John Addison Ferrick Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Phyllis Noble
Interviewee(s): John Addison Ferrick

Phyllis Noble: Today is June 28th, 2016. This is Phyllis Noble. I am interviewing John Addison Ferrick, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho from 1981 to 1984. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer, John went on to work as Peace Corps staff on and off between '85 and 1987 as a Peace Corps recruiter and trainer of incoming volunteers. And then he went on to be associate director of Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea from 1989 to 1990. And following that, he was associate director and then acting country director of Peace Corps in Fiji from 1990 to 1992. That's a long time to be associated with Peace Corps, eleven years.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, I think it shows the impact.

Phyllis Noble: Yes, yes, yes. I can't wait to get your story. So, John, let's start at the beginning. Where, where were you born? Where did you grow up?

John Addison Ferrick: I was born in Denver, Colorado, and spent the first six years in Denver and then came back to Wisconsin. My father was from Gays Mills, Wisconsin, west of Madison, and he was in the Navy and met my mother in Norfolk, Virginia, at a big naval base. And so my mother and father first went to Colorado because of some associations with family on my mother's side. But then we came back to, uh, to Wisconsin and to Madison. So I really see Madison as where I grew up.

Phyllis Noble: And you're still here.

John Addison Ferrick: And I'm still here. Left for a few years but came back because we had some small children and just thought it's a great place to raise kids and really love the east side of Madison. And I grew up on the far east side of Madison, which at that time was very working class. There's a real split and still is in Madison today between the working class and a much more, the educated, the university, government side of town. So my dad worked at Oscar Meyer and people at P.F. Schultz, really kind of industrial side of town. La Follette High School is where I went to high school, and that was, I would say, 98, 99 percent white.

Phyllis Noble: Sure.

John Addison Ferrick: At the time I was here, you know, I had a class of close to 600 kids in my graduating class. And I, I think we had two African Americans, maybe a couple Asians, and a couple of Hispanics in a class that size. So very, very homogeneous, very, very, you know, like working class Democratic conservative in terms of the social side of it in many ways. So.

Phyllis Noble: Sure. And when you were in high school, what did you do outside of academics?

John Addison Ferrick: Sports. I was very much into sports, I played football, basketball, and baseball. I probably had a pretty typical kind of childhood growing up. I would say.

Phyllis Noble: Do you have brothers and sisters?

John Addison Ferrick: I had an older brother that was a couple of years older than I was. He was two years, yeah, almost two years almost exactly older than I was. And that was just the two of us and my mother and father.

Phyllis Noble: And your mother stayed home?

John Addison Ferrick: No, my mother worked. She worked for the telephone company for years.

Phyllis Noble: Huh, no kidding.

John Addison Ferrick: She was with the telephone company.

Phyllis Noble: So did mine.

John Addison Ferrick: Really? Huh. Yeah. So she worked at the telephone company and my dad had, my dad was one of these dreamers that was always trying to, to, in hindsight I understood it, trying to, to get more for the family. So he was in and out of jobs. But he, he, like I said, worked at Oscar Mayer on the, on the east side, the meatpacking plant at the time, and had other various jobs. He passed away when I was 19.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: So I was pretty, pretty young when he passed away.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. You would have been in college?

John Addison Ferrick: Just, I was a sophomore in college actually, and I had gone my first year of college to Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Phyllis Noble: That's at University of Wisconsin.

John Addison Ferrick: University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, up in northern Wisconsin. And then my sophomore year, I went out to Lewis Clark State out in Idaho and took classes there and at the University of Idaho, because I had relatives there and always loved it.

Phyllis Noble: Ah.

John Addison Ferrick: And probably would have stayed if it wasn't for my father passing away and coming back and trying, you know, trying to support my mother and being with my mother.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So eventually then graduated from University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Phyllis Noble: In what, what did you major in?

John Addison Ferrick: I was in broad field social studies, it was called. But I was very interested in kind of the connection of education and agriculture in a kind of more holistic sense even back then.

Phyllis Noble: Huh. And you still are.

John Addison Ferrick: And I still am. I still am.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, yeah. Did your, um, did your family have a chance to travel together like?

John Addison Ferrick: Very little. We didn't do, a little bit in northern Wisconsin, but my mother, I think, was really kind of the instigator of my wanting to explore the world. She always talked about, you know, going beyond where you are and there's a big world out there.

Phyllis Noble: Oh wow, good for her.

John Addison Ferrick: And finding out. So I really do attribute my going overseas and international to my mother. My first connection with Peace Corps is my best friend in high school's older brother. Um, I knew Hank, you know, somewhat well before he left, but he left and was a Peace Corps volunteer in then Zaire.

Phyllis Noble: Uh huh.

John Addison Ferrick: And we just started writing back and forth. And his.

Phyllis Noble: While he was in Zaire?

John Addison Ferrick: While he was in Zaire.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, wow.

John Addison Ferrick: And so his stories of what he was doing, who he was working with, being in Africa just completely intrigued me and completely stimulated my interest in saying, I've got to go there. I want to do this.

Phyllis Noble: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So I went through college.

Phyllis Noble: Did you study languages, picturing yourself speaking something else?

John Addison Ferrick: You know, I didn't. Matter of fact, I consider myself pretty, pretty insufficient in learning language. It intimidated me I think at the time. I did have, obviously as a Peace Corps volunteer, have to learn language. I don't know how well I spoke Sesotho, though when I speak it now, and we'll get to being in Lesotho, I still, some of it comes back.

And I just think that that language is one of those key things to being comfortable or as comfortable as you can in a foreign country is knowing the language. And you just, if you don't know the language, you miss out on so much, and not only just the connections you make with people, but understanding how people look at the world a little bit better because I think that's one of the challenges of being overseas, is trying to figure out how are people looking at their own situations. And, you know, after now over 30 years going to Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, in many ways, I still don't exactly know how people do things and how they figure out livelihoods in that, because it just, it's just so, it's just out of my realm, out of my norm but.

Phyllis Noble: And language has something to do with figuring that out. But maybe one has to stay in a country for longer than just two years to really figure out in depth how things really work, how decisions get made.

John Addison Ferrick: But even then, I don't know how, you know, it depends on who you're talking about because we're at such a different level than. I'm not a subsistence farmer. I don't know what it's like. And sometimes I go to Uganda a couple of times every year and I still don't know how people make it at a subsistence level because it's just, it's, you know, the weather changes and they don't have it. So how do they do it? There's extended families, but that's starting to break down so much. So it's just, you get a piece. I think language is essential for getting, having any idea.

So my background that's, you know, the interest again started with my mother. I think Henri Mueller was his name, who was the Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, just kind of facilitated that with his incredible stories. He was a great writer, so his letters to me were just, just amazing. So it's something I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to do. And after I graduated, I said, I'm not quite sure what I want to do here, but so I'm going to do Peace Corps.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, yeah. Terrific.

John Addison Ferrick: And, you know, for me, Peace Corps at the time, I really didn't even think about it in a broad sense. I thought about going to someplace in sub-Saharan Africa because that's where I wanted to go. I didn't think about all the other connections you can have as a Peace Corps volunteer. I thought, okay, I'll go to some village and I'll meet the people there. But in that village that I went to, one of my best friends was a Sri Lankan. There was a South African that was living there. There was a whole Irish community because there was a pony project in Lesotho that I got to know. And then there are the returned Peace Corps volunteers or the volunteers that were there in my group who became some of my best friends and still are. We still get together.

Phyllis Noble: So it's, it's an international experience.

John Addison Ferrick: International.

Phyllis Noble: It's much broader than what we thought.

John Addison Ferrick: Very much so.

Phyllis Noble: It would be. In your application to Peace Corps, and you must have applied, what, in your senior year of college maybe?

John Addison Ferrick: I think so, yes.

Phyllis Noble: You, do you remember if they asked the question of, um, where you would prefer to be sent if you had, what would be your first choice?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes.

Phyllis Noble: And you got to say sub-Saharan Africa?

John Addison Ferrick: I did.

Phyllis Noble: Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: I did.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And so, and that's really where I wanted, I didn't, I didn't really want to go anyplace else.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. Oh, that's cool. I, I answered that question saying, yes, Latin America, because I lived in Chicago and there were millions of people who spoke Spanish. And so I got the invitation to train for Nigeria. You got exactly what you wanted. That's good.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, my best friend in Peace Corps, Michael de Damo was his name, who's since passed away, he was talking about languages. He just had a gift with languages. So he was fluent in French. So he wanted to definitely go to Francophone Africa.

Phyllis Noble: Yes, yes, yes.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, he ended up with Lesotho.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: Which is Anglophone.

Phyllis Noble: Nobody speaks French.

John Addison Ferrick: Nobody speaks French.

Phyllis Noble: That's right.

John Addison Ferrick: And, you know, in hindsight, it was, it was just an incredible gift to me that that happened because he was such an incredible, incredible person. But yeah, it's one of those things. It's not an exact science. And I can get into this more about my changes and thoughts about really what to me is important about Peace Corps and why it's, to me, it's more, even more critical today than it was when I was there, given the world.

Phyllis Noble: Good. Let's save that reflection for a while. But let's not abandon it. So you, you received the, uh, the invitation to train and you say goodbye to your mom and dad.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, it was interesting because I was waiting. I didn't really, I had like a year. They said you can go in and but it was like a year before I went.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: So I ended up going out to visit a cousin out in Seattle, Washington. And then I had a very, this friend of mine from high school whose brother had been a Peace Corps volunteer. Kurt Mueller had just gotten his first job with Hormel, the meat packing place, as a salesman down in Austin, Texas. So I said, I'll go down to Austin, Texas. So I drove down to Austin, Texas, from Seattle and stayed down there for almost nine months.

Phyllis Noble: Did you work at Hormel too?

John Addison Ferrick: No, I worked in various jobs just to kind of get by. And it was, it was wonderful. You know, at that time of your life, you don't need a whole lot. And Kurt had this great job at the time that he was doing so I could live with him. So it was a wonderful experience in between as I was waiting for my time to go in. And at that time they had these, you know, Peace Corps had these programs where it was almost like a week-long job interview.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, wow.

John Addison Ferrick: Where, and they were called, I want to say CRESTs, which was the acronym. I can't remember, CATs and CRESTs. But they, in, it was, it was actually Halloween that we went out to Washington. All of us flew to Washington. And then they put us in busses and we went out to a place called Cappahosic, Virginia, which is the birthplace I think of the NAACP. Beautiful place out in the countryside but you're very isolated. And you would have these what they called intact groups where you were with a group of other people wanting to go into Peace Corps and you had two trainers and you would go through these exercises all day long.

Phyllis Noble: And how many people would be in your group?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, I think at the time there was, that was like 60 some people.

