A Short History of My Service

With each Peace Corps volunteer’s close of service comes a document called the Description of Service. It is a good summary of significant projects. Here is mine:

After a competitive application process stressing practical skills, cross-cultural adaptability, and international experience, Michael Brannagan was invited to serve as a Business Development volunteer for Peace Corps in Suriname, South America from May 2008 to July 2010.

Peace Corps Suriname’s Pre-Service Training included a two-month cultural immersion period, in which Michael lived with a host family, attended formal Aucan language instruction, and organized a youth group as a sample project. Seminars led by business and organization leaders prepared Michael with the knowledge necessary to apply his skills within the Surinamese climate and culture. Pre-Service Training also included practical multi-day workshops in latrine construction and in agriculture methods in a tropical rainforest environment.

On August 2, 2008, Michael was sworn into Peace Corps service, and assigned to Diitabiki, the capital and cultural center of the Aucan people.

In September 2008, Michael was invited by the Surinamese Red Cross to participate in Food Security Assessment training, for which participants from four countries attended. After certification, Michael led an assessment team to determine the vulnerability of the people in his region after a devastating flood. His recommendation to supply planting material was approved, and Michael and two other volunteers partnered with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) to supply villages throughout the area with planting material while providing agriculture training. As a result of this project, farmers throughout the region were able to maintain their livelihoods and feed their families.

Because of the strategic position of his village, Michael was asked by the Peace Corps Safety and Security officer to serve as the warden of his region. Michael’s responsibilities as warden included: establishing a communication plan among villages not connected by roads or telephone coverage, running drills to test speed of communication, and developing exit strategies for evacuating the country based in an emergency.

In response to an expressed desire for knowledge beyond the borders of Suriname, Michael worked with community partners to develop a geography radio program. In the research phase, he and the director of the Pakaati radio station compiled profiles of every country in the world recorded in the Aucan language. These recordings, usually an hour or more in length per country, took nearly ten months to compile and covered such diverse topics as systems of government, economy, cultural groups and customs, physical geography, and history. The director of Radio Pakaati hopes to use the recordings to write the first book on world history in the Aucan language. This project has built the capacity of the radio station to share the world with their listeners and increased the people’s knowledge of the word outside the rain forest.

Through his relationship with the Pakaati radio station, Michael began a weekly radio program on small business economics, which he hosted live in the Aucan language. Michael organized multiple resources to write and translate four months of original episodes, using culturally relevant examples to communicate successful business practice to entrepreneurs. As a result of the radio program, community members as far as thirty miles upriver showed interest in obtaining episode recordings or in receiving consultation, and the Peace Corps country staff plans to use his episodes as a template for future projects.

Because of the popularity of Michael’s economics program, a local entrepreneur asked for business consultation. They explored the potential of using the business as a distribution center for local bakeries, though this was cost prohibitive. Covering basic startup concepts of bookkeeping, customer service, sales skills, costs and pricing, and marginal analysis, Michael gained significant experience in small business consulting.

Michael also provided information to Radio Pakaati on AIDS prevention and awareness, focusing on good family relationships. As a result of the AIDS program, people in the region are better informed about AIDS and its transmission and less fearful of interacting with those who have the disease.

In an effort to reduce costs and improve village selection, Peace Corps Suriname asked Michael to take the lead as a site development liaison. In selection and bringing the future volunteer sites up to safety standards, Michael and two other volunteers coordinated the actions of community partners and Peace Corps staff in nearly every stage of the process. He spent days at a time in the future sites, made a network of contacts, selected houses for future volunteers, evaluated purchasing needs, coordinated distribution of building materials, and resolved cost concerns addressed by community members. Because of Michael’s efforts in working beyond his project scope, Peace Corps has fully established its presence in villages that would not have otherwise received a volunteer.

In conjunction with Radio Pakaati’s geography radio program, and a UNICEF youth journalism project, Michael conducted a world map mural activity for the Diitabiki primary school. He applied for funding, and UNICEF sponsored the project in full. As a result of patient training and supervision, the local students took ownership in painting the majority of the mural’s surface. The mural promises to serve as a beautiful legacy of Peace Corps’s partnership in Diitabiki for many years.

In response to a request from the Surinamese Ministry of Education to Peace Corps, Michael taught a peer pressure and decision-making class for graduating students who will be attending middle school in the city. Ndjuka children as young as 12 years of age have faced great challenges when moving to an urban environment without their parents, and Michael hopes the students will be better prepared for this transition as a result of this project.

