Ralph Gilman Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Robert Klein
Interviewee(s): Ralph Gilman

Robert Klein: Today is September 13th, 2005. This is Bob Klein, and I'm interviewing Ralph Gilman, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana in 1962 to '64 in a secondary education project. So let's go back, oh, maybe a year before you joined the Peace Corps and talk about what was going on.

Ralph Gilman: I was, uh, I was at Stanford University. I had my senior year, I was a sponsor at, uh, working for the Dean of Students. I was at the freshmen dormitory. I was in charge of part of one of the floors of the freshmen dormitory.

Robert Klein: What were you studying?

Ralph Gilman: I was studying physics in Stanford.

Robert Klein: And at that point, what kind of career goal did you have for yourself?

Ralph Gilman: At that point, I knew that I wasn't going to be a physicist.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: Trying to figure out what I, what else I should do with my life.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And working with the dean of students had just, he had, um, Al, Albert [Allard] Lowenstein. Al Lowenstein had just come on the staff. And I got to know him and, you know, probably know Al from his work in New York City and so forth. And he was encouraging people to do good social work and join the Peace Corps and so forth. So he was quite an influence on my life. And as I told you today, I was, hadn't. I'd been working my way through school. And so I didn't have a lot of chance to go traveling or do any traveling. So I thought that was a good opportunity for me to join the Peace Corps, get some traveling, do some, do some good things.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Well, let's go back a little bit. Where did you grow up?

Ralph Gilman: I first grew up as a child in Hawaii during the Second World War. My father was, uh, was he wasn't a military, but he had. He was working as a foreman on the docks when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He wasn't hurt. Then we moved to Maui. And I grew up on Maui, basically.

Robert Klein: Until what age?

Ralph Gilman: About age seven. And then we came back to the Bay Area here in San Francisco.

Robert Klein: So most of your school years and everything were in San Francisco?

Ralph Gilman: In San Francisco.

Robert Klein: And are you an only child?

Ralph Gilman: I have a sister, five years younger.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK. And growing up in high school, what kind of activities did you do? What did you do with your summertime? Did you do any travel?

Ralph Gilman: Um, I grew up in, uh, I started working for the California Division of Highways. They were taking interns on for becoming surveyors and so forth. And that was a summer job. And I started that when I was about 14 or so, my second year of high school.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And would go off on summers and work for them. So I worked my way through high school to great extent too. I went to Lowell High School in San Francisco, which was a college prep school, had a lot of a lot of wealthy society people there. I didn't have any concept of that whole society thing. And I was a swimmer.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: My father was a swimmer and he'd been to the Olympics. And so I would go to school, study, and come home. I'd go to school in the afternoons, go and swim a couple hours a day.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: I ended up my last year, um.

Robert Klein: In high school?

Ralph Gilman: In high school, having done quite a lot of, as a very good swimmer. So I broke all the records and all that kind of stuff. And, um, it so happened that the high school coach of the swimming team was also the football coach. So he introduced me. And so, you know, I got all these awards and so forth. And just after that was the election for student body president. So I won for student body president. And so that, that and the application got me into Stanford basically, being able to.

Robert Klein: Did you go in as a scholarship student?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I went as a. I went as a swimming scholarship, and then they later on put it over to an academic scholarship.

Robert Klein: Right. And when you first started, how did, had you been interested in science?

Ralph Gilman: I mean, I started off in engineering because that was sort of the thing to do.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: I really hadn't been, although I went to a good college prep school.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And there were good teachers there. I really didn't know how to study. I didn't really know much. So when I hit Stanford, it was quite a lot of work for me just to get up to speed and, um, feeling. I felt a lot of conflict. And it was like, I remember my first year I would try to work, I'd read, I'd read a passage, I'd read the same page over and over and over again because I was trying so hard. I got to get this done, I got to get this done kind of thing. And it wasn't easy. So in fact, I didn't really learn how to really learn how to think and study until like until years later.

Robert Klein: Yeah. OK. So let's jump now back to your senior year. Do you recall when you first heard about the Peace Corps?

Ralph Gilman: Kennedy was still president. And there's a lot of peace, a lot of Peace Corps stuff. So it was just in the news all the time at that point. They were starting the Peace Corps. And I guess, I don't know if I first heard about it there. There wasn't any recruiting on campus necessarily, I think.

Robert Klein: Not in those days.

Ralph Gilman: I just, I just signed up. I called, you know, wrote in the application for it.

Robert Klein: Do you recall that it was a fairly lengthy application process with references?

Ralph Gilman: The only thing I really remember about that whole thing was when I was accepted and, you know. When I was accepted to go and they told me I was going to go to Ghana.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: I had heard that Ghana was a fairly easy place. It wasn't you didn't have to suffer too much. So I went to Al Lowenstein. I said, Al, I want to call and tell them to send me something more difficult. And he said, don't do it. If you do that, they'll probably not take you, they'll think you're a kook.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Yeah. Good.

Ralph Gilman: So, um, so I didn't do that. And then the second thing was that they sent around the, uh, I had to get myself fingerprinted at the local police station. And then they sent, they came around with the, uh, was it FBI or?

Robert Klein: FBI background check.

Ralph Gilman: Background check. And they, of course, they came to all the students who lived in the dorm with me, and they all told me all the stories they told these guys, what kind of a person I was. And so that was interesting.

Robert Klein: How did your family react to your decision to join?

Ralph Gilman: Uh, very. My mother was OK, very positive. She was concerned about me being away from her for such a long time because they were divorced. My father was dead at that time.

Robert Klein: Ah, OK.

Ralph Gilman: So it was. And she, that's why we didn't have a lot of money going to school, because she was just trying to work to keep up things. And, um, so. So that was fine.

Robert Klein: Do you recall your sister's reaction?

Ralph Gilman: No, she was, she was in high school, so she, she didn't know, she wasn't too much involved with it.

Robert Klein: And how about your peers at Stanford?

Ralph Gilman: Stanford was very, it was very positive about that. They thought that was a good thing to do.

Robert Klein: Had had others around you joined the Peace Corps at that time?

Ralph Gilman: I don't remember anybody else who actually. There were a couple of other people, I think, but I don't remember who they were at all. It was more, the influence I had was mainly from Al Lowenstein.

Robert Klein: And at the point you began the application process, did you have any alternatives in mind if you didn't get accepted? Did you have any sense of what you were going to do?

Ralph Gilman: No, I figured I was gonna get accepted.

Robert Klein: Fair enough. So you must have gotten either a telegram or a letter, saying report to?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I got it saying you're accepted and that kind of stuff. And then they said, report to Berkeley, right? I said, oh, shit, yeah, Berkeley. I mean, they could at least send me to New York State or something different, right?

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: But of course, the Berkeley was a was. We stayed at the international house there in Berkeley.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: And did the summer there. And as I wrote, I wrote some articles while I was in the Peace Corps, which they published in the Stanford newspaper, the daily newspaper. And as I said in there, I said that that was a very strong. That was a, how do I say? One of the most, not intense experiences, but to go through the training, the summer training.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Intense in what way?

Ralph Gilman: It wasn't intense. It was like, um, you felt you were. I felt that I was just cooking on all cylinders. I was just totally involved, that they were hitting me physically with all the physical things they were doing. They were hitting me with, of course, all the shots we had to take. They were hitting me with all the intellectual stuff, learning a little bit about the language and the culture. And of course, you were at Berkeley, too, I think, right?

Robert Klein: Yeah. Well, let's go back. Do you remember when you first reported into Berkeley? Now you're in the midst of a bunch of people who also joined the Peace Corps.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: And I think inevitably, you match yourself up against them. Did you recall any of that, you know, how you felt in relation to the group?

Ralph Gilman: Nothing negative, it was all pretty positive.

Robert Klein: No, no, but.

Ralph Gilman: No, just a matter of going to classes with everybody, getting up and going and reading all the books they gave us to read.

Robert Klein: And how big the group was it, do you recall?

Ralph Gilman: It was about 50 or 60 people or something like that.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: Men and women.

Robert Klein: Any married couples?

Ralph Gilman: I don't remember. I don't think so.

Robert Klein: Age for the most part, age range?

Ralph Gilman: Right out of college. All young people out of college.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: Um. There weren't, I don't think there were. I mean, most of them are. I don't remember anybody who was, had been in the military. I think that.

