"The Peace Corps volunteers were just doing small things. Not what really needed to be done'"

On school holidays, when he went back to his village, David began to notice unwashed young Americans hanging out with his friends and family.

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They wandered around, going to different villages, where they would cook and eat with Sierra Leoneans, take forest walks, play with children. "They tried to live a simple life, make friends, learn [local] ways of life," David remembers. "They advised our people, but they learned a lot from our people, also."

As a game, David and his friends would get themselves dirty, rolling around in the dust, "and then we'd say, 'Hey, we're doing Peace Corps style!'" Some of the Americans gave David their old novels. Others paid the school fees of local kids, helped them with their lessons and gave them extra food. But beyond long walks and lazy days reading, "I couldn't figure out what they were actually doing," David recalls. "They didn't seem to be too busy."

JFK had pledged to send people qualified to carry out specific jobs, but the volunteers David met "were just doing small things. Not what really needed to be done. Their effort wasn't even going to begin to tackle the problem [of poverty]. We didn't understand what they were actually bringing us."

David was not alone in his observation. One Peace Corps director, reflecting afterwards on the work of the agency in the 1960s, noted that "projects throughout the world were not sufficiently oriented to the immediate needs of the country". In 1967, the director wrote, Pakistan decided not to request additional volunteers because it "determined that its needs were for technicians and specialists of a more sophisticated level than the Peace Corps generally provides".

Despite his early educational aptitude, David was forced to drop out of school at 16 when his father became a prominent figure in the opposition party in the eastern region, and found himself shut out of jobs and contracts. David moved back home to his village. In the 1980s, looking for new opportunities, he moved to neighbouring Liberia with his brother. There, he met a Peace Corps volunteer I'll call Duncan.