflex camera.
Peace Corps found a job for me as a TISEP volunteer. TISEP stood for Teacher In-Service Education Program. TISEP volunteers went to area schools and used low-cost techniques to improve the rote learning which was the main way things were taught.
I remember first and second graders sing-songing:
“S-O, so” “L-O, lo” “ N-O, no”
“1 and 1 is 2”, “2 and 1 is 3”, “2 and 2 is 4”
For long seemingly endless periods of time. They also chanted the names of the presidents of Liberia. To take a break from rote learning, I taught and demonstrated phonic games to teachers in the hope they would use them.
In another use of “appropriate technology,” I had a little budget to buy butcher’s paper rolls, masking tape and magic markers. Schools in towns of some size, like Tappita, had a black board and sometimes chalk, but schools in tiny villages had nothing like that to offer active, rather than rote learning.
Taped on a wall, the butcher’s block paper became kind of a blackboard. I did some phonics that way. I also did “experience” stories with children, writing down stories that they told me. They later did some sight reading with those stories, with pictures they made of the story to help them along.
I wonder if teachers resented me coming in and telling them how to do their jobs. I was clearly younger than almost all of them, However, I carried a letter from the government telling them they were to take my classes. I made the classes interactive and that helped. It also helped that they all went back to their villages with the paper, markers, and tape.
There were, at the time, only two colleges in the country and, to the best of my memory, two teacher training schools. Teachers with college degrees were usually in Monrovia and often not in the primary level. In the back country, some teachers had not finished high school. I worked with skilled teachers to co-teach some sessions and I think that was effective. I wonder sometimes what happened to the teacher training activities I developed.
What an amazing Zoom experience- not only a meet up but an invaluable time travel to a distant time.
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