In recent weeks, the incidence of sexual assault of Peace Corps volunteers has (rightly) been in the spotlight and the subject of a Congressional inquiry. The callous handling of these incidents has been painful to the volunteers.
But we have also seen how Peace Corps critics are using this moment as a soapbox to pitch their misguided ideas about how to turn the Peace Corps into a development organization. In a recent Boston Globe article, RPCV Gal Beckerman suggests that because volunteers don’t deliver enough development, “Peace Corps may no longer have a real purpose.” Is that really true?
The glaring omission in Beckerman’s analysis is that there’s no discussion at all about whether “development” is always a good thing. I can think of many examples where development projects harmed the local environment or culture, or else made that community more vulnerable to exploitation or corruption. At the same time, what Beckerman overlooks, is that when volunteers do build something (cooperatively with the community), it is usually after spending lots of time in the field rather than air-dropping an aid project.
Peace Corps critic Paula Hirschoff, a two-time volunteer, is quoted as saying in the Boston Globe article, “Why should the American taxpayer in a time of horrendous budget cuts pay for these college grads to have a two-year vacation in a foreign land?” I would like to ask her if her own Peace Corps service was a paid vacation. If so, she should return the funds to the American taxpayer.
For me, Peace Corps was no vacation. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life. I was a recent college graduate but my youth was an asset. I came back with a very healthy skepticism about development and the impulse to bring things to scale.
Beckerman would like to see Peace Corps ”abandon the ‘go it alone policy’, and start collaborating with other big aid organizations.” But Peace Corps has always wisely defined itself against the development industrial complex.
Beckerman should realize that just because most volunteers don’t build a school or water well, doesn’t mean they left no contribution behind. That viewpoint undervalues the important impact teachers have made on their students (4 million of them in Africa alone since ‘61).
Perhaps the least convincing of the critics quoted by Beckerman is former Cameroon Country Director Robert Strauss (who was never a volunteer, but seems to really dislike them) who says, “The Peace Corps needs to start operating as an organization that is serious about efficiency and bang for the buck.”
Peace Corps does have some problems to fix, but efficiency is not one of them. At $374 million, the cost of the entire agency is tantamount to what is spent in a few hours prosecuting the pointless war in Iraq. If anything, the issue of sexual assaults shows how Congress should invest more so that victims of these horrible attacks can receive all of the support and medical attention they need for as long as they require.
You want bang for your buck? Go watch the next Harry Potter movie or something but stop using this moment as your soapbox.
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Rajeev, Robert Strauss was a Volunteer and his comments are based on that experience as well as his experience as a Country Director. Paula Hirschoff and her husband wrote a detailed plan on how to improve the
Peace Corps. I am not familiar with the quote you cited. But she has spent much time and effort on improving problems she ecountered during her service.
I agree that the current crisis is not an opportunity to change the Peace Corps. But two processes are happening and I think it is wise for RPCVs to want to influence those outcomes. The first is a refocusing of the agency as a result of a Congress Mandated assessment. The second is pending legislation as a result of the sexual assaults and the agency’s respond to them.
I agree the reformers shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. I don’t think Peace Corps needs a mission or an organization.
I also agree that Peace Corps currently gets pretty good bang for the buck. My guess is that a $3000 grant administered by a Peace Corps volunteer in collaboration with a village committee gets more bang per buck than any other development program. Such projects are likely to be responsive to local priorities, insulated from corruption, and leveraged by huge in-kind contributions from the beneficiaries.
However, I think you are mistaken to dismiss calls for reform that focus on improving Peace Corps’ development work. Peace Corps should not be content to be about “cultures, languages and people.” Even if that is Peace Corps’ real mission, it cannot be the mission that Peace Corps articulates for itself–cultural exchange/goodwill diplomacy only works when volunteers are doing good development work, or at least plausibly trying to. You can’t have the Peace Corps Experience if you’re just a tourist. But if you totally discount the development work, then Volunteers will be tourists.
Peace Corps should reform not by collaborating with or imitating other large development organization, but by being a better Peace Corps. It should take site placement seriously, set up a good portfolios of programs in each country, maintain relationships with local leaders and development NGOs/workers in order to give continuity to Volunteers’ work, etc.
All of this has to happen at the country level, and I do not think there should be no effort to standardize Peace Corps programs across countries. However, as far as I can tell, the country staff leadership’s work is influenced heavily by the priorities set by Peace Corps Washington. Currently, the message that comes from Washington seems something like: “All we care about is volunteer safety and security. We don’t care about development work, because Peace Corps is a goodwill diplomacy agency.” This message should be replaced by a message that takes development performance seriously.