Robert Klein: Now training usually has various components, area studies. And as we know, that was run by David Apter and Sinclair Drake. Your impression of that, do you recall?

Ralph Gilman: I thought, I was just trying to absorb everything as quick as, as much as I could, and going to classes was really. What got me was that they were, the physical ed was more oriented toward around, the physical education, was more about how do you teach physical education. It wasn't really to give us physical education. It was, you know, how do you create games for kids to play on the field, and how do you teach interesting things to kids? That was to me was very interesting. The, um, the language, the language, the medical we had. We did a lot of medical stuff, how do you keep yourself healthy?

Robert Klein: How was your language training structured?

Ralph Gilman: Uh, it was, we didn't go into a lot of language. It was just an introduction to Twi.

Robert Klein: And was everyone taking Twi?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I think so. At that point they didn't know where they're going.

Robert Klein: And it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't implied that you had to learn the language in order to qualify as a volunteer?

Ralph Gilman: So the whole idea there was that, like we said, it's a former British colony.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And you're going to be teaching in English and you just want to pick up a little bit in order to get some of the culture, in another culture and so forth.

Robert Klein: Now, another big area of training is what they call technical studies. You had not trained as a teacher. You knew you were going into a teaching program. What did they do to prepare you for the skills?

Ralph Gilman: Frankly, I don't remember too much of that. But I think they did do a little bit of that.

Robert Klein: Was there a student teaching or a practice teaching?

Ralph Gilman: We did not do any student teaching.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: We, um, they did go into some of the like lesson plans, how to do lesson plans and how to structure. I remember they gave us some books on that and workbooks. One of the big remembrances I have of that was we, they, one. We had to go for a night and work at the emergency room at the hospital to get an idea of just, you know, how to deal with the emergency people and so forth. And that was just an experience we had.

Robert Klein: And another big component of training is what's called the selection process. Do you recall psychological testing, seeing talking to psychiatrists or psychologists?

Ralph Gilman: I don't remember that.

Robert Klein: OK. So you don't recall that.

Ralph Gilman: It wasn't, it wasn't a, uh, something that was to me was stressful, I guess.

Robert Klein: Yeah. I mean, so you don't remember being concerned about whether you were going to be chosen to go?

Ralph Gilman: No.

Robert Klein: OK. At any point during the training, did you begin to have any kind of second thoughts that maybe, eh, maybe this is not such a great idea?

Ralph Gilman: No, I was looking forward to it. I was going to, I felt it was great.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: As I said, the whole thing was I felt that here I was basically at the top, you know, clicking on all cylinders, right?

Robert Klein: Oh, OK. Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Young, energetic. Emotionally prepared, physically prepared, mentally prepared.

Robert Klein: Did anyone from Peace Corps Washington come out to talk to the group?

Ralph Gilman: They probably did. It's not something I remember too much.

Robert Klein: And do you recall any discussions about political sensitivity going into the country? Any things you had to be concerned about?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, a little bit because at that time we did have some discussions about the Young Pioneers. And some of the influence of the, of the eastern, of Eastern Europe on some of the structures. And the fact that you've just got to be a little bit careful about, um, not careful so much, but just to be, that this is, the newspapers are very slanted, have their own views.

Robert Klein: And do you remember if during training you were, uh, you did any kind of the peer grading or listing of people you'd like to be assigned with, not assigned with?

Ralph Gilman: I don't remember.

Robert Klein: Or any preference for assignment?

Ralph Gilman: Urban or rural.

Robert Klein: OK. How long was training, do you recall?

Ralph Gilman: It was a summer. So we went out of Stanford in the, you know, what, June or something like that. Started went to Berkeley immediately. And by September we were, when the school started, we were in Ghana.

Robert Klein: OK. Did you have any home leave from the end of training before you went?

Ralph Gilman: Well, I think we had a week, a week off.

Robert Klein: And big farewells?

Ralph Gilman: Went to see the family, my mother and so forth. Had some farewells. Took off a couple of days, a couple of days early, again from Al Lowenstein, they were having a big, um. They were having the National Student Conference or one of the big conferences that he had been involved with at Ohio State. And my father had been to Ohio State and I'd never been in Ohio and so I wanted to do some travel. So I did take off and I, instead of flying to New York, where the plane left for Ghana.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: I flew to Ohio State and went to the student conference for a day or two there and then took the busses, took a bus from there to see the countryside a little bit into New York City and then spent a couple of days in New York City. Bought a camera.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And then we all took off to Ghana.

Robert Klein: Had the group sort of divided into cliques or were friendships formed, do you recall particularly?

Ralph Gilman: I don't think that I ever had any sense of cliques.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: Well, I never had as much sense of that anyway.

Robert Klein: Was there a, did you have a strong group feeling?

Ralph Gilman: I felt there was a strong group feeling.

Robert Klein: Yeah. OK.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah. The, um, there were a couple of people who stand out, who were different or sort of different. One girl, a very, very pretty girl, her father, I think, had been in a diplomatic corps. And so she knew, she knew what was going on. And had a lot of connections and so forth. And she sort of stood off a little bit because she basically knew what was happening. And, uh, but beyond that, everybody was to me was just part of the group.

Robert Klein: Sometimes groups come together during the selection process because someone is selected out who they feel shouldn't have been. And, you know, you sort of pull together and say that, but you don't recall any of that?

Ralph Gilman: I don't recall that.

Robert Klein: OK. Was it a charter flight to?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, it was. It was a first class charter flight. And after that, I understood that was the last first class charter flight, that we had free booze.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Although we were OK when we got, I don't think anybody was inebriated.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: When we got there. It was, I think we, I think it was they stopped in the Azores or something like that.

Robert Klein: They had to refuel.

Ralph Gilman: And the biggest thing I remember about the arrival was I had bought a very light suit jacket, you know, a seersucker type.

Robert Klein: Yeah, right.

Ralph Gilman: And they opened the door of the airplane. It was like my clothes just gave up. And when they just melted, when the hot, warm air came in, and I could just feel everything just like, like just giving up and wrinkling on it.

Robert Klein: Was there a reception at the airport?

Ralph Gilman: So they took us, they put us in a bus right away and took us out to the university. And we spent the first two weeks in Ghana because, you know, Ghana was unique in that the government was sponsoring us, did our pay while we're in country. And so they wanted to do, the government wanted to do an orientation for us along with the Peace Corps. So we spent, I think, two weeks or ten days at the university living in a student dormitory and then doing trips around in the southern part of Ghana.

Robert Klein: Right. Do you recall your first impressions of being in Africa?

Ralph Gilman: My first impression, obviously, having never gone out of the country before.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: My first impression was, my God, what am I doing? Um, not what am I doing, that was. Um. The smells, of course. And I think, I think as I remember. I remember thinking at the time, you know, I must be going through some culture shock because I'm sleeping 12 hours a day, you know?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: It's just like reintegrate, integrating all this stuff. But that only happened for a couple of days and then, you know, and I got my sandals on and got my shorts on and was able to basically do what we needed to do.

Robert Klein: I mean, you're suddenly thrown into a completely black world. I mean, it's all Africans.

Ralph Gilman: Having grown up in, I've never, being growing up in the islands, in Hawaii. And I just didn't have that sense. I don't, I never grew up with the sense of racial difference, differentiate. I mean, I knew. But and also having never really ran into a lot of, uh, I mean I grew up in San Francisco on what we would call the poor side of town, right?

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: But overall, I didn't know that. I just was, I was just living my life.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't really, I didn't really grow up with any kind of sense of racial differences. And so people were people to me. They were black or white. They were just people.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Do you recall if any of the others in the group were having more culture shock than you?

Ralph Gilman: I think. I don't think so. I think, because I think the other reason is because a lot of the other people had traveled in Europe and been out of the country a little bit. And I, this is my first real trip out of anywhere.

Robert Klein: Yeah. And while you were at Legon.

Ralph Gilman: Uh huh.

Robert Klein: Do you recall if some of the Peace Corps volunteers in the country came to join you during the orientation?

Ralph Gilman: Oh, I don't even remember that. You probably you did. You were one of them probably.

Robert Klein: But you don't remember.

Ralph Gilman: I don't remember that at all. I tell you what, you want me to tell you what I do remember?

Robert Klein: Sure, of course.

