| About the Book
“I served as a WAC in MacArthur’s headquarters and suffered nightly
bombing alerts in Leyte for over a month. There, we felt protected
by the army. Here we were on our own. How can a couple of hundred
Americans, with a Marine guard of not over 20, protect themselves if
there is a revolution and the Indonesians turn against us?”—December
13, 1957
Nancy Dammann spent over 17 years with the U. S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) as a Communications Media Advisor in
Indonesia, Thailand, Jamaica and the Philippines. In her efforts to
teach new agriculture and health habits, she suffered through
revolutions, earthquakes, typhoons and floods, and spent weeks in
rural areas sleeping in shoddy hotels and eating more greasy, buggy
meals than she cares to remember. She learned, with the help of
research specialists, that most semi-literate villagers didn’t
understand abstractions. All illustrations had to be realistic. When
questioned about a poster showing only a man from the waist up a Thai
villager said, “He must be a ghost; he has no legs.”
”Our foreign aid projects have accomplished much over the years. We
helped upgrade nutrition and education and almost doubled rice
production in many countries. We didn’t always have positive outcomes-
we battled unsuccessfully to eradicate Malaria. The experiences,
favorable or not, were always fascinating.”
-Nancy
Dammann
Read more about the USAID
experience at www.wetried.com
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