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¶ At Harvard, 45 men and women (including three married couples) are training for secondary-school teaching in Eastern Nigeria. Picked from 1,400 candidates, they will spend seven weeks at Harvard, then travel next month to the cooperating University College at Ibadan for four months of orientation and practice teaching.
¶ Ruggedest assignment belongs to 43 men at Texas Western College in simmering El Paso. They are surveyors, civil engineers and geologists (median age: 26), headed for road building in transportation-poor Tanganyika. Up at 5:45, they tackle Swahili, East African culture, U.S. history and world politics, study Thoreau, Marx and Lenin, after lunch head for the dusty hills to lay out imaginary roads. Then comes an hour of physical conditioning ("We don't hike up mountains. We run up them."), followed by more classes after dinner. "I never worked so hard in my life," says one weary student. "Tanganyika can't be any tougher than this." Late this month the group will go to Puerto Rico for three weeks of camp-out training, followed by seven more weeks of intensive language study at a center on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. To one of their Texas Western professors, who has taught for 20 years, "this is the smartest bunch I've ever seen." Equally admiring is the mayor of Tanganyika's biggest city, Dar es Salaam, who visited El Paso last week to inspect the troops. "I am impressed," said he, "with the zest of these young men."
¶ Living and breathing Ghana night and day are 58 men and women at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Next month, after eight weeks of twelve-hour days at Berkeley, they start two-year, no-vacation jobs in Ghana, teaching English, French, math, chemistry, physics and biology in secondary schools. To prepare, they have delved into such matters as leprosy, midwifery, "how to be a woman in East Africa," and bush nutrition ("Fish heads are good, but you don't have to eat the eyes."). They have spent a required nine hours each in the night emergency ward at Berkeley's Herrick Hospital. Ghana itself may not be all that grim. The Ministry of Education, their boss, recently crashed through with $1,960-a-year salaries (in addition to the Peace Corps' $75 a month). Three highly educated Ghanaians are on hand at Berkeley to teach Twi, one of Ghana's principal languages. Alarmed at the erudition of these teachers, one recruit joked: "My God. we're being sent out to lower their standards!"