Ralph Gilman: They took us on busses around different places. They took us to, and this is a story I've retold many times.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: To one of the, one of the suburbs, one of the towns along the coast near Accra. I forget exactly. [inaudible]

Robert Klein: It depends which way you're going, but yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Towards the west.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And they were having a festival, you know, a lot of dancing and so forth. And they brought us up to the second floor of this building with, which was the I guess was the city, city town hall, with all the shutters open and they had chairs. We're all sitting in chairs and this guy's up on the front of the room and he's giving us a lecture, right? This is the mayor of the town. He's lecturing us.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And he's saying to us, if he was going to build three statues in Ghana. He would build three statues, right? One of course would be the Kwame Nkrumah, the president that led them to freedom. The second would be to the Aborigines' Rights [Protection] Society, which is a group of Ghanaians who studied in Oxford during the turn of the century and got the parliament to pass a law saying that foreigners couldn't buy land because the ingota, because the land was held in common by the chief. The chief didn't own the land. He was just a caretaker. So you couldn't buy that. The third would be six foot high female anopheles mosquito, which kept the white man out of West Africa.

Robert Klein: That's great.

Ralph Gilman: I thought that was great.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: So during the orientation, you were feeling fairly comfortable about being in Ghana?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I felt pretty comfortable. We, of course, we went out to the local, uh. We had a chance to get out to the local high life bars.

Robert Klein: The Lido.

Ralph Gilman: The Lido, which is where they dance at nighttime especially and the highlife, which is the music. And so we had, we were getting acculturated.

Robert Klein: That's almost a rite of passage, you know, to go to the Lido and dance the highlife. Yeah, right. And at what point did someone come up and say, well, this is your assignment and this is what you're going to be doing?

Ralph Gilman: Somewhere along there they said, you're going, you're going, we've decided you're going to Dunkwa, right, which is the town they're going to here.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And myself and Don Fontaine, the two of us.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And um.

Robert Klein: So do you have any sense of what was going on with the secondary schools? You know, Dunkwa was what they called the GED school, the new government school.

Ralph Gilman: They gave us, during the orientation, they basically said that, you know, the education in Ghana has been a very, has been well established. The British had had very good schools, mostly church schools, I guess, church related schools along the coast. And they were, they had very prestigious. I always felt that it was like in, to get into secondary school was like getting into college here. You had to take the exam and if you did very well and or if you had rich parents and well connected, you would get into the best schools. And then if you couldn't get into the best schools, you go to the second schools. If you couldn't get in there, you go to the third schools. And if you couldn't get anywhere else, you'd go to Dunkwa.

Robert Klein: Yeah, OK.

Ralph Gilman: Because we had just, the school had just started out and it was brand new and.

Robert Klein: OK. And how did you get from? Well, let me ask. Do you remember Peace Corps staff then?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: And what role they were going to play in your, in getting you out there and supporting you once you were out there. Do you have any sense of that at the beginning?

Ralph Gilman: No, I didn't have much sense of that. I, you know, there was a doctor there. We knew that Carter was in charge of the Peace Corps there. I had, so, you know, I was just running around on the busses, having a good time. And I didn't have too much sense of those guys, of what they were doing, if that's hat you mean?

Robert Klein: OK, yeah. Yeah. So but you were content that there was a structure within which you would work?

Ralph Gilman: It was very good. And they also had a hostel of course in Accra, which we didn't, we didn't get into until. Well, I guess we stayed there a couple of times. But the idea that there was quite an infrastructure that they laid out for us.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: We were, of course, we were the first white people in, or Europeans as they commonly say, the white people to actually hitchhike around. Because up to that time, the British and everybody else, all the expatriates were in cars. So it was an interesting thing for the Ghanaians to see us hitchhiking around.

Robert Klein: Now when you got the assignment.

Ralph Gilman: Or going on bores.

Robert Klein: When you got the assignment, it was you and Don Fontaine to go to Dunkwa. Had you known Don particularly in training or just one of the group?

Ralph Gilman: He was just one of the group. And we, they put us together and we went up there. The headmaster sent a taxi for us.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: From Dunkwa, which is like, what, three or four hour drive, right?

Robert Klein: Right, at least.

Ralph Gilman: At least. And so like it's interesting. This taxi came and picked us up and we ended up 4 hours later, 5 hours later, in Dunkwa.

Robert Klein: Do you remember shopping in Accra or your, uh, what was it called, your settling in allowance, mosquito nets and pots and pans and? Don't let me put words in your mouth.

Ralph Gilman: I'm sure we got all that stuff because I remember we had, when we got to the house, I sprayed, I sprayed the bed very well with all kinds of insect repellent and stuff like that.

Robert Klein: Well, talk about arriving at the campus at the school.

Ralph Gilman: So it was a long trip, of course, on the taxi. And it was going through all these new areas for us.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And all the people along the road who were selling the bread and the bananas and all that kind of stuff. The women and, um, I didn't know necessarily too much about Dunkwa at that time. And so we arrived in Dunkwa. It was sort of like it was late. It was getting on late in the afternoon. And we, so the headmaster was there. So they drove us up to the school and the school was up on a hill. So it was very nice. And you could see, you could see around. And the headmaster greeted us and we got to know him a little bit. And I think he had dinner for us at his house.

Robert Klein: Do you recall his name?

Ralph Gilman: No, I don't.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: Um, what I do remember of him was he was a short man.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And he was not from the tribe. He wasn't from the Denkyira tribe. He was from the coastal tribe. And that being short and not from that area had very strong effect on him.

Robert Klein: So you, uh, you had dinner with the headmaster.

Ralph Gilman: Had dinner with him. And then he showed us to our, we saw the bungalow. They had a cement brick bungalow where the two of us stayed. We had two bedrooms.

Robert Klein: Have you been accustomed to taking care of yourself in a house? I mean, you're.

Ralph Gilman: So, and we have of course, we. I don't know if the first day if he had arranged it, but we have been told in during training that, you know, it's expected that you're going to have a houseboy.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: It's not something that you have a servant. It's just, it's more a matter of if you don't have a houseboy, what are you trying to do, take your money and go home or? You know, aren't you helping out the local people? So you're expected to have a houseboy to help out. And because you basically can't get out in the sunshine and work that hard.

Robert Klein: Yeah. All right. Let's stay with the living arrangements, then we'll get to the teaching. So you had a houseboy?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, it was a cement brick bungalow. It was very nice.

Robert Klein: And water, electricity?

Ralph Gilman: Electricity part of the evening, because we had our own generator they'd turn on.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And when the generator is off, the electricity went off. But in the evening we had electricity. Running water was fine. And a gas or kerosene refrigerator.

Robert Klein: That's right. Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah. And it was a living room and two bedrooms and a courtyard in back. A little courtyard in back of the thing.

Robert Klein: And the steward lived back there, the house boy?

Ralph Gilman: The steward? Actually, he lived in the little village and he would come up and he didn't live with us.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: He lived. He had his own. He had his own.

Robert Klein: Did anyone living behind you?

Ralph Gilman: No. There wasn't a separate house behind it.

Robert Klein: OK. So how did, did you let the houseboy take care of the whole thing about meals, I mean?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, he took, he took care of the meals. We, yeah. He would do, he would do the shopping, go to the market and do the. [tape break]

Robert Klein: OK. OK, well, let's.

Ralph Gilman: So the houseboy took care of the food. Cleaned the house for us. He did all the shopping, the market. Um.

Robert Klein: Was he an older guy, or is it?

Ralph Gilman: A young boy. Yeah, a young boy. He was, he got a girl pregnant while we were there. So he had come wanted extra chop money. We helped him, paid him a little bit extra to get money to so that his, uh, the lady could have food for their pregnancy.

Robert Klein: And he was from the area?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, he was local.

Robert Klein: Why was he interested in school or had he done school?

Ralph Gilman: No, he wasn't interested in school at all. You know, he just. He was. But I think he was recommended through the school to the people there. There was another although, another Ghanaian teacher there that taught physical ed.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: Maybe he was the one that recommended the young boy. Somehow he got ahold of him.

Robert Klein: OK. Now, let's talk about, uh. What was Don's background? Had he been a teacher or?

Ralph Gilman: No, he, Don hadn't been a teacher, but he'd been to, um, he was a liberal arts English major. So he taught. I taught science and math and he taught English and history and things like that.

Robert Klein: Right. And he had not taught before so he was a novice just like you.