I fear the recent hearings will take things in the opposite direction. What the volunteers and families who testified in front of Congress went through was awful, and they are justifiably upset. I hope that the hearings will result in improvements to the way Peace Corps handles rape and other tragedies. But I also worry that it will increase the emphasis Peace Corps places on safety. Safety is important, but Peace Corps does not have a duty to do that which is not within its power to do. It only has the power to create bureaucratic policies and control that burden volunteers without actually make them safer.
The overemphasis on safety is an unfortunate structural consequence of the way Peace Corps policy is made. Peace Corps is moved by threats from Congress, and Congress is moved by their constituents. The only loud message Congress gets from constituents is about isolated tragedies that befall volunteers–Peace Corps’ “development constituency” are “host country nationals” who do not vote. Consequently, we end up with a Peace Corps that is designed around the priorities of grieving families and justifiably upset former volunteers, not development priorities. The last time Peace Corps was in the news was a very similar situation–activism by the family of a Volunteer that disappeared in Bolivia in 2000 inspired Congressional hearings and a host of new Peace Corps policies.
I think your analysis that Peace Corps true constituency are HCNs is excellent and insightful. I do not think that legislation mandating Peace Corps’ response to Volunteers who report threats, feel unsafe, or are victims of criminal assault is incompatible with improving development work.
Congressional action in 2002-04 was prompted by the Dayton News Series on Safety and Security of Volunteers or the lack thereoff, of which the missing Bolivian PCV was one example. The Series documented persistent patterns of criminal activity against Volunteers and an inadequate response from the agency.
While I agree with your overall comments on development, I find your use of the word “upset,” inappropriate. “Upset” is when you lose money or when a romantic relationship turns sour. Rape is tramatic and life changing. The murder of a child is tramatic and tragic. To suggest that these victims are “upset” is patronizing and belittling.
This statement: “It only has the power to create bureaucratic policies and control that burden volunteers without actually make them safer”
is not self-evident. Explain what you mean. Give examples.
Rajeev
I agree with you 100%
Joey-
I agree that rape and murder are traumatic, horrible, and tragic. That is why I did not merely say that victims and families of victims of violent crime are “upset,” but “justifiably upset,” and why I said what they went through was “awful” and a “tragedy.” Perhaps I could have said something like “righteously and correctly furious” instead of “justifiably upset.” I certainly did not mean to patronize or belittle the victims by failing to choose the most extreme adjectives and adverbs.
Thank you for asking me to clarify my doubts about Peace Corps safety policies. What I meant is this: the Peace Corps country office is in the capital city of each country. Volunteers live and work in far-flung regions that are often a day’s journey or more the capital. Peace Corps, unlike the US State Dept., US military, int’l businesses, and many int’l NGOs, cannot protect the Americans it sends to dangerous countries by using razor wire, armed guards, special car services, or special suburbs. Volunteer safety can only come from volunteers’ relationships with people in their site and their linguistic and cultural fluency. This form of safety asks a lot of Volunteers, and will never be perfect. Some volunteers who make all the right decisions will nevertheless be victims of violent crime.
The Dayton Daily News series correctly traced the lack of safety to this fundamental aspect of the way Peace Corps is structured: “After spending years in a college dorm filled with people who knew him, Poirier went to live in an isolated jungle compound with virtually no supervision, no dependable method of communication with his superiors or anyone else, no budget to conduct business and no experience or other background in his assigned job: promoting tourism in the Zongo Valley…..’His project was a complete joke. I mean a 22-year-old person had no supervisor….I’m having a hard time with this because it’s so unreal,’ Sheila Poirier said. ‘You automatically think your young — in most cases — recent graduate is protected by the United States government and the Peace Corps in particular. And they’re not. You’re out on your own…We blame the Peace Corps for what happened to our son.”
Sheila Poirier (who, again, was justifiably and rightly enraged by an incomprehensibly horrendous tragedy) and the authors of the (perceptive, useful) Dayton Daily News articles may have been willing to end Peace Corps or to fundamentally change it in a way that would allow it to directly supervise volunteers. But Peace Corps, for obvious reasons, was not. Accordingly, Peace Corps responded by implementing safety and security policies within the existing Peace Corps framework—safety training, safety reminders, policies requiring volunteers to notify the peace corps office of where they were at all times, etc. I believe that these types of policies have a very limited effect on volunteers’ actual safety and therefore use up time and energy that would be more productively used by helping volunteers do good development work.
