Peace Corps today

Below is a response I wrote several months ago to an article by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker (abstract at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_hessler). I would assume many of you have read it, but for the others, it traced the story of a former volunteer in Nepal who during his service raised a staggering amount of funding (particularly in the context of Peace Corps, which deliberately works with miniscule budgets by international development standards) to help bring a water system to the people of his village. He is now a major (although unofficial) advocate for Peace Corps on Capitol Hill, employing sometimes extreme techniques to get the ears of congressmen and women and convince them that good Peace Corps volunteers do is worth far more than the less-than $400 million a year currently budgeted. (One of my favorite lines from the article pointed out that US military bands are currently better-funded than PC – I mean, nothing against bands, but let’s be serious.)

So, I’m a big fan of what this guy - Rajeev Goyal - is doing because I’ve come to believe pretty strongly in what PC does, and I was delighted to read Hessler’s piece. But as noted below, I had an issue with the way PC was represented, and would like to hear what others think. In the end, they didn’t publish my letter, but in its place accepted a response by a former PC Country Director, whose words were also critical but dealt with a different issue: the difficulty of creating truly sustainable development projects when so much foreign capital is involved – a view I share and would say most PC folks I know do as well, and one that Rajeev himself ascribes to, as cited in a recent article the by Hessler about the Greg Mortenson scandal: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/greg-mortenson-peter-hessler.html.

In any case, I was a little bummed that my response didn’t make the magazine, but that far more experienced ex-Country Director would have had much more reason for indignation had my piece been published in place of his, so no harm done.

I will throw out the disclaimer that my opinion is based on my own, perhaps uncharacteristically productive experience as a Water & Sanitation volunteer in Perú, and I certainly acknowledge that every volunteer (both my colleagues here and elsewhere) has a different experience based on factors both internal to him or her and many that are external and completely out of his/her control. Nevertheless, I hate to see this organization that I’ve come to really believe in portrayed as something less than what it has been for me and for the local people I’ve worked with. In a world full of well-meaning NGOs and government programs that carelessly – however inadvertently – foster dependency on the part of already-marginalized populations, the way PC volunteers work within their communities to help empower locals to solve what they themselves identify as their most pressing health-related and economic needs is a model approach. I am not saying it’s always successful, far from it. But it’s the right idea. And I think that needs to be better communicated to people who still think of PC volunteers as whimsical, idealistic kids hanging around in hammocks for a couple years and patting themselves on the back for all the good they’re doing.

Anyway, here is what I wrote, and I’d be interested in hearing anyone’s thoughts on it.

I write to applaud Peter Hessler‘s article “Village Voice” (December). As a current Peace Corps Volunteer, it is at once gratifying to see the organization get some press and fascinating to learn about what goes on behind closed doors (or in coffee shops) regarding our funding. Hats off to Rajeev for his noble efforts. However, I have to wonder why every time I read such an article, I find Peace Corps presented as something much less than the leading development agency that it is today. This is not to criticize Rajeev´s work in Namje, quite the opposite; he addressed the most urgent need there and greatly helped many, many families. But he was sent to his site to teach English, and had to teach himself along the way how to build a water system from scratch. In contrast to the early freewheeling days of the 60s and 70s, nowadays Peace Corps is a leading development agency that provides world-class technical training and resources to its volunteers in the field. Rather than being sent off to reinvent the wheel, my experience has been that our programs lay out clear, realistic goals, and volunteers are motivated and well-equipped to meet those goals with appropriate local resources. With “soft” power as vital to US foreign policy as it is today, it would be nice to see Peace Corps represented as the professional organization that it is.