00:00:00WILSON: Peace Corps Oral History Project, February 18th, 2005, interview
with Harold Freeman, interviewer Jack Wilson--Harold, if you would,
give me your full name and where and when you were born.
FREEMAN: My name is Harold Daniel Freeman and I was born in Nashville,
Tennessee on April 24th, 1943 though Nashville was not my place of
residence at that time. My parents live oh, seventy-five to a hundred
miles away in a small town.
WILSON: Okay, tell me something about your, your growing up and where
00:01:00that took place and your family and bring me up through your high
school days and so forth.
FREEMAN: Okay, my father was a Methodist minister which meant that I
didn't live in any one place more than six years. My initial hometown
was Lobelville, Tennessee which is about big as the palm of your hand,
west of Nashville, southwest. Before I was a year old, we moved to a
larger town, Lawrenceburg, also, southwest of Nashville and by the time
I was five, we were moving to Nashville where my father was pastor at
West National, a Methodist church. Went to grades one through three
there. By this time, my younger brother had been born, having five
00:02:00brothers, four years younger than I am. He was born just before that
move to Nashville. At, at the beginning of my fourth grade year, we
moved to the other side of Nashville, a suburb named Donaldson which
was beginning to explode in population adding about a subdivision a
year and saw that happen while we lived there. The dairy farm behind
us became a couple of hundred houses and my sister, my only other
sibling who's born while we lived there, when I was eleven years
old. We lived in Donaldson for five years and went to the fourth
grade through the eighth grade there. Signed up for high school and
registered but at that time, my father was transferred to Dickson,
Tennessee which is forty miles west of Nashville a town of about five
thousand at that time and so I dropped from a school of, with eighteen
00:03:00hundred students and grades seven through twelve where you know, Latin
and Psychology and Sociology and Art and Introduction to Business
and all that sort of thing was available to a town of the Dicson High
School which had about six hundred students in grades nine through
twelve, graduating class of only one hundred by the time I got through
there and when I went there, I tried to sign up for the same courses
I'd registered for at Donaldson High School but found out, they had
practically none of them except Algebra, English and General Science.
I tried to sign up for Latin and they said they didn't have Latin and
I said okay and they said they didn't have French--
WILSON: Ha
FREEMAN: I said okay, Spanish and it turned out they didn't have Spanish
and I said what do you have? And they said English. When I got in
the English class, I found out they didn't have much of that either.
English was never a problem for me so it didn't make a whole lot of
00:04:00difference I suppose in hurting me for college or anything. It didn't
help me but it may not have hurt too much and in the course of four
years there, I took most of the courses they had except for vocational
agriculture, home ec, and what I called civics for football players
that was taught by the football coach part of the time at least and I
was six foot one by the time I got out of there and they didn't have
many sports opportunities. There was no tennis or swimming or track
or whatever; just football and basketball for boys and only basketball
for girls. I tried out for basketball but I was so un-athletic that
I couldn't even make a team that started at 0-9 in one year but I did
become the score keeper. Now, backing up to my freshmen year, when
00:05:00I unable to find courses that I had intended to take, they ended up
putting me in World History as a freshmen which was really a course
for juniors or something in the way they had it set up there so I met
a bet of upper class folks I might not have otherwise known and by
the end of the year, one of those fellows asked me if I'd like to be
on the school newspaper staff the next year and I said sure so I, I
did join the newspaper staff and worked on the little school newspaper
which came out once every six or eight weeks or something like that.
The remaining years of high school and became the editor or co-editor
at my senior year and it also let me get inside the first, I got my
first look at a little newspaper office because the, the town weekly
newspaper or the county weekly newspaper published our paper there and
00:06:00on the days when I actually produced the paper, we would go down there
and observe the pages being made and things getting ready to go on the
press. I didn't know it at the time but I'd end up in that profession
a good deal down the road.
WILSON: So you graduated from?
FREEMAN: Graduated from Dixon High School in 1961 without much clear
intent on what I was going to do from there. I'd never been one of
those folks that had my life planned out. You know, some seventh
graders who know they want to be not only a doctor but say, a kidney
specialist and I didn't have a clue as to even what general field I
wanted in. I was pretty good in science and math and the best course
I had in high school was physics. I didn't have anything to speak of
in a lab but I had a tough teacher who knew what he was talking about
and made us pay attention to the subject even when the ----------(??)
00:07:00boys basketball team was in the regional semi-finals or something which
was unlike most of the rest of the school so when I chose a college, it
turned out to be Tennessee Tec, not Tennessee Technological University
in Cookeville. I didn't even know what I was going to major in. There
they didn't allow you the luxury of a freshmen year or a freshmen and
sophomore year of general studies. You had to pick something and I
thought well, maybe engineering. It had a big Engineering School and
I got there and saw all these guys carrying drawing boards and slide
rules. This was well before calculators were portable and I thought
hell, I'm probably not too good at drawing all this meticulous stuff
they had to do with the meticulous lettering on it as well. The first
one I saw in fact was a really detailed drawing of the inner workings
00:08:00of a hand cranked pencil sharpener, all those helical gears and so
forth. That's probably not my intended field but physics is not too
far from that. It's got a lot of the same stuff in it so I'll major
in physics and I did that for two years and survived the introductory
courses and so forth okay, A's and B's I think but then I got into
the real physics courses for physics majors, not the ones that were
also populated by engineering majors, math majors, chemistry majors
and high school science education majors and it quickly became evident
that physics was not the field for me as an occupation so to minimize
my losses or to make sure I didn't have any losses, I just changed my
major which was physics to my minor and my minor which was math to my
major and, and went on through the rest of my four years of college and
00:09:00graduated with a major in math and minor in physics, you know--
WILSON: And was--?
FREEMAN: And that doesn't sound like much difference but I discovered
that to be a physics major, you had to understand the math that you
took into courses and that to be a math major, you just had to pass the
math courses and I was pretty good at passing math courses but actually
using them in atomic and nuclear physics or physical mechanics and
dynamics things was something of a different ball game. You know, in
the physic courses, you, I remember one class where I had a take home
test. We were given five days to do it; had only five problems and
the best student in the class got four right and nobody in the class
got one of the problems right and I thought you know, this is probably
the end of my physics career. I think I got three out after five
days but I, when I went to college, by happenstance, on a Spring Break
00:10:00visit to the campus before, while I was still a senior in high school,
a nice lady in the admission office or student service office hooked
me up with the advisor of the student newspaper after asking what
extra circular interests and participation we had in high school and
I mentioned that I was on the high school paper and she said, "Well,
Mr. Norman, the advisor is over here in his office I think even though
it's Spring Break. I saw him earlier," and so she called him and
within a few minutes he came over, picked me up and took me on the tour
and assured me that my Work Scholarship could be assigned to a student
publication so I wouldn't have to work on buildings or grounds or in
the library or in the cafeteria line. The Work Scholarship just meant
you got paid the, well, that they subtracted from fees. A dollar of
money you earned at the rate of a dollar an hour instead of the basic
00:11:00student payment fee or rate of fifty cents an hour at that time in 1961
so I got paid just a little bit for doing something that I probably
would have been interested in doing anyway and it turned out that this
Mr. Norman, now, Dr. Norman and retired, had worked for three daily
newspapers and knew what he was talking about although he was the
entire journalism section of the English department within the school
of Arts and Sciences. There was, there was not a Journalism School or
even department and furthermore, teaching those courses was not the,
what journalism courses there were was not his only responsibility.
He was the Director of Public Information including sports information
and he oversaw the photo department. All those public releases that
go out that say so and so won an award or wrote a paper or is competing
in something or other or a new faculty, new dean has been hired or
00:12:00promoted or something so he had about three or four full time jobs
but never the less, those of us who were fortunate enough to work with
him, learned a lot and that's what made it possible for me to get into
journalism later even though I had only nine quarter hours of credit
in journalism.
WILSON: So you graduated--
FREEMAN: 1965
WILSON: In '65--
FREEMAN: Mm hmm
WILSON: And then what?
FREEMAN: Well, in college I had no clear idea what I wanted to do
afterwards than I had in high school when I was pointing towards
college. It had always been assumed that I would go to college. My
dad had a Master's degree from Duke and my mom had gone to school
for, to college for a couple of years. I think the first in their
families to have done so, so graduate school was a possibility as I
was nearing you know, the middle of my junior year or some thing along
the lines when you start thinking about what the next step is and a
job is another possibility. The military is another possibility, you
00:13:00know, the draft was in, in force at the time. Though, back in1964,
there wasn't any big, big call up because the Vietnam explosion had
not really occurred. There were not large numbers of troops there at
that time but I wasn't really drawn to any of those. I went to some
on-campus interviews and I remember AT&T invited me to North Carolina
or some place for a follow up interview with a possible position as
a technical writer because I had some, you know, journalism by that
time. I was Managing Editor of the college newspaper and you know, get
good recommendations from, from English and Journalism teachers and,
and I did have the math major and physics minor regardless of how, how
much mastery I had at those subjects. I wasn't afraid of technical
vocabulary anyway and that sort of thing but I wasn't drawn in any of
those directions and you know, along about that time, about the end
00:14:00of my, some time my sophomore year, the Peace Corp came into being and
so I, I applied in my junior year and by the fairly early in my senior
year as I recall, I had been accepted and then started the testing
process and going through the physical and so forth and I was accepted
on all those things and, and was told that if I wanted to join up, I
could go to UCLA in, in June right after my graduation in late May and
begin Peace Corp training for an assignment in Ethiopia.
WILSON: How did your family feel about that?
FREEMAN: Well, some of them thought I was a little strange and weird to
want to leave Tennessee and go to California and then to the far side
of Africa. Both my grandmothers who were you know, right on up in
00:15:00years at the time in their eighties I guess or nearly in their eighties
if not. Both were afraid that they'd never see me again either because
something would happen to me over there or they'd be dead by the time
I got back. They never really enunciated these fears but it was, it
was pretty much that way I think and I didn't know anybody who'd been
in the Peace Corp at that time. You know, this was so early and there
were, there were relatively few and I don't recall having known anyone
who had been and come back by the time I went. I'm not even sure that
I knew someone who had just left from a class earlier than me.
WILSON: Do you remember anything particular about the application
process?
FREEMAN: Oh, it was probably the longest form I'd ever filled out in my
life--
WILSON: Hahaha
FREEMAN: Up to that time and somewhere along the line, there was a
00:16:00fairly detailed language aptitude test which was based on Kurdish
or Urdu, something from a part of the world which the test makers
assumed that the average American college student or other Peace Corp
applicant would have no idea so that nobody, practically no one would
have a leg up on anyone else because of, of previous knowledge. They
would just give you a language principle or a set of vocabulary words
and then, ask you questions about them or what verb would likely be
related to what noun or something to see if you could pick out endings
or beginnings or something. I don't remember the details but it was
entirely foreign, foreign language and, but I must have passed some,
to some degree anyway. I had no knowledge of language that would,
was going to be useful in Peace Corps. I, I eventually did get two
years of high school French at Dixon. They, they did introduce French
00:17:00after I got there but I didn't gain much command at all of that and in,
at Tennessee Tec, I took two years of German and so I had not enough
French to do me any good in French west Africa or some other places
where French might have been in use and I don't think there were any,
any Peace Corps countries where German was an advantage and I didn't
have much knowledge of German either so I started afresh with Amharic
when I went to UCLA.
WILSON: So you went to UCLA?
FREEMAN: Yes
WILSON: And that was for training?
FREEMAN: Right
WILSON: And tell me something about that.
FREEMAN: Well, UCLA was chosen because it was one of the few places
in the country that had an existing language program that involved
symmetric linguistics and symmetric and hermetic linguistics and
because Amharic is in that group of languages, they were able to set up
00:18:00a training program. They already had graduate students from Ethiopia
there who could serve as our language practice guides and you know
native speakers we could hear. People we could sit with at our meals
and we could conduct drill sessions where we'd go over something.
WILSON: Had you shown interest in Ethiopia or Africa or--?
FREEMAN: No, I just signed up you know sort of a blank check. At the
time, as I recall, they said that you could list three counties of
preference in order of preference and let's see, if my mother had
been a native Spanish speaker and if I had grown up bilingual, then,
I'm sure they would have sent me to some country where Spanish was
a help but I didn't have any particular interest, you know, had not
focused on, hadn't done a big senior pro-, senior thesis or project
00:19:00on a particular country that gave me any knowledge or interest so
I just signed up just in general for the Peace Corps and I probably
would have never picked Ethiopia. As I recall, I knew three things
about the nation when I found out I was going there or at least, I was
going to training to go there. I knew the Haile Selassie was emperor,
that the nation was on the far side of Africa and that Addis Ababa was
the capital city and I don't think I knew a single other thing beyond
that and I certainly knew nothing about the official national language
which was Amharic which occupied much of our Peace Corps training. At
that time, almost all the Peace Corps training for volunteers was done
in the United States before you went to your country of assignment.