Ralph Gilman: Correct.

Robert Klein: Who else? How large was the school?

Ralph Gilman: The school was a fairly big school. It was a, we had a three two-story buildings. Three, two. Plus a, um, in the back an eating place, what do you call it?

Robert Klein: Dining room.

Ralph Gilman: Dining room and the kitchen with the, where the ladies fixed food for the students.

Robert Klein: Right. So it was a boarding school?

Ralph Gilman: It was a boarding school.

Robert Klein: Was it coed?

Ralph Gilman: It was coed. There was a separate, there was a. There was actually was there was two school buildings and the third. The third floor. The ground floor or the ground, the ground floor was where the classes were right. And above that was the, was where the, um, the boy students, the students lived. And there was a, uh, the building you come up to, the central building, was the administration building.

Robert Klein: Right, right.

Ralph Gilman: And that's where the girls lived, upstairs there.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: So there are more boys and girls.

Robert Klein: Right. And was it, were there three forms? You remember?

Ralph Gilman: We had, I think it was the second year the school was open, so there two forms.

Robert Klein: Two forms. And then they added on. Who else was on faculty?

Ralph Gilman: Don, myself, and the, uh, I think the Ghanaian teacher who was teaching physical education, soccer and so forth.

Robert Klein: And that was it?

Ralph Gilman: That was about it, yeah.

Robert Klein: Just the three of you? There must have been.

Ralph Gilman: There must have been someone else.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: I forgot.

Robert Klein: And the headmaster.

Ralph Gilman: And the headmaster.

Robert Klein: Do you remember getting your teaching assignment and having any sense of what it is you were supposed to be doing?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, we had the, we had the books there, and there are books that we that we had to teach against that. Frankly, if I look back on it, I'd say I was not a very good teacher. I was learning a lot about how to teach and how to and how to get the subject across. I had, uh, I wasn't necessarily teaching to the British system. I was trying to teach them to think and trying to interest them in science and math and so forth. So I was, we, I was teaching to the book. We had the books. They had to go through the books. There are textbooks for the form.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: But I didn't stick, I didn't stick enough to that because it was important to get that done.

Robert Klein: So you were teaching general science?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, just general science. We had general science books.

Robert Klein: Did you have math also?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: Did you teach math also?

Ralph Gilman: Uh huh.

Robert Klein: And math?

Ralph Gilman: And math.

Robert Klein: And Don taught English?

Ralph Gilman: English. I remember he was, he was teaching 1984.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: George Orwell. Didn't go over big with the local officials.

Robert Klein: That was a set book? In other words, it was.

Ralph Gilman: Part of the set of books, yeah.

Robert Klein: But just to set the context, the students would go to school for five years, at the end of which they would sit for the West African Exams Council set exams.

Ralph Gilman: Right.

Robert Klein: So as of your first year, that was still a couple of years down the road.

Ralph Gilman: Right.

Robert Klein: So the students didn't particularly pressure you? Or did the students pressure you?

Ralph Gilman: The second year they were getting more interested in this.

Robert Klein: But they didn't say, please, sir, that's not on the syllabus.

Ralph Gilman: They didn't go that far.

Robert Klein: OK. All right. Well, how did you take the teaching, do you recall your? I mean, you're suddenly in front of, what, 35, 40 kids and none of whose names you know.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I had done a lot of standing in front of people, doing things with them during schools and so forth, so that being in front of the classroom didn't bother me.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And teaching didn't bother me. But it was, it was a matter of just being able to get the things across to the students that I thought was good. And writing the, writing the exams and grading the exams and trying to keep up with all that stuff. Which I think overall, I mean, like I said before, I don't, I think I could have done a much better job with that.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Two problems that classically the Peace Corps teachers had in this situation. One is adjusting to the students' language and they're adjusting to your language. I mean, American English and Ghanaian English are two different things.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: Do you recall that particularly?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, that was fun. That's obviously a fun thing. The, uh, the students were fascinated by American English and American slang, as they called it.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And they would put rocks in their mouth and say, I'm gonna speak American slang. And they, uh. So I go to class, I think it was like the first day of class. You know, I'd say, you know, you take some water and, ha, ha, ha! The whole class is breaking up. This is so funny. I said, what, what did I? What happened? Right? And they'd say, water, you know, the way we pronounce water in here is W-A-D apostrophe R. Right?

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And the way they pronounce water is water, right? And so they thought that was so funny that I was going, I was doing wader instead of water. So I quickly learned to speak very, enunciate.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And speak slowly.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And such, so much so that when I ended up getting out of the Peace Corps years later, people thought. I came back here. I was still doing the same thing. People thought I was speaking down to them. I wasn't. I was.

Robert Klein: Yeah. How did you, do you remember how you addressed the students? Did you learn their names?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I tried to learn their names.

Robert Klein: First name, last name?

Ralph Gilman: Kofi, first name usually.

Robert Klein: Yeah. And that went?

Ralph Gilman: And the students were organized themselves or they, they were. They would organize themselves. There were obviously some students who were very bright and other students that weren't. So there was obviously a very mixture of academic talent.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And the ones who were very bright could catch on very quickly and they would help some of the other kids. They all slept upstairs on wooden, on wooden slats, you know, and they wash their own clothes themselves. They were. They ironed their own clothes, white shirts, khaki shorts.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: White shirts were always pure white, always well ironed. So they did a lot of good stuff to keep themselves there.

Robert Klein: And was the, like form one? Was it split to 1A and 1B?

Ralph Gilman: Not that I remember.

Robert Klein: OK. All right. Because sometimes they would put the better kids in A and the rest in B. The other difficulty that American teachers often have going into the situation is traditionally the Ghanaian students are fantastic with rote learning. And the American teacher comes in and wants to have them think and discuss. And do you recall?

Ralph Gilman: You know, in science and math, it's a little bit easier because you're not, you're not talking about, you know, interpreting a book or something like that.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: So you're just trying to get across the concepts of the math and concepts of the science. What is, you know, oxygen? And I tried to do a lot of, I tried to set up a lot of experiments. I sent off for some of the, some equipment that to be imported that we could use, like beakers and Bunsen burners and stuff like that.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: So we could show the students to some of the things. And electrolysis of water and that kind of stuff. So we tried to, tried to do what I thought was, so they could actually see it happening and physically touch it and so forth. Not everybody, they couldn't. It was only like in the front of the room. Um. As we went through the syllabus I tried to do, to show them the, um, what was the, how this actually works, so they can see it. Um. The rote learning.

Robert Klein: You know, if you gave them.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't have a, I had a sense. Yes, it was much easier for them to learn by rote.

Robert Klein: I mean, they could memorize long passages and not necessarily understand that the content.

Ralph Gilman: I had, it was more of a sense that the kids. The brighter kids caught on very, very quickly, and a lot of kids just weren't going to get it. And so there was a lot of, um, tried to help encourage a lot of help between the students too, outside the classroom, so that they would be working with each other a lot to help each other.

Robert Klein: Was there a point in the first semester or two where you had a sense that you were actually teaching, you know, you were achieving something? Although obviously you were somewhat dissatisfied.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I thought I was, I thought I was doing an OK job.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: But I thought, I thought that I just hadn't any skills in doing it yet.

Robert Klein: Did you test? Did you do regular testing of the students?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, we did. We did exams every so often. And I, you know, I created the exams. I tried out. And what I found out was that very, it was very different in their writing. Of course, their command of English. One of the big issues was between the different students was their level of English understanding.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: As you know, many of the students didn't speak much English at all. So they were trying to pick up English along the way as they were learning the subjects.

Robert Klein: Right. You mentioned these, I mean, Dunkwa was not a prestige secondary school.

Ralph Gilman: Right. But even so. Even so, um. You would have one student. The whole village would get together and pull their money to send one student, the best student from their village, to school. And that's all they could afford. And so there was a lot of, although the kids had a lot of fun, they were, you know, so forth. It was a, um, it was, they were highly motivated to try to learn. They were not there to screw around. They knew that this was their passport to, you know, to success or not. And they were, they were very, uh, they felt not privileged so much, but they felt that it was good to be there.

Robert Klein: Did, um, how did Don's experience match up to yours as you settled into becoming teachers?