In addition to his larger projects, Michael also engaged in secondary activities, including hosting and translating for several Surinamese and international organizations visiting his village, reporting and translating for the local radio station, training radio workers in sound recording equipment, giving English classes, providing computer training for four adults, and organizing a youth sports club.

Michael received certifications from the Pan-American Health Organization in latrine construction and sanitation methods, the Inter-American Development Bank in citizenship participation and responsibility training, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in food security assessment training, and the United Nations Children’s Fund in water and sanitation training.

A Few Last Projects

When children graduate from the Diitabki school, as with all interior schools, children as young as twelve move to the Paramaribo to attend middle school. Without the presence of their parents, these kids experience a radical cultural and environmental change moving from the rainforest to a city in their early teenage years. Many children in this situation become involved in drugs, get pregnant, or do not use their parents’ money wisely, bringing great distress to them and their villages.

So I went to the School to talk to the graduating class about my experience moving from rural Africa to Minneapolis when I was fifteen. We talked about lemmings, and why it is good to think about consequences. I specified that I was not going to tell them what to do, but that I wanted then to think about what is best for them in the long run and not loose sight of what they want for their future. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of smoking, saving money, taking drugs, and eating assai (getting a purple mustache vs. lots of vitamins).

I also recently finished my world map. It took about a hundred hours to complete. In addition to the countries and capitals, the map depicts every major river, the tallest few mountains for each continent, every city of two and a half million, other important cities, the Suez and Panama Canals, and some geographic and political regions. I painted the compass point and border with typical Ndjuka designs.

Ba Jotie had another last project for me. He has a DVD documentary on space, but it is in English, so he cannot understand it. We did not finish the set of DVD’s, but we did get a few hours translated. The ability to translate astrophysics is a great test of fluency. Big English words simply do not translate, so we had to take a lot of time to explain the big words. After our last session translating the space DVD’s, my official projects officially ended.

A New Generation

All the Peace Corps volunteers in Suriname are newbies, including those who have been here for two years.

This sentence, which I wrote over a year ago, still rings true. Volunteers from SUR 14, my class, opened up this river for Peace Corps, developed additional villages for more volunteers, and now we are being replaced with a new generation, SUR 16.

Matt, Brittany, and Meagan flew into Diitabiki on the 19th of June for a week in their future region. On the day they flew in, Matt and Meagan were supposed to go to Godolo, where Shelley would teach them the art of volunteer living, while Brittany was to stay in Diitabiki and learn from me. A chief from Godolo, who had come for a formal council, agreed to take the two to his village after the meeting. The parlay was an interesting experience for the newbies, and since traditional meetings of elders usually take place only in Diitabiki, it was good that they flew in here. Unfortunately, the chief’s outboard motor for his boat would not start, and when the volunteers were thoroughly exhausted at 5 PM, I made the call that they should spend the night in Diitabiki. That evening wee cooked up some macaroni and cheese, a luxury for a volunteer, and I imparted my vast wisdom of how to clean rainwater tanks, the best times to fish, and other topics of life in the jungle.

It was encouraging to see how new everything was to the new volunteers so that I could see how much I have learned in two years. Nevertheless, I am only beginning to understand deeper aspects of the culture (such as asking for things that you have just bought is considered very polite), and many common experiences are still difficult for me (such as people expecting me to cook extra food for them to eat). I am still learning new words in the Ndjuka language, and at least a few months ago, my canoeing skills were far from Ndjuka proficiency. People wince for fear of my fingers when I cut coconuts open with a machete.

I recently read a book called, The Riverbones, by a Canadian who traveled for five months in Suriname in search a blue frog and the country’s soul. Andrew Westoll wrote well and accurately depicted some of the places in the city and the mood and life of Peace Corps volunteers three years ahead of me. He critiqued a volunteer named Dara for attempting to turn herself into an Ndjuka, something she could never be, and he worried about Dara’s transition back to the States when her close of service eventually came.

Indeed, Dara struggled with reverse culture shock, and she returned home to Suriname to train SUR 14, my class. My first impression of Dara was similar to Andrew’s, but it came from the experience of having grown up in Africa, yet sill learning about Ethiopian culture when I left. No matter how dedicated volunteers are at integrating into the surrounding culture, they will only begin to see the depth of the peoples’ experience. I found that Dara came to learn this, and she approached her cultural errors with grace and humility, hoping that we could learn from them.

Andrew Westoll, however, is a tourist with a closed, Western perspective. His words rang with a hint of jealousy toward the volunteers who through their challenges experienced a depth that he could not comprehend.