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Three Hundred TEA Words - Lloyd Sherman

Page history last edited by Henry Hamburger 10 years, 7 months ago

 

     TEA was a God whisper: an unexplained event of goodness, an offering reaching to the ground being, unrequested and totally unexpected, a pallet to crate a context for being alive.  So it was and is that TEA began the composition of a still unfinished symphony.  To this child whose love of adventure ranged from the cowboys of the wild west to the Osa and Johnson adventure in the jungles of New Guinea, to the stories of Bomba the jungle boy and Tarzan, Jane and Boy, my God whisper came when I glanced across Professor Henssler’s desk where I was discussing my final paper for his course on Africa and spotted the New York Times advertisement for Teachers for East Africa. Following the conference, I asked to see the ad. I took down the particulars.  It was March of 1962, two months before I was to graduate from Wagner College.  I learned right away that the TEA application period was closed, but they were still looking for science teachers.  In that circumstance, in a two week turnaround, I was interviewed and received a telegram from Ken Toepfer offering me a place in TEA’s Wave 2B.   The decision to accept the three year assignment was filled with consternation.  Consultation with my valued professors and the love of my life at the time who was heading to graduate school, all agreed that assignment was an exceptional opportunity and that things would work out, as they have beyond expectation.  Marriage and family would be the fortune of another love.

 

     My journey in East Africa was filled with highlights from a broad spectrum of acquaintances and friendships: time with Ted Rice (spending an amazing evening singing with Pete Seeger whose family was staying in his Nairobi apartment for two weeks) and Winfield Niblo, and Bill Wild, all of USAID; travels with Lee Smith, Adawale Sengawawa, and Tom Cameron in the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi; trips to Mombasa and Zanzibar with Arden Holland; motorcycling to and then climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in the company of Don Schramm, and climbing Mt. Kenya with Phyllis Reed; good times with Don and Maureen Knies and Gray Cowan at Lake Turkana; and being present at the historic events of Uganda and Kenya’s independence; working with teachers at Makerere’s Institute of Education, especially with Elsa Meder, who made me drill down to the why I was teaching whatever it was that I was teaching—its meaning and purpose; and using what I had learned, first, with a host of students from 1963 to 1965 at Narok Secondary School in Kenya’s Maasiland, and, later, with the general public, working with Mervin Cowie, founder of the Kenya National Parks, and his successor, Perez Olindo, and Russell E. Train, founder of the African Wildlife Foundation, as the Education Warden setting up the first Wild Life Education Center in Kenya, at the Nairobi National Park.  These experiences were the grist for a life seeking the answers to fundamental questions about the conditions that made a difference in learning which have energized my professional life ever since.  My life there was particularly enriched by a deep and life long friendship with Gloria and Gordon Hagberg, of the field office of the International Institute of Education.  It was their friendship that exposed me to their acquaintances and many of their personal friends that included Tom Mboya, Mwai Kibaki,  Hilary Ng’weno, and Barak Obama, Senior.  A lasting memory was sitting with Mel McCaw, Gordon Hagberg’s close assistant, at the Equator Club in Nairobi, on the eve of Kenya’s Independence around a small table in a darkened corner having drinks and listening to conversations on the coming event there in the company of Kenneth Kaunda, President of Zambia, Harry Belafonte, and Harris Wafford, Peace Corps Director for Africa, being served by the beautiful Seychelles singer and waitress, Gigi Joseph, whom I had become acquainted.  I was twenty-seven years old, thankful for that God whisper.        

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