At some point after that, they decided that they should reverse the
00:20:00process and just have elemental orientation in this side of the pond
and, and send the volunteer recruits over to their, their country of
assignment so they would start getting used to things there.
WILSON: And so this was the summer of 1965?
FREEMAN: Right--
WILSON: And you were there for how long?
FREEMAN: June, July and August, eleven or twelve weeks, some thing like
that and the training consisted of a bunch of components. Language was
one of the big parts. We had an eminent professor of linguistics who
had written text books in two Ethiopian languages who was the head of
the program and he had Ethiopian doctoral students working with him and
each day, five days a week, they would give us about an hour lecture
on some specific aspect such as making plurals or something like that
00:21:00and then, we would go to an hour and a half or two hour drill session
with one of these native speakers who might have been a candidate for
a Master's degree or something or might have been just the wife or
husband of the student there but someone who was, was educated and was
native, you know, an educated native speaker of the language so if you
wanted to learn how to make the plural of lamb and plow and cow and
dog and then, tomato, you know. Then, you would have to make sentences
saying there's a tomato there. There are two tomatoes in the language
and so you'd go use that word over and over again and also you had
your own tape record with a tape lessons that you were supposed to add
to the text book and you were supposed spend an addition to the hour
or so in lecture and the two hours in drill, another hour or two in
listening to the tape pronunciation and speaking back to it and looking
00:22:00at the text book over the lesson that you'd had and perhaps the one
that you were going to have tomorrow and then, use some adjectives
instead of plurals and so you, it was easy to have four or five hours
a day devoted to the language. It wasn't total immersion where that
everything you did all day long had to be in Amharic. It wasn't like
that but it was much closer to emersion than what I'd had in high
school French and college German and one weekend, I remember five or
six of us rented a car and went to Mexico. We didn't have much spare
time but there was one because we had classes Monday through Friday
and then, at least half a day Saturday and then, somewhere along the
line, you had to read some of the two or three books a week you were
suppose to read and do your laundry and just, you know, the odds and
ends, write a letter home, something like that and so one weekend was
00:23:00a little lighter than the others and we rented a car and went as far
as Ensenada into Mexico, slept on a beach in San Diego and slept on the
ground at an orphanage run by an American church organization down in
Ensenada where tarantulas crawled across the ground and somebody drove
a herd of pigs past us--
WILSON: Ha
FREEMAN: But the orphanage folks told us we would be, we would be safe
there but anyway, I got into that by way of saying that on the way,
we took it upon ourselves, we tried to say as much as we could in
Amharic. We would talk about the street lights in the street and turn
right and turn left and all that sort of thing, you know? We had much
more motivation in the language than we did as high school sophomore
studying French for example because we knew here if this is July, you
know, in September, I'm going to be needing some of this stuff and I
won't have a car full of Americans with me so that we can switch to
English if we needed to. Now, as it turned out that Ethiopia needed
00:24:00a bunch of teachers. The Emperor Haile Selassie had decided that his
country needed to come into the modern age and that the only way to
do that was to greatly increase the educational opportunities in the
nation but there was no way for the Ethiopians to do that alone because
they had only one or two education, institutions of higher education
in the country that could turn out college graduates to be teachers
and the competition for this relatively small number of college
graduates of those institutions produced was intense then. You know,
the national airline wanted them. The national government wanted them
and the foreign businesses operating in Ethiopia wanted them or they
wanted to go abroad and continue their education or they wanted to be
entrepreneurs and make money or whatever so in order to mushroom the
number of teachers, they asked the Peace Corp to provide a whole bunch
00:25:00of us and there were five hundred or so at the time I was there which
was not very far into the life of the Peace Corp of course.
WILSON: And how, how many were in your training group or your particular
group?
FREEMAN: There were a little over a hundred in my training group and
there was a simultaneous group but being trained at the University
of Utah which also had a language program which allowed them to teach
Amharic but now, what none of us knew was what was going to happen to
us when we got to Ethiopia. We all went over at the same time. They
chartered jets so forth and we got to, and we all went to Addis Ababa
which was going to be, you know, the arrival and dispersion point and--
WILSON: Maybe before you get too far into that ake me back and talk a
little bit about other than language, what was included in the--
FREEMAN: In training?
WILSON: In the training program and--
FREEMAN: Well, they knew--
WILSON: And maybe a word or two about the selection process.
00:26:00
FREEMAN: They knew that in general, we were going to be teachers so they
focused on that. We had a number of lectures and classes by education
faculty members at UCLA and by the people from departments other than
language who knew something about Africa and Ethiopia in particular.
We'd have a geography or maybe a cultural anthropology professor.
I remember one came in and said well, tell me what you think about
Africa? You know, it's hot and steamy and it's jungle, right? And
everybody's black when you're not talking about the Mediterranean
tier of nations and so forth. He said well, in general, none of
that applies to Ethiopia. You know, most of the people live in the
highlands, way high, highlands. High as Denver or higher so it's
warm and dry, not hot and steamy. They did have some jungle down in
the areas close to Kenya and so forth but, and had some desert along
00:27:00the Sudan and, and the Red Sea and so forth but, but in general, the
conception that it was going to be you know, rain forest and jungle was
not true at all and it was really not true where I lived because trees
were prized and so we had that sort of instruction. We had the how-
to-be-a-teacher instruction. That was not terribly successful I would
say. I can remember one fellow who must have been a distinguished
professor in his field because he told us he was I think and he was
teaching us about testing which was not a bad idea because most of us
had not studied to be teachers. We had studied English or geography
or science and math as I had and we hadn't gone through any theory or
00:28:00practice or how to make up a test for anybody, much less students in
Ethiopia but as I recall, this professor told us that he knew about all
there was to know but there was very little hope that he could teach us
anything worth while in the time allotted to him and as I recall, his
prophesy came true. The most help I got in teaching was from a couple
of return volunteers who had been brought in to serve as you know,
adjunct faculty or whatever, just trainers in the training program
there, some who had just gotten back in the months before this training
started and I can remember on only one precept that I was taught and it
was worth while and they said, they told us about how teachers are much
respected in Ethiopia and this sort of strict discipline along that
line that came from the British and Italian modes of instruction and
00:29:00where the students rose when the teacher came in and it was yes sir, no
sir and, and things like that and they said Americans tended to be more
laid back and relaxed in particular sense, most of us were young. We
were just out of undergrad or grad school and very little older than
our students. I'll take a little tangent there. Students in Ethiopia
started school whenever they could. There was no automatic entry into
first grade when you were six years old. They told us in training
that the literacy rate in Ethiopia was only seven percent which meant
that practically no one got to go to school so that if you had a kid
who was nine years old and somehow managed to get him entry into the
first grade, that's where he went so he wouldn't be graduating from the
twelve grade if he was able to stay that long until he was twenty or
00:30:00something so we had, when I was teaching eleventh grade, I had a lot
of seventeen and eighteen year olds and maybe some nineteen and twenty
year olds. I don't remember for sure but I was only twenty-two when
I started so, so anyway, this return volunteer back at UCLA suggested
that it would advisable for us to start off tough. See, if you start
off tough and strict, you can always slack off and people will accept
that but if you start off relax, you sit on the edge of the desk, you
cross your legs and speak in a highly informal way, that if you find
out that doesn't work, it's much more difficult to get the students
to accept, accept the situation when you toughen up and require more
strict disciple or whatever in the class so I did go with that and I
don't think any of my students would ever have accused me of being too
relaxed and that, you know, it served us pretty well. I think most of
00:31:00us followed that advice so--
WILSON: So how many of your group actually went overseas and was there a
particular process of selection?
FREEMAN: Yes, there was a process. The Peace Corp fortunately was, or
happily was generally devoid of government jargon except for one term
that I remember or that stuck out and that was called de-selection.
You got selected during the application and testing process at least
from afar and then, once you got there, there were some folks who
were de-selected and some of them self de-selected. I'm not sure they
ever went so far as to call it that. Some people just decided it just
wasn't for them and you know, were home sick or the language too tough
or just the idea of going eight thousand miles away and maybe the
00:32:00girlfriend or boyfriend was back home or, or the parents got sick or
the grandparents or whatever but some just departed on their own at, at
unspecified intervals during the course of the summer and all the time,
we were going through this stuff, oh, we also had some physical training
I never mentioned. We were, we lived on a hilltop in a dorm and we
walked all the way across the campus of UCLA for our weekly shots which
there were many. I think, if I recall, getting five at one time on
at least one occasion, you know, both upper arms TB test, a lower arm
and maybe gammglobulin echip or something like that for preparations
and trying to keep, stave off Hepatitis before there were vaccines for
that. Anyway, that would be a mile away so you'd walk a mile up and
down hills and get to the student health center and you'd walk a mile
back and then, they also had specified phys ed. things where you,
00:33:00a lot of us didn't know anything about soccer and we were told that
soccer was the biggest, you know, biggest game over there and so here's
a little bit about how to play soccer and said oh, you might as a, as
an inculcator duty, you might be the track coach or something so here
everybody runs hurdles a little bit or you know, you'll be running
a couple of cross countries sashays up and down through the walking
trails on campus where we would lope, jog, trot or walk, whatever you
were up to, things along that line. We had an Olympian discus guy
showing us how to throw the discus I remember and he was Australian,
the Australian champion but now, I've lost my train of thought there--
WILSON: You were talking about de-selection--
FREEMAN: The de-selection, well, anyway, we did a whole bunch of things.
In addition to the training, they also had interview sessions. They
sent us to psychologists and maybe, and one psychiatrist I know. We
00:34:00had group sessions where they just tried to feel us out or tell us
what might, what sort of difficulties we might encounter and how we
might deal with them and at the same time, I'm sure they were trying
to evaluate us so they could tell the Peace Corps managers, bosses
there, the Training Directors who they thought might not be suited or
the ones that they thought were suited for this. Then, you did have,
as I recall at least one individual session with the psychiatrist
and I don't remember anything about that and then, we had some more
testing, like much more aptitude testing or something there or there
was personality, what the Minnesota Multiphasic something, MMPI or
something like that, psychological inventory and I don't know what
they used those for, perhaps for deciding who might be sent out into
00:35:00an individual spot and who might need to be with a group and who might
need to be urban rather than rural. They never really explained that
but we did take hours of tests along that line but in one way, I was
less impressed I suppose by the selection process there than I was
about most of the other aspects of the training. Almost any of us with
walking around since there could have told the people who were doing
the selecting and de-selecting that some of the people they selected
didn't have much chance and that one person they de-selected should
have been selected and the one person they de-selected I remember was
a fellow who's name I don't recall but who was really, you know, hard
working in all the training and so forth and he was allowed to come
back later and he really wanted to go and he went through the training
00:36:00the next year and was delayed a year but did end up in Ethiopia as
I recall and actually even did some in a newsletter to help other
teachers, you know, something he'd come up with that worked. This
was way before Internet and email and all that and there were only two
or three telephones in my town and you know, you didn't call anybody
anywhere so once or twice a year or once a quarter, maybe, you might
get an email, I mean a mimeographed newsletter just to keep people in
touch with other people because Ethiopia is a good sized country so
those folks you lived and worked with for three months, day and night,
seven days a week were suddenly six hundred miles away from you and the
phone was out of the question and, and mail was slow.
WILSON: So you went in country--
FREEMAN: Yeah, well, I was going to say one other thing. This fellow,
two examples to back up my contentions that the selection process
00:37:00was iffier than the rest of the situation. Then, there was a couple
who had been a couple I think before they got there. They at least
known each other, not married but they were from at least the girl
was from Long Island and the guy was from metropolitan New York area.
I don't remember where but they seemed highly unlikely to be at home
and comfortable in a rural undeveloped part of Ethiopia or a rural
undeveloped part of the United States for that matter and indeed, but
they were both chosen and they, they remained interested in each other
even though they weren't assigned to the same town or city. The girl
was assigned to my town and the guy was assigned to the capital city
of Eritrea, a good sized city which was an hours bus ride or more, an
hour and half bus ride away and the girl went there to visit him almost
00:38:00every weekend rather than being involved in what was going on in the
village, staying around where she would have interactions with students
and their families or whatever and just getting to know merchants and
what not. Anyway, the fellow made it through the first semester of his
first year and then, he was gone by his own choice as far as I know.
If they had decided that he should go, they probably wouldn't have
announced that so I couldn't rule that out as a possibility and at the
end of the first year, the girl was gone but I think if you'd taken
a poll of the folks who'd been through training with them, they would
have probably, would have estimated that they had less than a twenty
percent chance of, of staying and I don't know why that everybody
else, you know, the other people were supposed to be the professionals
at this couldn't see that so I did see an example of someone who was
de-selected who should have gone and a couple who were gone who clearly
00:39:00shouldn't have gone. Overall, most folks who went there stuck it out.
