Word: abidjan
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Adzope is one of a score of drab, sprawling towns which you pass on the Ivory Coast's main highway north of Abidjan. The West African countryside is absolutely flat, and in the thick coastal forest the town is invisible until a turn in the road brings you into the center. Then suddenly the wall of the trees opens up, and there is a glimpse of long dirt roads, gas station signs and telephone poles, laundry spread out on the grass to dry, and people walking past rows of identical shops stacked with bright plastic washtubs. The reflection...
...fact of Adzope's is its ugly plainness, its disorganization. Drivers on the highway drive by, heading either for Abidjan's stores and skyscrapers or for the upcountry north for a look at wild Africa. This isn't worth a stop--it's too dirty to be sophisticated and too civilized to be picturesque...
...Adzope, or the hundred towns like it, is going to be far more crucial to the development of the Ivory Coast than the capital or the villages. The capital, Abidjan, everyone there says, is beautiful, but no more African than Marseille. The glamor of the villages quickly becomes boring--progress avoids them. The success or failure of the country will be decided outside both areas: outside Abidjan because it is such an anomoly, outside the villages because nothing ever happens there...
Students in Adzope form a variety of strong groups. Youth and sports Supplies equipment to several soccer teams, which play matches in nearby towns, aiming for a chance to compete in the big stadium at Abidjan...
...termination conference in Abidjan 25 teachers expressed this feeling almost to a man. As the report on the conference noted, "The image of the Volunteer as a well-meaning amateur sent abroad to 'relate' to people came in for a strong battering." One expression of this point of view is that the Volunteer tends to see the solution to his problems in technical terms: he feels he needs better training, more modern textbooks, abler support from the Peace Corps staff, or special skills he doesn't now possess...