The Toughest Job: The Crossroads of One Man's Peace Corps Experience. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Toughest Job: The Crossroads of One Man's Peace Corps Experience

In 1995, a young civil engineer from Massachusetts volunteers for the Peace Corps in West Africa. He trains in Senegal, serves in a small city in Côte d’Ivoire’s western highlands, and travels extensively through the Sahara Desert in Mali all the way to Timbuktu. Everywhere he goes, he encounters extreme poverty, harsh conditions, religious differences and political turmoil. He endures police bribes and corruption, perilous bus rides, polluted water and suspect food, debilitating illnesses, a hunt for ‘bad’ sorcerers, a 100 kilometer hike in five days in +100°F heat, a run-in with the Taureg Freedom Fighters, being stranded in the middle of a 465,000 acre national park with large predators, an attack from a sacred mask, and a visit from a deadly green mamba snake. The Toughest Job is a window into the unique world of a Peace Corps volunteer and the challenges they must face to carry out their lofty mission and improve the human condition.

Scott M. Henrickson was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts–Lowell in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. After graduating, he tutored math and science at Fitchburg High School and volunteered with the Student Conservation Association at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. From January 1995 until November 1996, he served in the Peace Corps in West Africa. In early 1997, he returned to Mammoth Cave as the park engineer, designing mostly boardwalks, walkways, and overlooks. In the fall of 1998, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska to work for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, managing water and sewer projects in remote Athabaskan villages along the Yukon River and its tributaries. At the end of 2005, he returned to work for the National Park Service in Honolulu, Hawaii to manage facility projects at eleven parks in Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, and American Samoa, as well as temporary assignments at Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona and Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. Scott wrote The Toughest Job during his spare time on nights and weekends over a fifteen-year span, primarily for the accomplishment but also to celebrate and share the experience.