Softball, Snakes, Sausage Flies and Rice: Peace Corps Experience in 1960s Sierra Leone

Just a few months out of student life on the rolling green lawns of Haverford College, Philip Fretz was living in a small, remote West African city amid insect invasions, deadly snakes and coups. It was the tumultuous 1960s, in both the United States and Africa, and he had become an early recruit to the Peace Corps, founded in 1961. He was the first volunteer to be sent to teach English at the Kenema Technical Institute in Sierra Leone, a former British colony that had been left in stark poverty and underdevelopment when colonialism ended. Half a century later, he began to pore through the diaries he had kept, sporadically, during those two years in Kenema. When his father died in 1998, relatives found in his papers all the letters Philip had written home to his parents, recording his illnesses, his extraordinary adventures across West Africa, and the pain he felt watching his students struggle amid poverty and tribalism, in bare-bones classrooms without books and supplies, while keeping alive their hopes that they could have a brighter future.