Phyllis Noble: Divided up into smaller groups?

John Addison Ferrick: And divided up into smaller groups. So you had all these intact groups that you went with and they had exercises. They had these different almost kind of scenarios and case studies, and you watched films and they even said, you know, even when you're eating, when you're interacting, we're watching.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. So were they talking about deselection?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes.

Phyllis Noble: Only some of you will go and some of you will not.

John Addison Ferrick: Exactly. So actually, the person.

Phyllis Noble: [inaudible]

John Addison Ferrick: It was. It was, it was fairly intimidating because you're wondering how honest can you be if you really have a reaction to something because you don't know who these people are really. You don't know how they're interpreting it.

Phyllis Noble: And all these other people, these 60 other people. Was it a mixed group, men and women?

John Addison Ferrick: Men and women.

Phyllis Noble: Some married couples?

John Addison Ferrick: Um, one married couple. And that was it.

Phyllis Noble: And you were all expecting to go to Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes.

Phyllis Noble: If this week of.

John Addison Ferrick: It was all for Lesotho.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. Yeah. How interesting.

John Addison Ferrick: And we, there was a couple African American. No, one African American, I believe, in the group if I remember.

Phyllis Noble: Just one?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah.

Phyllis Noble: Everybody else was white?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. Mm hmm. And so. And that was a part of it. You're going to Lesotho, which is stuck in the middle of South Africa. Apartheid is alive and well. And so a lot of it was, and he was actually deselected.

Phyllis Noble: The African American?

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm. Because of, and again, I'm, I don't know the whole story, but part of it was because, you know, the questions of how would you handle these situations if you're confronted, which you have to be. Lesotho is like an island in the middle of South Africa, with these situations of whites, when you have to go into South Africa to do things. And his reaction was pretty strong about what he wouldn't put up with and what he wouldn't do. And coming from his perspective, I can understand that. But he's also going to South Africa and so he was deselected.

Phyllis Noble: Wow.

John Addison Ferrick: And my best friend from that, that I got closest to, was my roommate, was deselected. And part of that is because, um, he was quiet. And they told you right up front, no data is data. So and, you know, I don't, I thought it was a mistake because I thought he would be an incredible volunteer. But he was also deselected. And then the way it was handled was done very poorly.

Phyllis Noble: And all those decisions about being selected or deselected were made on the basis of that one first week?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes. Well, in your, yeah. You got there and you were, how that worked is you went through this week and the last day you were called in by yourself and you had your, your two intact leaders there and they talked to you about things that they saw and they said and we've, you know, for me they said we think you'll be a good Peace Corps volunteer. And so you, you're out of there. I hate it!

Phyllis Noble: That's right. Yes.

John Addison Ferrick: And then you had other people that were in tears coming out and they put us all in the same bus back to Washington.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, how difficult.

John Addison Ferrick: So how do you? You're in your, you know, I was euphoric. So were all these other people. And you have this other group. How do you, you're sitting there going, you know, I can't be excited. This person's been devastated. So it was, it was a really horrible, horrible part. That part of it was horrible. That week was actually lovely. It was just incredible.

Phyllis Noble: Did they asked you to evaluate your peers at any point during that week?

John Addison Ferrick: No.

Phyllis Noble: It was all the trainers.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: Evaluating you.

John Addison Ferrick: Exactly. Yeah. So that was, that was, that was intense. And so but then you had a month. They sent you back.

Phyllis Noble: Back home?

John Addison Ferrick: Back home.

Phyllis Noble: Oh my goodness.

John Addison Ferrick: I had a month before, when that was over to the time we left. So you had this month of getting ready and.

Phyllis Noble: Packing up.

John Addison Ferrick: Packing up.

Phyllis Noble: They gave you a list of things?

John Addison Ferrick: They give you a list, you know, Peace Corps is very good at providing those, that type, that type of information. I got to learn more about, you know, when I first went into it, I thought it was "Le-so-to" I was going to.

Phyllis Noble: Right. Right.

John Addison Ferrick: I didn't know anything about it. They had a little phrase book. You could start to learn some of the greetings and but you went back and then we kept in contact with each other that were going by calling and.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And so we had a month, and four of us.

Phyllis Noble: How many of you were going to go now from the sixty?

John Addison Ferrick: Probably about 45 or 46.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. So maybe 15 people were deselected at the time. So you had a month at home. What were your, your mom was, I'm sure, quite supportive. You've given an indication that she's.

John Addison Ferrick: She was, but she was also, you know, the real, the realization that I was going to be gone for two plus years and communication at that time, as we talked about, Phyllis, was a lot different than it is today.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: She was also really, she was excited for me, but at the same time, she was frightened. I was going to Africa. What did you know about Africa? All these images that sadly haven't changed all that much from today, I think, in terms of our knowledge of what Africa is. We still get things so distorted. We're all there. So she was excited and at the time my mother had gotten remarried. My father had passed away several years before.

Phyllis Noble: That's right.

John Addison Ferrick: She met a wonderful guy. So that made me feel better about going in.

Phyllis Noble: Okay, because you wouldn't have to worry about your mom.

John Addison Ferrick: Right, my mother. So she was, so she was excited. It was, it was that part of it. And, you know, having to sell. I had an old car, so it wasn't a big deal because I think I sold it for $100 or something to somebody, it was an old beater. And then friends, saying goodbye to them and things. So it was an exciting time. And then we met out in Croton on Hudson, to a guy that lived out there. Went to New York City because we were all flying out of JFK on.

Phyllis Noble: So, so Peace Corps flew you from Madison, Wisconsin, to Croton on Hudson?

John Addison Ferrick: To New York City.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, that is New York City.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, it's just north, it's just up the Hudson.

Phyllis Noble: Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: So we flew in the JFK and four of us met and went out the night before. And then all of us met at JFK, 45 of us or whatever it was, and flew to Paris. Had a day in Paris.

Phyllis Noble: No kidding.

John Addison Ferrick: So we all went.

Phyllis Noble: So you get over your jetlag.

John Addison Ferrick: Jetlag. A little bit.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: Because there was quite a bit of drinking going on and card playing on the way over. And then we were out in Paris. So we're at the cafes drinking wine, and then we, everybody crashed. We got on the plane and went from there to Johannesburg, which is a long flight.

Phyllis Noble: Long flight.

John Addison Ferrick: Long flight. And I had my first. Stop me too, Phyllis, if I'm jumping ahead. But I had my first sort of experience with apartheid at the airport in Johannesburg, where a friend of mine, Mike, the guy I said before that was my, ended up being my best friend, went up to the bank in Johannesburg to change some money from dollars into rand.

Phyllis Noble: So you didn't have to stay in the airport at Johannesburg?

John Addison Ferrick: No, we were, we were. We were getting on, we were going to go. They were trying to figure out exactly some, something happened with travel, but what they were going to do with us. So we were there and wanted to transfer some money, went to the line where there's a bank. And the teller made the two Africans who were in front of us move to the side. And we, and of course, we were kind of indignant about that and said, no, we're not going to do this. And the guy said, well, then I'm not going to wait on you.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, wow. So you're in South Africa. Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And the two guys there said just go up and do it. So we got up and changed our money. And then we went to, uh, we went to this very nice hotel. Peace Corps put us into what they called a braai, which is a barbecue. That's what they call a barbecue in South Africa. And I think braai is either Dutch or Afrikaans. And did that for the day. There was a swimming pool and it was just, it was bizarre because we're in this hotel. The only Blacks there are waiters and waitresses. They couldn't, it was illegal for them to be in that hotel. And so Peace Corps did that, which we were all saying, what is this about? You know, because that wasn't our image of what we were supposed to do.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And then we ended up flying to a.

Phyllis Noble: But that was just one night, right, in that hotel?

John Addison Ferrick: We didn't even spend the night. We were waiting for a flight later to fly to Bloemfontein.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, okay.

John Addison Ferrick: So it was during the day.

Phyllis Noble: A few hours of, uh, R & R.

John Addison Ferrick: There was about six or 7 hours that we were there and then took a flight to Bloemfontein, which is in the Orange Free State, which is kind of the center of, it was the center of the Afrikaans, um, kind of power structure at the time. So it was all, all white, surrounded by all white farmers. And you did have these townships or homelands at the time around there. So Bloemfontein was a city that at night all the Blacks had to leave, so they all had to go out to their, to their little township outside of Bloemfontein.

Phyllis Noble: And how long a journey might that be, where they worked in Bloemfontein to where they lived?

John Addison Ferrick: No, they all, all these busses came in and they got on busses. It wasn't too far outside, but the conditions were, you know, this nice city and the conditions in the townships were pretty horrible. And then we took a bus from Bloemfontein into Lesotho. And I remember it was pouring raining, it was dark. We didn't, you know, you're so disoriented, you're tired. They served us Kentucky Fried Chicken on the bus.

Phyllis Noble: And the road, what's the road like?

John Addison Ferrick: The road wasn't bad from there.

Phyllis Noble: Paved?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, it was paved. It was all paved. You know, South Africa is one of those places where, you know, even, even today, they talk about it different than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, because it was very Western in what was developed. A very large African population that was totally disenfranchised. But it was, it was, that part of it going from Bloemfontein into South Africa to Lesotho was very well done. It was a very nice highway. And so we went to the border, got in, and then we, it was nighttime and we took the bus to a town called Roma.

Phyllis Noble: This is a different bus now, you switched at the border?

John Addison Ferrick: No, same bus. We had to walk across the border, then get back on the bus, and it was pouring raining.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, my.

John Addison Ferrick: Get our passports and all that done. And it was interesting because at the time we had two passports as Peace Corps volunteers.

Phyllis Noble: Two?

John Addison Ferrick: Because I think we were the only country in the world that they allowed that. Because if you traveled, many countries, both in southern Africa as well other places, if you could, wouldn't accept your passport if you had a South African stamp in it.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: So they knew that.

Phyllis Noble: Okay, because they were against, that was a way of showing their opposition to apartheid?

John Addison Ferrick: Correct. So we had these, you know, two passports. So you gave the one passport to the South Africans and they stamped it in. And then we had this other passport later when you traveled. So and we took a bus in the middle of the night to a town called Roma, which is where the National University of Lesotho is, and the nicest, probably one of the nicest secondary schools in the country, which was a Catholic school, and went into dorms. So almost all of us were either secondary school teachers or they had a group of teacher trainers. And then they had a couple of kind of people that would work on a higher level with, you know, training programs, even at the National University and other places. And my friend actually became, Mike became a teacher at the National University in Lesotho, National University in Botswana, and the National University in Swaziland. So he went around teaching management training.

Phyllis Noble: As a Peace Corps volunteer?

John Addison Ferrick: As a Peace Corps volunteer.