Ralph Gilman: Don was, Don was more in. Actually, Don got more involved with the students and teaching and took, went on the lorry trips, a couple of lorry trips with them, to northern Ghana and so forth. And I was teaching but when I, when I wasn't at the school doing teaching, I was taking off going on my own trips.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: So he was more involved with the life of this a little more than I, more than I was.

Robert Klein: Did you feel guilty about that?

Ralph Gilman: At the time I didn't, because at the time I was involved with.

Robert Klein: Your own life.

Ralph Gilman: My own life. Looking back on it, I say, I said it would have been nicer for me to have been less involved with myself and more involved with the students.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Was there a point in the first half year where you woke up one day and said, oh my God, I'm in the Peace Corps, I'm in the middle of Africa and I'm doing it. I mean, is there any sense of that?

Ralph Gilman: There wasn't any sense of that. It was just a matter of day to day, of trying, getting stuff done. And, you know. Um. You know, then on weekends, of course, we'd sometimes get on and take the lorry up to Kumasi. We'd do our shopping for European type foods, like a bottle of liqueur every so often, and something like that. We'd go shopping up to Kumasi and there were a lot of Peace Corps volunteers up there. And there were the expatriate. There were places to stay with Peace Corps volunteers or other places.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And so that was a socializing with other volunteers. We didn't really get to meet, besides Don and I when we were in Dunkwa, we were the only Peace Corps people around there besides you. Some people would drive through going to their school like yourself.

Robert Klein: Yeah, I was further out by 30 miles or so, and I would stop by.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, the, um. But my remembrance is there was teaching, was the students during the breaks when school was over.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: They would have all their, all their bags and packed up and their suitcases and their trunks waiting, waiting out in front for the lorries to come pick them up to take them back to their homes for the time. That was a big deal.

Robert Klein: So during your first year there, you tended to, you would often on a weekend would.

Ralph Gilman: Take off.

Robert Klein: To take off and go up to Kumasi.

Ralph Gilman: Or somewhere else.

Robert Klein: Down to Takoradi.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't go to Takoradi so much, but Kumasi, yeah. And then at the, it was unique there because at the end of the first semester.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: The Ghanaians, when we happened to be there, they were changing. They changed semester, when semester starts and stops.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: So they actually had a month and a half of break in December. So I was there, taught for a couple of three or four, three months or so, and then they had a whole month and a half off or two months almost before they started up again. So. I don't.

Robert Klein: Do you remember what you did?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah I remember what I did. I went to Timbuktu. I took the lorry up to northern Ghana and Mali and up to Mopti. And went, floated down the river on the barges and.

Robert Klein: Travel alone or?

Ralph Gilman: Mostly alone. But there were Peace Corps volunteers pretty much everywhere. So like in Mopti there were Peace Corps volunteers. And even in Ouagadougou, which is up in, which is a way out of the way kind of place up there, there wasn't a Peace Corps volunteer, but there was an American guy that was up there and we could stay with him. And we found somebody to stay with all this. I didn't know where I was going to stay every night. You know, you don't know where you're going to stay the next night.

Robert Klein: But you were footloose and fancy loose.

Ralph Gilman: I was footloose and I was going to going to experiment and explore and see how far I could go, what things I could do.

Robert Klein: And you enjoyed that?

Ralph Gilman: I enjoyed it, yeah. I took a lot of notes and took photographs and that kind of stuff.

Robert Klein: Now, so there was this couple weeks of teaching. Then there was the big break.

Ralph Gilman: And then a couple of months of teaching, then a big break. Then I came back and taught the rest of the year. Then the summertime. Then we had summer break. Then the second year.

Robert Klein: OK, let's stay within the first year. Do you recall what was your contact with Peace Corps during that time, the Peace Corps staff?

Ralph Gilman: The major contact with the Peace Corps staff was only really when I would go to Accra occasionally, and they had a big three-story building, was it?

Robert Klein: Uh huh.

Ralph Gilman: For the Peace Corps volunteers, like a youth hostel set up for there. And it was all nice, a nice place to stay and so forth. Beyond that, the Peace Corps staff had very little to do.

Robert Klein: You didn't have visitors that you recall?

Ralph Gilman: Not up there. The biggest thing I remember is we had a big trunk of, a whole trunk of books arrived, one for each of us, with uh.

Robert Klein: It's supposed to be a book locker.

Ralph Gilman: A kind of foot locker, which we were supposed to give out to people or read or do something.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: We did take a couple of trips up to. The kids loved, it was great, Shakespeare. Of course, as you said, they could, they learned how to memorize. And so there was a Shakespeare troupe that was coming through Kumasi. And so we took the lorry up and went for an afternoon and they saw Shakespeare. And it was a, and it was a great experience for them because, you know, they would mouth all the words, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and you'd hear this echo out in the audience, these kids.

Robert Klein: So let's go back to the school setting. It's a boarding school setting and very often the faculty have additional duties like a house master or a sports master. Do you recall any activities like that?

Ralph Gilman: Don and I were house masters. We had other activity. We were supposed to take care of the dormitories, make sure that there were the lights out at night.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Make sure things were cleaned up, cleaned up and so forth. And I think we, let me tell you the experience we had there about. A lot of the kids had never had, um, we were having problems with the toilets were always dirty.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Because the kids were used to squatting.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And so they would be standing on the toilets. And so the story was the head, the headmaster. I have to tell you about the headmaster first. So the headmaster was a short man, right? Part of his duty, he felt, was occasionally to cane the students. That is, to discipline the students with a stick.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And so whenever the new student would come up to join the school, it was his, it was his decision whether the student got in school or not. He was the arbitrator of whether he accepted the student or not.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: He only accepted students that were shorter than him. Because he didn't want the kid to turn around and beat him up. So he told us, he said, listen, Don, the kids are not, the boys are not being messing up the toilets because they're being nasty or anything. They just don't know how to use them.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And so if you teach all the kids to sit on the toilets, it would be, we're going to not have this problem of cleaning the toilets all the time. So Don was in there. And so I remember this one day with Don. Don was giving the talk to the, we had 15 Ghanaian students around us. He was standing on the toilet in the stall and I was in the back listening to this thing. And he was saying, listen, this is a European instrument, the toilet. In fact, it's the WC, the English word. It flushes things over a little ledge. And he says, if you use the European instrument toilet in the European way, if we all sit on it, then we won't get messy. And obviously, if someone messes up the toilet seat, the next person's got to stand on it. He's not going to sit on it, and so forth and so on.

And so if, so one of the Ghanaian students, I guess he'd been sort of looking through the windows at us. He said if us Ghanaians use that European instrument in the European way, our long African penises are going to dangle in the water. And that was a kick. That was such a kick.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Other than the housemaster responsibilities, did you do any?

Ralph Gilman: That's about it. We had, we had that. We.

Robert Klein: Did you get involved in the sports at all?

Ralph Gilman: Just to watch the students. We had.

Robert Klein: But you didn't coach or anything.

Ralph Gilman: I wasn't coaching anything because you had the, we had an athletic coach, the Ghanaian guy. And he was, he was a good, athletic young man and was teaching the kids to do soccer and so forth. He did an excellent job.

Robert Klein: But on a typical school day, I mean, you were only teaching maybe 2 hours, 3 hours. How did you, what did you do?

Ralph Gilman: I was preparing for the, preparing for the next class. I was grading papers in the evening.

Robert Klein: In the little blue books.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah. And I was setting up the, setting up the, doing the laboratories, the science lab kind of thing. The blackboards were exactly that, of course, they were boards painted black.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And so cleaning up the place a little bit. The, um. Teach. Do that. Have lunch. Go back teach again. Come back in the afternoon. Prepare. Read a little bit. Evening time, we would have dinner. And usually Don and I would sit and talk. Or we'd, we would read Shakespeare together, to each other, take parts. And I remember we went through a couple of books, Shakespeare books like that.

Robert Klein: Were both you and Don at that time playing guitar?

Ralph Gilman: Don played the guitar and I had a banjo.

Robert Klein: Talk about that, I mean.

Ralph Gilman: I had a banjo and we didn't, we did. So I don't remember too much of us singing that much, but I did. I did do. I had the banjo and I was into playing that and the Ghanaians sometimes liked, you know, we'd play a little bit.

Robert Klein: You ever try to perform for the students?

Ralph Gilman: Occasionally I guess, but not that much.

