Michael Prewitt eulogy
Michael and I first met each other in June of 1966 at a Peace Corps training program at UCLA. We had all just graduated from college and were preparing to go to Ethiopia to serve as either secondary schools teachers, lawyers or instructors in various Red Cross schools of nursing.
The Peace Corps at that time offered those who were accepted into the program an occupational deferment from service in the military in Vietnam where we had a half a million soldiers. Still, it was a great adventure for all of us to go live and work in Africa.
We might have foreseen back then the ministry in Michael’s future if we had connected the dots. It was all there from the very beginning: Michael’s big personality, his quick wit, his keen intelligence, his love of laughter, his athleticism, his enthusiasm and his independent streak all made him personable and likeable, in other words someone with that intangible quality we call leadership. Most of all he was known as someone with integrity, and I was proud to be his friend.
We were stationed in different provincial capitals the first year, but were transferred to the capital Addis Ababa the second year. Michael first showed us what an original thinker he was when he persuaded the Peace Corps’ country director to let him start a publication like Scholastic magazine that was geared to Ethiopian students. He managed to get the funding and circulate it to students throughout the empire. At the same time unbeknownst to the Peace Corps he started a potato chip company called Kush Kush, which means ‘very crunchy’. It was bank-rolled by a friend of Michael’s, a wealthy Ethiopian in the royal family. They bought oil from Italians, potatoes from Indian growers and gave employment to Ethiopian students selling chips at the soccer stadium.
I’ll leave you with one Michael Prewitt story: Ethiopia in those days was a place where just about every strain of malaria known to man existed, and in the Peace Corps office in Addis Ababa there was a big map with push pins showing where all the various strains were located.
Being the original thinker he was coupled with an can-do attitude, Michael did some research and concluded that if we were to contract a very mild dose of malaria that could be remedied with, say, quinine, we would qualify for a medical deferment when we got out of the Peace Corps and so would not have to go to Vietnam. The map showed there was a location with just such a mild strain only an hour’s drive outside of town and, what is more, Michael said he could procure a Peace Corps vehicle for us to use.
With complete confidence that Michael knew what he was talking about and with him in the driver’s seat, a fellow volunteer John Triesault and I headed off to a place we called Mosquitoville. No sooner did we unroll our sleeping bags and roll up our sleeves to camp out along the Awash River when the heavens opened up and it began to pour like there was no tomorrow. We ended up sleeping in the Land Rover with the windows rolled up. Adding insult to injury, the next morning we had to be towed out of the mud by a local farmer and a team of horses. We never were bitten and of course didn’t get malaria, but we had a good laugh that’s lasted a lifetime.