Nine Hills to Nambonkaha

Posted on 07 August 2017 by Sarah Erdman

The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn t yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she finds that Nambonkaha is also a place where AIDS threatens and poverty i Download Nine Hills to Nambonkaha – kino-fada.fr this was the first of MANY peace corps memoirs i suffered through reading material choices were limited to our paltry communal bookshelves in the volunteer lounge of the swaziland peace corps office anyway, i used to write a monthly literature review box or our volunteer newsletter, and one month i ranted about this genre below are my thoughts Dissecting the Peace Corps Memoir One of my least favorite genres of nonfiction is hands down the peace corps memoir I attribute it to both the f this was the first of MANY peace corps memoirs i suffered through reading material choices were limited to our paltry communal bookshelves in the volunteer lounge of the swaziland peace corps office anyway, i used to write a monthly literature review box or our volunteer newsletter, and one month i ranted about this genre below are my thoughts Dissecting the Peace Corps Memoir One of my least favorite genres of nonfiction is hands down the peace corps memoir I attribute it to both the fact that I am a volunteer myself, and thuscritical of the actual content And then probably due to the sheer volume that I read, I m picky about writing, appreciating only good prose More often then not, I feel like returned volunteers have good stories to tell and get book contracts for these stories without actually possessing the literary training or raw talen...I feel very conflicted about Sarah Erdman s _Nine Hills to Nambonkaha_ Life is a little too perfect for the starry eyed narrator her integration is almost immediate, barriers language, cultural and otherwise are minor, and her projects succeed with only the tiniest of flaws She was either the poster child for Peace Corps Volunteers, or she is prone to slightly embellishing At times, I can share her sentiments and at other times I feel uneasy by her subdued, but nevertheless self congrat I feel very conflicted about Sarah Erdman s _Nine Hills to Nambonkaha_ Life is a little too perfect for the starry eyed narrator her integration is almost immediate, barriers language, cultural and otherwise are minor, and her projects succeed with only the tin...I picked this up as research for a story and within a few pages realized it was not what I needed But by that time, I d been hooked by Erdman s writing There are so many ways that a white woman s memoir of her Peace Corps work in an African village could have been irritating or obnoxious But it doesn t read like Erdman s memoir, in the sense of ...Sarah Erdman spent two years with Peace Corps in Cote d Ivoire from 1998 2000 Most of that time was spent in the northern village of Nambonkaha which she says in pronounced like Nam bong Kaa She sought to bring good hygiene and family planning to a village that had only known traditional ways and animism I particularly liked how she candidly admits the battle that raged within between wanting to help the village and the recognition that such help could cause them to turn from the traditions Sarah Erdman spent two years with Peace...Erdman details the quintessential Peace Corps experience adapting to life in an African village means bucket baths and reading by candlelight, yes, but evendifficult is the attempt to integrate into a new community when all one s assumptions and understandings become null and void After a frustrating year of learning how to communicate with her fellow villagers, and adapt to a slower pace of life, she finally is able to make some real progress in sharing modern health and hygiene infor Erdman details the quintessential Peace Corps experience adapting to life in an African village means bucket baths and reading by candlelight, yes, but evendifficult is the attempt to integrate into a new community when all one s assumptions and understandings become null and void After a frustrating year of learning how to communicate with her fellow villagers, and adapt to a slower pace of life, she finally is able to make some real progress in sharing modern health and hygiene information The only wa...A beautiful and vivid look at life in a small, impoverished african village and their struggle to eek out a meagre living, raise and feed their children and themselves, and survive in an environment that seems to want the exact opposite for them.The author, through her words, creates a touching portrait that captures the inherent helplessness, fatalism, and life s utter unfairness while bringing out the humanity behind hopelessness, the despair behind despondence, the personalities behind the pe A beautiful and vivid look at life in a small, impoverished african village and their struggle to eek out a meagre living, raise and feed their children and themselves, and surv...This was the common book all the freshmen had to read my first and last year at Winthrop University It was a good choice for a book to bring people together I have always been passionate about helping the children in Africa who are victims of the civil war going on in Sudan And this book told the story of a woman who was doing what I did not have the resources to do Her story was so detailed and she made you feel like you were right there with her while she helped give birth to a child in This was the common book all the freshmen had to read my first and last year at Winthrop University It was a good choice for a book to bring people together I have always been passionate about helping the children in Africa who are victims of the civil war going on in Sudan And this book told the sto...One of the first in the new I joined the Peace Corps and this is what I did genre, Nine Hills joins Peter Hessler s Rivertown as an example for travel writers to try writing about the people they meet and not themselves A novel concept ha Sarah Erdman, though, does do a fine job balancing a narrative that is one part the West African village and the changes it undergoes in two years, and one part living a life as the total and complete other A fascinating look at one small part of a huge se One of the first in the new I joined the Peace Corps and this is what I did genre, Nine Hills joins Peter Hessler s Rivertown as an example for travel writers to try writing about ...This was one of the most beautiful and moving books that I have read in a long, long time Erdman writes beautifully, and it is not about her at all, except as it relates to the people of Nambonkaha She fell...Sarah Erdman is a Peace Corps worker, sent to Nambonkaha, a small village in northern Ivory Coast, mainly to introduce better health to local villages The main focus of this book are the people she meets and the village of which she becomes a p...

English
07 August 2017

Sarah Erdman