Robert Klein: I mean, formally.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah. Don put on, actually Don put on a play. They had the students put on a play.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: During, I forget what year it was.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And I ran the, uh, I ran the stage and the lights and, you know, and created the lighting effects and all that, all the scientific science kind of stuff.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And Don did the play and so and we did it downtown, ended up doing it downtown. So that was.

Robert Klein: Oh, you went into town to do it?

Ralph Gilman: It was, yeah. The play was actually done on a stage and we set up, or in a room, we set up a curtain and put lights on it and dimmed the lights and all that stuff.

Robert Klein: Did during that first year, did you, uh, you don't, there weren't that many other faculty members. Did you?

Ralph Gilman: There I think there was a woman.

Robert Klein: Must have been a woman.

Ralph Gilman: A woman. A teacher.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: But I frankly I don't, unfortunately I don't remember.

Robert Klein: Do you recall particularly getting to know Ghanaians, I mean, having any Ghanaian friends, personal friends, you know, rather than just someone you work with?

Ralph Gilman: There was, um, in the, it was a really wasn't a village but at the bottom of the hill before you get to the main road was a small village and there was living a Ghanaian but he had actually studied in the United States and studied anthropology and we got to know him. But that's kind of, he was more, he had a little bit of more American. We did get to know, I think it was more in the second year than the first year, we got to know. Dunkwa was on the railroad tracks, and so it was, it had a lot of ministry type, little small ministry type people there, young men who ran the ministry offices in town.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And they were all, so we'd get together with them on a Sunday afternoon and drink palm wine downtown at someone's house.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And, um, drink palm wine. And they called it Sherwood Forest. And we would have. And they would, and if anybody spilled the palm wine, they would have a trial. And someone had to be a defendant, and someone had to be the prosecutor. And they had. And Don would play the guitar. We'd sing and so forth.

Robert Klein: And this is all young men.

Ralph Gilman: All young men.

Robert Klein: And was, the exchanges were all in English?

Ralph Gilman: All in English, yes, because they were all young bureaucrats basically.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And they spoke English. Dunkwa was also had a fairly strong expatriate. They had a, they had a big alluvial gold mining operation there. So they had, they had a fairly strong, um. They had a hospital, a Ghanaian doctor, and we got to know him. He invited us up. But they also had a bunch of English people there who worked with, who worked the gold mine or the alluvial boat in the middle of the river. Got the boat.

Robert Klein: Did they have their own club?

Ralph Gilman: They had their own club. So every so often we'd, maybe once a month or twice a month, we'd go out there and they'd have, they'd have a movie show and a swimming pool and a club and that kind of stuff out there. That was, you know, of course, that was not Ghanaian. That was basic expatriate.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Do you recall any sense of, you know, how did the British people react to you, I mean you're Peace Corps?

Ralph Gilman: They were very, people were very friendly to us.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: And being in the Peace Corps and they're very helpful. They were helpful as far as I could tell. We were always friendly with them. They, you know, they didn't know quite what we're doing there if we weren't making a lot of money.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Most of the people I run into mostly were, you know, they were there because they weren't necessarily they had, they felt this was. I'm talking about the expatriates there.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: Except the guys who ran the, a couple of guys that ran the place, but the rest of them were technicians and mechanics and that sort of thing that felt it was an opportunity for them.

Robert Klein: How did you and Don get around when you decided to go to in town or any place?

Ralph Gilman: Went to the town, we'd walk. Generally walk. Occasionally the lorry would go into town. We'd catch the lorry into town.

Robert Klein: The school lorry?

Ralph Gilman: School lorry. But overall we just generally, we didn't have our own cars or anything like that, so we'd walk. If we go to Kumasi, we generally would hitchhike. We'd get on the road and hitchhike. And usually what that meant was a lorry would be coming by and he would pick us up. The lorry being the transportation of all the people, a lorry, a truck with right across the back people would sit on.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And you know, there they'd always want to put us up front in the front seat and we'd always want to say, no, no, no, we don't have to do that. You have to end up in the front seat anyway.

Robert Klein: So coming to the end of the first year, I can't remember. There's usually a mid service conference where all the volunteers are called together.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't recall.

Robert Klein: You don't recall that at all. It may not have happened. But by the end of the first year, had you had much contact with the other people you were trained with or the other Peace Corps in the country?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, because I'd go to Accra and we'd meet people there and I'd go to Kumasi and there were people there.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't really. I got to know a couple of people a little bit, but I was not. I was not that involved with, you know, being part of a Peace Corps community per se.

Robert Klein: I mean, did you have a sense that other people were having a better experience or worse experience than you?

Ralph Gilman: I thought people were about the same. I thought that they were all in fairly. They were, the government was taking care of them, that they were. There were a couple of people, I think, who had some problem. One lady, one girl left early. [tape break]

Robert Klein: One of the issues with Peace Corps was at times staff would express in different ways is that it wasn't enough just to be teaching, that you really should be involved in the larger community, get to know Ghana better. Do you recall that at all? Again, don't let me put words in your mouth. You know, being encouraged to do projects, to do more than just be on the compound.

Ralph Gilman: Don and I. Don and I had talked about that and we talked about it more in the sense that there is a sense of wanting to leave something behind and say I've been there kind of thing. And how important, was that really important or was it important to do our, to do our job to teach? And so we didn't get involved with any projects.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: I was, if I look back on it in truthfulness, I would say that I was there to teach. And to travel and get to know the land. That's what I was doing. I was doing my teaching, doing what I needed to do. I wasn't, I didn't go out of my way particularly to do too much in the community. And when I did have extra time, I used it to travel.

Robert Klein: You felt it was yours to do?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah. I look back on that and I say, that's probably not necessarily the best thing.

Robert Klein: Well.

Ralph Gilman: But that's what I did.

Robert Klein: So your recollection is that it was pretty much an individual thing you were doing. You were not necessarily constantly aware of being part of a bigger Peace Corps.

Ralph Gilman: Except that I felt that, you know, that it was a, what do you call it? It was, there was a whole infrastructure.

Robert Klein: OK.

Ralph Gilman: There was, you know, if I needed help, that was going to be fixed. It was, there was an infrastructure there that if I needed it, it was available. And the other thing is, by that time, in the second or third year, there was, you know, you could travel just about anywhere in West Africa and find a Peace Corps volunteer within a couple of, within an hour's walk somewhere.

Robert Klein: Through the first year, how was your health?

Ralph Gilman: Fine. I had no problem at all.

Robert Klein: OK. And there's a long break between first and second year in the school pattern. Almost two months, at least two months. What did you do during the long vacation?

Ralph Gilman: Again, I had met, when we were going at the university, during our introduction.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: I had met a couple of the, a couple of professors there who were from South Africa, and they had left South Africa because of the apartheid. This is white people, these were white guys who didn't, who left and wanted to teach. So they were teaching in Ghana. And so I decided that I got the name, but I got to know them a little bit and got the names of some people that they knew in South Africa. And I decided to take off for the summer. And I flew to actually Rhodesia and hitchhiked from Rhodesia down to Cape Town and back.

Robert Klein: You were aware that that was against Peace Corps policy?

Ralph Gilman: It was through the Peace Corps that I did this with Peace Corps. They knew I was doing it.

Robert Klein: Leaving to South Africa?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: In fact, they gave me a second passport. I got a, I got a, I have, I got two passports, one for the Ghanaian and one for, one anyway. So they gave me, I got a second passport so that I wouldn't get a South African visa on my passport.

Robert Klein: Well, related to that, now that during the first year and even into the second, there was a certain amount of political tension about the Peace Corps in Ghana that, you know, with times there were accusations that Peace Corps were spies. And Ghana was moving sort of between east and west.

Ralph Gilman: Right. We saw that. We saw it because there was a young, all the students who had the Young Pioneer leader who was not from the school, who would come out and organize the students and have Young Pioneer meetings and so forth, bandanas and sort of like a Boy Scouts kind of thing, which was a.

Robert Klein: How did that affect you directly, do you recall?

Ralph Gilman: It didn't affect me, except for the students looked at this and said, you know, to some extent they liked it. They like the idea of it. To some extent they had no choice. They had to do it. They look on it like here's a little bit of propaganda. They didn't, they had to put up with to do this. It didn't affect me that much except that to go to South Africa, I had to get, I had to get the visa through the post. So when I came back.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: The, I remember that they got me into the downtown and a bunch of local, what looked like workers, but they were people who got me into and say, well, would you ever go to South Africa? What would you do to go to South Africa? They knew I'd been there.

