My Africa

THE UNHEARD

A Memoir of Deafness

And Africa

By Josh Swiller

Holt. 265 pp. Paperback, $14

Josh Swiller went to a remote village in Zambia in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer. His task was to get the local people to dig wells, but he could never get the project going. Nonetheless, Swiller, who had been deaf since birth, felt at home in the village. He learned some Bemba. People spoke to him slowly and directly; there was little background noise to distort the sounds he received through his hearing aid. He made friends with Augustine Jere, a health worker, and a thoughtful, introspective local woman who came daily to cook for him.

But Mununga was not only bitterly impoverished, but dangerous and violent. Swiller managed to obtain funding for a much-needed extension to the clinic, and he and Jere raised the building, only to have it ruined by a corrupt local leader. Swiller made the mistake of confronting this man, and, within hours, he and Jere were facing a drunken mob intent on murder.

Swiller doesn't deceive either himself or us about the utility of his work. By the book's end, he has seen sights of unspeakable anguish; the deaf children whom he taught briefly, and who saw him as their model and savior, still languish in their silent world; his housekeeper has been forced into marriage; even his dog has been kicked to death. Perhaps worst of all, Jere's beloved little daughter has died of malaria.

"There was a saying in the Peace Corps around the time of my service," Swiller writes. "Volunteers who go to South America come back to the States politically active, volunteers who go to Southeast Asia return spiritually aware and curious, and volunteers who go to Africa? -- they come back drunk and laughing." And yet he continues to love this place in which he felt for the first time fully himself. His appealing, intelligent narrative serves both as a coming of age story and as a penetrating light into one corner of a tormented continent.

--Juliet Wittman is the author of "Breast Cancer Journal: A Century of Petals."