You know, there was not, there was not a high percentage of departures
and some of the departures were because an immediate member of the
family was stricken by a debilitating you know, incapacitating illness
and was really needed back home. I think one girl's mother was, you
know, was stricken with terminal cancer that was unknown to her when
she went to Ethiopia. Might have been, you know, a few instances like
that but I don't think there was much, the dropout rate was not very
high and at that time, there was no provision for visiting home. You
know, you didn't get to come back the way soldiers do from Afghanistan
or the way Peace Corps volunteers do at sometime now as I understand
although I don't know the details about that and I think I called home
twice maybe in two years because it was a big deal and a big expense
00:40:00and took four hours and you had to reserve a time and you know, some
places you probably had to bribe a telephone clerk and it had to be
done at the city, you know, say an hour and half bus ride away and this
was before cassette tapes even that were small reel to reel recorders
and I sent and received a few tape recordings for my family that way
but again, that, you know, sending one and getting a tape back that
responded to your tape, I mean, that was a thirty day exchange deal
that people responded within a few days so mostly it was just letters
in terms of correspondence. Now, I diverted you from a question.
WILSON: That's fine. Tell me something about what your job was.
FREEMAN: Well, I was--
WILSON: Where you were assigned in Ethiopia?
FREEMAN: I knew nothing at UCLA when we finished Peace Corp training,
I knew nothing about my job except the fact that I was going to be a
00:41:00teacher in Ethiopia. I didn't even know, didn't know what subject,
what grade level, what part of the country and I was in the same shape
as everybody else and we were all, I mean, we had some leave to go
home and then, we all gathered in New York and took off for Rome and
then, from Rome to Addis Ababa and we spent just a few days there of
orientation, resting and from you know, a many thousand mile plane
trip, getting acclimated to living at seven thousand five hundred
feet, if that's what you were going to do because Addis Ababa was above
seven thousand feet and where I was essentially, eventually assigned
was six thousand feet up and the city that I mentioned Asmara was also
above seven thousand feet so a few of us were accustomed to that and
I'll give you one anecdote from that. I remember in our first couple
of days there, I happened to be the office of a hotel where the Peace
00:42:00Corps had put us up and of course, there were no phones in the rooms
there. There was just a phone in the office and a call came in from
the permanent Peace Corps office there for the country and it was for
a girl who had been in my training group at UCLA and I said well, I
think I know where her room is. I'll volunteer to go get her so she
can come over here and talk. Well, this was sort of a quadrangle style
hotel with a court yard in the middle and two or three stories tall
so I loped across this court yard and then, went up one or two flights
of steps and at this time, I'm twenty-two years old and I'm, you know,
six foot one and weigh a hundred and forty-five and I was in pretty
decent shape, you know? But I got to this girl's door and knocked on
it and she answers the door and I couldn't delivery the message except
to make the sign of the telephone with my hand and fingers and point
00:43:00(laughs) the other way over there, so it took a while before our bodies
got used to getting, getting enough oxygen in our blood there at that
sort of altitude and that, you know, not much of exercise. I maybe
trotted or, a little thirty or forty yards and, and probably double
timed up one or two flights of steps and you know, it was not a great
deal of exertion but it was a great deal more than my body's oxygen
carrying capacity was prepared for at that time. Well, anyway, they
gave us orientation there and let us go to the big market which was
an interesting cultural thing and also let us try out our new found
command such as it was of the Amharic language which is quite distant
anywhere related and practically no way to the English language even in
the manor of writing. It has its own alphabet and so I enjoyed going
00:44:00to this large market, the marcato, a great deal and bargained some and
found out I was able to do that with some degree of success and boy,
I'm really liking this. This is not what I could do in French and
German. I couldn't have done anything if I'd gone to France or Germany
to speak of except hello and goodbye and please and thank you maybe
so only about two days after I had this, this enjoyment at the market
using Amharic and speaking with the hotel staff and so forth too, and
Peace Corps staff that were Ethiopians, I found out that I was being
sent to Eritrea, the northernmost province of the country, the province
where there are several languages spoken, none of them Amharic--
WILSON: Ha
FREEMAN: Except by the educated folks and the central government
people who, who were installed by the, by the emperor's government
00:45:00and Addis Abba and many of the people who spoke Amharic up there also
spoke English and, and in some regard, Amharic was not terribly well
received. Students were required to take it in school because it was
the official national language but it, in a way, it was the language
of the outsiders, those who were making the big decisions in Addis
Abba and who were not terribly well received in Eritrea and Eritrea
eventually became a separate nation in 1993 and at that time, the
separatist movement was already underway and we had to take care of
to steer clear of political discussions and taking sides or anything
like that. It was the sort of thing that Peace Corp volunteers
00:46:00wherever they are assigned have to do. You're there as a guest of
the government to assist things and you know, it was made clear to us
that we were not there to foment revolutions and if we had been there
to foment revolution, we would have been gone as soon as the you know,
the powers got wind of it so I started you know, within a week after
having arrived in Addis Abba, I was in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea
which I said was at that time the northern most providence and is now
an independent nation of less than four million people I think. It
boarders the Red Sea and Ethiopia and Sudan and it's a long skinny
piece of land that supports--
[Tape one, side a ends; tape one side b begins.]
00:47:00
WILSON: Side two, tape one of interview with Harold Freeman, Peace Corps
Oral History Project, February 18th, 2005. Harold, you were talking
about being assigned to Asmara, to teach. Tell me, what did you teach
and where?
FREEMAN: Well, we were all sent to Asmara and a couple of days of
orientation there to Eritrea and then, we were dispersed throughout
that province. Some were staying right there in the capital city and
I was sent to the town of Adi Ugri, also known as Mendefera which was
fifty-four kilometers south of Asmara and, and about fifteen hundred
feet lower but still, six thousand feet above sea level and I was
assigned to a high school, Saint George Secondary School at . Their
high schools were few and far between. As I mentioned earlier, the
literacy rate was very low. There weren't very many schools so in
an area the size of a county, there would be, except in major urban
areas, only one high school and that was the high school, that was
00:48:00the situation I was in. My town may have had ten or twelve thousand
people. There was no census so who knows? But it was not a tiny town.
It wasn't just a little village by any means and it was on one of
the two major north-south highways in Ethiopia so there was a two lane
paved road that ran North and South through the town and one little
paved cross street and then, pretty much else was like village streets
in much of Africa and much of the rest of the undeveloped world and
Ethi-, the Italians who had had a strong presence in Eritrea from 1890s
or so on up to when they were defeated in World War II, had determined
a lot of what towns like that looked like. A lot of the amenities were
00:49:00left over from the Italians, the power system and the water system and
the electric system. We had electricity at night when a big diesel
generator was turned on and there were some street lights and, and some
of the better housing had electricity though generally, only four, a
few lights. Students lived in a place, I had some students, six of
them lived in one little room. They were allowed fifteen or twenty-
five watt bulb and if they used it later than eight p.m., their landlord
charged them extra so there was a lot of that and an elementary sewer
system and then, a water system that worked most of the time. When
water was scarce, you might have to get up, we lived at the bottom of
the hill so we had to more water pressure. If you lived at the top
of the hill, you might have to get up at two or three in the morning
and fill buckets to have, to, so you could have a water supply during
00:50:00the day. Anyway, there was a lot of Italian influence there and this
school I think had been, perhaps, been built by the Italians but it
was built along the style that they might have had and the number of
classrooms all spread out in single story long buildings parallel to
each other and it was seventh grade through, by the time I got through,
twelfth grade. It had been a middle school or something like that.
It was fed by a number of elementary schools some of which were out
in villages so the students at St. George's Secondary School, some of
them were coming to this larger town for their first experience there
and some walked every day to and from their village. Some were, their
villages were so far away that they had to stay in town with relatives
or in a tiny room with a bunch of others that they rented for a very
00:51:00small sum but it was a very large sum if you only make a few dollars
a month, you know, if your family income is only a few dollars a month
and by the time I got there and I was not in the first group of Peace
Corps volunteers there. There had been volunteers there for at least
two years before I arrived so we had an overlap with some who were
still there when my group of four arrived. We had two or three others
who had been there for a year or so. We had some, some continuing
orientation. It was good to have some Peace Corps mentors there who
could tell us something about the school and the faculty and what the
students were like and things like that--
WILSON: And you were--
FREEMAN: So we had a good size group, let's say there were seven of us
and I say and I'll explain some other things but one girl there was
00:52:00leaving after one year. She was still there when we got there but her
two years were not up, she was leaving after one year so we had very
little overlap with her and there were others who had just left, you
know, we got there in September, first of September, end of August
and those who had finished the preceding school year had left shortly
after that and because this was a large school with close to fifteen
hundred students and you know, forty or fifty faculty members. Of
the small group of, I'm not going to, a small group out of that total
faculty but a fairly large group of Peace Corps volunteers to be in a
small town, six or seven of us. We were assigned to the upper grades
because we were all college graduates at least and I think at least
one had a Master's degree out of this group and most of the Ethiopian
00:53:00teachers were challenged by trying to teach a grade that may not have
even completed themselves so you might have a, you might have an eighth
grade teacher who had finished only the tenth grade or a ninth grade
teacher who had finished only the ninth grade or maybe only the eighth
grade because the opportunities were not there where they'd grown up.
They couldn't get into a school or if they were older, the British or
the Italians had not allowed them much educational opportunities. I
say the British because the British were assigned sort of a caretaking
role in Eritrea after World War II for a while and so we all found
ourselves not teaching seventh and eighth grade at all. When we
00:54:00got there, it was the first year they had the eleventh grade and I
was assigned four eleventh grade math classes and others, generally,
somebody taught geography or biology. My roommate taught biology and
others taught math or science, physics but we were all in the upper
grades because very few of the other teachers--there was one, one
Ethiopian, Eritrean teacher who had gone to, had graduated from the
American University in Beirut. I think his family was well to do is
why he had managed to do that and he had a car. There was only one
other teacher in the faculty who had a car. Now, granted, this guy's
car was a Fiat 650 which makes the Volkswagen Beetle look large and
commodious. The other faculty member's car, it belonged to an Indian
00:55:00teacher, a contract teacher hired from India. Then, as now, India had
more people with education than it had jobs for and so there was a man
and his wife who both taught there. The man, I can't remember what he
taught but his wife taught, they called domestic science but we called
it home economics or something along that line and I, I taught math
both of my two years there. I took the eleventh grade class into their
senior year so I got to be there for the first graduating class of St.
George's Secondary School and the way Ethiopian's system is set up,
the, the seniors, the twelfth graders took a national school leaving
exam which I might compare it to the New York regency exam, something
that really determines more what you do in terms of graduation than
00:56:00what you're getting your individual classes. It was a national exam
that was administered at the school but it was done early in the second
half of their twelfth grade year and after that, they were through
with school even through there were three months left or something so
when that came to headmaster who also an Ethiopian, Eritrean graduate
of the American University in Beirut and a quite impressive man who
had the third car. I didn't count him among the faculty. He was
the headmaster and he had a Volkswagen Beetle. He assigned me to
help the teachers of science in the twelve seventh grade classes and
I can tell you that's the most interesting assignment I've had in my
working life probably all the way up till this time and it was quite
rewarding. It'll take a little while to explain why I really think
it's worth it. While many of us Peace Corps volunteers may not have
00:57:00known much about teaching because we didn't even intend to be teachers.
We were just told we were going to be many of us. We at least had
had exposure to a wide variety of teaching styles through at least
sixteen years of education back home. Well, the Ethiopian teachers
primarily, particularly those teaching the seventh grade, had, had come
up through the Italian, British model where the Italians, the teacher
was maestro and then, you know, it was strict and all that and, and
much of what they did was read from a text book or dictate a lesson
or deliver a lecture and the students copied down copious notes or
in some cases, just copied verbatim the small textbooks that they had
available to them as the teachers read them and this is what happened
to these teachers when they were subjected to education as students
00:58:00so they didn't know anything else about it. I can give you an example
of what they did. I saw a test and the students, when I came to work
with these, I was not given a class of my own. I was supposed to be
sort of a resource teacher or an experiment teacher to work with all
twelve sessions of the seventh grade but I saw a test that said after,
this is after they'd studied light and cameras and opti-, you know,
introductory to optics and so forth and spectrum probably, prism,
things like that. A camera is a blank for making a record of light
and it was the part of the test you were supposed fill in the word
"device." Well, that's an English vocabulary lesson but the operative
00:59:00principles here are camera and record and light but that was not,
that was not, a camera is a device for making a record of light was
a sentence out of the text book and to make the test, the teacher had
just put a blank in place of one of those words but it was not testing
any scientific knowledge or understanding of what they talked about
in there so my job was to do things like when we moved onto sound,
well, I would take in rubber bands of various thicknesses and length
and you hold them between your fingers and you pluck them and you get
different pitches and you can tell if you stretch it more tightly, the
pitch goes up. We talked about vibrations. By the time I got there,
they all know that sound was the vibration of molecules in the air as
01:00:00transmitted to the eardrum or some such sentence but that's what they
knew about sound so vibration, what does vibration mean? Put your hand
on your throat as you talk. I've got a lower a voice than you, put
your hand on my voice box as I speak and you'll feel the difference.
