The Village of Waiting

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by George Packer and Philip Gourevitch

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc

Due/Published July 2001, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0374527806

New Foreword by Philip Gourevitch.

Back in print, the "masterful" (The New York Times Book Review) account of an American in West Africa.

In Out of Africa Isak Dinesen writes of Kenya: "Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of the heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be." Of my five-hundred off mornings in the Togolese highlands I woke up hung over, bathed in sweat, hungry, blowing on an extinguished lamp instead of turning off my alarm, mildly at ease, or mildly anxious. But never where I ought to be.

Here is a frank, moving, extremely vivid account of contemporary African life for anyone whose curiosity extends beyond the limits of Out of Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny underdeveloped Togo, George Packer portrays his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of villagers — peasants, chiefs, charlatans, children, market women, cripples, crazies, and those who, having lost or given up much of their traditional identity and fastened their hopes on "development," find themselves trapped between the familiar repetitions of rural life and the chafing monotony of waiting for change.

The Village of Waiting is a contemporary classic of travel literature, a must-read for anyone interested in Africa today.

George Packer's journalism and essays have appeared in Harper's; The New York Times; the 1997 Pushcart Prize anthology, The Art of the Essay; and elsewhere. His latest book is Blood of the Liberals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.