The Editor, Sir:

I was once a US Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. That was more than 35 years ago. I was fresh out of a four-year liberal arts college in Florida and an American war was raging somewhere else in the world. I had little life experience except as an unskilled labourer and yet I had already formed a personal record that suggested, especially to my draft board, that I would be a poor candidate for becoming a soldier on the ground in Vietnam.

Then, after nearly four months of special training in San Diego, California and in Kingston, I found myself at odds with the programme's plans, alone out in the foothills of Trelawny, unwanted, and feeling all together forgotten and wasted by two governments, both by my own, as a volunteer in a foreign country with the highest drop out rates in the hemisphere, and by the Jamaican Ministry of Education, whose mismatched and poorly designed effort I was about to discover would result in not even one of the small group I had been trained with, doing what they had been trained to do.

That is the truth of my first experiences in Jamaica. Yet, in my failure I learned important lessons. In those most difficult of times, saving me from myself and my fate, there was the friendship offered me by a poor, illiterate farmer, an old man who shared his precious time and knowledge with me for no other reason than I was there in his world, apparently lost and forgotten, just as I suspected he often felt he was himself.

Hard labour

Today, I'm sorry, but you cannot tell me with all your great educational philosophy that I am to believe the value of this poor man's life, of his nearly seven decades of hard labour and work for his family and community, of his sharing himself with me, was worth one tiny bit less than that of some successful, well-educated entrepreneur.

I am, etc.,

ED MCCOY

mmhobo48@juno.com

Bokeelia