Stick a meter stick over the end, sit a student down on one end of it
and then, twang the other end and watch it go boing, boing, boing, you
can see vibration. Then you tell them, well, sound is faster than that
but it's the same idea. And the best moment I ever had in teaching
was after a session with one of these twelve classes and this class
had been selected, the best two or three students from each of these
elementary schools so out of all these twelfth grade students, you had
the one, I mean, seventh grade students. I had the one twelfth, the
01:01:00upper one twelfth in essence in one little section. Well, you've never
seen such a, such a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed bunch of kids. They
were in there to learn and they were able to learn despite all their
malnutrition and illness and walking maybe five kilometers to school
and back each day and not having pencils and paper when they needed
them all the time but they, they would glom onto anything I would throw
out there. It was going right into their little heads. And one day
I finished one of my sessions where instead of standing up there and
droning on about a camera being a device for making a record, they
had to copy it down, slowly, laboriously. I had done something that
had helped them learn something and they all gathered around me on the
floor or something like that. One little boy followed me out and I
was headed back to the empty room that served as a teacher's lounge,
and he said "Mr. Freeman? If you have some free time, could we do some
01:02:00more of that?" And you know, that's about the highest compliment you
can get as a teacher. And I realize looking back that that I did not
teach the math that well. In the first place, teaching plain geometry
or trigonometry, it doesn't lend itself to such simple things, I mean,
just right off the top of the head as rubber bands and meter sticks
and, you know, a pulley or a string or something like that but if I
were doing it, if I were to do it over again, I would try to make my
math lessons much more like the science lessons. Of course, I had the
advantage of having been there a year and a half and you know, whatever
it is, only a year and half of teaching experience but that was a year
and half more than I had when I started teaching my eleventh grade math
students but I greatly enjoyed that. Something I should mention by
01:03:00the way is that I taught in English and though Amharic is the official
national language, English was the second official national language
and that was because the Ethiopian languages, in general, were not
spoken beyond the borders of the country and there were few books
available in Amharic and Tigrinya which was the language of Eritrea
in the part of Eritrea where I was. And there were upwards of eighty
dialects we were told spoken in various parts of the country. So in
order to make it possible for Ethiopians, Eritreans and residences of
other provinces to go abroad to study or to do business internationally
or to listen to the BCC or the voice of America, whatever, you know, to
do international trade, they needed to have some language besides their
own and they had chosen English which was a good choice for them and
so many of their text books or most of their textbooks above seventh
01:04:00grade level were in English and the instruction was in English and
even the Ethiopian teachers were supposed to teach in English. Some
of them would take the easy way out, particularly those who, you know,
I described as who might have finished only seventh or eighth grade
themselves and didn't have the greatest command of English but that
made it easier on me so--
WILSON: So what, what would a typical day have been like for you from
the time you got up onward?
FREEMAN: Well, that brings up something that mostly was a surprise to me
and would be a surprise to most folks, talking about the Peace Corps.
I mean the vision you have is going and living in a mud floor hut and,
and so forth and you know, doing whatever the people do and we did do
whatever the people did but, and we were supposed to be paid according.
I was paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars, U.S. dollars a month.
01:05:00
WILSON: That was a living allowance?
FREEMAN: Yeah, that was the living allowance and then, they paid a
rental allowance. You know, that was what each volunteer in the
country got that amount. They provided housing allowance that varied
according to where you were. If you were in Addis Abba, you, you know,
housing was scarcer and harder to come by and therefore more expensive.
My town was sort of in the middle so you know, we weren't the lowest
or the highest but there happened to be a few nice houses in there
and one had been rented by Peace Corps volunteers before we got there.
Then, a group of three newcomers, of whom I was one, were assisted
by an Ethiopian staff member of the Peace Corps office in Asmara in
01:06:00negotiating another lease there so we weren't at the mercy of the local
landlord in not knowing what prices were supposed to be or anything
like that. We had this staff member who really took care of that for
us but we had a nice house that had tile floor. It was Italian design
and actually, some of the tiles might have come from Italy. I don't
know. It was, you know, stucco exterior and we had bougainvillea
around it and a wall around it. Walls were common for protection to
keep stray dogs out. There were stray dogs out. I'll touch on that if
we get a chance so there was a house with two large rooms.
WILSON: Running water and electricity?
FREEMAN: Running water and electricity with the exceptions that I
mentioned before, the electricity didn't come on until dusk and then,
our, in our community room, our living room, dinning room, lesson
01:07:00preparation room, we had an overhead florescent light fixture and one
of us had to remember to turn that on soon after the generator was
turned on shortly before it got dark or we wouldn't have any light
until after eleven p.m. because with florescent lights, the starting
voltage, the voltage required to start is higher than the voltage
necessary to keep it going so if you didn't turn on your florescent
light before the other folks in town turned on their lights once it
got really dark, then, when you turned it on all it would do is kind
of hum and flicker and wear out the cube but it would never come on
until people started turning their lights off and the overall voltage
went up. And we had a bathroom with an Italian old style toilet with
the tank way up, above my head, six or seven feet up on the wall with
a pull chain for flushing. And a sit down toilet, not a squat Italian
toilet, thank goodness. And we had a shower which was just a shower
01:08:00head that hung. It pointed straight down and it had charcoal or wood
fire water heater connected to it. So twice a week, we built a fire
in that and had a warm shower and I mean, everybody, you arranged so
that everybody was there at the time, you know, when you had because
the fire wouldn't last all that long. And I mentioned the trees were
scarce, hence, firewood and charcoal were scarce and it was actually
against the law to cut down trees without permits and so forth so it
was sort of a surreptitious thing. I mean, everybody had to cook,
you know, so you had to have something to cook with and most folks
couldn't afford the bottled gas that came from the city though we did
do that for our kitchen, our kitchen gas stove we had. There was an
old Italian stove but we didn't have any refrigeration. We didn't
01:09:00have electricity to keep it going in the day. And then the other Peace
Corps household did have a kerosene refrigerator but it was so much
trouble and so stinky, you know, that kerosene flame would just fill
the house even if you had the windows open all the time and stuff that
they didn't really use it much. I think they gave up on it. By the
second year I was there, nobody even tried to use it. Anyway, we had
a house with two nice large rooms and my roommate and I shared one of
the rooms. The other large room was the community room: the living
room/dining room, where you typed your lessons and your letters home
and had company. Then there was a kitchen that was between and there
was a little hallway between those two and the bathroom is outside
connected to the house but you had to go out onto patio deck, whatever,
terrace to get into the bathroom. And then, in an adjoining compound
01:10:00there were three other rooms that served as bedrooms and the third
person in my group was a girl. She had her room down there. And
our maid had her room down there. And the third room was kept by the
landlord for when he came into town, he could stay there. Our landlord
was from Asmara. He was a big, big man directly translated. He was
well to do and powerful and had had government positions, and he spoke
English and Italian and Amharic and Tigrinyan. Was well dressed and
had a small old Mercedes and another car so he was, you know, in the
upper one half of one percent of folks in Ethiopia. And he'd been a
Senator and he'd been head of Civil Aviation and so forth and owned
a lot of land including this real estate that we rented. We had this
01:11:00and we had all-purpose maid, cook, wash woman and you say, well, why
did you do that? You went to the Peace Corps -- why did you go over
there and you know, you have a servant in essence? Well, it turned
out that that's what all the Ethiopian teachers did, too, and part
of the reason is that if you ride your bike a couple of kilometers to
school in the morning and every morning, you have to go buy bread and
you have to buy whatever vegetables you have. If you're going to have
a chicken, you've got to go get the chicken that's either alive or
freshly killed so if you're going to shop for lunch. You've got to go
to four or five places and you have no refrigeration for this so your
lunch has got to be fixed right before you eat it. I mean, you ride
your bike home for lunch, there was no cafeteria or any provision for
storing food really or anything there besides what you could just put
01:12:00in a container or something like that but at room temperature. Which
is what the students did by in large and a number of the faculty. But
we had a student who lived with us and we gave him -- he was from a
village twenty kilometers away -- so we gave him free room and board in
exchange for going to the bakery for breakfast for us to get us fresh
bread and doing some other shopping and other household chores. And
he's geophysicist now, by the way, in the United States. He worked
for an oil company in Canada and the United States. But daily life
was very time consuming. Clothes were washed by hands and they were
01:13:00hung over a clothes line to dry. If you were going to iron them with
an electric iron, you had to wait till electricity was available. If
you're going to wash them, you had to build the fire and wait for the
water to get warm if you wanted to wash them in warm water and cooking,
you know, we couldn't afford canned goods. The only thing we ever
bought in the way of caned goods was mayonnaise and tuna and we bought
that up in the city. We'd buy a case of tuna, you know, twenty-four
cans or something--
WILSON: So what did you normally eat?
FREEMAN: Well, scrambled eggs and bread from the bakery that was not
far from our house. It was Italian style hard rolls and loafs of
bread and we would buy some jam, maybe, or some Italian jelly or jam
like that. We would eat Ethiopian and Italian style food. A lot of
pasta, you know, vegetables that were grown around there, tomatoes
01:14:00and green beans and onions, some carrots, not a lot of variety. I
mean, you weren't going to get asparagus and well, I don't think corn
was available. I thought of corn but they just didn't grow it much.
It takes too much water but it was animal feed if it had been there
probably. But I didn't do badly for food at all. During Peace Corps
training back at UCLA, our native speakers of Amharic and Tigrinya
had provided us a meal of Ethiopian food with the Ethiopian spices
at the level that they would normally eat. Which left me with the
feeling that -- as I mentioned, I was six-one and weighed a hundred
and forty-five or something -- after two years of trying to exist on
that high percentage of very strong red pepper I would probably be
01:15:00six-one and ninety-five pounds if I indeed did survive at all. Of
course, since we had our own cook, we could tell her that when she made
Ethiopian food for us which was quite frequent that it not be quite
that heavily spiced or at least until we got used to it. And we did
get a great deal used to it but even some of our colleagues who were
more natives of the country could not eat it all. If you got an ulcer,
you certainly didn't want to be the dead guy that died so food was not
a problem and living accommodations really weren't a problem. Now, we
had to be careful because you know, the water was not safe to drink.
The water went through a ceramic filter and was either boiled or
you put a measured amount of chlorine bleach in it and let it sit and
stir it and so forth. If you were going to eat salad and tomatoes and
whatever, anything that was not cooked and was not peeled, then it had
01:16:00to be dipped into or left to soak in a salt water solution or a bleach
solution. When you went to, out to eat at the home of someone who was
not educated enough to know about hygiene or you went to a restaurant,
you were cautioned not to eat salads even though it might have looked
pretty, it may have been well presented. And the steak that was
served in the nice restaurant in Asmara or the chicken may have been
beautifully presented and delightfully tasty, you could get something
that you really didn't want. And the Peace Corps medical kit that was
provided to each location --we had it at our house, for our group --
it had five levels of treatment increasing severity, you know, larger
01:17:00caliber gun for the treatment for gastrointestinal distress, diarrhea.
And at least once during my two years there, somebody had to go all of
the way up to, to a level five which was not desirable at all. But I
mean you were really sick when you got there. But everybody got into
one or two more than once, you know.
