UNDER THE NEEM TREE

by Susan Lowerre ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1991

Stirring confessions of a Peace Corps volunteer who participated in the fisheries project in Senegal--and a worthwhile counterpoint to The Ponds of Kalambayi (1990), Mike Tidwell's account of his stint as a Peace Corps worker teaching fish-farming in Zaire. Armed with a B.A. in biology and some rudimentary training from a Peace Corps course, young Lowerre-- a ponytailed, impressionable, gently raised native of Upstate New York--set out to teach the people of northern Senegal how to grow fish in the desert. The visions of romantic Africa that danced in Lowerre's head were soon dashed as she encountered the relentless heat, flies, filth, and desolation that plagued her allotted region. Staring incredulously at a landscape so brown and monotonous that it looked ""as though photographs were pasted to the inside of the car windows,"" Lowerre traveled to the Moslem village of Walli Jalla to face two years of backbreaking labor among resentful male workers, primitive living conditions, and the rebellion of her own body as she was relentlessly attacked by parasites. To her surprise, though, once she was adopted by a neighboring family, had befriended some of the local women, and learned more of the local language, she grew so attached to the hard, ungiving landscape, the flowering neem tree in the courtyard where she slept, the clear river where the women bathed, and the slow, intimate life of the village that leaving it left her as desolate as arriving once had. Shortly after her return to the sterile-seeming US, Lowerre learned that the fish-farming program had been canceled--but she, at least, would never be the same. An emotional, honest, and deeply human tale, more introspective than Tidwell's and, miraculously, just as engrossing.

Pub Date: April 1, 1991

ISBN: 1877946036

Page Count: -

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION