Antananarivo, Madagascar
THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps' country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.
However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.
This wasn't the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it's much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.
The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.
The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.
In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad's backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma's cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I'm pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.
For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.
Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn't matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.
This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.
The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.
4 comments:
I saw that article encouraging older people to apply, and promptly filled out an online application, only to find at the very end a request for three letters of recommendation. I am in my sixties with a track record of living and working abroad in languages other than English. I want to be evaluated on that record, not on who I can summon to say nice things about me. If the PC wants real candidates, it will have to get out from behind the desk and look for them. I trashed my application which, by the way, is administered by a non-PC third party.
"Too Many Innocents Abroad" has the sound of someone who's parachuted out of a Peace Corps career and into the private sector, but more important it simply omits consideration of the Second Goal enshrined in the Peace Corps Act: "Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served."
This goal alone (in part by virtue of its mere existence, which in turn argues for an organization that, yes, DOES for the most part deal in "young volunteers [who] lack... maturity and professional experience") has advanced American ideals more than any combination of development specialists could ever hope to.
And would Strauss care to name an organization that has pinpointed just what expertise in any given country, any given decade and any given field is most effective from the standpoint of real economic development, measured on the ground?
Taken in this light, and considering that it (somehow) was given the high ground in terms of media exposure, "Too Many Innocents Abroad" does the Peace Corps a tremendous disservice.
It is interesting that this posting has drawn comments. My lifelong ambition has been to do volunteer work in a Latin American country in my retirement. More and more, it seems unlikely that this will be possible, not for lack of will or lack of my own skills, but for lack of opportunity or appropriate government or religious program.
This message is meant for PG, don't know if this is the means to do it ...
I have lived and worked in Latin America off and on for years, am now retired, have lived the last three years in Brazil. I happen to serve the Episcopal church, but I know there are other churches with a presence there who would welcome a volunteer. The same is true of Mexico and, I imagine, other LA countries. Many formal and informal church programs offer free housing. This has been the case with me, and I have found my social security check adequate to cover my remaining expenses. I have also taught a little English on the side to bring in extra income. Do you speak Spanish and/or Portuguese? Obviously that would be a plus but is usually not an absolute requirement.
The Catholic Worker has houses in a number of countries. Lodging and maybe food is provided. They have a website. Look them up. I don't think you have to be Catholic.
I know little about government programs. Try the PC if you don't mind their process.
David Catron
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