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LPOD |
Africa & the Peace Corps, UA and more Africa
After graduating from the University of Arizona with a BS in Astronomy I worked two years in Kenya as a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher. In preparation for my African assignment I was sent to New York City for three months of training. Actually, it was three months of culture shock for a young person who had lived mostly in the west and mid-west. But I liked NYC and the practice teaching and living in Harlem. Finally, in early January,1966 the 60 or 70 of us who trained in New York boarded a plane for a 22 hr flight to Entebbe, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya. After refueling stops in Amsterdam and Cairo we landed in Entebbe about midnight and half the Volunteers deplaned. I remember the heat and humidity and the large slow ceiling fans in the airport lounge. Early the next morning the Kenya group of Volunteers landed groggily in Nairobi and we began two years of immersion in another culture.
I taught secondary school in a small upcountry town near the shore of Lake Victoria on the border with Uganda. Although I trained to be a science and math teacher I also taught history, geography, English, soccer and occasional lectures in religious knowledge! I learned a lot of physics, chemistry, biology and math and realized that I could learn anything the night before I had to teach it!
Schools in Kenya had three terms per year which meant there were three vacations too. I was lucky to be able to travel around Kenya and nearby Tanzania and Uganda, visiting some of the largest volcanoes and rift valleys on Earth. This helped me understand similar features such as Olympus Mons and Vallis Marineris on Mars
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After two years in Kenya I took a steamer and train 4000 miles down the Nile to Cairo. And then hitchhiked thru the Near East and Europe for nine months. I made sure to visit volcanoes in Italy and Iceland, observatories in Greece, Italy and England, and ruins and cathedrals all across the Mid-East and Europe. Vesuvius as seen from Pompeii - photo by me in 1969 |
MS Interlude
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And then I returned to the University of Arizona and did a MS degree in geophysics, with a thesis of magnetic and gravity surveys of some remarkable maar volcanoes in northern Mexico. And I continued to work at the Lunar Lab, this time directing the cataloging of lunar craters using the Lunar Orbiter IV photos. I also collaborated with Bill Hartmann on the discovery and description of lunar multi-ring basins. During this time Dale Cruikshank and I visited active lava flows and lava tubes in Hawaii and ended up writing a paper about tubes and lunar sinuous rilles.
Hadley Rille and the Apollo 15 landing site (arrow), a lava channel on the Moon. |
Africa Again - Ethiopia
At the end of my MS work, the lure of Africa resurfaced and I departed for two years in Ethiopia as an assistant professor (research) at Haille Sellassie I University in Addis Ababa. This was another wonderful experience. I worked in the Geophysical Observatory and learned to read seismograms (we had to smoke the paper cylinders and then tape them to the drum) and make magnetometer readings. I was able to go on amazing cross-country trips to high mountains, rift valleys and hot deserts. The best trip was to the Danakil (or Afar) Depression, a triangle of land below sealevel but unflooded because of a volcano that blocked the Red Sea's access. On Christmas Eve, 1973 we stood on the rim of Erta Ale volcano, looking one direction into an incandescent lava lake, and the other up at Comet Kohotek, with not a light for a few thousand miles!
In Ethiopia, colleagues and I also studied maar volcanoes and calderas and published papers in local and international journals about them. During my two years in Ethiopia a severe drought occurred, which led to the overthrow of the Emperor Haille Sellassie and the installation of a military government. A Geology Dept colleague was murdered by the military and I came face to rifle with a young soldier during one of the military's invasions of campus. For some reason he didn't shoot. The drought prompted us to study historic rainfall patterns and we ended up publishing papers about rainfall variability (with application to resettlement of populations) and a surprising 2000 year correlation between Ethiopian rainfall and sunspots.
Next: Brown University
