The Village of Waiting by George Packer, r. Apr. 2013

p. 33 But to the Togolese I knew - especially the villagers - wealth seemed natural to yovos, a part of our constitution, like stomach disorders and nasal voices.

p. 75 Even under a black government, contempt for the black man hadn't been forgotten.

p. 100 Encounter with yovos seemed to touch some chord in fous, of delight, anger, desire, humor, or sorrow - something so deep and troubling that in sane Africans years of social formality kept it hidden. A flash of recognition, a wound or hope too tender to be laid open by anyone who wasn't out of his senses.

p. 137 As the tide of Westernization washed over Africa, one change it brought was the weakening of personal ties in the village, under a different, Western code that demanded loyalty of an individual to his public role, his country to people he didn't know, to a tribe he perhaps despised.

p. 184 "In Lagos I am one man," Max answered, losing his smile. "But when I go home with the money to my village, I am another man. No French, no English, no Bob Marley. I carry water like the others. I am happy there and happy here. How can I go making differences, that this one is better than that one? I have too many other things to go worrying about things like that."

p. 194 Here [in tourist-town Nairobi] there were no anecdotes, and no defeats. The old strain of struggling and failing to live with Africans on something like their terms was lifted; whites were in the saddle again.

p. 196 And the mood itself - an exasperation and gloom because of my mother's presence here, the felling of resistance and futility that had begun in Kenya - came of the fact that there was so much I couldn't share with her [about Peace Corps life in the small village of Lavie].... For a year I'd concealed much of myself from the village; now I was concealing myself from my mother as well.

p. 301 He had been educated to the ears, and sixteen years of school had cut him off from the life of his village. Now the promise of sacrifice had been broken, and he was trapped in Lome with a headful of knowledge and nowhere to go. He must have wondered if it wouldn't have been better never to have left the fields.

p. 307 If Lavie ever got the electricity the chief wanted, it would look like this: harsh, white, with a machine buzz drowning out the buzz of the bush.