WILSON: What about recreation? What did you--
FREEMAN: Well, daily life was recreation to a great extent. I mean,
everything was new to us. If you wanted to go out and do some of
the shopping yourself, you were seeing a type of store that you'd
never seen before and you were dealing with and I enjoyed interacting
with people and trying my language skill such as it was. You know,
bargaining with things. And I learned how to say, you know, I want
the relative price, the family price, the brother-in-law price, you
01:18:00would say here. And they would laugh because most foreigners did not
learn much of the local languages, you know. Some had been there as
conquerors, the Italians, so they thought the Ethiopians, Eritreans
should learn Italian. So if you made an effort to go on the other
side, you were welcomed. Going back and forth to school -- we were a
couple of kilometers from the school or something like that -- and we
had a single speed Italian bicycle apiece. So you'd go and come in the
morning and at lunch and then, in the evening so I rode four or five
miles a day on a bicycle if I didn't do anything else so trying to get
exercise was not a problem. If you went around town, you walked. You
didn't own a motorcycle or a car in the Peace Corps there in Ethiopia
unless your job required it. If you were one of the small number of
01:19:00people who were say, public health workers, and you needed to go from
village to village or something like that, then you might have greater
distances than you could travel on foot or on a bicycle, then you
would be allowed to have a Land Rover or a Jeep or a car, whatever was
suitable. But we got around on our own feet and we went from town to
town, you know, from our town to the city, fifty-four kilometers away,
we took the bus like everybody else. I kind of helped coach basketball
a little, despite the fact that I was bad, you know, I couldn't make my
high school basketball team. Have people over. You'd get invited to a
wedding or you'd go out to a village with your students or just go out
to a village to look at it. See little boys that couldn't get in school
out there herding the sheep and the goats and the cattle and strike up
01:20:00a conversation with people. And Peace Corps provided us with a whole
bunch of paperback books and I read a whole lot of those, you know? We
had short wave radio and that was it for radio. There was no T.V.
WILSON: Did you, on school breaks or anything, did you travel within the
country or elsewhere?
FREEMAN: Yes! That was encouraged and of course, we wanted to see some
more of the country besides our own particular areas. And whenever
there'd be a long weekend or a week off for what'd be say Easter or
something like that, then we would travel. And even Eritrea was widely
different in its ethnic makeup and its geography. Forget the rest
of Ethiopia, just this one province which is now a small nation of
01:21:00its own. I had lived in the highlands where many of the people did
and Asmara was much the same there but if you went towards the Sudan,
you would find nomadic tribes who spoke entirely different languages.
I remember going there one time, the Easter vacation, I believe it
was my first year. Probably March something. There were Peace Corps
volunteers out in a town only about fifteen or twenty kilometers from
the Sudanese boarder and they invited us to come out and we did because
Peace Corps, you could bunk with most anybody as you may recall in your
own experience. If you were in a town and they had a floor, you could
sleep on it, you know. Or a couch or whatever. So the people who were
in this town wanted to go somewhere else but they left their student
or their maid or whatever, information about us, and we were allowed
01:22:00to go into their house. So we spent a couple nights there and this was
entirely different because this was low land. Our area was arid and
semi-desert or almost semi-desert but this area down there was between
semi-desert and desert and there were nomadic tribes with camels. I
mean, camels came through my town too but the people who lived there
didn't have camels. And you'd see those big old termite mounds that
are eight feet tall that there weren't in my area. And in order to
bargain at the outdoor market there, I had to find somebody who would
speak a little Amharic or Tigrinya which was an alien language in
this area and get him or her to translate with the shop keeper or the
merchant there into ----------(??) or Ethiopian, Sudanese, Arabic,
01:23:00something which was a new experience, trying to use a language in
which I was not adept to speak to some third party and between me and
someone else. And if you went in the other direction towards the Red
Sea, you'd go through Asmara, the capital city and then down seven
thousand five hundred feet of mountain roads which the Italians had
built back in the 1930s or so. They were not very wide and they were
more hair pin turns than most Americans can envision in a life time on
just one trip there. And also there was a railway, the narrow gauge
railway went down there, just a two or three car train where the diesel
engine was part of one of the cars or something. And you could take
01:24:00that also and I once rented a bicycle in Asmara and rode half way down
there to where there was a Peace Corps volunteer. Snd that was kind
of interesting. You hoped your brakes worked because if they didn't,
you were going to burn the bottoms of your shoes off trying to drag
them off to stop on that. And then put the bike on the bus and go
on the train and go back. But I did go to the city on the Red Sea a
couple times, a port city there. And that was an international city.
People from everywhere, small ships coming in, and it was entirely
different. We had a warm dry climate where I was. There, they had
sticky, hot. The place was called one of the hottest port cities in
the world. It was not uncommon for it to be a hundred and five degrees
in what seemed like ninety-five percent humidity? They had ceiling
fans and that was it unless you were rich and could stay in an air
01:25:00conditioned hotel which Peace Corps volunteers didn't do. and that was
an entirely different, you know, in entirely different surrounding to,
different culture, different food. You know, I should probably bring
this up. While I was in that town out near the Sudanese boarder that
I mentioned, the town of Tesseney, something happened that I learned
about when I came back. I went out there with, well, two girls from
my town, two Peace Corps volunteers. We rode the bus out together and
stayed in this house of volunteers who'd gone off on their own holiday
trip and then, returned to Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea which
had a Peace Corps district office or whatever they call it. I think
it may have been the only other one besides the one in Addis Abba, the
01:26:00Ethiopian capital. Well, I was there, and I don't know, spending a
night there perhaps out shopping or eating and someone from the Peace
Corps office or another Peace Corps volunteer saw me or found me and
said Harold, they want you back at the office or used the name of the
director for whatever, or assistant director for the country. And
he didn't say what for. You know, it was the first time anybody had
said "you need to go." We'd go in and check for mail and stuff like
that. It wasn't uncommon to go there but it was the first time I'd
ever been told that I was needed or wanted there. So I went there
shortly thereafter and found the director or assistant director in that
office and made some kind of joke, you know, "what have I done? Why am
I being sent to the principal's office," or whatever. And he didn't
respond in any jocular manner and told me to sit down. And then told
01:27:00me that my roommate from Adi Ugri who had not gone to Tesseney with
the three of us, he had gone to the southwestern part of Ethiopia, he
had flown there and had been killed by a crocodile in a river. And
that was the farthest thing from the mind of anybody who might have
been in there. You know, Peace Corps deaths were not common and that's
the only one that I knew of in the whole time I was there but we were
left or I was left, I guess, as a roommate, not with having to inform
his parents or anything. The Peace Corps hierarchy took care of that.
But I packed up his belongings and shipped them or actually, I think
I communicated with them by letter and they said well, whatever the
students or folks you might find useful there keep there and send
01:28:00back personal stuff, things like that. But indeed this was Bill Olson
who was a Cornell University graduate and was from a town in upstate
New York, near Cornell. Cornell is in Ithaca and he's from Spencer,
New York, I believe. Well that was, that was the biggest shock of my
entire time in the Peace Corps. And of course, the school went on.
There was no replacement at the last half or the last semester coming
up so I don't remember exactly how. Bill taught biology and I don't
know whether some of our other, or the rest of us, or someone else
filled in in his classes. Now, I can't recall. I know that I didn't
01:29:00because I had a full load of classes. Or whether the students just
didn't get the last half of their last semester of tenth or eleventh
grade biology. Another volunteer was sent the next year so I did have
a different, a new roommate the next year. They assigned someone else
in there to teach the same sort of thing that Bill had been teaching.
In the summer time, back to your original question, in the summer
time, we were encouraged or well, instructed, I think, to spend a month
doing a project. And then, take a month for vacation and a few people
did projects in their towns of assignments if they saw something they
thought they could do that would help things there, and if they didn't
wish to travel elsewhere. I wanted to see a different part of the
country. I went to Addis Abba and worked in a mental hospital, not
01:30:00a very high level but this was a very low staff hospital. It was the
only mental hospital in the country at the time as far as I know. It
had all levels of folks from those who were completely uncommunicative
but would keep their clothes on. They'd just squat in the dirt and
spend their days that way to folks who had maybe bi-polar disorder or
schizophrenia or someone who at sometimes could function and at a high
level and were educated and could converse with me in English in an
interesting manner and maybe play scrabble or checkers or something
until they had an episode that set in. You know, the depressive or the
manic state would take over and my job was just to try to give these
folks something to do. I would collect magazines and take them in even
they were in English. It would be something for them to look at. They
had nothing. The beds were a couple feet apart lined up like, sort
01:31:00of like a prison dormitory or jail or something because they had more
people than they had room for. Just try to provide a diversion, you
know, a conversation, something along that line. It was not any sort
of therapy beyond whatever that provided. But I lived again, I lived
in the home of a Peace Corp volunteer who was off going somewhere else
and, and took a couple of buses across town and walked a ways to get
to this hospital. So it let me see a good bit of Addis Abba and then,
I got to visit with other Peace Corp volunteers I'd known in training
but hadn't seen for a year and take advantage of what a large city has
to offer, movies and see the big government buildings and landmarks
and things like that. Then, during the actual vacation, I spent
thirty days or so in what had formerly been British East Africa: Kenya,
01:32:00Tanzania and Uganda. Peace Corps volunteers who were stationed in
Addis Abba arranged cheap transportation for us. They bought a block
of seats on Sudanese Airways to fly from Addis Abba to Nairobi and we
all went on one day. You know we were able to save a lot of money by
doing it that way and come back at the same time but once you got to
Nairobi, you were on your own. Small groups of us, one fellow said oh,
let's rent us a Land Rover and a driver, guide and go see some of these
game parks and things that we can't find on our own. You know, it'd be
too expensive for one or two people to do but I think eight of us did
that so we did that for a while. And one girl I was with in this group
wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro which never even occurred to me. She
couldn't talk anybody else into it so I said well, okay. We hadn't
01:33:00come equipped for Mt. Kilimanjaro which is, you may recall,19,200 feet
high and it was fortunate that if I was going to do it any time in my
life, I did it while I was twenty-three years old and had been living
at 6,000 feet and occasionally traveling to 7,500. Because it was
by far the hardest physical undertaking I've ever done. And I, after
that have been in the Army and gone through basic training and been
to Vietnam and stuff but. But it wasn't the equivalent of taking a
leisurely stroll for three and a half days from--
[Tape one, side b ends; tape two side a begins.]
WILSON: Peace Corp Oral History Project, tape two of interview with
Harold Freeman, February 18th, 2005--Harold, you were talking about
climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
FREEMAN: Yes. I won't spend much time on that but I will say that
01:34:00even though I was young and I thought healthy and in reasonably
decent shape, I was put to shame by, and this is, by the way, the only
thing that I really did as a true tourist in my two years as Peace
Corps volunteer, including my six weeks spent traveling home through
Europe. But because we didn't know what we were doing and because
they required that you have at least a guide, you know, the national
government there in Tanzania, we had a guide and we hired porters and
we rented boots and jackets and I mean heavy weight coats and that sort
of thing and they provided food for us. And you had to carry your own
fuel and you had to haul your own trash back down, I mean, the crew
did. Well, all I carried basically was my camera which turned out
to be plenty once you get above 15,000 feet or so. But the porters
we hired started off and we were at times, part of the time, you went
through thick forest and it looked damp and there'd be a little path
01:35:00along the side of the hillside and we'd be careful, And some people I
was with, the various groups that go together, some would use hiking
sticks. Well, the porters are carrying forty pounds and wearing flip
flips and not having any trouble with their footing. But the rest of
us are being careful and sometimes grabbing a tree or a vine or using
a stick or something. And they'd give us a break every now and then.
You know, you climb 500 feet or a 1000 feet of elevation, you stop
and have a fifteen minute break, ten minute break or something. Well,
the porters sit down, put their forty pounds down or whatever and, and
sing in harmony. You know they're the ones been doing all the work and
they've got enough breath to sing. So you can see where you wouldn't
want to get into the marathon race with these folks. And there are
01:36:00actually a couple of ladies of British heritage there who were in
there upper sixties or something like that who went up to 12,000 feet.
They'd been up the mountain several times before and they just wanted
to go that far. They weren't up to going farther but it was great.
They were gray haired ladies going up here to 12,000 feet. I can't
complain about that. And, in fact, I didn't have any trouble. We
started, as I said at 4,500 feet or so and spent the first night at
9,000 and the next one at 12,000 and the third one at 16,000. And by
this time, we were well above the tree line and it's pretty much just
this little scrub vegetation and mostly loose gravel and dirt. But
I didn't have much difficulty there. And we spent the night in a hut
which just had kind of shelves in it and the sleeping bags that we had
rented from this place. Slept on that and it got cold in the night.
And they had told us that in order to get the spectacular view of the
sunset from the summit over an adjoining mountain which was tall but
01:37:00not nineteen, you know, 17,000 feet or something like that, we needed
to be up there at sunrise. So we could get up at two o'clock and I
remember getting up at two o'clock. And they fed us a little breakfast
or something. And made our visits to what was called, the label inside
the door said the coldest outhouse on this plane which indeed it was
in the dark at two a.m.! And even though, this was, I'm talking July
and only, you know, a very short distance from the equator here, but
the wind is twenty miles an hour, thirty miles an hour or something.