Phyllis Noble: Wow.

John Addison Ferrick: He did those. At first he didn't like it very much. Again, I said he was gifted at languages during our training. He became quite fluent in Sesotho in a very short period of time.

Phyllis Noble: Wow, what a gift.

John Addison Ferrick: But then, but then all of a sudden he's in Botswana, which he can use that because Setswana is very close to Sesotho, but then Setswati is very different. So he, but he'd learned bits and pieces of all of those. But that was the group. And we were in these dorms and it was a wonderful time just getting to know all the other, uh, Peace Corps volunteers. I met some of the people that are my best friends today. I also was exposed, I think, back up. I was, I think I grew up in a, you know, Madison was pretty conservative where I was. So, you know, obviously, I knew, I knew, obviously there was people that were gay or lesbian.

Phyllis Noble: In the training group?

John Addison Ferrick: No. Back, backing up. Back when I was in high school.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, okay.

John Addison Ferrick: But I didn't, it was like that was totally out of my thought. I didn't even think about that at the time. And it really wasn't until I became a Peace Corps volunteer and a couple of my best friends were gay. A couple of women that I, and I started to examine my own self in terms of where was I and this feelings of these things. And it opened up a whole different world than where people are from.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. Another thing that you didn't anticipate Peace Corps giving you.

John Addison Ferrick: Never. You know.

Phyllis Noble: So many, yes.

John Addison Ferrick: Didn't even think about it.

Phyllis Noble: Right, right.

John Addison Ferrick: And you know, it's, it's.

Phyllis Noble: What, uh, were, if there were gay people in your Peace Corps group, were they able to be out or do they have to?

John Addison Ferrick: No, not really. Not at the time. It wasn't that, in fact, my, again, one of my better friends and still they, Bill Botticker, who lives in San Francisco now. Bill didn't come out to any of us till about a year later.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And it was, it was more of, you know.

Phyllis Noble: While still in Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, we were still in Lesotho when he said that. I don't know who you are. I didn't know any of this stuff. Part of it came out that we started discussing because at the time we used to get Newsweek magazine as volunteers.

Phyllis Noble: Yes.

John Addison Ferrick: They, that one, when we were in country very early on, they came out with a story about this new disease called Slim's Disease. And nobody knew what it was, but it was impacting the gay community and people, the drug users.

Phyllis Noble: Was that what we now call HIV AIDS?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes. And so, and so Bill, we didn't know at the time. Bill actually would go to gay bars in South Africa.

Phyllis Noble: Ah, okay.

John Addison Ferrick: He would escape and get out. And he was a math teacher. He ended up being in Roma in that national university. So he was close to the border and could get out. And it's a whole different community. So it wasn't till about a year later and then there's a couple other people came out. You just kind of, you know, that's, that's when I really, it became very clear to me. It's like, so what? People are people.

Phyllis Noble: That's right.

John Addison Ferrick: And I learned to, and I'll say this very openly, I learned that I could love a man and not confuse that with the whole sexual side of it.

Phyllis Noble: That's right. That's right. You can, you can feel emotion and caring deeply.

John Addison Ferrick: Exactly. And that was that was probably, I mean, I look at the learnings that you get from an experience like Peace Corps, and those are the types of things that you learn about yourself that carry on forward and impact what you do. And not only then but afterwards and what you do with your children and those things that are just so powerful. And I'm not sure if Peace Corps, I don't know how you do that to people trying to go in now or even afterwards, how you really kind of parlay that kind of information to them, because I think you almost have to experience that yourself.

Phyllis Noble: I think so.

John Addison Ferrick: And how does that happen to you as an individual? So, it was wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: More about training. You were living in a dorm in a Catholic secondary school.

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm.

Phyllis Noble: School must have been out of session.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: During that time, so they had the space for you.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: And, and there would have been classrooms for you to meet in?

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm.

Phyllis Noble: And what's, what sorts of activities went on during training?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, it was, you know, language was a big one, cultural was another one.

Phyllis Noble: And the language was Sesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: Sesotho, right. So it's a Bantu language. So it's, you know, the country's Lesotho, the people are Basotho, one person is a Mosotho, the language is Sesotho. And you can do all the way up to Uganda now, it's Uganda, Baganda, Moganda, Lugandan. And so there's a lot of similarities as you go through and even some common words. So you know, all of that was happening. We also did teacher training.

Phyllis Noble: Ah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And Peace Corps hired, hired. It was really hired students to come back where they provided them lunches. So at one point for a couple of weeks, we were in classrooms teaching students that would come back.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So which was also wonderful because it's pretty intimidating. And it wasn't until later, one of the problems with that is, again, I said we were in one of the best high schools in the country. They had labs as well- equipped as we had in the United States.

Phyllis Noble: Now sitting in Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh yeah.

Phyllis Noble: That's good to know.

John Addison Ferrick: And it was all developed by the, the, with the, um, Oblate brothers in the Catholic Church. But it didn't prepare you that well when you went to your own site. Because I went to my own site and I had a beaker and a Bunsen burner that didn't work. That's what I had for equipment.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So it wasn't, it wasn't a very, um, good job of really preparing most of us for our situation.

Phyllis Noble: In that way. But it did get you standing in front of a group of kids and talking and trying to figure out how you're going to present an idea.

John Addison Ferrick: Right. And so they would have trainers that were there that would sit in your classroom and. See, part of what, part of the group that we had were teacher trainers. So these were people that already had teaching certificates. So they would help. It was peer to peer in the sense that they would sit in the classroom and talk to you about what you did and help you write, we had to write lesson plans. We had to do all of these things. And so it was, um, it was a great time. And then you had the, all the social other things that went on. There was kind of social activities that they would put together, and then you could play basketball or go for hikes. We went for a beautiful hike. I have a beautiful picture of us in the mountains. You know, one of the things that people don't think about when they think of Africa is a place like Lesotho where it snows. I got snowed in and snowed out of my site.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, that's not the image one has of Africa.

John Addison Ferrick: No, not at all. So there was very high mountains. They had a little place you could go skiing. It was in the Drakensberg range of mountains in South Africa. And my, one of the best things I ever got that I really looked at that Peace Corps gave us, and I really heeded it, was a very warm sleeping bag.

Phyllis Noble: Ah.

John Addison Ferrick: Because it got cold.

Phyllis Noble: And you brought that over with you?

John Addison Ferrick: I brought that over with me.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. You wouldn't have ordinarily thought to put that in a trunk.

John Addison Ferrick: No, I was going to Africa.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: The good thing about that is we didn't have malaria.

Phyllis Noble: True.

John Addison Ferrick: We had other things that, you know, dysentery, things that you had because of water.

Phyllis Noble: Were, uh, was part of Peace Corps training getting a big series of vaccinations?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes. Yes.

Phyllis Noble: And that happened in Lesotho, not here?

John Addison Ferrick: We did before. We had to get some before. But then you also had your gamma globulin shots.

Phyllis Noble: Ah, yes. Every six months?

John Addison Ferrick: And if you, you know, you were threatened if you didn't come to get that, you were, you could go home. They'd send you home.

Phyllis Noble: That's a hepatitis, right?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. So which they don't do anymore.

Phyllis Noble: They don't?

John Addison Ferrick: I don't think or else they have a different way of doing gamma globulin.

Phyllis Noble: There was a huge shot in the butt.

John Addison Ferrick: It was. Yes. And we always made a big party of it. So everybody had to come down from their sites and you'd have to get your GG shots.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So that was a great kind of part of it.

Phyllis Noble: But back to training. So you're learning language. Are they talking, were there classes about the history of Lesotho, the politics?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes. I mean, we had like at that time, the ANC, the African National Congress, was considered a terrorist organization and they were in Lesotho. So they, Peace Corps actually had ANC come and talk to us. And I can remember them saying, you know, thank you for all being, all of you being here. But if you really want to help us, go home. Because you as an American have such more influence if you go home and, you know, look at how you vote and do those things. Now, after having said that, they said, okay, we understand you're not going to do that. And we also understand you need to educate yourself on what the realities are.

Phyllis Noble: Right.

John Addison Ferrick: So please keep that in mind when you're in Lesotho where people are free in a sense, um, that just across the border. And South Africa on several occasions shut down Lesotho because the ANC would go do something in South Africa. You know, it was a violent time, bombings and, and they literally shut the border and had jets flying over. They raided Lesotho.

Phyllis Noble: While you were there?

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm. Yeah, we had volunteers in the capital city, several of them, that got caught in between some firefights between the South African Defense Force and the ANC and bombs went off. And, you know, luckily nobody from our group were injured, but were in pretty scary situations.

Phyllis Noble: Were you instructed by Peace Corps about what stance you were to take or not take vis a vis apartheid?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh, yes. You don't, you know, yes, you can. Taking a stance, and this is the U.S. Government stance, is something they really kind of discouraged you from doing. And to be aware of where you're doing it and who you might be talking to that, you know, that you could put yourself in physical danger. So they really kind of warned you off of that. But it was really difficult to do.

Phyllis Noble: Mm hmm.

John Addison Ferrick: Because, you know, one, you're young and you're just pretty idealistic about what you think the world should be or can be. And hopefully you don't lose that idealism completely. But at least you haven't tempered it with having more life experiences I think. So it was difficult to do. And we were at a university too, so we would go out and go out to a bar in the university and be confronted with some pretty severe, you know, kind of perspectives on America. And that's, to me, that's another excellent thing that Peace Corps does. It gives you a view of how Americans are viewed outside. You learn much, much more about, you know, what we are doing.

Phyllis Noble: Mm hmm.

John Addison Ferrick: And how we impact the world. And I think, you know, Phyllis, and I know if I jump into this now, this is one of the things that I think, that I just think, uh, that I wish more Americans would do Peace Corps. It's not for everybody, but they would, because I get very. For me personally now, when people say, well, why do they hate us? Or we, you know, we should be, you know, we're loved, we're doing all this for them. I just kind of shake my head. And you say, do you realize the history of what we've done and who we've supported?

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And you know, that, that, you know, people aren't going to see everything that we do as being positive and everything that we do isn't in the best interest of the country that we're in. It's for American interests. That's what foreign policy. All these other countries basically do the same thing too. But we've done some horrible, horrible things. So if you don't have that perspective and you're here, it's, you know, you have a lot of the hatred and perspectives that I hear people talk about today. And I look at, you know, what our potential people holding high offices have, their perspectives. And I just kind of shake my head because it's, it's, uh, so narrow and it also doesn't take into consideration so many other things that should be.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So that's a one, I mean, that's what, that's what that training did. You get very close to a, to a group of people and we were pretty close as a group. There's actually five or six of us that got very close. And we still, every other year, we're going this year, have rented a beach house in North Carolina.