Robert Klein: Uh huh.

Ralph Gilman: And so they had to, I had to discuss. I could never tell them exactly. I could never say that I'd been to South Africa, but they knew I'd been there. And so we had, I said, well, I had to explain why I went there in order to see the apartheid people that were fighting the apartheid down there and understand what these people were doing and so forth. Not that they understood. But I remember I got a grilling from the local, some local people there.

Robert Klein: Who are friends of yours?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, there was not a, it was not unreasonable and they weren't being nasty to me, but they were just wanted to know what I was doing. Did anyone at any point, a student or faculty or other friends ever say, well, are you a spy or?

Yeah, in fact at this meeting they probably asked me if I'd been a spy or what. They probably did. None of the students did. But just that that one meeting was, and they, you know, and I said, no, I'm not a spy. I'm just me trying to learn about the life and people.

Robert Klein: Right. So, OK, you did the South Africa trip.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: And managed two passports and so forth. Now you're coming back for the beginning of the second year. Do you particularly recall starting your second year?

Ralph Gilman: I recall, and to me it's just one big, one big, um, you know, doing my thing there at the school.

Robert Klein: So there wasn't any sort of self-reflection about, you know, I'm achieving what I wanted or going into the second year, maybe I want to do this before I go back because now I know it's just another year.

Ralph Gilman: I was doing a lot of personal growing up at that time.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: The, you know, I think I thought I was fairly mature. I thought I was doing good and so forth. And but as I look back on it, I think I had a lot of self-interest. I wasn't, I wasn't very overall quite compassionate. I felt I was doing good things, but I wasn't going out of my way to become involved with a lot of stuff.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: And you know, as I said, why did I do that? I say, well, that's just who I was at the time, I guess.

Robert Klein: Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable. Do you remember the Peace Corps staff asking you to go out to Sefwi because there were two women who were assigned there your second year? It would have been their first year.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: To kind of help them settle in.

Ralph Gilman: We did. I remember Don and I went out there a couple of, once, at least once. I remember going to. I remember going out to see you once I think, you are out there.

Robert Klein: I, well, your first year, it was my second year there. But then Barbara and Elaine were there.

Ralph Gilman: They were there and we went up. I don't think we were necessarily very helpful though. I think we just went out there and said hello and spent the evening. And but, I mean, in terms of actually being helpful, in terms of.

Robert Klein: Well, you were veterans at that point.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah. But they were, uh, as I remember, they would come by and stop by Dunkwa when they came back and forth to Kumasi, that kind of thing.

Robert Klein: Because they had a jeep.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, they had a jeep and so forth. I guess, I didn't know that. I forgot that.

Robert Klein: OK. So second year you're teaching.

Ralph Gilman: The same kind of thing as the first year, teaching for me.

Robert Klein: Any particular travel during that year?

Ralph Gilman: No, they didn't have, because the thing that Timbuktu and so forth was, uh, was because we just had a real long break that first year.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: So the second year was a normal break. And so I remember we probably just probably went to Accra or something like that.

Robert Klein: And your role pretty much continued second year, essentially teaching?

Ralph Gilman: Teaching science and math.

Robert Klein: And being the housemaster, but no larger circles. You had some friends in town.

Ralph Gilman: In town we'd see on some Sundays and for the, uh. But I didn't really get to, I didn't get involved with the local politicians or the local chief, even though the chief was a young man and had just, had been, he had studied in the United States, just gotten back. And I just, we didn't get to them. We went to a couple of the festivals and we got to, we were invited and we went to them and so forth. But I didn't, I didn't really spend. The only thing I did do is I did do some, there was a school in town that was teaching, that was starting up, another school.

Robert Klein: Oh.

Ralph Gilman: Of course. And I went there and helped them out a little bit.

Robert Klein: How?

Ralph Gilman: Just talked about some.

Robert Klein: Was it a private secondary school?

Ralph Gilman: It wasn't secondary. It was just a private school.

Robert Klein: Training college?

Ralph Gilman: Training college.

Robert Klein: Oh, okay.

Ralph Gilman: And so teacher training, I think or something.

Robert Klein: Was that at your initiative?

Ralph Gilman: So I don't know. They asked us to come let them know and see if we could help out.

Robert Klein: Oh, and it was all Ghanaian?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: So what did you do? Did you teach science to them or?

Ralph Gilman: I think I taught some math. It was only a couple of times.

Robert Klein: Oh, all right, all right. As you're getting near the end of the second year, what do you envision as your future? I mean, you know, you're going to, I assume you're going to, your choice is to leave Ghana, not to try for a third year.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, right. Again, I got out of school here on the Stanford and not knowing what I wanted to do so, but knowing that I thought I'd better take the opportunity to get some traveling and experience for myself. And then so I'm at the end of the second year, I'm saying, well, you know, what do I do with my life now?

Robert Klein: Right, right.

Ralph Gilman: And I didn't know what I wanted to do there either. So I had decided to. I thought I would go to. I thought I'd hitchhike basically, go across the continent to East Africa and see if I could get a job in East Africa teaching for another couple of years in East Africa.

Robert Klein: OK, let's stop at that point. Let's go. Do you recall, usually at the end of the your Peace Corps service there's what's called the termination conference? The group gets back together and you talk through your experience. Do you remember that at all?

Ralph Gilman: No, I don't know that.

Robert Klein: Your group was, it had become traditional, but only for a short time, was, uh, met with Kwame Nkrumah before you left.

Ralph Gilman: Yes, we did. We did welcome back Kwame Nkrumah. But that was more like herding us into the, into his compound.

Robert Klein: Flagstaff.

Ralph Gilman: Flagstaff house and meeting him on the bus. And running in and doing that and then leaving. To me, it was, it was very nice, but it was just.

Robert Klein: But this was Nkrumah. You know, if you lived in Ghana in those years, wherever you turned, you would hear about him. Any special impression or?

Ralph Gilman: I thought, I thought he's the guy. My impressions of him personally, no, because I didn't, I just saw him a little bit.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: But as far as the people thought of him, I felt the guy was, had really done a lot of good stuff. I felt, I mean, I felt there was a little bit of self-aggrandizement there. Kumi Nkrumah, The Big Man, kind of thing.

Robert Klein: The Redeemer.

Ralph Gilman: The Redeemer and all that stuff. But it was my sense, as they taught us in training, you know, that's part of the deal, right? And so I felt that he was, I felt that he had done some very good stuff for the country and that the people liked him. The people felt it was worth, it was good.

Robert Klein: During your second year, it was when Kennedy was assassinated.

Ralph Gilman: Second year was the Kennedy assassination.

Robert Klein: Can you recall how you heard about it?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, I remember about that, very definitely. We were, we were walking.

Robert Klein: You and Don?

Ralph Gilman: Don and I were walking from the school with a bunch of students in the town. This is about, this is about a mile and a half hike kind of thing.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: Down the hill from the school to the main road and then into town, up the hill again into the main town. And we were coming down the hill when the students came up to me. And he said, Mr. Gilman, I'm very, very sorry. He said, your president was just killed. Your president was just killed. It was like, he felt it very personally, just as if Nkrumah had been killed and had died. And I said, woah. And that was, that was a shock to everybody. And so. I do, I remember we were, we were certainly for a day or two, we were feeling very, uh, connected and sorry and grieving about that.

The Ghanaians, all the Ghanaians were totally, were very, they were very compassionate about the whole thing. All the students and everybody was very compassionate. They felt very strongly for Kennedy and the fact that he'd been doing some things. That when Nkrumah had been in the White House, had been to the White House, that Kennedy held the umbrella for Nkrumah, which is holding an umbrella for the chief as a big deal. So he was showing deference to Nkrumah. And things like that, right? That they felt, they felt very strongly that Kennedy was a, had done a lot for them, and they felt, they felt very connected with Kennedy.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: Everybody did.

Robert Klein: Were either you or Don churchgoers, I can't remember.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't go to church and Don, I think, was Catholic, but I don't think he, I don't remember him going to church.

Robert Klein: So you don't recall if there was no.

Ralph Gilman: I think he mean, maybe he went to the Catholic Church.

Robert Klein: There was a Catholic Church in Dunkwa?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah.