And it was dark at night so we started off up there and even though
I had had no trouble up that time, I mean, I got tired, I guess, we
were walking several miles a day and up a fairly steep incline, by the
time I had taken maybe fifteen or twenty steps from this hut where we'd
01:38:00spent the night, I felt like all my capillaries were wired to 220 and
that whatever oxygen carrying capacity my blood had had, had been left
back at the hut and was just gasping for breath there. And our guide,
there was a Canadian guy with us and his guide on him at the same time
too, but our guides were carrying a lantern and a thermos of tea. And
they were looking back at us and we were slowly going on. And you
know, I'm thinking boy, this is, we've got 3,000 more feet of this to
go (laughs). I don't know, you know, this is not possible and I think
probably some stupid male twenty-three year old pride or something
saying this girl is in front of me. If she can make this, I can make
this. And that was probably the only thing that got me up there. But
we would stop and we would climb on this loose gravel they called scree
01:39:00so you had to just go back and forth and back and forth. You couldn't
go straight up. It was like climbing a pile of gravel and we did get
up there indeed before the sunrise which was indeed spectacular. And
once I got up there, it was okay and the girl who had been my motivation
for going and got altitude sickness and she didn't feel good at all
but once I was up there, I was all right. Coming back down was really
interesting because we came down in a day and a half while it took us
three and a half days to go up. And we came down back to that hut in
about an hour what had taken us four hours to go up and we could have
done it faster except that this girl, ----------(??), from Rochester,
New York was feeling bad so she wasn't up to the kind of exertion.
Basically, you just took a giant step over the edge of this stuff
and planted your heel in this loose gravel and your heel would carry
01:40:00you on two or three more feet. So you felt like you were Paul Bunyan
just taking giant strides across the countryside there. I also got
to go to Mombasa and see the sea, and take a steamer trip across Lake
Victoria and see lions and flamingos and elephants and giraffes and in
the game preserves, see Nairobi which is a fascinating city. Eat a lot
of Indian food, saw a play. Anyway, it was just a considerable break
from Ethiopia being in a relatively small town. And didn't have any
responsibilities there, you know, so we could do whatever we wanted.
WILSON: So you spent two years, you came to the end of your term in '67?
01:41:00
FREEMAN: Right
WILSON: And then, what? Tell me something about your departure and--
FREEMAN: Well, I ought to mention a couple or other things--
WILSON: Okay
FREEMAN: I haven't brought up the fact that Eritrea didn't liked being
attached to Ethiopia or at least a significant number of the Eritreans
didn't like that and there was a separatist movement afoot and so the
government was on guard and, and we heard. We had a student musician
in our school and I have heard sing a song called "Shigei Abuni"
which means "Give me Freedom." Which wouldn't have gone over well
with the government if he'd been heard singing that and indeed, at
one point, well, I need to back up one more step there. I mentioned
the headmaster who was a quite distinguished gentleman, gray haired,
01:42:00looked like he should have been a headmaster or an executive corporate
level or something, who really had, as far as I could tell, really
had his students' welfare at heart. And I had been in his office one
time talking about something and he said and there was no one else in
there and I think maybe he said this because I was a foreigner and his
compatriots would not be hearing this. He said, "I have no money for,
even for chalk. What am I going to do?" You know, he had no money
for supplies. The government was paying the teachers. He didn't have
to pay the, you know, he didn't have to come up with the money for
teachers, whatever. They hired, they were paying. But if teachers
needed chalk and students needed paper and so forth, it was just really
hard to come up with, with anything along those lines. Anyway, during
01:43:00the school year, we were told something and this ranked up with the
death of my roommate here, that his daughter had found him, I think
on a Saturday, not on a school day, had found him hanging from the
shower at home. And this was an absolute total surprise to us. And I
don't know whether, well, I just don't know what it was. I don't know
whether his task was overwhelming or that it was something entirely
personal and had nothing to do with that or he had a medical problem
that precipitated this or what not. But it was just a complete shock
and so after his death, then, back in the school week, there was to
01:44:00be a funeral procession to pay respects to the family. And we were
to walk from the school which is, I've said, a kilometer and a half
or so outside town, back in town, past my house and on up toward his
house and/or the church or a community gathering ground where they had
festivals and stuff, the Easter celebrations and things. Anyway, on
the way, we had this long procession of you know, most of those twelve
or fifteen hundred students going along this and it spread out for a
kilometer or more. Along came some police or government agents and
snatched at least one student out of this procession and hauled them
off to Asmara for questioning of the less than polite sort and this
student was one of my students. Had been a junior, an eleventh grade
01:45:00math student, was then a twelfth grade math student and he was gone for
several days, you know? When he came back, we got the word that he had
been interrogated about anything he might know about the separatist,
the independence movement and that his head was dunked under water
and things like that. So we already had this funeral procession and
the death of the headmaster hanging over this. And then, we had the
uncertainly while Asgedom was gone and then, the tales which I guess
he wasn't at liberty to say outright when he came back, you know to
the student body or anything or he would have been considered even
more suspicious but that was certainly unsettling. Asgedom, by the
01:46:00way, become a lawyer in the capital city sometime after, later on. But
anyway, that was, those things transpired before the end of my term
there. And there wasn't any big ceremony or departure or anything. We
just made our own plans to leave. The Peace Corps said it would buy us
a ticket for the direct route home or give us the equivalent sum if we
wished to make our own arrangements and you know, if you wanted to take
a tamp streamer and take six months getting home, whatever. I took
the plane ticket which allowed you, you took the direct flight but you
were allowed to make a bunch of stops around. I think the airlines are
much more restrictive now but instead of flying back home the way we
01:47:00went over, which coming over was Nashville, New York, Rome, Addis Abba,
and then, onto Asmara, I went from Asmara to Athens, to Belgrade, to
Vienna and Rome, Rome, Florence and Venice, Zurich, Amsterdam, London,
Montreal. I thought I was going to the World's Fair. Turned out that
you can't get into town where there's a World's Fair, you know. They
didn't tell me this in London when I left. They let me buy a ticket
to there and when I got there, I asked them about my reservations that
Air Canada had made for me. "Reservations? Ha!" they pretty much said.
SoI left Montreal immediately and went, stopped in Detroit and visited
01:48:00relatives there, an aunt and uncle and their family. before coming
back to Tennessee but one little sidelight. My time to come home, I
had intended to perhaps do something different and because of politics
in the region, you couldn't just go from any one point to another
point. If say you wanted to go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, you had to go
to some neutral point, Nicosia or Athens or something first and then,
trying to come back toward where you had been. And I had thought about
doing that but you couldn't fly from Addis Abba to there or something.
Well, if you, we're both old enough to remember what happened in June
1967 in that part of the world and it's called the June 1967 War, as
a matter of fact, the preemptive strike by Israel on the gathering
forces of the Arab world and so going to any part of the Arab world
01:49:00or to Israel didn't look promising at all. As a matter of fact, for
about oh, two or three, that was early in June, I think and then, I
was going to leave in mid-June or something. It appeared to get to
Europe, I was going to have to fly south back to Kenya or something
and then over into Central Africa and then up to the Mediterranean way,
the dickens west of all this. But the week before I actually departed,
Ethiopia decided that things had settled and I mean, the war did not
last very long. And so they considered air space safe again and they
wouldn't be showing any partiality at all to Sudan by flying over
Sudan or something. So I was allowed to take a reasonable, just fly to
01:50:00Athens without going four to six thousand miles out of the way and I,
because by the time I had traveled in Ethiopia and East Africa cheaply
as Peace Corps. By the way, I mentioned that my pay was a $125 a month
the first year. They decided that was too much. We could live too
high on all of that so they cut it to $100 a month which was, you know,
both of those were in the range of what a college educated Ethiopian
secondary school teacher would have made. But in essence, there were
no college educated, well, there was the one that I told you about who
had the Fiat and so we could live better than a teacher, an Ethiopian
teacher who had a wife and two children. None of us had wives or
children we had to pay for. He could live if he had only a tenth grade
01:51:00education, he wouldn't be paid as much as those of us who had college
education so they cut down on that. And we really couldn't complain
because we could survive quite well and even save a little money if you
didn't smoke or drink or buy great gobs of souvenirs or local art or
something like that on a $100 a month with your health care provided
such as it was. Most of us didn't need a lot of health care and with
the rent supplement took care of that. So I traveled through all those
countries I mentioned on the way home for six weeks out of a suitcase
and an airline bag which served as my camera bags
WILSON: Came back to Tennessee then?
FREEMAN: Yeah, came back to Tennessee. And while I was over there, I
didn't, I'm again, here I am once again, aimless and directionless.
I didn't know what I was going to do when I came back. I knew I'd
have to do something here to put food on the table or go back to
school or something. But about midway through the second semester of
01:52:00my second year, I got a surprise letter from a former teacher of mine
at Tennessee Tec who's not the teacher I mentioned earlier, someone
who'd been hired to help him while I was there. But in my sophomore
or junior year. And he said that the other teacher, the one I had
mentioned first had moved on, gone back to school, something and that
the letter writer needed assistants and would I be willing to help him
with advising the school newspaper and teaching Introductory Journalism
courses and doing some things along that line. I said, "Well, I would
have never applied for such a job given my qualifications but you know
them and you know me," and he said, "Oh, by the way, we know you don't
have a graduate degree and so forth so this has to be approved by
the Dean of the Faculties but he knows you and he's already approved
this too. So I came back and did that for a year and in fact, they
01:53:00asked me. I was an instructor of the lowest level. I was one step
above graduate assistant or something like that. But they asked me
if I would like to do it another year and I said no for two or three
reasons. I still didn't know what I wanted to do but I knew that in
my own mind or in my heart, I didn't know what I needed to know to
teach Journalism to these folks and then, on the other hand, I had a
bunch of students who didn't, not all of them by any means but many,
who didn't want to know what it was that I did know. They were not
journalism students by choice. They were Secondary Education English
majors and the curriculum writer had thought, oh, Secondary Education
English majors are going to probably be the advisor to the school year
book or literary magazine or the newspaper or the student radio station
or whatever so all these people have to take at least one or two
01:54:00courses in Journalism. And they didn't want to be there. They wanted
a grade that would let them pass and that was it, so it wasn't terribly
satisfying from that standpoint and the only attraction was one, and
I couldn't do this in good conscience, was by this time, Vietnam had
heated up to a considerable degree and there was drafting right and
left, and I was twenty-five years old and single and as long as I
taught. There was a teaching department bye, you know, but I thought,
given those other situations that it really would not be a matter of
an action of the highest integrity to stay there doing something that
I thought that I didn't really want to do and didn't think I was truly
qualified to do for the best of the students' benefit to just keep me
safe in essence, while there were lots of other folks out there who
01:55:00could be drafted who didn't have the option of just being safe and
that's what they wanted. So I didn't teach and then I got called up for
my physical and declared 1A which meant prime draft meat. And so I had
a temporary job with a mapping company running around the back woods of
Tennessee looking at property lines to see if they were actually where
the property was and so forth which was kind of interesting but not a
life's work. Then I got called up and drafted by the Army and spent
my twenty-sixth birthday which was the cut-off date for being drafted
in basic training in the Army at Fort Campbell. I had an interesting
encounter before that and once I found out I was 1A. I was, you know,
some of the way between ordinary American and conscientious objector
01:56:00but I couldn't claim conscientious objector status in good conscience
either because I could've seen if I had been that same age when Hitler
was invading Europe and Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor, I wouldn't
have claimed conscientious objector status. And they didn't allow
you to pick and choose your wars so I went to the draft center in
Nashville and asked for the oath that you had to take when you went
in because I was kind of iffy about what it was I could promise to do.
Well, they wouldn't give it to me and furthermore, they threatened
to have me arrested if I didn't leave, and I might have gone along
for that, not ever having participated in a demonstration or anything.
Tennessee was kind of behind the rest of the world with the hippie
revolution and people demonstrating and protesting and marching, but
01:57:00I had two people waiting for me where I had left my car. I was going
to give them a ride to another town, including Velman, and Velman was
a Belgium journalist and I thought well, I best not leave him stranded
in Nashville for two or three days while I get myself in and out of
jail. So I did leave but then I wrote to the Senior Al Gore who's a
Senator from Tennessee at that time and told him of my experience and
said that I thought I should be able to find out the contents of the
oath that I was going to be asked to take. And he thought so, too, and
sent it on and I got a letter from a Colonel at the Pentagon who told
me that yes, indeed, I was entitled to such information and here it is.
So then, when I was indeed drafted, you know, I had to show up at this
same induction center a couple of months later. They knew who Harold
01:58:00Freeman was because they'd heard of me from the Pentagon. But I did
not take the oath because it said I would obey all orders or all lawful
orders or something to that effect and even though the My Lai incident
had not yet come to light, if it indeed had actually taken place at
that time, I was not comfortable saying that I would do anything that
they told me to do. So I just got inducted without taking the oath
which kept them giving me a security clearance. Which didn't keep them
from giving me three jobs that required security clearance. So I've
been in the Peace Corps and I've been in the war corps and I prefer the
Peace Corps to a high degree over the war corps.
