The lively exchange between John Coyne and John Turnbull about the Peace Corps, Vietnam, Jack Vaughn and LBJ impells me to add my two cents.
I was in the same Peace Corps group in Ethiopia as Coyne, as a first tour American diplomat I had the pleasure of meeting Jack Vaughn as his contact officer when he came to Panama to watch horse racing and have other fun, I have my draft notice from LBJ carefully filed with the one line letter from the SSS saying, “Your draft notice is hereby rescinded,” in spite of beating the draft I still wound up as one of those RPCVs in the middle of the Vietnam War - so I feel qualified to enter the fray.
The issue is to greatly increase the Peace Corps, one that I have written on in some length. I am not safisfied with doubling the Corps, I want to see 100,000 PCVs around the world. The crunch question is not if there is funding, but if there is the will and the way.
John and John discuss the “will” with the suggestion that nothing like a huge army call-up to stimulate youngsters to volunteer for the Peace Corps. I would answer this by noting that even when I was in the Corps, women comprised a large share of volunteers and I have read they account for more than half today. Obviously they were not motivated by the “hot breath of the draft.”
No, as I have stated many times, I believe the reason for the substantial decline in the Corps from 15,000 or so in the 1960s to half that number today is the result of policy decisions to make the Peace Corps a professional development group, what I am given to calling a “junior AID.” This is why 80% or more of the Peace Corps budget is spent at headquarters on staff and contractors busily working on making sure the “right person” is placed in the “right job.”
I say pay more attention to getting Americans abroad under the Peace Corps banner to improve understanding between ourselves and other peoples. I am not so concerned by the job they do, but that they have the direct, personal contact on which we can build closer relations with others. This does not require specific skills applied to specific jobs. To use an analogy, I believe the Peace Corps should be more “Habitat for Humanity” than “Doctors Without Borders.”
Now I am sure I will hear from many who insist that the Peace Corps be a “professional” service. But remember, this is a two year assignment, not a career. The original goal of JFK was to have as many Americans as possible meet as many foreigners as possible in the context of mutual cooperation in order to forge better mutual understanding. This is what I still hope the Corps can do.
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Leo, I sympathize with your hopes for the Peace Corps, I really do. But it must be said that the “professionalization” of the volunteer corps hasn’t happened in a vacuum, or just because Washington bureaucrats have decided it should be so. Your vision of the Peace Corps as primarily a grassroots cultural exchange program is a distillation of one side of the never-ending tension between what Americans want the Peace Corps to be, (or actually think it is) and what its host countries want. Depending on where you sit, the Peace Corps is at least two things.
It is indeed the exchange program you extol. It does promote international understanding; every RPCV is proud of the fact that in many countries, the only Americans whom local citizens have ever known are Peace Corps volunteers, and the program has left behind immeasurable good will as a result.
But to the host-country officials whose job it is to develop their countries, the Peace Corps is an actual part of their development schemes. To them, good will is just fine, but it’s hard skills they are primarily looking for. One would hope, for example, that after nearly 50 years, by dint of the work of, among others, Peace Corps health generalists, Ghanaian mothers now know it’s best to boil or otherwise treat water before giving it to their children. Most do, and those who don’t can now be taught by other Ghanaians.
In this way, the Peace Corps is successfully working itself out of its generalist job. The countries it has served traditionally are progressing past the point where unskilled, minimally trained generalists can be effective, and countries where it has never been or from which it has been absent for many years are at a level of development where they are seeking specialties they cannot supply themselves, not generalists. Countries like India, Brazil, and Indonesia still have deep poverty, yes, but they also now have large enough middle classes to supply their own generalists for the grass-roots work Peace Corps volunteers may have done in the past. (And even if they don’t, and they are still not requesting generalist PCVs for reasons of economy or national pride or whatever, it’s not the job of the US government via the Peace Corps to contradict them.)
To stay relevant the Peace Corps must find a way to attract and program for the more highly skilled workers many countries are seeking while maintaining the good will and grassroots exchange aspects that have made it so well loved. Mid-career professionals would be ideal, and they certainly deserve the same cross-cultural opportunities afforded generalists, but those people tend to have families and mortgages, and the Peace Corps’ economics-driven, restrictive policies on placing and supporting entire families overseas makes them virtually impossible to recruit. More senior volunteers would also go a long way towards filling the bill, but the longer we walk the planet, the more medical conditions we tend to amass that make it hard for the Peace Corps, which is the primary health insurer while a person is a volunteer, to be able to afford to place us. Of course, the Peace Corps could merely open the financial spigot and pay for these more expensive volunteers, but then the entire program would cost more, gain a higher congressional profile, become controversial (like Americorps) and lose that way. (Personally, I shudder to imagine a Peace Corps with a high profile on The Hill.)
Like it or not, the Peace Corps is facing a real-world conundrum: how to keep its grassroots, cultural exchange creds while also remaining relevant to the countries it purports to assist. I hope and pray there are creative ways to make that happen. But I’m afraid the day of 15,000 generalists, much less 100,000, is gone.
Ralph
You postulate a world where “untrained, generalists” are not lacking. I have spent my life living in other countries under various guises, beginning with the Peace Corps. I can assure you there are still many places where a well intentioned “untrained, generalist” can do some good. My country of service, Ethiopia, had a population of 22 million when I went there in 1962. It now has 80 million. And you know what, it still has a severe shortage of teachers. I could see 10,000 PCVs working in Ethiopia alone. No, I still believe the need is there.
As for the attitude of the host country itself about having a large group of Americans sprinkled around the countryside doing good and making friends, I can recall that many Ethiopians disparaged our group way back then as being naive, unskilled kids who were just on a long holiday. Well we did good and we made friends.
I would promote the Peace Corps with other countries s being a means to improve relations between the USA and the host country. If the host country is not interested in doing this, then I do not believe it is fertile soil for the Peace Corps.
Leo C