Phyllis Noble: No kidding. You get together?

John Addison Ferrick: There's a woman from Alaska that comes, a couple from, um, Bill from San Francisco and his partner, a couple from upstate New York, the only married couple in the group, upstate New York. We come from Wisconsin. And there's somebody that comes from Washington, D.C., and Colorado.

Phyllis Noble: And these are all people who were in your training group?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah.

Phyllis Noble: When you all you went through that one week together and then you went through training in Lesotho together.

John Addison Ferrick: And then we went off and did. But we stayed, we stayed really, really close.

Phyllis Noble: Wonderful.

John Addison Ferrick: So it's just incredible.

Phyllis Noble: How long did that training last in Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: That training was, what was it? Eight weeks, it was almost two months.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. That's a good chunk of time.

John Addison Ferrick: And, you know, you're 24 hours, you're together.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, yeah. And then at the end of that, was there a swearing in ceremony?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, the big thing I can remember at the end of the training is we got together and they had balloons up. They had a big map of Lesotho and they had balloons up.

Phyllis Noble: Oh wow.

John Addison Ferrick: And we took turns throwing a dart at a balloon and it would pop and there would be somebody's name so we could go up and read the place and the name. And that's how people found out.

Phyllis Noble: So until that moment, you didn't know where in Lesotho you were going to be assigned?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. They talked, they talked to us about, you know, and they did make an assessment I think right. Because so many people that go in, they think that they want to be out in the remotest place.

Phyllis Noble: Mm hmm.

John Addison Ferrick: And after you've got, you've been there and you really kind of understand what you're getting yourself into, that changes, which is a good thing. They need to do that. And I knew I wanted to be up in the mountains and I got that, but others didn't. So it was, it was wonderful. And so that was a, I mean, it was such a celebratory time and place. It was just pretty amazing to kind of go through that and be a part of that. And then we did have, yes, we went to the ambassador's residence and had a swearing in ceremony. It was a fantastic ceremony. Plus we had the swimming pool at the ambassador's.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And when I was in Peace Corps, and this again, this is a difference than being overseas with the new, you know, FaceTime and Skype and all of this. We were really discouraged from calling home, using any kind of two-way radio or any of that, because there was also the association with Americans and CIA.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: Especially in South Africa and Southern Africa, what was going on.

Phyllis Noble: So if the people would see you on the phone?

John Addison Ferrick: Right, right. So we were discouraged, so we wrote.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: You know, when I. The other big thing I can remember about after that was going up to my site because that was, you know, you'd been intensely in this kind of environment, experiences, training. And then the next day I, there was a, Musan Deely, who was the driver for Peace Corps. He and I going up the mountain road.

Phyllis Noble: Just the two of you?

John Addison Ferrick: Just the two of us going up the mountain road to my site, which the mountain road ended up, you know, most of it was dirt. And it was, it was pretty, you know, you're down steep.

Phyllis Noble: On the edge of a cliff.

John Addison Ferrick: Edge of a cliff, and you're going up to this school. And he took me up there and.

Phyllis Noble: And how long, how long a drive is this?

John Addison Ferrick: It was about four hours.

Phyllis Noble: From the capital city?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, because the road bent and you're going up.

Phyllis Noble: Right, right.

John Addison Ferrick: You're going up. And so he dropped me off and it was holiday time still. So there wasn't. He dropped me off and he left and I'm kind of.

Phyllis Noble: You're standing there with your suitcase?

John Addison Ferrick: And so I end up going over to the, to the priest's home.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, it's a Catholic school?

John Addison Ferrick: It's a Catholic school.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: The priest's home. Because, well, when he first drove in, there was the school on the side of the mountain, which was out in the middle of nowhere. And then he kept driving. And he came around this, back in this cliff to this mountain was this beautiful, beautiful mission, just gorgeous. And so.

Phyllis Noble: But we're not in the village, there's not a town?

John Addison Ferrick: The village is down. I could see the village, but it was down the valley, down. But there was a river in the valley and the village Marakabeis was the name of it. It was down by the river.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And the mission was up on top. So I eventually. And they were supposed to be meeting us there. But, you know, of course communications and things were a lot different. But eventually they came out and they put me in this, it was an old convent, this one room. It was an old convent, and it ended up being that's where I stayed. This guy from Sri Lanka, Guy Amar, was there. And then there was.

Phyllis Noble: He was a faculty, another faculty member?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. And then there was a, there was a, uh, Lesotho couple who became, Indotti Majody became one of my, and Me Mama Jody became some of my best friends and their, their children. I can remember them, the youngest ones there. So we had this little. And we had a beautiful porch that I had a rocking chair that we could sit and rock and look off down the valley. And we would sit at, you know, you didn't have television, you had radio. You could get radio, South African radio mainly, but you'd have tea at night and coffee and just sit and talk, you know, and that electricity would stay on. There was a generator. The electricity would stay on till I think it was 9:00.

Phyllis Noble: Ah.

John Addison Ferrick: And then the electricity would go off and then you had, you know, paraffin and kerosene lamps and things.

Phyllis Noble: But you had people to talk to.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, it was wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: In the dark. Sit out there.

John Addison Ferrick: You could just sit out there and talk. And it was just, it was one, I, you know, if anything, you know, when I think back in memory, I treasure those times of just kind of the simplicity of it all. And you had more chance to just talk.

Phyllis Noble: So when you first got there, you were taken to the, you had a room in what had been a convent?

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm.

Phyllis Noble: And was that where you stayed for your whole two years as a volunteer?

John Addison Ferrick: No.

Phyllis Noble: Or did you move into something a little?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, they ended up building houses over by the school.

Phyllis Noble: Mm hmm.

John Addison Ferrick: And so about a little into my second year, they moved us over there. And I really wish they wouldn't have because it was just more isolated, because it was just, there wasn't more of the mission things that were going on. And there was a primary school at the mission. So there was always kids around.

Phyllis Noble: Little kids around. Yeah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And at night we're over at the school where we were, there was no electricity. There was no running water.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, not even something that would end at 9:00, there wasn't?

John Addison Ferrick: No, there was no.

Phyllis Noble: And no running water?

John Addison Ferrick: No running water. So we had to go down. There's just a little ways down the valley. But to get water and carry that up.

Phyllis Noble: In a bucket.

John Addison Ferrick: In a bucket. And then we'd fill. During the school, when school was on, they had kids do that, that would go down and fill it into a bigger bucket.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So we had this outside, this bigger bucket.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And that's, but it was a nice house, but.

Phyllis Noble: So let's go back to the room in the convent first and then I want to hear more about the, the nicer house without the amenities. Are we okay time wise?

John Addison Ferrick: We're fine.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. Um. In your, uh. My mind just went blank. At the, when you lived in the, in the convent was there some community? All you, you were just in a room so where did you cook or how did, how did you eat?

John Addison Ferrick: We got, um, we often ate together, all of us. But I had a little gas cylinder with a little gas stove. And so that's what, we'd cook things on the little gas stove.

Phyllis Noble: Outside?

John Addison Ferrick: No, it was inside the room. There was another little room that off of that that we could put the gas cooker on.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. So each of you had a little gas cooker?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. That was right there.

Phyllis Noble: And that was provided for you? Did Peace Corps issue that to you?

John Addison Ferrick: No, we had to get it.

Phyllis Noble: You had to go buy it?

John Addison Ferrick: We had to go buy it. We had to, that was part of our settling in allowance that we got from Peace Corps. And to get gas, we had to go down to the town in the valley, which, it was a long way. So often we would get a horse, strap it to it, or else we could. If at my first year, if the priest was going down, he'd give us a ride in the vehicle. And we could get our gas cylinders and bring those back up. Um, there was no heating.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: I mean, a lot of them, they had these paraffin heaters, but I didn't like it because I didn't like the smell. So I just wore more clothes.

Phyllis Noble: You're talking about a place where it snowed.

John Addison Ferrick: It was cold. And taking, you know, taking a bath. It was cold. It was cold. And, you know, you had mice and, you know, those types of things in the building. So I would ball up my socks at night and I'd hear the scratching and I'd take my flashlight, the torch, and turn it on and fire my socks. So it's just such great, great, wonderful memories.

Phyllis Noble: But, um, you were eating, who cooked? You cooked for yourselves? It wasn't like a cook for the mission.

John Addison Ferrick: No, it's, you know. The priests and the nuns lived very well. They had a huge garden and they weren't very accommodating and sharing.

Phyllis Noble: Oh. They didn't invite you all over?

John Addison Ferrick: No. And I, you know, this kind of shows you. You know, I grew up Catholic, but I didn't consider myself religious, and still don't. But I would go to church because it was a part of the community. And I stopped going when the priest admonished the community for not putting more of their money into the`. And I just said, I can't. This is just, these people, these are subsistence farmers. They're barely getting by.

Phyllis Noble: And meanwhile, the people running the mission are living quite comfortably.

John Addison Ferrick: They, the priests and the nuns lived very well.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: Vehicles, tractors that they did for their mission land. And so they lived, had a two, it was the only two story building around. The new convent they built was two stories, was very nice. I think I was invited to dinner once, um. So, and I can, I'll go into something else a little bit later in terms of the teaching that became what I consider the best thing I ever did as a Peace Corps volunteer, which, which really put me at odds with the priest of the mission.

Phyllis Noble: Let's save that for a minute, because I just want to get straight about your living situation, and then we'll go on to the classroom.

John Addison Ferrick: Okay.

Phyllis Noble: When I'm thinking about your health and how much control you had over what you were eating. And so were you able to get vegetables and protein? And was the water potable? What did you have to do to keep healthy?

John Addison Ferrick: Getting the right kind of vegetables, it all depended on what time of the month it was and what year. At the beginning of the month after we got paid, then you could get things, you can buy things.

Phyllis Noble: So there's a market in that little village down there?

John Addison Ferrick: And it was wonderful because, you know, bartering is a part of the, kind of the, I would say, even I'll generalize, the African kind of spirit so.

Phyllis Noble: And I'm thinking that maybe the market people didn't speak English.

John Addison Ferrick: No. They didn't speak any English.

Phyllis Noble: Right. So you got to use whatever you learned in training.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: At least in the market bargaining.

John Addison Ferrick: That and going out to the bars, that's where, that's when you get to know many of the men. Because in those rural areas, women didn't go out. The only time a woman would go out would be they would basically be a prostitute, especially in the rural areas, because you just didn't, you went out to what they called the shebeen, which was a local place. And they may have regular beer that we know or they had local beer. It was a great place to go and meet men and talk to them.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And find out what was going on.

Phyllis Noble: But now I'm feeling very sorry for the woman Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho.

John Addison Ferrick: It was.

