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This question is for you, dear Reader. Did you miss out, in your idealistic twenties, on a memorable adventure that might have severely tested your character and yet probably turned out to be the most exhilarating time of your life? Maybe you did. Lucky those few thousand in the richer countries of the world who came to adulthood in the 1960s, who had completed a degree or two and who were caught up in the wave of secular (well, in some cases missionary) zeal to help folks far away who were leading fairly miserable lives. Most of them, Henning among them, seem to have had great experiences.
 
The pebble that Alec Dickson dropped in the ocean in 1958 when he launched Voluntary Service Overseas in Britain produced a ripple across the Atlantic. Two years later Senator Hubert Humphrey and the Kennedy brothers launched the Peace Corps. In our own country the Canadian University Service Overseas (now CUSO) grew out of the initiatives of a few young people who had found an echo from a single expedition - Lewis Perinbam in the famous 1957 WUSC study trip (it included Pierre Trudeau) to Ghana, Guy Arnold and his school leavers in Guyana, and Keith Spicer with his 16 volunteers who went to South Asia in June 1961 under the name Canadian Overseas Volunteers.  By the time Hans-Henning Mündel joined CUSO in 1966 and went to India for three years, the organization had matured and expanded:  in that year it had 560 volunteers placed in 34 countries. Henning was among 32 CUSO in India, and he was almost certainly more qualified than the pioneers. He had a BSc in Agriculture from the University of British Columbia, and two Masters degrees – one in agronomy and plant breeding, the other in international agricultural development – from the University of California, Davis. He had also seen, from the age of three, more of the tougher side of life than most Canadians.  Fleeing in 1945 from Russian army forces to refugee quarters in Düsseldorf, his family who were originally German Balts from Latvia only reached British Columbia and the orchard country of the Okanagan six years later. 
 
So he was a well traveled, well schooled agriculturalist when he was posted to India, to work with tribal families in the Nilgiri Hills in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu) as farm manager of the Paniya Colony. The Madras government had just granted to the Nilgiris Adivasi Welfare Association (NAWA) 100 acres of land, for 25 Paniya families to work. He was only 24 and the farm was very isolated. His living quarters were extremely primitive: he occupied the smaller of two rooms that together measured 97 square feet and had floors made of cow dung and mud. The larger room was a kitchen where Anthony, a charming older man whom NAWA had hired as his 'butler', stayed. There was then only one well on the farm, and washing facilities consisted of a jug and basin on a stump. 
 
Daunting enough. Moreover, the Paniyas were illiterate and (as Henning later wrote in Man Deserves Man, the CUSO anthology published in 1968) "reputed to be perhaps the most backward of the many Nilgiri Hills' tribes – despised by much of the local population for their filthiness and poverty, landless labourers, formerly working as bonded servants, almost like slaves". One can understand why David Hopper, who was agricultural adviser to CUSO-India on top of his job with the Rockefeller Foundation (and who in 1970 became president of the International Development Research Centre) tried to change Henning's placement as soon as he landed in Delhi. Hopper sent young Henning off to see a plant breeder who was doing agronomic research on a range of crops at Phaltan in Maharasthra state, and it was assumed he would stay there. Henning's spirit comes through in a short sentence: "However, I was on my way to the Nilgiri Hills and, as you can read in this book, I stayed there for 10 months."
 
So this is a book about those 10 months. It reads like a diary, but is an edited collection of the letters he wrote to Bev Atherstone, the fiancée he had left completing her psychology studies in California and (in German) to his parents. They were months of hardship and joy; of facing the language barrier and strange customs with gentleness, clear affection and good humour; of making considerable advances to diversify from a staple crop of tapioca (or cassava).  Under his direction, the Paniyas grew ginger, lemongrass for its oil and planted mulberry bushes for silkworm culture, as well as the young fruit trees, mangoes and limes. The rains, though, were unreliable and in March the severe drought killed the beans, chickens ate the cabbage and tomato plants, and elephants smashed banana trees nearby.
 
Through all this, the men showed their sense of humour. One day, he came on them planting tapioca in an odd pattern, stretching some 40 feet. When he looked carefully and asked the supervisor, he realized it was a caricature of himself, standing with arms akimbo, designed by Veran a part-time hypnotist. In turn, he taught them to plant along the contours, insisted on an iron plough in place of their homemade wooden ones, and purchased a bullock cart that could bring in manure.
 
And affection. He persuaded the local elementary school to take 20 Paniya children on condition they were scrubbed and properly clothed. Henning and Anthony set to soaping them at the well, and later sewing on buttons and mending torn clothes. He oiled and combed their hair and used to walk them to school. After a while he had to spread his fingers wide as so many of them wanted to hold his hand. The CUSO staff in Delhi took to calling him "Mother Hen".  And the children put roses in front of a photograph of Bev.
 
Isolation was a huge factor. It was 120 miles to NAWA headquarters and his mentor Dr. S. Narasimhan, who visited at most once a week, and five miles over the hills to a tea estate in an emergency for other doctors. He provided pills and first aid. Many Paniyas suffered from anaemia, workers cut their feet badly and dear Anthony died of dysentery. It was a nine mile round-trip by foot to a post office and it took three months for parcels to arrive from Canada. But Henning from his letters (and of course you pump yourself up to be cheerful in such circumstances) hardly seemed to have had a low moment, except when the fertilizer didn't come nor the man to take soil samples.  He welcomed the white ants invading his small room, the rain deluging through the straw roof, and he gloried in the evening spectacle of thousands of fireflies and marveled at the mountains. He once acted as a midwife, gave vitamin pills to nursing mothers and organized midday meals. He played his recorder, took lessons in Malayalam from the children and wrote full descriptions of weddings and funerals. And he seemed to love walking those many, many miles. "It is one of the most beautiful places in the world," he wrote. 
 
But money was always short. His monthly salary from CUSO and NAWA combined was 85 rupees – about C$11.50. (German volunteers got 600 rupees.) In April a letter from NAWA announced strict austerity and cut the midday meals. And a letter from Bev asking "whether I felt I was actually doing something real here" was an obvious jolt into introspection. He wrote that his contribution was "vastly suboptimal" as his academic qualifications were inadequate and wrongly slanted for this place, he hadn't mastered the language and generally lacked practical experience. He decided of his own accord that he was a financial weight on the farm and should leave the Paniya Colony. David Hopper thus won his point in the end, as Henning transferred in August 1967 to the Phaltan research institute.
 
So to my personal view on his book. In researching the book that I wrote in 1969 (Half a Loaf: Canada's semi-role in developing countries) I visited CUSO volunteers in Jamaica, Colombia, Nigeria and India. In three subsequent years when I was on the CUSO board of directors I visited others in Tanzania, Malaysia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea, and have kept up an association with many returned cooperants, as they now call themselves. And of course I have read the CUSO anthology Man Deserves Man to which Henning and 28 others contributed, as well as Ian Smillie's history of CUSO, The Land of Lost Content. So it is on this basis that I really think Henning's book ranks with the best writing on this fascinating organization and the testing life of its volunteers and is a wondrous window into those early days. As a collection of letters, it is better than journals and diaries that too often are self-serving. It is lyrical, but you are also in the mud of those distant fields. It is shiningly genuine, because you can't fool your fiancée or your parents. It has been the most enjoyable read I have had for months. I hope you relish it as much.
 
Clyde Sanger, October 2007.