Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

Letter Twelve: Little Ambassadors, Big Ambassadors

Stefan Verbano grew up on Guemes Island, the son of Chris Damarjian and Larry Verbano. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Jornalism from the University of Oregon and is currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, Africa.

His home base is a small rural village near Mansa, Zambia where he is working with the local population to establish rural aquaculture and agricultural sufficiency. Through his writings you get a sense of the joy and frustration at trying to make a difference. Stefan has agreed to share his letters with his home community.

Stefan's solar power charger no longer works to power up his laptop - so his emails are getting sparser.


The Ambassador is fourth from the left and Stefan second from the right.

Little Ambassadors, Big Ambassadors

Thursday, November 8th, 2012

When I swore an oath of public service and made the leap from "trainee" to "volunteer" seven months ago, Peace Corps Zambia's Country Director introduced us to the waiting crowd as "little ambassadors." That is, privates preparing to join the unarmed ranks of  U.S. citizens living abroad and representing the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. If our villages are microcosms of Zambia as a country, then I suppose in our own humble way we are their American ambassadors.

But last week I had the privilege to meet someone whom you might call a "big ambassador." U.S. Ambassador to Zambia Mark Storella invited five volunteers to a light dinner in the dining room of one of Mansa's five-star guest houses (waiters with clean shirts, folded napkins blooming out of wine glasses, places set with more than one fork, consistent electricity, etc.) Mr. Storella was journeying through Luapula Province on official business, and made an outreach effort to spare his fellow homesick countrymen with a multi-course meal, cold drinks and lively conversation.

Our suit-and-tie rendezvous in Mansa was the kickoff to several whirlwind visits of health and aquaculture volunteers working in the villages - a select group of which sadly I was not a part.?? The six of us (two new education volunteers, two health volunteers working in clinics and on maternity projects, myself and our volunteer leader who manages the day-to-day provincial affairs in Mansa) were trucked out to the guest house in a Land Cruiser, its troop-transport style seating again bringing me back to the 12-hour car rides up and down the Great North Road during training. It had been almost three months since I had set foot in one of those big white boxes on wheels.

On the outdoor patio we met a woman traveling as part of Mr. Storella's entourage, who beckoned us to chairs and beer. Since I arrived in country, a little part of my soul has died inside every time I have been forced to choose between a bland, fizzy yellow lager from Namibia and a bland, fizzy yellow lager from South Africa. But tonight the bottles were ice cold and on someone else's dime. So, I went for Windhoek Lager. The Ambassador pulled up a chair and greeted us all, beaming with his pale blue eyes and skin tanned like ours under African sun. He was casually dressed without a tie, which he did not fail to turn into a joke, seeing as how the grimy, pit latrine-using, dirty well water-washing volunteers somehow managed to show up to dinner wearing smarter clothes than he did.

As he offered fragments of his life's story in a very mild-mannered and almost hushed tone - probably his defense against the chaos that comes with trying to run an embassy using American logic in an African environment - he asked us follow-up questions from the resumes we provided him with weeks in advance. He talked about growing up in Boston and his love of major league baseball, along with how he made his first baby steps into the U.S. Foreign Service. This broke our group into a long, often pedantic discussion about what life in the foreign service was like and the rigorous, belated application and examination timeline. More than once the ambassador urged us all to take the Foreign Service Exam, but, throughout his reminiscences about how difficult and discouraging the whole process is, I came away with mixed feelings. The test sounded like a more brutal version of the SAT - a combination between trivial pursuit and the hefty final from some post-graduate international political relations course – involving mock scenarios testing one's skills at negotiation and group management along with questions about obscure political and economic systems in obscure places like Montenegro. The best way to prepare for the merciless mental probing, the Ambassador said, was to start reading every coming issue of The Economist cover to cover starting now and not stopping until your passing grade is in-hand. His description of one scene in the exam's one-on-one interview portion kept eliciting scenes from bad detective movies where the good cop and bad cop silhouetted against one glaring incandescent bulb put the screws to criminals ready to crack. It sounded like an interrogation, where by the end of it my examiners convince me of being guilty of some crime of which I was innocent when I walked through the door.

But this fear of having Uncle Sam test my mental stability and try to squeeze out a confession about my communist ties or hallucinogenic drug use was counterweighted with the romance of the job. Flying around to far-flung reaches of the world; learning a slew of interesting languages; representing the better angels of America's nature. So much of it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, with a government paycheck not derived from dirty advertisement money or from Duck Football hysteria. I felt I could wake up every morning and muster up all the patience and good humor I could before I went out and mingled with people of such vastly different races, ethnicities, cultures and creeds. I could show them that people from my homeland cannot be rolled into some neat little ball; that the influences of materialism and pugilism and blind faith are not absolute from sea to shining sea. I could be a scientist working at the chemistry set of foreign policy, adding the ingredients I see valuable, leaving out those I see as a threat to our missions abroad, and hoping it all doesn't turn volatile and blow up in my face. And, after all, it would all make for such a good story.