Phyllis Noble: Who was way out in the country. They'd be very isolated.

John Addison Ferrick: It was a challenge. I mean, in most places I've been in the world, it feels women have unique challenges with that. I mean, most places I've been are very, very male dominated. And that's, that wasn't the exception in Lesotho. It was very much the norm. So, yeah, it was much more of a challenge. But they also were in women's groups. You know, people were very good at finding their kind of niches and things so.

Phyllis Noble: So you went to the market and you could buy vegetables or you could buy whatever was in season at that time.

John Addison Ferrick: And they had a, they had a shop down there too. There was a very large, you know, and this just shows you my memory. I forget the name of it, but it was a large South African kind of firm that had a shop there. So you could get tinned things, tinned meat. You could get soap, you could get things like that.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: You couldn't barter in there.

Phyllis Noble: No.

John Addison Ferrick: With the market you could. And so a lot of times I would barter with, the women at first knew. You know, didn't know who I was, but I would barter with them. And then I would usually, because they'd always ask for more money, because I was this white guy that was there.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, sure.

John Addison Ferrick: This foreigner, I should say more, because it happened no matter what you were.

Phyllis Noble: So how would it work? They would say, um, what's? What's the currency in Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: Maloti.

Phyllis Noble: Maloti.

John Addison Ferrick: Yes.

Phyllis Noble: So suppose they would say, um, you want to buy this, what? What, a loaf of bread. I'm making this up.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: I don't know if they had bread. They have bread?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh, yeah.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. You want to buy a loaf of bread and it's going to be 10 maloti.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: And then you would counter with?

John Addison Ferrick: They'd ask for 20, let's say. If it was supposed to be 10 there, they'd ask for 20 from me.

Phyllis Noble: Okay, so when they asked for 20, then you knew it was supposed to be 10.

John Addison Ferrick: So I would barter them down. I'd say no, I'd say eight. And they would say, no, no, all this time. And they go up to, you know, 15. Then we get down. And eventually I'd get them down to 10 or eight.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And then I'd pay them 15. And after a while.

Phyllis Noble: And you just enjoyed, they enjoyed.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, it was kind of an insult if you didn't do that.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, sure.

John Addison Ferrick: It was part of that. So and after a while they knew me and they, they, they'd ask for 50, you know, because they knew we'd go back and do all of this stuff. And I got to know them. I got invited to their houses. Many of their kids were, were students at the school. So I got to know the parents. And so that was a wonderful, that whole part of it was wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: That's terrific.

John Addison Ferrick: And, you know, I'd ride horses. The, the Lesotho, they had, matter of fact, the big Irish group that I told about earlier were trying to revitalize the Basotho [or Basuto] pony. So main transportation in the mountains was in, was on a small horse.

Phyllis Noble: Uh huh. And you had one or access to one?

John Addison Ferrick: Access one that I could ride. So I would ride. The teachers, the teacher trainers actually, many of them had horses or motorcycles. They were the only ones.

Phyllis Noble: Because they'd have to go from village to village.

John Addison Ferrick: They'd go to different schools. So, um, they were the only ones that could have motorcycles also. It was forbidden for anybody else. You weren't even supposed to ride on a motorcycle. So it was wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: But what were you eating? Was there, were there, was there animals? Was there meat?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, you could get meat. But so at the beginning of the month, I may get meat. At the end, I didn't have enough money because I'd spent stuff. But you could, you know, we'd get sacks of potatoes and get them. So we ate a lot of potato soup we made. Greens, you could get greens and have kind of moroho. And the staple in Lesotho like a lot of east and southern Africa is maize meal.

Phyllis Noble: Ah.

John Addison Ferrick: So you'd make what they call papa.

Phyllis Noble: That's interesting.

John Addison Ferrick: Or pap. And so you'd have, you'd make maize meal up and you could, if you could have some kind of a gravy, and you could get those Knorr's gravy mixes.

Phyllis Noble: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And then they had, uh, for breakfast and things, they had what they call jungle oats, which was oatmeal. So you had oatmeal and things like that. You could get eggs. We could buy eggs from people around.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. Yeah. So not too bad.

John Addison Ferrick: No, it wasn't too bad. It wasn't too bad at all.

Phyllis Noble: I'm thinking about the maize meal. That's corn.

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm.

Phyllis Noble: And of course, corn originated here in the Americas.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: So before the 1500s, people in south Africa would not have had, there must have been some other?

John Addison Ferrick: It would have been millet.

Phyllis Noble: Millet?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. There would be a millet or a sorghum, you know, which is millet, that would have been their.

Phyllis Noble: Some other kind of grain.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, that would have been their staple.

Phyllis Noble: And what about water?

John Addison Ferrick: It was, you know, it was. We're up in the mountains, so it's spring fed. It's pretty clean.

Phyllis Noble: There's no factory up above you dumping?

John Addison Ferrick: No factory above us. It was pretty clean. You had to be careful just because of cows. And so we always boiled our water.

Phyllis Noble: You did? Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. Because you didn't know what animals, sheep. You know, they had sheep and goats and cattle and horses. So you didn't know where they were. They didn't usually have protected places, so you just didn't know what could be in your water. I actually got amoebic dysentery. I'd never been sicker in my life at my site and trying to get down to the capital city was, was, I mean, it's, right now it's kind of a fond memory. It was, it was such an experience and there's some funny parts of it. But at the time I was just really, really sick. And that's because, you know, sometimes you can't, if somebody offers you some tea or something.

Phyllis Noble: That's just it, when you're a guest in somebody's home, you have to accept it.

John Addison Ferrick: You accept it, you know, and somebody cooks you something. You don't know how clean their hands are, but you're not going to question that.

Phyllis Noble: No. And you survived this.

John Addison Ferrick: I survived it and I have great stories with some of that. So.

Phyllis Noble: So we're talking about water. Um, what about water for bathing and toilets? What did you do for bathrooms?

John Addison Ferrick: You just, you had a bucket and there was a toilet like in both houses. They had a toilet, but you had to fill up a bucket.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, and put it in the tank.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, well, not in the tank. The one didn't even have a tank. You just poured it in.

Phyllis Noble: Into the toilet?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah.

Phyllis Noble: It'd go down.

John Addison Ferrick: To flush. Right. So that wasn't, those things weren't bad.

Phyllis Noble: Where did it go then?

John Addison Ferrick: There was a cistern or, not a cistern. Uh. Septic.

Phyllis Noble: Septic tank?

John Addison Ferrick: Tank under there that they would do. And, you know, I never even thought about pumping those things out or what they'd do with them or anything like that. But that would have been an issue at some point. Um. But it was, you know, it's just, I just have such incredible, incredible, fond memories of that. And I realize that, you know, electricity I could really do without. I wasn't, that wasn't that big a deal. Not having running water that, you just realize how much time it takes to do anything, to wash dishes. You got to heat things up, to wash dishes, to take a bath. You know, we would heat water to take a, it was just too darn cold.

Phyllis Noble: Cold, yes.

John Addison Ferrick: To take a sponge bath. And you learn how to take a, you know, use a minimal amount of water and take a sponge bath.

Phyllis Noble: That's right.

John Addison Ferrick: Washing clothes, it was terrible.

Phyllis Noble: You had so little water, which you had to carry, drop of which you had had to carry up.

John Addison Ferrick: And I, you know, my first year I did my own. And then Dodi Majori just said, John, when are you going to stop that? You realize, you know, you give somebody employment here.

Phyllis Noble: Ah.

John Addison Ferrick: And we talked about it and he said, listen, you don't, you can, you don't have to treat them as if you're a servant. You treat them as an employee, that you're employing them, you treat them fair. That's, there's nothing wrong with that. But having, especially because of, you know, being white there. You know, I asked my students one time, am I better than you because of who I am? And they said yes.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, it's so ingrained.

John Addison Ferrick: It's so ingrained. So I was so sensitive to that and didn't want, you know, I'm not, you know, people would call me master and do all that. I mean, it was just what they did. Because if South Africans were visiting up in the mountains, that's what they expected.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: But the second year I ended up hiring this woman to do my laundry because it was just, it was. What a relief.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, sure. Your primary reason for being there was to be a teacher?

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: And that to be a good teacher, you need time to prepare and think things through.

John Addison Ferrick: Right. And, you know, so that turned out fine. It turned out wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: Good. Let's go into a classroom.

John Addison Ferrick: Uh huh.

Phyllis Noble: For the two years you taught in that same school the whole time?

John Addison Ferrick: I did.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. What was the name of the school?

John Addison Ferrick: It was Saint John the Baptist Catholic Mission.

Phyllis Noble: Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: Marakabei. That's the village it was in. Saint John the Baptist.

Phyllis Noble: When you see me writing things down, it's because later on I'm going to ask you how to spell them.

John Addison Ferrick: Okay.

Phyllis Noble: Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: And I remember my first class that I had. They had, they're in the British system.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So at the time, actually there was form A, B, C, and D. So ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th grade. Form A was ninth grade. Students were supposed to take an exam to get into ninth grade. And then after their sophomore year, they took another exam to go up to senior second, to go to junior and senior year. Well, this is a small, a small mountain school. So many of the kids coming in, their English was terrible because they were out in these primary schools.

Phyllis Noble: Right, right.

John Addison Ferrick: They didn't have teachers that really knew English to teach. They'd come in, but all of a sudden, the curriculum is all in English. And as a matter of fact, after that second year, the exam that you took was marked down in the capital city. And then the one that was done at the end of your senior year, and I was in. The British system has ordinary levels and advanced levels.

Phyllis Noble: A-levels, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So my school is only an ordinary.

Phyllis Noble: If somebody wanted to go for the A-level, they would have to?

John Addison Ferrick: Go someplace else.

Phyllis Noble: Go someplace else.

John Addison Ferrick: But they had to pass this test at the ordinary level. And at that time those tests were taken and then they were sent back to England.

Phyllis Noble: England.

John Addison Ferrick: For marking. In the history of the school, there had never been anybody that passed O-levels.

Phyllis Noble: Nobody?

John Addison Ferrick: Nobody.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, how discouraging.

John Addison Ferrick: Because it was just, well, it was where they were coming from. It's just such a poor base.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And that leads me to the story. Let me come back to the minute. My first encounter in the classroom, I walked into an A-level math class.

Phyllis Noble: An A-level?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. For freshman year.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, that's right. We're not talking about the A-level exams. We're talking about.

John Addison Ferrick: The A-level.

Phyllis Noble: Form A

John Addison Ferrick: Form A. 110 kids.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, my gosh.

John Addison Ferrick: In a classroom probably as big as this room.

Phyllis Noble: Which is smaller than a standard classroom.

John Addison Ferrick: It was 110 kids all on the floor.

Phyllis Noble: On the floor?