Robert Klein: Yeah. But at the time of Kennedy's assassination, there was no thought of, you know, finding a church to go to or?

Ralph Gilman: Not that I remember. Not that I did. It was more just talking about him.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Yeah. OK. And let's jump now. You finish your service. As you're leaving Ghana, did you reflect back at all on your own sense of achievement or what it had meant, you know, for the two years?

Ralph Gilman: I was, I was planning. I was, I was mostly moving on.

Robert Klein: Thinking what you were coming into.

Ralph Gilman: It might not be, it might not be necessarily strong, but one of the. When I, sometimes I have a dream nightmare. I don't dream at all. I go to sleep, I wake up, I don't dream very much. But occasionally I would have one and that was I had re-upped in Ghana for a second or third year. It was like, I'm stuck there. Like I didn't want to leave, that I am not moving on with my life kind of thing. This is later years. This is later years. This is like.

Robert Klein: After.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, afterwards. So I looked back on the sense, and I wonder, I don't know why that is. I don't consciously have that sense of it, but I have that sense of I was marking time and not moving on with my life. And in terms of I think probably in terms of adventure and learning to be self- sufficient, yes, I was, I did a lot. But in terms of actually, um, I guess I would have to look back and say I was marking time there and was pretty much self-absorbed.

Robert Klein: But in many ways, there's no grand closure. I mean, to your two year, it's not a cycle where at the end of it you have a monument you can look to and say, this is what I achieved. Because, you know, school is ongoing and you're going to leave and it'll continue and yet.

Ralph Gilman: We had Sharon come in, of course, when Don and I. Don and I were there the second year and a third Peace Corps volunteer had come in and she was staying on after that, right?

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And she lived in, she actually lived in the girls dorm. She wasn't in the dormitory. They had a second, like an office. And that's where she stayed, next to the girls dormitory.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: And she was very much involved with all the girls in the school.

Robert Klein: When you left were other volunteers being assigned there or you didn't even know?

Ralph Gilman: I think there were, but I didn't, I didn't know them. We'd gone already. [tape break]

Robert Klein: We're talking about the end of service. And Sharon had come and was on staff.

Ralph Gilman: On the second year.

Robert Klein: Right. And she was staying on for the third, obviously. But there's no, as I was saying, there was no grand closure to having been a volunteer at Dunkwa, I mean, if you had done it.

Ralph Gilman: I had done it and I've gone on to something else.

Robert Klein: The next thing was?

Ralph Gilman: I'd been involved with the, you know, the girl in Accra, who was one of the volunteers in Accra.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: A girl, we had become involved with each other to some extent.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: I went out to see her. And she and I actually traveled through, she and I traveled together through Nigeria and into the Central African Republic.

Robert Klein: Oh. Is this at the end of the service or?

Ralph Gilman: When I was leaving and she was, she was a first year so then she went back to Ghana.

Robert Klein: Oh, OK.

Ralph Gilman: Um. Yeah. I feel in that sense I felt that, I look back on that and here's this girl who's a very lovely girl, traveling with me, wanted me to become much more involved personally with her life in terms of maybe ongoing. And I just had no clue about that. I was on my adventure.

Robert Klein: Right, right.

Ralph Gilman: And she finally got fed up with me on that.

Robert Klein: Yeah. So after Peace Corps, I mean, you did lots of things in your life, but at this point, looking back, you know, there were three goals to the Peace Corps. One was to provide needed skills where requested, and that's the teaching you did. The other is to familiarize people in other parts of the world with America. And the third is to, you know, have Americans learn about other parts of the world. Have you, in the years following, have you done much on the third point, you know, to let the world know about, to let Americans know about other parts of the world?

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, well. Um, let's see. After the Peace Corps I ended up in, I ended up doing a bunch of stuff with the school in Europe and ended up working with some of the military people, American military in Germany.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: As an expatriate. And I would give, I would sometimes give lectures to people there. I had slides and would show some of the slides. I wrote some articles which got published in the Stanford Daily, the Stanford newspaper. Years later, I talked to somebody who said that he'd read the article I wrote and he signed up for the Peace Corps and it changed his life. And I think, wow, great.

Robert Klein: Great.

Ralph Gilman: But as far as actually organized or becoming involved with groups or something like that, you know, I didn't get involved with that.

Robert Klein: And you haven't been back to Ghana and have not been able to maintain contact with any.

Ralph Gilman: I didn't try actually.

Robert Klein: Well, OK. Overall, what would you say was the effect of having been in the Peace Corps on your life?

Ralph Gilman: I would say that, that I've, I've always. The reason I stopped is, is that I really tried to figure out what is the, well, what's the difference between what I usually say and what might be the truth, right? Because that's why I don't know how to say this. My normal thing is, yes, it was a great experience I had. I did, uh, I did some good filling a slot as a teacher there.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: I got, I had a lot of sense of my own ability to, uh, to face any kind of situation I wanted to face. I mean, travel anywhere. Um. I got to know a lot of different, different cultures and feel comfortable traveling among all kinds of different cultures. And what is the? I felt, I've always felt that I did something good. Therefore, I'm, I'm an okay person. I'm a, I'm a compassionate human being.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: The, um. I say, what did I really learn there? And I think it was a sense of growing up, of learning to be self-confident. I think, I think I would say, I would say very, very much I was, I had a lot a lack of a sense of a lot of self-confidence.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: During that time. It didn't show it directly, but indirectly. And I was, I was proving myself, I was trying to show, to prove to myself that I can handle myself in these situations.

Robert Klein: Well, I certainly knew traveling to Timbuktu, you must have had some sense of achievement, hitchhiking.

Ralph Gilman: Hitchhiking around the Congo and things like that.

Robert Klein: As well as teaching where you'd never taught before.

Ralph Gilman: Yeah, and getting to know the people. The long lasting is, the long lasting that I felt that a sense of acceptance with other, for cultures, all cultures. But, you know, having grown up in Hawaii as I said early on, that was, I had grown up with that kind of sense of it wasn't a matter of understanding the importance of cultures and of different people. And, and, what I didn't, what I didn't learn at the time is how to get out of my own self, my own skin, and really, really connect, and really connect and with other people in order to help them.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: I was, I was there to help people, but to help myself, right?

Robert Klein: Sure.

Ralph Gilman: And it was, it was not, it was not. I was not at the level of maturity where I could just put myself aside and say, how can I be of service?

Robert Klein: Well, you may just be being more honest than many people are, you know, because it's clear there's a self, there's a, you know, an individual role and purpose in doing it and there's a lot of personal benefit to it. And incidentally, you help and, you know, making the leap into someone else's shoes is not a simple process.

Ralph Gilman: That's true. But like Don, if I look at Don. Don was much more, he got more involved with the students. He went on trips with the students, took the trips students on a trip to northern Ghana and to Ouagadougou. He put on plays with the students. You know, I taught, and when I was through teaching, I went home.

Robert Klein: And some of that may well have to do with personality difference. And it's not like he's a better person than you.

Ralph Gilman: No, but at that time he was, you know, not better. But he was at a place in his life that. And he was Catholic. That's right. Very true. And he had grown up with the sense of a little more maturity in that sense than I had. I had struggled through, struggled through high school, struggled to make a living, and the struggled through, not struggled, but through Stanford was, you know. And I had not yet learned, I, my job was to figure out how I can make my way in life, not how I can be there for other people particularly.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: At that time.

Robert Klein: I don't know if there's anything else you want to add, but that's as good a place to stop.

Ralph Gilman: I'll just add one more thing or two.

Robert Klein: Sure.

Ralph Gilman: Walking down. One of the other stories I tell is, often people go, what did you learn in the Peace Corps? What's the difference? And I said, well, walking down the hill one time with the students, another time in the town, one of the young, young students looks up to me and, you know, and had said to me, Mr. Gilman, why did Europeans kiss? Because he'd seen that in the movies, right?

Robert Klein: Yes.

Ralph Gilman: And so it's one of those things when I say, well, what do you say to a young kid about why the Europeans? It feels good or whatever it is? Because they're, I guess he was young enough, perhaps, and also their culture is not quite quite that same thing. So. Well, it's showing affection. But anyway, it was like a fun, you know, those kinds of experiences you get as to the different attitudes toward life.

Robert Klein: Right.

Ralph Gilman: That you see in the Peace Corps.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Ralph Gilman: That's about it.

Robert Klein: OK.