Despite my misgivings, I knew that at that moment drinking cold beer in the courtyard of a swanky Zambian hotel with a man in whom my country put its utmost faith, the Foreign Service had made him who he was; had tempered his demeanor and given him a hunger for knowledge about the world and its cultural treasures. He had made his mark on three different continents, serving as the Senior Coordinator for Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, as a Deputy Representative at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as well as at the U.S. Embassies in Rome, Bangkok and Paris. And now - with French, Khmer, Italian and Thai on the tip of his tongue - he was now in Africa. If I could look back on such a rich and extensive tour during the golden years of my professional life - doing something I knew was inherently a service to my fellow countrymen and served the greater good of world peace and understanding - then I think I would be fulfilled.

Mr. Storella's gentle prodding was cut short by the call for dinner. Ladies went first. The meal was served with ladles full of nshima, rice, chicken and fried fish which - though the nausea brought about when approaching the tub of speckled-white sticky cornmeal lumps has been slow to die since my three-month prisoner's diet during training - I ate without discriminating. After all, there were no bowls of soya chunks fried in "fat spread" to be found in the serving line, and for that I thanked whatever gods may be.

As we sat back down with our heaping plates, the Ambassador beckoned the dining group to move clockwise around the table and give everyone a chance to introduce  themselves. There were two young Zambian journalists from the Zambian National Broadcasting Corporation (the country's main televised news station) - one of whom sat to my right and the other directly across from me. Another reporter hovered in the background with a television camera mounted on her shoulder, assumedly collecting b-roll footage for a brief soundbite about Mr. Storella's trip. I introduced myself as a fresh recruit for Peace Corps Zambia's Linking Income, Food and  the Environment Project, and spoke a little about my past experiences working with non-profit agricultural organizations stateside. He asked for anecdotes from our work sites, so I recounted stories of suffocating in dusty poultry houses shoveling chicken manure to use in my demonstration garden progressing full-tilt along Chofoshi Stream, sparing the more lurid details, of course.

After we were all better acquainted, Mr. Storella asked that the cameras be shut off in order to have a string of more frank discussions. We talked openly about malaria prophylaxis-induced nightmares and the degrees of horrors we have witnessed thus far working in the villages. Not surprisingly, the health volunteers conveyed the darkest stories: tales of watching babies delivered as stillbirths; mothers purposefully starving their infants out of neglect; medicine shelves that went empty for months at a time. My experiences thus far had not lent me the macabre ability to paint such a picture, but I did bring up the seemingly ubiquitous malnutrition present in Mwanachama and the associated villages, where in this season children with bony legs and arms and bulging bellies climb trees barefoot to gnaw on under-ripe mangoes with lime-green flesh still hard as a rock. The back and forth was dominated primarily by talk of health and education issues in Zambia, but I tried to make my case for the need for agricultural reform, seeing that villagers in my catchment area are preparing to plant next year's maize in the coming weeks and many of whom have not yet received their FRA payments for last year's maize sold almost three months ago. Without this money, of course, farmers are unable to finance the inputs (hybrid seed, inorganic fertilizer) for the coming year, which pushes back the entire process and often results in the rainy season coming to a close in late-April with cobs underdeveloped due to late planting.

When the Ambassador finally opened the floor to our qualms about Peace Corps logistics, the usual bevy of concerns came pouring out; an understaffed medical office, feelings of insecurity while living in the villages, transportation being so unreliable in places like Mansa that many volunteers resort to hitchhiking. In this vein, I thanked my lucky stars that I could not testify on behalf of the first two issues- I have not been hit with any critically debilitating malady requiring medical attention since I set foot in country nearly 10 months ago, and as a hairy, broad-shouldered 100-plus kilogram male I have never felt more safe living out in the bush. All that I could provide was some colorful stories of standing on the side of the road in hole-in-the-wall junction towns for half the day waiting for a benevolent, lead footed Zambian to stop for a quick snack and, in the process, have me sweet-talk him into letting me ride shotgun for 400 kilometers. But some of the other diners did have authentic horror stories from the villages about being harassed by drunken would-be male suiters and waiting days on end in the medical office in Lusaka to undergo something as simple as a blood test. Needless to say, these stories were far less colorful.

As the clock began to draw the attention of more and more of us - including Mr. Storella - we mutually decided that our dinner date had come to a amicable close, and, after a quick photo shoot, the Ambassador bid us farewell with overstuffed boxes of American junk food as a sort of inter-agency peace offering. Embassy vehicles trucked us back home with the coveted cargo in back - chocolate covered, artificial fruit flavored, cheese powder-coated, carmel filled tastes of nostalgia for American kids who would trade their kingdoms for a taste of home. In the days following our formal gathering, I would often lie in bed at night and savor the taste of individually wrapped mini Milky Way bars, thinking about how goodies like these are shipped all over the globe in military aircraft to stock convenience stores in Army barracks and embassy outposts, offering a shard of cream-filled, deep-fried comfort to homesick "agents of virtue" carrying the lighted torch of democracy and development through far-off lands.

We are the "mini-ambassadors"; just one of the many tentacles belonging to an entity of foreign aid and influence powered by airlifted Pop-Tarts.


- Stef


"The opinions and impressions expressed herein in no way represent the official stances or policies of the United States Government, the United States Peace Corps, Peace Corps Zambia or any appendage of the Zambian Government. These writings are intended for a small, select audience comprised of the author's friends, family members and associated parties back home, and are written in the capacity of a private U.S. citizen abroad and not officially as a Peace Corps Volunteer or U.S. Government employee."

 

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