The travels of a UN man
p. 61 · Read in the full issue
Books
A BOOK has been published to coin cide with the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. HIBISCUS YEARS; Travels of a UN man, is a mem oir of travels in service of UNESCO, UNDP and the European Commission.
Bom in Northern India, speaking “the language of the Sherpas”, George Bishop, after war service, took a science degree in the United Kingdom, taught and spe cialised in the training of science teachers, a skill in great demand during the enor mous expansion of education and develop ment in the post-war Third World-wide movement to independence.
After initial stints in Lesotho, South Africa, and in the University of the West Indies, travelling to schools all through those scattered islands, he directed a UNESCO project for the training of sci ence and mathematics teachers for Tan
zania and Uganda. 500 graduate teachers later, in 1971, he moved to direct a broad er UNDP Project in the South Pacific.
Working from and with the new univer sity there, Bishop, his team, and local assistance developed appropriate and acceptable curricula and trained hundreds of teachers for countries from the Solomon Islands to the Cook Islands and from Nauru to Tonga. In later years he returned to Africa, to Swaziland, and, with his wife, for a last, hair-raising visit to report on manpower in Mozambique amid sol diers, bandits, and the FRELIM/REN AMO civil war.
Bishop has an eye and a memory for places and scenes, and his accounts are always colourful, as are those of the unusual characters and the usual and sometimes dangerous incidents he encoun tered.
There is little detail of his own work, the Projects themselves, their successes, difficulties and frictions, or of the role of UNESCO, “a great creation of human enterprise”, as he describes it.
But he was significantly involved in the most rapid, widespread, and extensive educational and national-developmental change in human history the colonial Directors of Education he meets in 1971 had disappeared by 1981 and this pro vides the backdrop for an interesting mem oir of travelling and living in exotic lands. • The Hibiscus Years, by George Bishop.
Paperback original; 261 pp; 6 colour illustra tions; ISBN 1-899077-01 4. Published on 31. 3. 95 by Fisher Miller Publishing (Wits End, North Waltham, Basingstoke, hants, UK,