John Addison Ferrick: Sitting on the floor.

Phyllis Noble: There weren't desks?

John Addison Ferrick: There's desks, not for the A-level, because there's too many kids. When I got to, um, to the higher level, I was actually ended up being the class teacher. I only had 15 students. So that was wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: But that shows about the attrition.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, the attrition was just incredible.

Phyllis Noble: Kids didn't make it through to those higher levels.

John Addison Ferrick: So I just, and kind of my, kind of one of the things that I do when I teach is I like to walk around and be able to.

Phyllis Noble: Well, how could you? There's no aisles.

John Addison Ferrick: And the students are very, very trained that the teacher goes up, writes everything on the board, sits down, and then, and then the students copy it. And I, that was, I wasn't going to teach that way. I ended up doing more of it at the form A level because it was so hard to do anything else with a hundred. And just the noise was just incredible. At that higher level, I could do more.

Phyllis Noble: And you were teaching math and science?

John Addison Ferrick: Math and science. I ended up teaching English. I ended up teaching, tried to teach religion, that's all another story.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: I taught geography, human and social biology, and math. Um, chemistry. And then they switched my second year from human and social biology to physics, which was just another horrible thing in terms of preparation for those students and what they didn't have in terms of background. So as an incredible, that was my first experience. You know, corporal punishment.

Phyllis Noble: Were you expected to mete out?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh, yeah, I was.

Phyllis Noble: Really?

John Addison Ferrick: I, I. When they did that one time, I went in to the headmaster and said, I think that's totally inappropriate. I will not do this. And so they would do it behind my back.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. So you would report a student who.

John Addison Ferrick: I never reported students.

Phyllis Noble: No?

John Addison Ferrick: No, because I knew they would, they'd go get whipped.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: They would get whipped with a plastic that they called it a shambock, a plastic whip.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: You talk about hurt.

Phyllis Noble: No kidding.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. And there was a lot of improprieties in the school with teachers and students and things like that. And you just kind of, you just said, jeez, what do I do about this? I've got to teach my things. And, you know, I don't know. They learned also not to show me things because they knew my reaction, what my reaction would be. So I lived with that. Not my good, my good friends, we talked about it. Ntate Motjoli and Me Ma Motjoli, both teachers. We talked a lot about it and said it's such a horrible situation.

Phyllis Noble: Now, these people you just mentioned, they're the, um?

John Addison Ferrick: They were Lesotho and they were teachers.

Phyllis Noble: Lesotho people, okay. What were their names again?

John Addison Ferrick: M. M-O-T-J-O-L-I. And L-I is pronounced like a D. So Motjoli is the name, was their name. And one of them is Ntate means like father, but that's N-T-A-T-E. Ntate. And then Me, which is just M-E, is, is for, like a woman.

Phyllis Noble: Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: So it's a respectful way to say, so Ntate Motjoli and Me Ma Motjoli. And Ma is like a mother. Me Ma Motjoli. They were good friends. And then Guy Amar, also, who is a Sri Lankan, became a very good friend. And then my second year, and actually another American, he wasn't a Peace Corps volunteer. He was an Oblate volunteer, a Catholic volunteer.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, okay. I've heard of Maryknoll volunteers but there's some difference here.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, he was an Oblate volunteer. Joe D'Andrea, still a very good friend today. He lives in Boston, teaches philosophy at a small college in Boston. Wonderful guy. Just wonderful guy. And then there was a South African, a woman who wanted to get out of apartheid and came up to the mountains. And I learned so much about South Africa. And she was from Cape Town.

Phyllis Noble: Uh huh. And she was as against apartheid as you were?

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm.

Phyllis Noble: Well, how refreshing to know that it's not a monoculture there.

John Addison Ferrick: Yes.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So.

Phyllis Noble: But you're the only Peace Corps volunteer.

John Addison Ferrick: I was the only Peace Corps volunteer.

Phyllis Noble: For the whole two years?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes. Yeah. There wasn't another Peace Corps volunteer. There was another volunteer about an hour and a half away by motorcycle. Walking it would have been down in the valley, a long walk. And we did walk it actually.

Phyllis Noble: So your first experience was stepping into a classroom with 110 kids. Were they the same age that we would expect ninth graders to be? Or were they older?

John Addison Ferrick: They were both, many of them were older.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: Because they sent out herd boys, you know, the tending the cattle or the sheep.

Phyllis Noble: Right.

John Addison Ferrick: The girls had to stay at home and do things.

Phyllis Noble: So this was both boys and girls?

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: Okay. So they're bigger bodies. They're not the bodies of a 13 year old.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, you may have smaller ones.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. You've got some, you've got a mixture. They're all crammed together, sitting on the floor. Did you ever have, did the school ever supply textbooks?

John Addison Ferrick: Um, no. Well, we had some textbooks, but not nearly, not for everybody.

Phyllis Noble: Not, not enough for everybody to have a book.

John Addison Ferrick: At that level. When I was in my, my upper level, they would have a science book.

Phyllis Noble: Okay.

John Addison Ferrick: Some of the books I got, actually, one of my secondary projects was helping to build a library.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, good. Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: So got some books for the library and got some science equipment, but not very much.

Phyllis Noble: How difficult to have to prepare people or to try to prepare people to pass an exam which is going to be in English when you don't, when the students don't even have textbooks written in English. That's, that's.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, and that's why.

Phyllis Noble: It's so self-defeating.

John Addison Ferrick: This. I'll tell this story because it is, it's probably, I'm most proud of it. It just kind of makes me kind of cry in some ways too. It's probably the best thing I ever did in being as a Peace Corps volunteer was not teaching anything. It was getting a student out of our school into the school in Roma, which caused tremendous problems. Matter of fact, the priest of the mission never talked to me again. He would pass me on the road when I was hitchhiking, trying to get out of the mountains because he was so.

Phyllis Noble: Because you had arranged for one of his students to go to school where he could actually learn.

John Addison Ferrick: It was the potential for him being the first student to ever pass the O-exam. But Morosi Moshoeshoe was his name. Moshoeshoe is a, is actually a, uh, and it's M-O.

Phyllis Noble: That's okay.

John Addison Ferrick: M-O-shoe-shoe. But that was, that's very royal. The kings of Lesotho are Moshoeshoes. So Morosi Moshoeshoe had some relative. But he was from way up in the mountains. He came in to me and he said, Ntate John, can you talk to me? Can you tell me what?

Phyllis Noble: Oh, so that Ntate was applied to you too?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh, yeah.

Phyllis Noble: You were Ntate John.

John Addison Ferrick: Ntate John. Can you tell talk to me about the Falkland Islands and I went, what? Yeah, what, what was, what's happening with the Falkland Islands? You know, why are the British there? And so I just, I. Morosi was just in an, I mean, a brilliant student. And I talked to the priest of the mission and said, you know, Ntate, he really shouldn't be here. He needs to be someplace where he can really take advantage of the education.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: We don't, I don't have a beaker for science. How am I going to really teach him science? And the priest of the mission said, no, he's going to stay here.

Phyllis Noble: Well, they were getting his tuition.

John Addison Ferrick: Right. Well, and he. Part of it I understood, he could have been the potential to be the first person to pass, but that was sacrificing him. So I went down. I got to know during training the brothers at, at Christ the King, which was the school in Roma, where we did our training.

Phyllis Noble: Which is 4 hours away.

John Addison Ferrick: Yes.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah. So it'd be a boarding school.

John Addison Ferrick: It's a boarding school. I went down. Our school is a boarding school.

Phyllis Noble: Ah.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. We had.

Phyllis Noble: So people came in from the outlying villages, which were even more remote.

John Addison Ferrick: Oh, exactly. So I ended up talking to the brother down at Christ the King, and he had a, saw his exams and then said, oh yeah, we'll get him in here. So I got Morosi out of there, down to Christ the King. Long story short, he ended up graduating from the National University, has been very successful. Just incredible.

Phyllis Noble: What's he doing now?

John Addison Ferrick: He is, he's got two businesses, three businesses that he's doing.

Phyllis Noble: Still in Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh, yeah.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, he's still in Lesotho.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: I just heard from him.

Phyllis Noble: Ah, no kidding. Are you in touch?

John Addison Ferrick: Just recently. And but the priest of the mission never really talked to me again, you know? But, you know, I said, you know, if that's, if I look back, I still say that's the best thing I ever did as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Phyllis Noble: You saved a life.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. And if, you know, as I've gotten older, the idea of how we change the world or changing the world has changed. And it's, to me it's one person at a time. And if I can make a difference in one person's life. And that's how, that's what Peace Corps taught me, but also being in the development world all these years has really taught me. You know, you look at all these big development projects and everything going on and, um, so often they make very little difference. And so often it's because they don't get down to the personal level there. And I think, you know, when I, when I really look at. People will often complain about Peace Corps. Peace Corps volunteers, they don't have technical skills. We need more people with technical skills over that. And I, at one point I even agreed with that. Not anymore at all.

I think taking young people, educating them, having them educate others in that country, trying to be really culturally sensitive, trying to teach that. That makes them so much more of an impact than any huge dollar development project that you're going to bring in. Because most of the time those huge dollar ones, like I said, are going to miss the people at that level.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And I think it's what we do in terms of changing ourselves does make a big difference. I even look at myself in terms of the career that I ended up taking, you know, training young kids at university and doing some development work in terms of projects on the ground. What I do with my kids, talking to them about voting, talking them about participating in your community, what community's about, you know. Boy, what an impact. And that really, I really attribute that to Peace Corps.

Phyllis Noble: Let's go back to you being a Peace Corps volunteer. Yes, let's take a break. We're back from a short break. Um, after your first year of teaching, which was seems to me incredibly difficult. Did you have a break? Was there, you started at the beginning of a school year, right?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. Yeah. You know, as a Peace Corps volunteer, you accumulate leave time. They do really encourage you to do a secondary project, especially as a teacher, which I did.

Phyllis Noble: You mentioned the library.

John Addison Ferrick: The library and trying to get science equipment and just kind of working in the community and doing some things.

Phyllis Noble: How did you, how did you do that? Did you have to do some fundraising back home or how did you get the money to get books, to get the science equipment?

John Addison Ferrick: Right. All of that. I wrote to people not only in the U.S. but in Europe, anyplace I could find, you know, where were there pots of money that you might be able to get? And I got some support. I can't even remember what the foundation was. Peace Corps would give us, here's some potential opportunities for funding. And I can't remember. I just remember writing and getting some money. And then I got the Catholic Church to get some money for the library at the school.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, good.

John Addison Ferrick: So it turned out to be wonderful. It turned out to be really incredible. Um. Never enough books, never enough things for them, but more equipment. But it was better than what we had. The sad part of that, I'll just jump ahead a little bit, is I did end up going back to Lesotho ten years after I, no, 20 years after I left.

