Have skates, will travel: A conversation with writer Leita Kaldi

     On a summer afternoon, Leita Kaldi opened the door of her Sarasota home and welcomed me in. A few week’s earlier, I e-mailed Kaldi, asking if she’d be willing to speak with me about her books, the Peace Corps and her life since. Since Kaldi lives not too far from me, she invited me to her home, and I gladly stepped inside. 

     Kaldi’s book about her time in Senegal, “Roller Skating in the Desert,” came out in 2010. Last year, her book “In the Valley of Atibon,” about the five years she spent in Haiti after the Peace Corps, was published. 

     Before joining the Peace Corps, Kaldi spent years working with the Roma, the United Nations and UNESCO. I was interested to see how her time in Senegal and her experience with the Peace Corps compared to what came before in her life and what’s come after.

     During our visit, we spoke about her more recent work with the UN National Committee for UN Women, the courses she teaches about the Roma at the University of South Florida, Sarasota, and what she thought of those Gypsy reality shows (not much.)

     Our conversation was edited, minimally, for length.

KH: On my ride here, I passed lots of highways, I passed the bay, lots of lovely little trailer parks and condos and shopping malls. If I was coming to visit you in Senegal, what would my commute have looked like?

LK: (Laughing) From the capitol, Dakar, it would have been about 10 hours, changing bush taxis about five times. I was in a very remote part of Senegal, because when I went in, I said, I want to be somewhere where I’m totally far away from Americans. I didn’t come here to hang out with Americans, and I want to be in a place where people haven’t seen white people, and as remote as possible. So they sent me down to Delta Sine Saloum. 

KH: Even before you joined the Peace Corps, I read that you had a lot of adventures, working with the UN, UNESCO, the Roma. Tell me about your life up to age 55, when you joined the Peace Corps. Just start there and tell me how you ended up wanting to do the Peace Corps.

LK: Well, you have my resume with the UN, etc. I was always working in institutions that dealt with global issues and developing countries, and I ended up in Miami, loving Miami, working in the hotel industry because there was nothing like that around. So I was very bored. And I have two sons, they were grown, and I thought, I’ve got to get out of here. I want to go to a developing country. I want to go to Africa. And so I just called Peace Corps, and I was amazed that they took people my age. So I applied, and voila. I really wanted to go to Africa. I was very concerned about African countries, the situation, and knew quite a lot about the country from things that I’d read.

KH: What kind of things did you read leading up to leaving for Senegal, and how did they compare to what you found when your feet were on the ground?

LK: I read tons of books about Africa. Paul Theroux was a great influence, and the African writers, like Chinua Achebe. What surprised me is that in Senegal, western Africa, there were no animals. West Africa is about people. East Africa is about animals. And I was very surprised that it seemed more Arabic than African, because of course the country’s entirely Muslim, and everyone’s wearing Muslim clothes, and their lives revolve around Islam. But I was very happy when I went to my village that there it seemed like the Africa I had dreamed about, and there was animism instead of Islam, or they coexisted symbiotically. So there, I found the Africa of my dreams, more or less.

KH: I know that you had done a lot of development work up to that point. Was there anything about the Peace Corps that surprised you? The Peace Corps either as an idea, or an institution, or kind of a messy bureaucracy?

Leita Kaldi in Senegal. Submitted photo

LK: I thought the training was such a drag. And the air of mystery around Peace Corps. They’re not transparent enough. They don’t tell you what they’re going to do, or how they think about you or feel about you. I was always trying to figure out where I stood with them. They were scheming and tricking, you know? I think it was part of the stress of being there at first that made me really nervous about things like that. But I knew, for example, that I went to a site where there had been a Peace Corps volunteer who was quite nuts and had alienated the entire village by building a wall around his house and other various and very crazy things. And I realized after I’d been there a couple of months that Peace Corps had sent me there to kind of make amends with the village, to be a diplomat, to ingratiate the village, because this boy had had alienated everyone terribly. So I went back to the Peace Corps and I said, you know, you could have told me that. That is why you sent me there, isn’t it? Yes. I said, So why can’t you be upfront about stuff like that? It would have armed me better.

KH: I read a one of your short stories on Peace Corps Worldwide. One of the things I thought was really interesting about it was that I felt fully immersed in the room. I felt like a fly on the wall. It was lovely storytelling. How do you write? Do you collect things? Are you taking pictures in your mind? Do you write in journals? What is the process that you take to get the stories?

LK: I’ve written in journals forever. Forever. Both this book on Senegal and the one on Haiti is all based on my journals, and I’m so glad I did that. And now, I’m writing a book on Gypsies from journals that are, let me think, 50 years old, because I was involved with them when I was very young. And then it takes a long time. It took me 10 years to write each of those books. Just slogging away at the journals.

KH: You went on to work on Haiti. How did the adventures that you after the Peace Corps, internationally, how did those compare with the Peace Corps?

LK: Well, first of all, I would never have gotten the job if I hadn’t been in the Peace Corps. This was a huge job, administrator of the Hopital Albert Schweitzer, which had its first incarnation in Gabon. When I interviewed for the job, it required a Master’s degree in public health, which I did not have. But you know what, I just brought my photo album from Senegal and told them what I had done there, and they just looked at this album, and what they were really looking for was somebody who could survive Haiti. It’s a very tough place. And that’s why they hired me. I thought that it would be easy because I spoke French fluently from Senegal, and I figured the people would be quite similar, because they’re West African for the most part. But they’re very different, and throughout this book "In the Valley of Atibon," I’m remembering my beautiful, peaceful, serene Senegal existence and saying, this is not like that. To put it in a nutshell, when I first went to Haiti and the director of the board of directors said, how do you handle stress, warning me that there was going to be a lot of stress. And I said, I don’t get stressed out. I learned, after three years in Senegal, how to be peaceful, things don’t upset me. I’m very centered and focused and I don’t get stressed. About six months later, he said, how are you handling the stress? And I said, I’m drinking gin and smoking cigarettes. 

KH: Have you been back to Senegal since you left?

LK: Yeah, a couple of times. I went back twice. I went back in 2001 and 2005.

KH: What was it like to go back?

LK: Wonderful. I was so happy to see the progress. Senegal is really progressing. Really developing. It was great to go back to my site, and everybody remembered me. Of course, they were amazed that I was still alive. And they’d be very happy to know that I got married, because that was their biggest concern about me.