It sounds like you know much more about Peace Corps history and policy than I do, so perhaps you can explain why this point of view is wrong-headed. But since you asked for an example I will try to give one based on my (admittedly limited) observations of Peace Corps when I was a volunteer between 2003 and 2005:
I came down from my site to the departmental capital in October, 2003 after a difficult two weeks in site trying to get work started. In my inbox were four emails sent by the Country Director from the far away capital city. The first email was about our upcoming quarterly regional safety and security meeting, at which we will discuss ways to say safe. I knew this meeting would likely be the only work-related contact I would have with Peace Corps until the next time we discuss safety and security. The second email tells us that during the upcoming week of national elections, we will be required to call the country office every day so that they know we are safe. To make this call, I knew I would have to climb the mountain behind my site, which was way too small and rural for any election-related riot to be imaginable. The third email said that pursuant to her new out-of-site policy, we could take the Thursday of thanksgiving as a holiday but must use a vacation day if we remain out of site on the following Friday. This out of site policy was inspired not by a desire to ensure that we were doing development work, but by statistics which showed that volunteers are more often the victims of crimes when they are out of site. The fourth email was the latest in a series of updates about the work she was doing with the US Embassy to put pressure on the national justice system to convict a man accused of raping a volunteer.
These policies were all well-intentioned, and each had some good things about it. No doubt *some* safety advice was productive, as was *some* kind of out of site policy. What I objected to was that the Peace Corps office spent *all* their time on the problem. Consequently, their efforts are subject to diminishing returns: the office had already communicated to me the safety advice that was relevant to my situation, and it was not helpful for me to hear it again.
What I really needed help with was development work, but they didn’t seem to spend any time on that. There were no quarterly development work meetings, no email updates with advice or tips about work, and none of the new country director’s energy went toward improving the program lineup or site placement.
And on a more subjective level, I was frustrated by the fact that I was doing all of these things to help the office with their safety priorities, but what was the office doing to help me with the development projects I cared about. How could Peace Corps threaten to punish me for being a “bad volunteer” who spent time out of site when it seemed not to care at all about what I did when I was in site? Maybe I was young and naive, but I believed that policies focused on creating a Peace Corps organization that made volunteers’ work effective and successfully engaged them their site might have improved volunteer safety more than efforts to crack down on what the country director called “the peace corps party subculture.”
Tyler, Thank you so much for your thoughtful and comprehensive reply. First, I think your frustration that you were not getting help with development problem is legitimate. You were entitled to that help. But I question your assumption that the Director couldn’t provide that kind of program support because she was obligated to be concerned about safetyand security. I think you had a lousy Director. She may well have made safety and security a priority, bu that did not excuse her from supporting you with your development concerns. Just out of curiosity, what was the Director’s background? Was she a RPCV?
Now, I think that you should have had a secure way of communicating with the Peace Corps office, other than email that you couldn’t access in a timely manner. I believe that most PCVs now have satellite phones. There are two issues that I think are legitimate: volunteers may be more vulnerable to crime when they are out of site; and Peace Corps may have had information about potential pollitical violence that they choose not to share with PCVs, but rather just to issue restrictions.
Volunteers may be the target for violence for a variety of ways. Successful Volunteers may threaten existing power relationships or their very success may make them a political target. Female Volunteers may threaten the male power structure. So insite violence can occur, also.
I served in the early sixties and I am female. Peace Corps Bogota could only communicate with us via mail or telegram, neither was dependable. Standing instructions were if we found ourselves out of site and political violence was occurring, we were to return to our sites, immediately, “stay inside and not take pictures.” We were told that if we were good Volunteers, the people in our site would protect us and if we were not good Volunteers, we deserved whatever happened.
One problem with depending on people in the site to protect the Volunteer is that it can place an awful responsibility and burden on them. In Southern Colombia, there was an upsurge of political violence. Some people in our site said that they would protect us., but others asked us not to come to them for help. They were afraid that we were political targets and our presence could endanger their families.
I accepted the fact that I would serve, unarmed and “ungarrisoned.” My mother was furious. So I can understand Walter Poirier ” mother’s reaction. However, I understood then and understand now, that Volunteers must be free to work in the communities and that is the only way to do it.
The problem in Bolivia was that the Director had no contact at all with Walter Poirier and did not know that he was missing. It was six weeks after he was last seen that she became aware that he was missing. By that time, the “trail” was cold.
With Poirier and the other PCVs, one of the problems that Peace Corps must solve is the lack of prompt effective response when a Volunteer is the victim of a crime or cannot be located.
I am unfamiliar with the term “Peace Corps party culture.” I do think it is outrageous when adult Volunteers are treated as children. I remember we partied when we could get together, usually at holiday times. It saved my sanity many times. The “in site, out of site” policies, I remember, were arbitrary and ridiculous. We covered for each other, if Peace Corps official showed up in any site unexpectedly, we just said the absent Volunteer was “out in the campo.(field) working.”
Without being asked, the people in our site also covered for us if Peace Corps officials showed up …we were “working in the field.”
This did not enhance our safety, but Peace Corps was “checking up on us,” not trying to make sure we were secure. I cite this, not because I think it was good, but because that is how it was.
You describe two problems. The first is the lack of adequate development support. The second is the “infantizing” of Volunteers. Both problems need to be addressed. I think they are long standing.
However, neither problem should be used as an excuse not to deal with the safety and security of Volunteers.
I