Book Review:  Three Hundred Cups of Tea and The Toughest Job

by Asifa Kanji and David Drury, D. Drury and Sons Publishers, 2015

Reviewed by Joni Johnson:

It’s rare for me to love a book.  I loved this one.  It wasn’t because they are friends of mine and live here at the Manor.  It wasn’t because I too was in the Peace Corps. It’s because some of it took my breath away.  The book is divided into two sections.  Both of them refer to the Peace Corps experience that Asifa and David had as mature adults in Mali in West Africa at the edge of the Sahara Desert.  When they talk about living with the debilitating heat of 120 degrees Fahrenheit on and off for four months of the year, we can finally appreciate what that really means.  I think one day of 115 degrees was quite enough and that was with air conditioning.  They had none.

Asifa and David and their head of training at                                        their swearing in in Mali

Asifa writes the first book, Three Hundred Cups of Tea. The second half, The Toughest Job, by David, is about the same subject sort of but describes his job and his experiences from a male point of view. Asifa, as you may know from her writings here in The Complement, is both beautifully descriptive and very honest emotionally. I felt as if I were there in Mali with her.  I felt her moments of exultation, her moments of despair, her feelings of frustration viscerally and how important her relationships with the people of Mali were to her.  In addition, with her great sense of humor, there were many times she made me laugh. David not only shared many of his experiences both in terms of training and his job, but he also gave us the more scientific approach to life in Mali.  He spent time discussing the language they spoke, Bambara, that is in no way connected to any Indo-European language we know.  And he included a great explanation of the shaming game between joking cousins, which, as he explained, was a wonderful way to keep peace and harmony between groups.  So while both books explored the same period of time in Mali, they were very different in scope and style and subject matter.  Asifa’s job became an effort to train the Malians to grow Moringa, a miracle tree whose leaves cure whatever it is that ails you including malnutrition and arthritis. This was to be done, as Asifa says, all in a simplified Bambara. And David’s task was to help promote and improve a radio station 20 minutes away by bicycle, speaking French (which David had learned long ago but hardly remembered).

So through their two books, we really got the feel of what it was like to live as mature Peace Corps volunteers in Mali.  The secondary phrase on their cover says it all – Riding the Peace Corps Rollercoaster in Mali, West Africa.  And a rollercoaster it was. Somewhere in their second year, a new political group took over the Malian government by force.  With gunfire and a coup d’état, the Peace Corps evacuated their volunteers almost immediately and suddenly.  There was hardly a chance or no chance to say goodbye.  As Asifa wrote in her postscript, “Sixteen months later, I live to tell you that those were some of the most fulfilling and exciting months of our lives.  We jumped off the cliff and we did learn to fly.”  And if you read this book, you too will jump off the cliff and fly with them.

Their book is available in paperback and kindle at Amazon and directly from Asifa and David as well. All royalties go directly to Jackson County’s United Way for the fire victims still struggling with survival.  There is also a copy in the library.