No Accomplishment
"Som eare Aboure, some are Agni. They won't understand." Her unspoken question was: What would it all accomplish, beyond satisfying my own need to make a gesture? I saw that I was really debating with myself and losing. "Well," I said, shamefaced, abashed at my own lack of resolution, "why don't we put it off, then?" "Putting it off," of course, meant dropping the whole idea. I backed out quickly and disappeared. In retrospect the memory is painful....
The volunteer who fails does not lack good intentions. He is probably
Teaching is hard enough. The obstacles to extra-curricular projects is overwhelming. The Nationals are not eager to help themselves. For the volunteer, 'there is a crisis of commitment. The answer may be to make the job easier. cursed with a too reasonable turn of mind; he cannot stop asking himself what good any particular action would serve. This is the genuine crisis of commitment for Peace Corps volunteers.... If there is an answer, it is to make the volunteer's job easier, not harder--to give him a task where he will have a stake in commitment. A job that is a treadmill of frustration cannot stimulate enthusiasm....
Again for Learning
"Would you do it again?" the volunteers are asked on questionnaires at the end of their Peace Corps service. Nine out of ten say "Yes.". "We learned a lot," is the common theme. But there is all the difference in the world between young Americans learning "a lot" and official claims that the work of the Peace Corps is laying the foundation for a new world community. Jack Vaughn, the Peace Corps director, quoted with approval a Dominican official who sobbed that the Dominican Republic might have been spared its revolution and bloodshed if the Peace Corps had only sent four hundred volunteers as requested....
Helping a country sidestep revolution, building a new nation, promoting world peace--these are large achievements. Few activities of the Peace Corps seem to merit such grandiose description. In the Dominican Republic, volunteers in urban-development projects are organizing neighborhood clinics or helping to obtain piped water for a barrio; those in rural-community development are setting up agrarian leagues and advising on local school construction.
In Ten Years
This is important work, the kind that, if carried out on a large scale, might begin bearing fruit in eight or ten years. But it is hard to see how five times as many volunteers would have affected either the rebels who tried to take over the government in 1965 or the unyielding miiltary junta that resisted them.
Peace Corps teachers in Malawi may be working in classrooms in large numbers, but African officials there and elsewhere are not about to turn over the task of charting national policy to young American volunteers. Malawi, in fact, is one of the few countries where volunteer activities have drawn an offcial reprimand: President Hastings Banda complained in a speech that volunteers were trying too hard to live like the people, when as teachers their job was to take a more professional, more aloof attitude. Instead, here were Americans living in huts, dressing sloppily, sleeping with local girls, and, worst of all, getting mixed up in local politics.
It is with good reason that volunteers are impatient with official over-years of the Peace Corps, a comic dialogue developed between volunteers and staff that went something like this:
"We didn't accomplish anything."
"Of course you did. You were just too close to the situation to appreciate what you had done."...
Into Disrepute
Fortunately, this logic has fallen somewhat into disrepute, and much of the shifting emphasis in Peace Corps programming and operations has in fact come from listening closely to what volunteers have said.
Those who listen closely cannot fail to observe that the difficulties cited most frequently on the questionnaires given to corpsmen at the end of their tour of duty were "frustrating work experience" and "lack of activity of nationals in helping themselves."
From my own experience, I would say that it is the second problem, the one of host-country attitudes, that shapes the views of the volunteers about their own contributions, whether or not they are conscious of it. As in the case of Japan or China, the initial stimulus to development may come from outside--in the shattering influence of a technologically more developed society. But the drive itself depends on a local leadership disciplined enough to forgo its own pleasures in order to promote advancement. This is the consideration that should inform all programs of assistance, whether monetary, technical, or human