The Peace Corps, Sierra Leone, and Me

What prompted a naive nineteen-year-old from Michigan to work in villages in West Africa where locals had never before seen a white person? How did his two-year tour with the Peace Corps in the 1960s meaningfully change the course of his life over the next fifty years? This compelling story follows the author, Norman Tyler, during his time as a volunteer in a Rural Development program in upcountry Sierra Leone, West Africa. He daily experienced cultural interactions that were to gradually change his life perspective. Readers ride with him in his beat-up Land Rover and vicariously share in the insupposable challenges of getting a health center or school built in an upcountry village; being exposed to tribal rituals of secret societies; working with local African officials who still had a colonialist perspective. This timely narrative also captures historic changes that have taken place in the host country from its "golden period" just after independence through its decades of major troubles-political upheaval, civil war, the "blood diamonds" conflict, the Ebola crisis-over the last fifty years.