Across the water

Dear Exile bridges a gap

by Johnette Rodriguez

You've read stories, both true and not-so-true, of the life of a post-collegiate twenty-something-going-on-thirty-something making her way in the Big Apple, changing jobs, apartments and boyfriends almost as quickly as seasonal wardrobes. And you may have read accounts of youthful adventurers in the Peace Corps, observing, trying on and perhaps challenging the new culture in which they live and work.

Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (For a Year) by An Ocean (Vintage), by Hilary Lifton and Kate Montgomery, brings those two worlds together, in a correspondence they maintained from October, 1996 through December, 1997. Published by the Vintage Departures series in May, the book is already in its third printing and has been chosen for paperback lists by the likes of Newsweek, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle and People.

It's an unusual book to find such a wide audience. But if the authors, who were college roommates at Yale, had been less articulate writers; if they didn't share a keen sense of self-deprecating humor; and if they hadn't trusted each other enough to be completely open and honest about their everyday lives and their ever-shifting world views, then this wouldn't have been the funny, poignant and compelling read that it is. From witch doctors and student riots in Kenya to medical doctors and cybersex in Manhattan, these two friends make us believe enthusiastically in their daydreams and in their nightmares. And, maybe most significantly, they remind us of the powerful gift of friendship.

"We didn't set out to write a book and certainly not about friendship," noted Liftin, in a conversation from a Manhattan office where she works as the product manager of a music website. "But in my postscript and in Kate's epilogue, we talk about our relationship, and it's less warm and fuzzy than some people thought.

"That's why it touched a note for people," she continued. "It's part of a whole life. Close friendship sustains you in a more family-type way -- it offers you unconditional love. But we don't dress the same way or go on friendship retreats. We like that the book portrays our friendship as textured and three-dimensional."

Indeed the pair came from very different backgrounds when they first met. Montgomery was from a small town in Rhode Island (Wakefield); Liftin was from New York City; Kate was blonde and studious; Hilary was dark and gregarious.

But there was something in Montgomery's very first letter to her future roommate, before they had actually met at Yale, that clicked for Liftin -- "I could see that she didn't take herself seriously but that she saw the world in a serious way." That never proved truer than during her 15 months in Kenya.

Montgomery and husband David Hackenburg met at Columbia, after she had completed a post-Yale year teaching in Czechoslovakia. They both wanted to travel to a place where they could get to know the people in the country, and that led them to the Peace Corps. Montgomery vividly remembers the moment she decided they "just had to go." She was in the shower of their 103rd St. apartment, watching a piece of cardboard flap on a vent they had taped up. The irony is not lost on her that their biggest everyday struggle in Kenya was for water -- there was never enough for showering or flushing toilets and their efforts to boil and filter the little water they had for drinking were semi-successful at best.

"It was hard, but it was fun," Montgomery asserts, with characteristic stoicism, in a phone conversation from her home outside New York, where she is on leave from a teaching job in East Harlem and at home with one-year-old son Kobi. "We were trying to live somewhat as the people did, but we didn't have to worry that we would die of malaria [though she did contract a very mild case]. We were trying to understand poverty, but we weren't living in poverty ourselves. We didn't have that much money, but when we saw tourists, it felt like another world, one that we weren't interested in being a part of."

Montgomery and Hackenburg were first assigned as teachers to Ramisi, a village on the grounds of a former sugar plantation and factory, with rusted machinery in the grass and people living in rows of cement housing. They transferred to another village three months later; though the living conditions were "much, much better," according to Montgomery, the situation at the school was similar to the first: corruption by the administration, violent discipline (caning) for the students and, in Kwale, the second village, no plumbing facilities for 500 students. They all took to the woods nearby, with the overpowering stench and spread of "funny-funny diseases," as one headmaster called them, no surprise to the two Americans.

"As disturbing as that the caning existed," emphasized Montgomery, "was how many Peace Corps volunteers went along with it. Not caning themselves, but sending students to the disciplinarians or delivering speeches to them that were threatening. It came up in training, and we had a discussion about it, but the Peace Corps is under the constraint of being in the country at the invitation of the government of Kenya. I was, nonetheless, really mad at Peace Corps for placing people in these situations -- I don't think that's OK."

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, how did Liftin's adventures compare to those in the African back-country? Somewhat tamer, certainly, though the cybersex episode has its own suspense, and Liftin's writing is so lively that her dating struggles, her attempt to move into her very own apartment instead of hunkering down with family or friends and her delight in the developing romance between a good friend and her brother vie for equal attention with the plight of the Peace Corps couple. She shares with Montgomery a facility for apt metaphors and finely drawn characterizations. Toward the end of the book, she discovers that her downstairs neighbor is a paranoid freak, believing that his upstairs neighbors are "sending pulses" into his apartment.

Asked about her fears of still living above this weirdo, Liftin responded: "It's just that New York thing where you just get used to it. I guess I feel that way about my whole life. I'm much more stable about my whole career. During the book I was discovering that questions about a home, a job and dating were the things I was going to be worried about for years to come. "

On her end, Montgomery doesn't hold out much hope that conditions in Kenya will change very quickly. The lack of sanitation and proper food for the students provoked riots that injured teachers and sent Montgomery and Hackenburg back to the States. Yet she is anxious to stress that there were "great, great parts" to their time overseas, and she still struggles to understand the factors that inhibit progress as we know it: clean water and humane schools.

"If everyone you know lives in a certain way, you just go on and do it in a certain way," she reflected. "The cause and effect are too far apart. There are so many tribes in Kenya in which the youth are severely beaten if they don't respect their elders. But the overarching culture of the schools was colonial, even the names: `Headmaster, prefect, form one, form four.' "

Both Liftin and Montgomery plan to do more writing. Liftin is working on another book, which she describes as "the managing of social life through the astrology of gardening." Montgomery thinks she will write more about Kenya, perhaps in short stories. She will sign copies of Dear Exile at Waldenbooks in Wakefield on Saturday, July 3 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.