Community Corner
A Peace Corps Message from One Alelle
Middletown North graduate, Mathew Pompliano, comes home from two years of Peace Corp service in Western Africa.
He grew up in town and graduated from Middletown High School North, Class of 2002. He gives the table a hardy fist pound when he declares that. He's proud of it. In Middletown they call him Pomps, but in Bole, Ghana (West Africa), his name is Alelle.
"Nicknames are important," he said, "or should be. They say a lot about a person saying very little. Most times what is said is more truthful and descriptive than birth-names."
Alelle, in the native tongue of Bole (Ngbanye-to) means, "do not stop doing good, when good is not done in return," or as it translates to ascribe as a name, "person who speaks and does good." In the case of Mathew Pompliano, it is both accurate to say that his Ghanian nickname is indeed truthful and descriptive.
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Pompliano, is home now, after serving in the Peace Corp in Ghana for the last two years.
After graduating from Rutgers University's Cook College in 2008, Pompliano joined the Peace Corp and was sent to the Eastern Region of Ghana for three months for pre-service training and then on to his work in Bole.
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Pompliano worked on many projects during his 24 months in country, including Banking on Change, which was desgined to improve the living standards of rural communities through micro-finance training.
He also was involved in Dam Stabilization through the Uses of Vetiver Grass, which utilized a non-invasive but highly effective native Indian grass that protects against erosion. Pompliano farmed the grass with the local sanitation department and then transplanted it around the community dam.
Towards the end of his time in Bole, Pompliano worked on Celebrated Language Project (CLAP), a volunteer-inspired and run project, the brainchild of Nikolas Wolfe, who felt it was necessary to revamp how Peace Corps volunteers learned their local language. With the help of other volunteers, including Pompliano, Wolfe has gone around Ghana recording the various spoken languages with which volunteers will come into contact.
Pompliano also worked with Gonjaland Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). Peace Corp volunteers gathered 57 junior high school and six senior high school girls for a week-long camp designed to empower the girls for the future.
They engaged in team building activities, held discussion sessions about proper hygiene, relationships, and their rights as women and students. At the end of the week, at a bonfire, the girls displayed the native dances from their respective areas. "Many of the girls," Pompliano said, "had never left their communities before this event."
In addition to all of that, Pompliano also sparked a product development initiative based on clothing accessories he became fond of while living in Bole.
He introduced a baseball cap design using native fabrics and sought to spark an interest or invigoration in sandals manufactured using recycled tires.
Though people in the region thought the footwear too common or low-class, the Middletown native reveled in them and the idea that what would have been discarded and dangerous to the environment could be reused and enduring.
"People here in America wear cheap plastic flip-flops that wear out in no time," he said. "These sandals last forever and they already even had a whole previous life as tires."
Things that last forever weren't just on Pompliano's feet while in Africa and now back in New Jersey, they were and are also on his mind.
The work he did in Bole was satisfying to him; but, what he says springs more fruitfully from his experiences in Africa were the enduring philosophies, ideas, lessons, fables and also pitfalls of both African and western civilization.
Having lived here, gone there and returned home, Pompliano has a rare vision and message of and for both sides of the world.
As part of the mission of the Peace Corp is to understand, appreciate and exchange cultures, it was interesting for Pompliano to scrutinize the world and ways of his temporary African home and to introduce his own world's ways as well. Striking and a bit dismaying to him was just how similar cultures are becoming worldwide.
"Our perception of the developing world is that they don’t have certain things we do here," he said, "but the youth’s priorities are actually the same there as they are here and everywhere. They want and feel they deserve things.
"And I found the youth there often resented the old ways … they resented their parents and thought of themselves as somehow superior to their parents because they went to school and their parents did not. They valued the certificate over the experience."
Pompliano acknowledged that he got along better with the older people in Africa than the young. "I respected the fact that they knew that if they wanted things like TVs and cars that they needed to work and work hard," he said. "They needed to care for their families first and grow their own food. Their values were more clear and centered and they relied on old ways whose enduring usefulness was evidence of its effectiveness."
Having lived in the numbing excesses of the western world with disposable everything, including traditions and culture that seem increasingly non-recyclable, Pompliano sought to point out, from the "heap" to the heart of Africa, that the old ways their old ways mixed with new, healthier, more renewable means are essential for a better future.
"Their traditional beliefs and practices are good," he said. "It makes them unique. It works. There’s no need to struggle to find ways to make things work when if they just went back to things like communal working and self-sufficiency they’d actually develop faster than if they rely or look to imitate the excessiveness of our western practices."
In the end Pompliano felt satisfied that he had made a difference and that the work of the Peace Corp, the mission of President Kennedy's March 1961 executive order, was still thriving and ever more important to the health of the entire world.
"The country is going to change when everyone realizes that the problems out there in the world are ours" he said. "Even here in America we’re inclined to blame others or our situations for the reasons why things aren’t as we would want them … but once people accept challenges as their own then things will really change, worldwide."