WILSON: Did you actually go to Vietnam?
01:59:00
FREEMAN: Oh yeah, I was sent to Vietnam and when I got there, they sent
me to, well, they sent everybody to a personnel warehouse where they had
you fill out a form, a long form and hand over your personnel records.
And they said on this form, there's no place for this, but if you can
type, put the approximate number of words per minute out in the margin
some place. Well, all they ever saw on my form was name, rank, serial
number and forty to forty-five words per minute or something. And they
said, "Freeman, you're going right over there" and pointed across a
valley to another place and a post there so I was a paperwork warrior.
Turns out that paperwork warriors are more--you know, they used to
say the Army travels on its stomach. Well, by that time, the Army
traveled on its paperwork and documents and I was given an opportunity
to, I was sent to a civil affairs company and some folks have heard of
civil affairs companies now in Iran and Afghanistan. They're supposed
02:00:00to help military aspects coordinate with local governments and work
with whatever's necessary, public engineering projects or education
or health or public safety, whatever and the same thing was true in
Vietnam except that it really didn't much if it got done there and I
don't know whether it's getting done in Iran or Iraq, I mean, Iraq and
Afghanistan but mostly it was a make work job, saying that we achieved
our goals. We had -- my company was an unusual outfit -- operated in
seven provinces in Vietnam and one of my jobs in the headquarters was
to keep in touch with all those folks and help all of them keep up with
their paper. You know, if somebody out there was, payment to his wife
back home was not reaching home, then I'd try to fight the paperwork
battle to get that. Do reports and stuff like that. Pull guard duty
every third or fourth night and sat out by a machine gun hoping nobody
02:01:00would show up on the other side and intrude. Nobody did though you
never knew there. You know, they told me stories when I got there that
a rocket had landed in the mess tent up the hill, I mean, the dining
hall, the mess hall, some time before that so not to be too complacent.
They offered me the chance to go out to one of these seven provinces,
a location where I might actually have some contact with Vietnamese
and I said yes, I would prefer that but by that time, I had helped them
do the annual report which was due right when I got there, you know,
two weeks after that so I spent two weeks doing this and they said oh,
you can go out here if you want to and the Colonel who had given me
that option was rotated back to the states. His time was up and his
right hand man, the Major, executive officer, yanked me right back in
there because I was one of those clerks who could actually type. Their
writing came out better when I got through with it than it did when
02:02:00they finished it so that was, I had nineteen days out there with the
people. Other than that, it was mostly with the Army.
WILSON: So you spent time in Vietnam, then, you came back nd what have
you done since?
FREEMAN: Well, didn't know exactly what I wanted to do then either
except I knew it wasn't military. I got out of the military as soon as
I got back.
WILSON: So that would have been '69, '70?
FREEMAN: Well, I went over, I left the United States on Thanksgiving Day
of 1969 for Vietnam and came back and while I was over there, toward
the end of my time there, they started winding down. They started
the initial troop withdraw so I, everybody went over for a year. I
actually came back in about a year, I mean, eleven and a half months
or something like that. Then, I did a couple of short term things,
you know, my wife and I, I met my wife. We got married. I took her
02:03:00on a trip to Ethiopia, and she'd never been outside the country except
to Canada before. She'd been to Hawaii out toward the west but had
not been anywhere else and she heard me talk about the Peace Corps and
Ethiopia a lot and she wanted to travel besides. We took a big trip
that took us to the Bahamas and through some of Europe, some of the
area that I had traveled on the way back home and then, we went Addis
Abba and Asmara and my town Adis Ugri and she was greatly impressed
with the people there and hospitality that we were shown. This was
1973 so it was six years after I had been back and we found some of our
people and my old landlord let us stay in the house where I had stayed
and found the assistant headmaster who had become the headmaster after
02:04:00the suicide of the original headmaster. He had us to his house and
found some of my students who had moved to Addis Abba to go to college
there and had stayed there and so forth so she enjoyed it. She got a
real taste for we traveled for more than a month, I think. So she got
a real taste for international travel and living overseas so she was
a nurse in a hospital in Nashville that turned out to be the beginning
of the Hospital Corporation of America which eventually decided to
expand overseas and its first hospital was in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh.
And so she signed up for, or got us in on that where she would be
head of cardiac care there. And they opened it, when they opened this
hospital and I would do a bunch of ancillary stuff for the almost, with
02:05:00a primarily international crew because the Saudis didn't have people
who could staff a hospital to the level they aspired to there. It was
going to be a medical center for the Middle East, if not the world, and
so we went over there and spent six months and she got to liking that
sort of thing and went back to school and ended up getting a doctorate
in teaching nursing at the University of Louisville where she initiated
their first nursing courses abroad and she's taken students to England.
She's a Florence Nightingale Scholar and did some area study there but
also has taken them to Germany and some to Russia because she got into
an assistance program after the fall of the Soviet Union. A hospital
here was in a government cooperative program to assist hospitals in
the former Soviet Republics and so she's been there a couple times,
took students one time and we've had those folks here who just got
02:06:00interested, you know, in international things. We have taken students
from the International Center from the University of Louisville. We've
had Chileans and we had three guys from the United Arab Emirates help
us put up our Christmas tree one time. All Muslims, you know. We've
had Taiwanese and we still keep up with the Chileans, the first one we
had here, a Chilean. We've kept Russian businessmen overnight through
the Louisville International Cultural Center business exchange program,
you know, just a number of things.
WILSON: And what you've done here was with the--
FREEMAN: When I mentioned that how I went back to school, that was in
Augusta, Georgia at the Medical College of Georgia and even though
I had been editor of my high school paper and managing editor of
02:07:00my college newspaper and when I was in the Army, one of those three
jobs that I wasn't allowed to have because I didn't have a security
clearance was working on post newspaper and one of the interim jobs
I had was a small printing company where I edited some customer's
stuff a little bit along the way. When we were in Saudi Arabia, I did
the hospital newsletter which was just done on a copying machine but
I wrote the stuff and put it together, you know, as I said and then
the Army after that and when I taught at Tennessee Tech, then I was
advising the school newspaper. So I'd never really been away from
publishing, printing, editing, writing very far. And so I went to
the newspaper, morning newspaper, down there in Augusta, Georgia and
got a job as a reporter shortly after we arrived there and then Linda
got herself a couple of degrees there, and I knew an editor up here
at The Courier-Journal and put in a call. She had said well, if you
02:08:00want a job, if you're interested in a job up this way, give me a call
and so I did and got an interview and got a job and I've been here
since February of 1978, this now being February of 2005, just passed
my twenty-seventh anniversary here. I came here -- I was a reporter in
Augusta -- I came here for an introductory copy editing job and I did
copy editing jobs and other sorts of related editing jobs all along.
I'm an assistant metro editor of The Courier-Journal now.
WILSON: So what do you think the impact of Peace Corps was on Ethiopia
or your particular time there?
FREEMAN: Well, I should have said something that I've often said to
people that I think the Peace Corps. My two years in the Peace Corps
was worth more to me than any Master's degree I could have got in the
02:09:00same time. I never did go back to graduate school but I did explore
it before coming to Louisville. And the long term effect in Ethiopia:
there have been two wars between Ethiopia and Eritrea for separation
and eventually, separation was accomplished and the entire fabric of
life there was disrupted. Eritrea lost pretty much a generation of
young males to the war. I have an acquaintance here that works in a
restaurant downtown who's from Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea.
He lost two brothers. He came here for medical treatment and is
still here but he lost two brothers in that war and he said there
are no people. There are young people and there are old people but
there are no male people at least, you know, his age, twenty-five,
thirty, thirty-five so forth in there, maybe on up into their forties
02:10:00and facilities were bombed and shelled and things like that. I don't
know what's become of my school at this point but I do know that
for a time at least there was no school so folks who survived didn't
get much education there. I do know, on the positive side, while I
was there, actually, before I got there, the Peace Corps volunteers
before me had started, were aware of the American Field Service
foreign student exchange program that was not known to me. There were
no exchange students at my high school and I hadn't been connected
with any anywhere but they had already initiated the process somehow
and got applications coming so I was involved in writing letters of
recommendation for some of my students that I had the first year and
02:11:00we had quite a good success rate. We got three students from that one
student were accepted by American Field Service and one of them became
a lawyer and one became a geophysicist and the other I don't know what
he became but he was the son of the imam at the mosque. My town by the
way was roughly half and half Christian, Ethiopian Orthodox Christian
or Orthodox Christian, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. There were others,
also some Protestants or Catholics; there weren't many Protestants but
there was an Italian Catholic Mission there. There was a church or an
convent monastery up on a hill there too, so we were able to get those
kids there and unfortunately, those that are educated and who were in
02:12:00danger if they were for independence, then they were in danger from the
central government and some of them came over here and stayed and some
did not. But while we were there, we had questions that we didn't know
were going to develop from this but, you know, we did, we taught what
we were assigned but had to agree to that. You know, I was teaching
trigonometry. The other people were teaching geography and some were
teaching English and there was some need for all that but sometimes if
you came to, went to work for the school and you saw many mothers with
small children who didn't know to get the flies out of their eyes, you
know, to wipe their noses, didn't know anything about sanitation, you
thought why am I spending five days a week doing this when there's such
a need for other stuff there? And you could go the other way, well,
02:13:00you can never teach all of the uneducated mothers about germs, I mean,
to why they need to do these things because they don't even know the
existence of germs and you can't show them to them and so forth. They
have to have a certain basic education before you can make this change
and you know, the change is going to come a few years down the road so
these people you're teaching are going to become teachers of others and
their own children are going to be better cared for than if you weren't
here. I had two students who had only one arm and it wasn't because
they were born with congenial deformity but because they suffered
an arm injury sometime in childhood and then the only treatment was
amputation. I had another student with a permanent limp who couldn't
walk any distance except with great difficulty he had to ride a bike
and he used it with one leg to do all the pumping basically. Out of a
hundred math students I had, only two wore glasses. Well, that's not
02:14:00because Ethiopians are born with perfect eyesight, it's because they
don't have money for glasses or access to glasses, testing for glasses
and some of them had oh, what's that disease? Trichoma that causes
whitening of the cornea, clouding or so forth in one or both eyes and
so sometimes we questioned what we were doing and when we had trouble
to, you couldn't get chalk for the blackboard or you had to teach from
a textbook which was an old British textbook that was using examples
about natural gas and therms. Well, Americans don't know what natural
gas and therms is unless they work for a gas company. There wasn't
such a thing natural gas in my town so you were better off making up
your own examples and then people would want to know why you weren't
using the book but we were lucky to have a book at all because some
schools didn't, you know. Two kids would have to share a book or there
02:15:00would be more or there wouldn't be any textbooks at all. The teacher
would have a textbook if he or she would like to so there were a lot
of things there and again, looking back on it, I didn't do the best job
of teaching, I know, and part of that was being young and stupid and
not experienced. On the other hand, it's hard to get people who are
experienced and adept in their profession to pick up and leave their
parents or their children or their homes and their jobs and take off
and go to Ethiopia for two years. Plus, it's harder to ride a bike,
you know, five or ten kilometers a day now or deal with the diarrhea
that you occasionally get or deal with the dust or whatever hardships
that didn't seem like much like hardships then but are different if
you're forty-five or sixty-five or whatever.
WILSON: What would you say was the impact on you?
FREEMAN: Well, I came from, you know, even though my parents were
02:16:00educated and so forth, I grew up in a place just by happenstance of
birth and geography where I knew practically no Catholics or Jews,
didn't go to school with any black people because it was segregation
time in Tennessee still in, in the public schools. Now, in college,
there were Indian students and a few black students and, but it didn't
have a lot of cultural exchange, you know, first hand knowledge of
anything. I found out I liked that sort of thing. You know, I didn't
grow up with prejudice against it. I just didn't have exposure to it,
had no first hand knowledge and I like those things and that's been
born out as I told you. We've kept up contacts with and we try to be
of some assistance to the international community here and we travel
some. I've been in twenty-five countries now from Iceland to Iran,
02:17:00from Australia to Mexico and you know, Uganda to St. Petersburg,
Russia and a lot of Americans haven't done that. And I probably would
have if it had not been for the Peace Corps and it's made me aware.
I still every now and again, I mention to somebody that you know the
people in Ethiopia wouldn't believe we're throwing this away. You
know, now we're trying to recycle at work, we're trying to make it so
people recycle their plastic water bottles and their aluminum cans and
we have been doing that but the fact that you would throw one of those,
even consider throwing one of those away is something that my students
or their parents in Adi Ugri, Eritrea, Ethiopia could not have fathomed
because you couldn't afford what came in the cans in the first place
and once you emptied the can, then you used the can or the bottle as
a jug for something else. You certainly wouldn't throw it out in the
02:18:00trash or even consider not recycling.
