The Stuff of Fiction
As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was a teacher of junior high school math and “technology” from 1978 to 1980 in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. It was a dreadful job and convinced me to give up my nascent idea of a teaching career. (N.B. I loved living and working overseas and made that my career.)
I later described my teaching style as “dancing a three-ring circus.” There were 50 to 60 children in each class, seated three to a desk, and they were never quiet. I was teaching in French, after just six weeks of combined French and teacher training. The 100-degree days were blessed by winds like the gusts from a hot oven door, so our Bic pens dried out and our cheap Chinese notebooks turned to dust. And for children who lived under thatched roofs and camel-hair tents, interest in lessons about set theory and the distinction between mass and weight was … um … superficial. I escaped into novels like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Frank Herbert’s Dune series.
Levin Born (right) with the Mauritanian Minister of Telecommunications.
Last Sunday, almost 42 years after I left Mauritania, I got a call from one of my three adult children. He’s a businessman who puts together technology transfer deals between American telecommunications companies and developing countries, and he happened to be in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, for a couple of days. At the beginning of a formal meeting with the Minister of Telecommunications, a meeting that was the culmination of months of excruciating preparatory work, the Minister welcomed my son and courteously asked whether this was his first visit to Mauritania. Levin affirmed that it was, then mentioned that his parents [that would be me and his father] had once been teachers at the Lycee d’Aioun el-Atrouss. The Minister’s face froze as he paled; Levin nervously nudged his local partner to ask whether he’d said something offensive. When the stupefied Minister regained his composure, he said our full names and then stated “I learned math from your parents.”
This wondrous echo of a long-gone time and place set me thinking about fiction, about plausibility, about imagination (and of course about karma). In 1897, Mark Twain wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” We learn in school that fiction refers to plots, settings, and characters that are created from the imagination, while nonfiction (truth?) refers to stories of actual events and people. Levin’s exchange with the Minister, so implausible and surprising, could have been a first, middle, or last scene in a thriller, a fantasy, a family saga, an international romance, a horror story, a children’s book. It could have been a potent event or a minor distraction from the plot. It could have been set in a fictional country or in another galaxy. Instead, in all its glorious absurdity, it is a true story. Unless we’ve entered The Twilight Zone again.
If you were once a Peace Corps Volunteer, or know of one in the area, please let me know (legacyusedbooks@gmail.com). If there’s enough interest, we can plan a get-together.