Phyllis Noble: Wow.

John Addison Ferrick: In the early nineties. And the school is in much worse shape than it was when I was there.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, that makes you feel bad.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, it was just. But at the time it was just, yeah, it was just amazing. It was. But it was just like one schoolhouse and no windows or no glass in the windows. And when it rained, you had to stop because it was just a tin roof.

Phyllis Noble: The noise.

John Addison Ferrick: The noise was so intense. And lightning, you know, you're in the mountains and people would get killed often by being struck by lightning because there was no, Lesotho doesn't have any trees or almost no trees. So it's these bare mountains. And so if you're out walking, it was pretty intense. And so, and students knew that. So when it was lightning, people would dive under desks. And it was pretty, pretty kind of a scary time. And lightning struck close to the houses that we were in on several occasions. So it was, it was, it was just such a great environment. So, so very amazing.

Phyllis Noble: Did you take a break ever?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah.

Phyllis Noble: Did you get some vacation? You said it accumulated.

John Addison Ferrick: We did. We went, I actually had one of the most incredible vacations I've ever had in my life where we hitchhiked to what they called the Wild Coast. You know, at the time, politically, South Africa was making these, these homelands and saying that they're independent countries. And the only, I think the only country that recognized them in independent countries was Israel.

Phyllis Noble: Oh. And we're not talking about Swaziland and Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: No, no, no. We're talking about the Transkei and the Ciskei, all of these that were in South Africa that they made into supposedly independent countries. So there was one called the Transkei, which is along the eastern border of South Africa, absolutely beautiful. So we hitchhiked to the, Durban is the big city kind of in the north. We hitchhiked to Durban and then went down the, went to a place where the road was. And by the way, there was a Holiday Inn with a casino. So if you're in South Africa, it was illegal for gambling. Prostitution was illegal. But they put prostitution and gambling in Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, and so the South Africans would come in

John Addison Ferrick: In these homelands. Right. So Sun City is one that people have often heard of up by Johannesburg, which was this big playground for South Africans that was in, I forget which homeland it was in. And these homelands were like islands. They weren't necessarily contiguous, they were broken up in some cases. So we went to this Holiday Inn, and from there on there were no more roads down the coast. So we walked down the coast for ten days to a place called Port Saint John's.

Phyllis Noble: Wow, you walked for ten days?

John Addison Ferrick: And it was just incredible because you'd have these white sandy beaches and the way that the, um, Ndebele they're called, where they live. And that's where Nelson Mandela was from. They didn't live right on the coast. They lived inland. So the coast itself was pretty deserted. And there was actually a, um, game preserve right on the coast that we had to swim across the river to get to. And then there was people with guns on one side saying, what are you doing here?

Phyllis Noble: Oh my goodness.

John Addison Ferrick: And we told them, that they took us across the game reserve. So we saw, it was the first time I saw giraffe and some other big game. And then we walked down the coast to this place called Port St. John's. And so it was, and we were out, there was three of us that did it. And it was just magical because you have no electricity, you're right on the coast. We'd go out and wade in and get mussels off the rocks and have steamed mussels and we got bread. There were some villages we could walk inland a little bit and buy bread and peanut butter.

Phyllis Noble: We you're saying, who's with you?

John Addison Ferrick: Guy by the name of Dave Roush. Dave is now a math professor at the University of Denver and, and Deb McDuffie. And Deb is, uh, she works in. I've lost touch with Deb. She's in upstate New York and had just lost touch with. So three of us in our group along the coast.

Phyllis Noble: Terrific.

John Addison Ferrick: And it was just, yeah, it was just absolutely amazing.

Phyllis Noble: Was this sort of at the halfway point?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah.

Phyllis Noble: When your school would have, the students would have had a break of a couple of weeks?

John Addison Ferrick: Correct. Yeah. And one of the, another time I want during the school we did it, is that we actually took the kids to Durbin.

Phyllis Noble: Took your students?

John Addison Ferrick: Took group students to Durbin. Got money from the mission and from the, to take them there.

Phyllis Noble: Now was that?

John Addison Ferrick: They'd never been out of the mountains. Some of these kids had never been in the lowlands of Lesotho.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: First time some of them have ever seen more than a two story building. When they went through at the border, I had to get out because it was illegal for me to ride with the students because they were Black.

Phyllis Noble: Once you're in South Africa.

John Addison Ferrick: Once you're in South Africa. So they got out in the bus and I hitchhiked to, there was a lot of hitchhiking at that time. I hitchhiked to Durban.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And then at the beaches in Durban, it was.

Phyllis Noble: Then you met up with the students.

John Addison Ferrick: Right. I couldn't stay with them. It was illegal. And I wasn't actually supposed to be on the beach with them. They had Black white beaches.

Phyllis Noble: Were you the only, um, staff person from the school?

John Addison Ferrick: No. There was a couple other teachers that went.

Phyllis Noble: Okay, that helped.

John Addison Ferrick: That went with them, that they could stay because they were Basotho. They were Black.

Phyllis Noble: Right. They were Black so they could be on the bus with the kids. Okay, that's good, I was worried about.

John Addison Ferrick: But that was an incredible experience. Just another eye opener about what that was like. Just, just incredible. And you got, actually on the way back from Port St. John's to Lesotho to come back, I don't know why Dave wasn't with us at this point, but Deb and I split off to come back and we were hitchhiking and got into a, inevitably what happened when you got picked up by a South African, especially a farmer. She'd get around to conversation and eventually they'd say, well, what do you think about our Blacks?

Phyllis Noble: So of course, when you say a South African farmer, this is a white guy.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, this is a white guy, an Afrikaner.

Phyllis Noble: So he'd get around to asking you, what do you think?

John Addison Ferrick: What do you think about our Black guys? And they would say that, what do you think about our Blacks? They're not like your Blacks. They were. And you know, most.

Phyllis Noble: How do they know, what's their conception of an American black person?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, much more smarter, uh, much more, um, kind of knowing their own skills and things, where their Blacks were lazy and, and, you know, couldn't trust them. They'd steal, all of this stuff. So most of the time you did, you'd say, do I say something? I'm out in the middle of nowhere. Do I say something? You say, well, you know, we all have our own, you know, we all have our own way of looking at things. And, and, you know, what you do in your own country is different than what we do in our country. So you do something political. You kind of lost a little bit of your soul, I think, every time you did that. But you did wear your, well, this time I didn't. This is an old farmer and I was just fed up with it. And I just said, I think it's absolutely atrocious about how Blacks are treated. And the people I know are incredibly bright.

Phyllis Noble: Yes.

John Addison Ferrick: And we're out in the middle of what's called the Karoo. We're in the middle of, you're, in parts of South Africa, you're out in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing around. Probably the closest town was, it was, it was Bloemfontein, it was 50 miles away. He let us off, goes well I think it's time for the two of you to get out.

Phyllis Noble: And there you are, fifty, five-oh?

John Addison Ferrick: Five-oh.

Phyllis Noble: 50 miles away from the nearest city.

John Addison Ferrick: Right. And we're out in the middle of nowhere. And of course Deb's going to me, what did you do? Well, we were out, and it was, I remember it was dark and there was a big truck. You know, most people would pass you by. You're out in the middle of it. And because a lot of the drivers were Black and they'd never pick up a white.

Phyllis Noble: They wouldn't?

John Addison Ferrick: No, because you'd get, they'd get in trouble.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, my goodness.

John Addison Ferrick: They could get in trouble. But a truck came and we were hitchhiking and a truck stopped. And when he saw us, afterwards he goes, if I would have known you were white, I never would have picked you up. But he ended up.

Phyllis Noble: But he was a Black Lesotho?

John Addison Ferrick: He was. He was, no, he was actually colored. See.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, yeah, okay, there's this.

John Addison Ferrick: He was Cape Coloureds, which, which you had different, you know. The lowest on the totem pole were Africans.

Phyllis Noble: Right.

John Addison Ferrick: You know, complete African descent. Then you had coloreds, Cape Coloureds, which was a combination, could be a combination of whites and Malay and.

Phyllis Noble: Indian maybe.

John Addison Ferrick: Indian maybe. But then you had Indians.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And Indians, but some of these, like to go across the Orange Free State, an Indian had to get a special permit. And then you had whites, but then you had two classes of whites, you had the English whites and you had the Afrikaans. And so it was such. And there was a big, you know, in World War II, the British put Afrikaans in concentration camps. Many Afrikaans died if you look at the history of World War II, because they supported Hitler.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: Because they thought if they defeat the British, we can get rid of the British.

Phyllis Noble: Out of South Africa.

John Addison Ferrick: Out of South Africa. So there was all this tension that goes on. So eventually we got a ride in and got back. But it's, you know, you confronted that all the time.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: The apartheid was just, it was an amazing, amazingly effective system for what they wanted to have done. Completely dehumanizing.

Phyllis Noble: Yes.

John Addison Ferrick: And it always, you know, when people say that, even like whites that have been overseas and especially where I was, and they say they know what it's like to be in a minority. You don't. You're in a minority in a very privileged sense.

Phyllis Noble: Oh, yes.

John Addison Ferrick: You have no idea what it's like when it would be flipped. I have no idea. In almost any place I've been in the world, that's the case. Yes, I might be the only white person, but I'm also seen at a, you know, a higher level.

Phyllis Noble: Yes, yes, exactly. When somebody in the African bush reaches out to touch your hair, it's not the same as a white person assuming that privilege with a Black person.

John Addison Ferrick: Right, not at all.

Phyllis Noble: It's a very different thing.

John Addison Ferrick: Completely different.

Phyllis Noble: So, um, you're having these extraordinary experiences. You're learning so much. You've got family back here in Madison. Well, your mom is back here in Madison.

John Addison Ferrick: Right, and my brother.

Phyllis Noble: And your brother. And the only way to communicate with them is writing letters. Did you have those blue air letters?

John Addison Ferrick: Air grams.

Phyllis Noble: Right. That's right.

John Addison Ferrick: You'd write those and for, what would happen for us is that the mail truck would come up and drop the mail down in at the, um, shop down in the valley, and then we'd be sitting at our, on our porch and we could watch the mail coming up by horse. So they would bring the mail up by horse and you could watch. And it was, and then there was a little post.

Phyllis Noble: They'd bring it up to you at the mission?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, no. At the mission, right, there was a post office on the mission that people. So you could, but you could. It was delivered by horse. And you know, the communication, it would take, it would take a month to two months for the letter to, you know, if you gave it, who knows how long it takes to get back to the U.S.

Phyllis Noble: It might be a month or two months before your mother would get a letter that you had posted.