WILSON: You mentioned a lot of travel since and a different world
view, what do you see in the future? You see more, more travel as
a possibility?
FREEMAN: Yes, and actually, Linda is more interested in travel now than
I am. I found out, I'm beset by inertia and I haven't traveled abroad
now since '94 when I went to St. Petersburg, Russia for a week but
I'll probably do some more of it some time. She's trying to talk me
into a trip this summer. She's going already for her stuff. She went
twice last year for her work. But I don't know, I'd like to see more
of the United States. You know, there was a lot of that that I hadn't
02:19:00seen. And I have tried to rectify that some and I've been from Miami
to Seattle and then, from San Diego to Boston, through I haven't seen
New England and North Dakota and Montana and Idaho and I'd like to do
some more of that. I like to drive and get off on back roads and she
doesn't. She likes trains and planes and get there and be over, but I
like the traveling itself and you know, I like to get off interstates
and just follow my nose through small towns and stop and talk to people
and see what's different there from what I'm accustomed to.
WILSON: What do you think the overall impact of Peace Corps has been
over the last forty-five years or forty-four years, I guess?
FREEMAN: Well, as they noted when they started out, you know, there's a
two directional aspect of the Peace Corps. Part of it is to help the
people you go over there to help and help their nations and individuals
02:20:00and part of it is to inform Americans about the rest of the--
[Tape two, side a ends; tape two side b begins.]
WILSON: Side two, tape two of interview with Harold Freeman Peace Corp
Oral History Project, February 18th, 2005. Harold, you were talking
about what you thought the overall impact of the Peace Corps has been.
FREEMAN: Well, you know, there are a few hundred thousand folks in this
country now who know a lot more about the world than they did before
and there are probably a few million people in other countries who
can say that they have met an American who was not a soldier, who was
not on the TV screen or on a movie screen and that's all for the good.
There are a lot you know, we didn't make a lot of wholesale changes
02:21:00that you could see right away. When I got to Adis Ugri, there were a
few girls, just a handful of girls in the eleventh grade but they all
disappeared right away, before I even had, you know, probably a week
or two worth of lessons. They went off to specialize, nursing school
or something like that I don't even know what type, a low level nursing
school, probably an LPN equivalent or something. So I had no female
students in the eleventh or twelfth grade. That needs change, and we
didn't change that. We couldn't change that, and we couldn't tackle
all the problems all the time. We didn't know how and we weren't
supposed to in the first place. You know, there needs to be a lot
of changes made in just one place. And the same sorts of things that
may not be the same problems but the same sorts of things in different
02:22:00place, deforestation, there was a lack of water period and a lack of
safe water even greater. Agriculture needed to be adjusted to what
was available. They're wearing the land out using all the resources
that were there. They didn't know so much about not planting the
same thing over and over in the same ground, having land depleted of
nutrients. So there was education to be done on all the fronts, you
know, public health and communications and transportation and just
a whole array of things. And the Peace Corps can't solve all those
problems. If you put the entire resources of the Peace Corps into
Eritrea which used to be just one province and is now one nation, you
02:23:00know, ten years from now, still all the problems wouldn't be solved and
that's to be expected, of course. We haven't solved problems in our
own country with all our huge array of resources so it's disappointing
that we didn't make more headway. But it's better that we made
whatever headway we did than that we didn't try at all because there
were some successes. And if nothing else, we opened some eyes to
possibilities and provided some possibilities and you know, even though
I taught trigonometry which didn't seem like much of a step forward in
terms of the needs of the country but it made it possible for some of
those students to go onto university where they were required to have
trigonometry even if they didn't, you know, go on to use it in a law
career or, or whatever although some of them did. The one who became
a geophysicist couldn't have done it without, you know; he had to go on
and take calculus and things like that so there was some help there.
WILSON: And so what do you think the role of the Peace Corps ought to
02:24:00be today?
FREEMAN: I think it ought to keep on doing more of what it's been doing.
I think it's probably some of the best money the U.S. government
spends. Again, I think it was a lot better spent than the money I saw
being spent in the military. I said only somewhat facetiously that if
one Peace Corp volunteer hadn't accomplished more than my whole company
did in Vietnam, that the Peace Corps would have died before it hit 1970
and lots of folks will discount that as a bias. But whatever it is,
that's what I believe. And you know, President Bush has said one thing
about what, doubling the size of the Peace Corp, something of that kind
02:25:00of gone and that's kind of gone by the wayside with the last budget.
I don't know if you can double it efficiently anyway in a short period
of time and you know, not everybody's qualified to be a Peace Corps
volunteer and of those that are qualified, not everybody is interested
in being a Peace Corps volunteer. You can't just grab the first one
hundred people you meet or even the first one hundred college graduates
you meet or the first one hundred people that have proved themselves
competent in their fields of endeavor and pick them up and send them to
Armenia or Afghanistan or, or Ethiopia or Uganda or Nicaragua or Fiji,
whatever. So there still needs to be care in whom we pick and whom we
send. And I think we need to see that the projects that we take on are
02:26:00not just for the benefit of the governments in power there so that they
look good, but I don't think there's been too much of a problem with
that, I don't know, a certain amount to be sure but the governments are
taking a risk, too, particularly those that are, if not despotic, not
the sort of, open sort of thing that we'd like to think our government
is, That you're going to get new ideas from Peace Corp svolunteers that
do not emanate from the information ministry of whatever country is
involved. Does that deal with some of what you're--
WILSON: Exactly.
FREEMAN: Not very specific, I'm afraid, but every Peace Corps volunteer
has a different experience and probably a different evaluation of
things.
WILSON: Exactly and that's all the sort of structured questions I have.
But what have I missed? Do you have another story or two you'd like to
02:27:00tell me or something that I've overlooked that you'd like to include?
FREEMAN: Oh, there's probably a lot, I already talked a lot but I
think I could say that, you could offer the question "Would you do
it over again knowing what you know now?" Yes, I would. I'd try to
do it better and I would even consider doing it again at some time
if, you know, I thought about it. Well, maybe sometime, if all those
other restrictions that I talked about before that make it hard to
get someone in mid-career and I'm in end career more than mid-career
now. I'm aged, I'll be sixty-two in a couple of months but I still
have my mother's still living at age eighty-nine and needs attention
and my wife's parents are both living in their mid-eighties and need
attention. And if you go, you've got to do something with the house
and you know, sell it or rent it or whatever and wonder about it and
your health problems are likely to become more frequent at age sixty-
02:28:00two than they were at twenty-two or seventy-two if it comes to that. So
maybe you don't want to be out in Adi Ugri and I want, I didn't mention
that my second roommate was stricken with a kidney stone attack that
woke me at maybe three a.m. not knowing what he's complaining about
pains in his back and I think it was his first one so he didn't know
what to expect. There was one Italian doctor in my town who did not
speak English and could not be found at three o'clock in the morning
because I tried, And I tried to then try call the Peace Corps doctor
in Asmara again, you know, an hour and a half away and the buses didn't
start till six. I did mention that because of the separation anxiety
of a whole different type there that travel between six a.m. and
six p.m. was all that was allowed. That's when private vehicles and
buses ran so there was not, there wasn't even an option of putting him
02:29:00on a four a.m. predawn bus. There wasn't such a thing, to head him
up that way. So I tried to call him on one of the few telephones in
town and I lived a short distance from the center of town where the
government switch board was and the police and I went to the police
who have a telephone but they wouldn't let me use it. They told me I
would have to wake the switchboard operator who slept in a room behind
the switchboard exchange right next door and so I woke her up and she
told me that I couldn't use her phone either. I would have to use the
phone at the one gas station in town and the gas stations were hand
pump, that sort of thing. This was not a big convenience mart with,
you know, twelve island things. This is one pump but fortunately, the
night watchman there was one of my students so he let me in to use the
02:30:00telephone to call across the square. I mean, half a block from where
I had been, to call up the woman who I'd just spoken with in person
to get her to call the Peace Corps doctor who told me that, you know
I can't remember what exactly, but to get my roommate, Larry, Larry
Johnson on the first bus up there so that the doctor could examine him
because if the doctor came down there and then he needed something,
then he would still need to go back up there because there was nothing
that could be done right there and so that sort of thing, you know,
is not the sort of thing you want to go through in any time, much less
when you're older and you know, farther along in years. There was one
thing I didn't mention also and this is entirely out of this context
but it's probably worth mentioning. I did mention that there was a
high level of frustration of what we were able to do, given what needed
02:31:00to be done and the lack of resources and maybe where resources were
allocated by the government, as few as they were. But at one point
we had a dog. You know we had to vaccinate our dog ourselves and we'd
never done that before but we got it from the Peace Corps doctor and he
said well, you don't have to worry about, you know, you don't swab the
dog's skin. They're pretty much immune to infection for some reason,
you know. Just give the dog the shot and the dog had puppies and we
had one of the puppies. But then, one day-- I mentioned that we had
a compound with the wall out front and then, a fence, a kind of old,
rusty wire fence with vines and stuff growing up over it in the back.
Well, one day, we found this dog that really looked suspicious outside
trying to get in our compound. I think it must have been a weekend.
I was home in the day time. Maybe it was a lunch time but I saw it
coming in and I really didn't trust it at all. It was coming around
and he found a hole in our fence and it was lunging at the fence, you
02:32:00know, completely out of character with any kind of dog and so I picked
up what amounts to a mop handle. We didn't have mops there but you
had a long stick with a cross piece on the end. And you put a rag
down on the floor and you push it back and forth which was better than
getting down on your hands and knees, you know? So I had this thing
there and watching this dog and it found a hole after it had just
lunged, you know, blindly it seemed like into the fence, just throwing
itself into the fence so it started to get, to stuff in that hole that
it was big enough for it to wiggle through. Well, I popped the dog
on the nose kind of underhanded like using a shovel or something with
that piece of wood, right on the nose of that dog and it didn't seem
to faze it. Well, you know, a pit bull would have been fazed by that
under ordinary circumstances I thought. So I'm thinking, well, for
sure, we've got us a problem here and I couldn't keep the thing out
02:33:00and it came in and I didn't want to be out there where I was standing
flaying wildly at it and being subject to the thing. And so I went and
I hurried up and warned all the others and it came in there and then,
we got it through, we had an interior fence so we got it behind that.
It kind of locked it into a smaller part of the compound and then, I
went to get the cops to come shoot it. You know, again, it was just a
short distance, like a block from my house. A four minute round trip.
Well, I went and got the cops. Well, they didn't know what they could
do, whatever, and well, anyway, they wouldn't come. Well, it must have
been a weekend, I remember now because the landlord showed up and he
was from Asmara, the city, the capital city. Well, he showed up and
he had a pistol. By this time, the dog had gone under his car in the
little shed in the garage thing and we thought, he got his pistol out
02:34:00and well, maybe he would shoot the dog but then, he was afraid that he
wouldn't hit the dog or that he would hit his car. I don't know but
maybe the cops would not take kindly to having a shot fired in town
here, who knows. Anyway, he didn't shoot it and the cops never came
and even though, this guy was like a former senator and he had a title
of nobility, Dejazmatch, which is like count or baron or something, you
know. So I figured if you can't swing the weight to get the cops to
come shoot this thing, we're totally out of luck and eventually, the
dog got out and got into the field behind us. Even though we lived
right in town, we were still, there was a field behind us or garden and
it was plowed back there and there was a kid down there and later on
that day or the next day, a kid got bit by this dog and I found the kid
and took him to the hospital clinic there that the nuns and the Italian
02:35:00or Spanish doctor operated at to get him started on his shots which at
that time were given in the abdomen. So that was the hottest I guess I
ever was at the establishment there. I came back in and wrote a letter
that I semi-coded by typing double spaced on an air letter. And then
went back and typed in between the lines there so that if a person for
whom English was a second or third language was going to have a dickens
of a time trying to ----------(??). I didn't write to my parents
because my mom could not know that I had rabid dogs in my yard but I
wrote a college friend this letter just detailing this stuff and my
utter disgust at that and, and there were violators of communication.
There were things you could tell, you know. You didn't write grandma,
granny, and mom and dad some of these things. The information about
02:36:00my roommate being killed by the crocodile in the river down in the
southeastern part, I mean, that was national news in the United States
and you know, a small item about it appeared in the National Banner and
The Tennessean, too, I'm sure. But my mother had the clipping for me
when I got home and so you couldn't keep everything away from them but,
you know, certain of your friends got certain information and certainly
your relatives got a filtered version of some of that.
WILSON: Okay, Harold, thank you for your time.
FREEMAN: Well, I was happy to do it. Thank you for taking on this
project.
[End of interview.]