• On Peace Corps training: “The idea of training was essentially futile. College graduates without a word of French or a day's teaching experience had ten weeks to learn French, something of Ewé or another local language, and English instruction within the French West African educational system before being packed off alone to teach in a village school. This while suffering from heat and dysentery, pining for letters from home, and wondering if we hadn't been flown to the wrong planet.”
  
• On farmers going to their fields: “Farmers, like columns of ants after a rain, emerged from shade and torper and began going to the fields every day.”
  
• On the children of Togo: “Nothing was more unnerving than the children.”
  
  
• On trips to the Atakpame market during staging: “These were occasions of terror.... We were like a herd of prisoners being brought out in a cage for public inspection, looking through bars at the world around us and unable to make any sense of it, or to get away from its sights and smells. A hundred black eyes stared back in.”
  
  
• On a gift of fufu from a neighbor: “The next night the glob of fufu sent over was the size of a monkey's skull.”
  
  A monkey's skull? If anything in the book reveals the writer's sophomoric attempts to project his own inability to adapt to Togo on his surroundings, it is this comparison. Of all the things a ball of fufu could be compared to in order to give a sense of its size (a cantelope, a round loaf of bread, even a bowling ball) the comparison to a monkey's skull is both absurd and offensive.
  

It should come as no surprise to the reader of this book that Packer quits his assignment before the end of his two years, for no reason he cares to articulate. It's a dirty trick for a teacher to abandon his students, but in Packer's case my guess is that they all breathed a sigh of relief. You may want to read this book because it is about Togo, but be prepared to be turned off by the writer's nasty attitude.

This book is (thankfully) out of print, although you may find it at larger libraries, especially at universities.