John Addison Ferrick: Right, and I'd seen one.

Phyllis Noble: Coming back?

John Addison Ferrick: One time I think we went four or five months without hearing from each other. And so she's wondering what the heck's going on. I'm wondering what the heck's going on. I did, during that time, I did call home because I was really worried.

Phyllis Noble: Uh huh.

John Addison Ferrick: I could book, when I went down to the capital city, you could book a call at the post office. Was that the post office? I can't, I can't remember now. You could book a call into and you could also go into a, you know, we had in the capital city of Maseru, you had a Holiday Inn with the casino. You had a Hilton with a casino, beautiful hotel.

Phyllis Noble: And those hotels had phones?

John Addison Ferrick: They had phones.

Phyllis Noble: Right. Yes, right. That was my experience. I had to go to a fancy hotel.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. They were, they were definitely, you know, you didn't stay in those. They were more expensive.

Phyllis Noble: But you went into their lobby, maybe use the bathroom and make a phone call.

John Addison Ferrick: We actually did stay there one time, and this is kind of a funny story. I told you about the ANC in South Africa. Well, the ANC had a raid in South Africa. South Africa closed the borders, actually flew jets over and said they were, because that the Lesotho army captured some South African military. And they said, South Africa said, if you don't return our military, we're going to bomb your capital. So they flew everybody over and there was all this tension. And Peace Corps in its ultimate wisdom, I say that tongue in cheek, brought all the volunteers out of their sites to the capital city, which was exactly where.

Phyllis Noble: Which was the place that would be bombed.

John Addison Ferrick: Right. Well, the funny part of it is, so they put us up in the Holiday Inn.

Phyllis Noble: Which is also a casino.

John Addison Ferrick: And they were having the Miss Nude South Africa contest. So there are all these volunteers coming in and there were all these women, you know, and they were white women, sitting around with no tops on and they're sunbathing and it's the Miss Nude. And you had all these Afrikaan men and all these. It was, like.

Phyllis Noble: Surreal.

John Addison Ferrick: It was surreal. It was so bizarre. It was so bizarre. And we had some volunteers that lost all their, because there was a casino, there wasn't really anything to do. So they lost all their, their monthly allowance and barely limped back up to their site once they let us go after a couple of days of wisdom saying, well, maybe this isn't the best place for all these volunteers to be. It was just kind of crazy, kind of crazy stuff.

Phyllis Noble: Well, it sounds like you had a very full two years as a volunteer.

John Addison Ferrick: I did. It was absolutely wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: Is there anything else about that happened during those two years that you want to make sure?

John Addison Ferrick: Well, I just think the, the, to really kind of focus. The depth of friendships that you get there can change you for a lifetime. You know, it's not just the friendships of other Americans, other volunteers, it's the whole host of things that you learn about. So sitting around and having, talking about, you know, what's going on in Ireland and Northern Ireland and that at the time and their perspectives on that, and talking about all these other things happening in sub-Saharan Africa. You know, that's just, I mean, that's an education that you can't duplicate in any place.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And then like I said, Phyllis, I think the biggest thing, and I do. I do. I wish more Americans would do that. You know, then learning about your own role in this world and what can you do or can't do or what do you want to try to, to accomplish? I think it's just. I just think it's invaluable. To me it changed my life. I think it changed the life of my wife. I think it like changed the life of my kids.

Phyllis Noble: Was your wife in the Peace Corps, too?

John Addison Ferrick: She wasn't, but she always wishes she was.

Phyllis Noble: Okay, yeah. When you finished your two years, was there some kind of debriefing in maybe Maseru?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, we had. We had, we had those COS conferences, close.

Phyllis Noble: COS being closing of service.

John Addison Ferrick: Conferences. And so we had a close of service conference and debriefing. And I ended up staying a little bit longer because I ended up doing, helping with training and doing some other things with Peace Corps volunteers coming in.

Phyllis Noble: Uh huh.

John Addison Ferrick: So my total time was about three years almost in Lesotho. So yeah, it was just an incredible, incredible experience. I still look back on that as, you know, if I, and my wife and I talk about this, about the potential of doing Peace Corps again.

Phyllis Noble: Do you, do you? And you'd do it together?

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah, we'd do it together.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. And I don't know if that will happen or not. It depends on our health and things like that. But we'll see because I think it still is an incredible experience. So I would, you know, I, again, I come back to I really do think that having young people do it and learn about this and people learn about them and etcetera is just so incredibly valuable. And man, don't we need it more today than any other time when there's so many tensions and people?

Phyllis Noble: Yes.

John Addison Ferrick: Things that they're saying about other cultures and things, I just.

Phyllis Noble: People are grouping together with like-minded groups.

John Addison Ferrick: Yes. Nationalist tendencies that's happening.

Phyllis Noble: Yes. After you left Lesotho, you went on to have a very international life. You were, you were Peace Corps staff in Papua New Guinea as associate director for a couple of years or a year maybe. And then you went on to be associate director and then acting country director in Fiji.

John Addison Ferrick: Right.

Phyllis Noble: I would think that you'd be the best kind of Peace Corps director because you had been a volunteer yourself and you could, um.

John Addison Ferrick: I think it's, to me it was just, it was absolutely wonderful being able to develop projects. One of the things I always emphasize to volunteers at that time too was don't get so hung up on your job. Your job is, yes, you want to try to do some things, but you can't do your job until you really get to know people and understand people. And, and we as Americans, we just want to get in and do stuff.

Phyllis Noble: Yes. Yes.

John Addison Ferrick: Positive or negative in a sense, we just want to see ourselves doing stuff. And that's, that still happens with all these development projects I see today. You know, we want to just do stuff. Well, doing stuff might not be the right thing. We want to try to do the right things. And we can't do stuff for people. People have to do stuff for themselves. We can try to facilitate and help out. And that, that's a long-term commitment. It's not going to happen in a couple of years. So it was always fun kind of talking to people and, you know, that works and doesn't work. And part of that is just learning through experience about that because, you know, you, and the more technical you get.

We had, when I was in Fiji, we had a lot of senior volunteers because it's a, it was a safe country. There wasn't, very little, you know, disease. Beautiful. So we had a lot of retired people that were very successful bankers and, you know, people that were very successful in businesses. And getting them to say, you're not transplanting an America to these places. You've got to figure out how you take the skills that you have but do it within that context. It was extremely difficult. I mean, we had just too many older volunteers that would just say, well, this is the way to do it. If they want to be successful, they need to do it this way.

Phyllis Noble: Yeah, slow down there. Um, some. Uh. Did you go back to school?

John Addison Ferrick: I did. I went back.

Phyllis Noble: At some point?

John Addison Ferrick: Yes, I did in between, after the Peace Corps. So that time when I was doing the trainings, I was in school. I was in graduate school.

Phyllis Noble: Okay, here at UW?

John Addison Ferrick: In Madison. I ended up going to Madison because it was just cheaper for me to stay in state and go here.

Phyllis Noble: Sure. And so what were you studying?

John Addison Ferrick: I was doing agricultural extension, so I really wanted to work with agricultural extension agents internationally. I had planned to stay overseas the rest of my life working on projects and things. And then I met my wife.

Phyllis Noble: Oh yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: And we did go overseas to, but my daughter was born and my.

Phyllis Noble: Your wife went with you to Papua New Guinea?

John Addison Ferrick: She was supposed to, that's a whole story where that became. Papua New Guinea is a very, culturally it's the most incredible place I've ever been, but it's also has a lot of security issues. There's a lot of things culturally that happen. So if you do something, if you're a male and you do something to me, I get back at you by doing something to your wife.

Phyllis Noble: Oh.

John Addison Ferrick: So it became, it became really. And some things happened that, you know, where some people tried to take my counterpart in the Ministry of Education by gunpoint. And I ended up getting out of this situation, um, and they smashed my window with a shotgun. And I said, my wife can't come.

Phyllis Noble: No.

John Addison Ferrick: We had a small, our daughter was just small. So then we went to Fiji and they were in Fiji for two years with us. But then my mother started having health problems, Linda. We said, do we want grandparents as a part of our kids lives? We wanted, we knew we wanted at least one more child. And so that's when we decided to come back and see what happens. And so we came back and, you know, I had been offered a job in Washington, D.C., but I said, I don't, I want to, you know, if we're going to do this, let's have them as a part of their lives. So we ended up settling in Madison. I ended up working at the, where I am now in the College of Ag and Life Sciences in their international programs office, working on international projects all over the world and trying to teach and do some things using my experiences and had some wonderful bosses there.

Phyllis Noble: You spoke of Uganda.

John Addison Ferrick: Mm hmm.

Phyllis Noble: And I know that, uh, I think a colleague of yours, Dr. Cindy Haq?

John Addison Ferrick: Oh yeah.

Phyllis Noble: Has been doing, from the University of Wisconsin Global Health Institute, has also been doing projects in Uganda.

John Addison Ferrick: Well, we actually helped Cindy start the medical schools program in Uganda. I do this with a colleague, James Ntambi. James is a professor of biochemistry and nutritional sciences here. He's Ugandan. And James and I started this program. This will be our 15th year taking. We teach a course in the fall on international health and nutrition and then take students over winter break to Uganda, where we go to hospitals and clinics and villages. We're based in a village, doing some incredible work in this village, we're really kind of a place based approach over the last four years.

Um, but have worked with Cindy. Cindy did her, part of her residency there back in the eighties, right when the current President Museveni was coming into power. Her daughter is now married to a Ugandan, and Chris and, they have a daughter. And I just saw them last year when I was there because her daughter graduated from medical school here, is doing her residency down at Baylor University in Texas. And they have a big program in Uganda. So Heather had gone back. And so, yeah, Cindy's, Cindy's wonderful.

Phyllis Noble: So you're still at it. You're very much internationally involved.

John Addison Ferrick: I am. And I am still, you know, I still try to do as much with Peace Corps. I was in charge for a while here when the Peace Corps recruiter was based out of our office. So I would help with the recruiter, and I still do whenever I can, I, I try to help out because it's such an incredible experience. I'd like to get back involved with kind of the Peace Corps group, the returned Peace Corps volunteer group. It's just time.

Phyllis Noble: Time, yeah.

John Addison Ferrick: I think I will do that again at some point.

Phyllis Noble: Is there anything else that we need to touch on?

John Addison Ferrick: I don't think so. I just, you know, it's, it's just such an incredible experience. And as I said and I, I wish everybody could do it. It's not for everybody. But I, I just wish people could have that experience of seeing themselves in a different culture and seeing that culture, how that, that experience changes them.

Phyllis Noble: That's right.

John Addison Ferrick: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Phyllis.

Phyllis Noble: Thank you, John.

John Addison Ferrick: This was wonderful.