There used to be a ladder to success. It was the college→good job→marriage→house→family→cushy retirement. Sure, not everyone made it, there were a few broken rungs near the bottom but that was the guiding light to the good life and enough people made it that it seemed within reach. A few people questioned this ladder as really being "the good life" but those were just hippies or crazies, no one worth paying...
"What your profession?" The small Indian man twisted his upper body to eye me curiously as I gripped the little auto-rickshaw seat tighter--I wished he would keep his eyes on the maze of trucks, cars and other rickshaws that were weaving in and out of our lane with Nintendo-like ease.
I could explain to him that I used to work for no money in a country he...
It was too green. The cows were too fat, the children too clean, the roads too well-paved. I turned to Mariah, my bus buddy on for the two hours from the airport in Casablanca to Rabat, the capital of Morocco.
"Are we really still in Africa?"
"I'm not really sure of anything anymore," she wearily responded.
It had been four sleepless days since Peace Corps had announced that we were leaving Niger....
