http://sites.google.com/a/afghanconnections.org/afghan-connections/Home/third-goal-activities

Copy and paste the webpage above and start navigating around the Friends of Afghanistan site. The first site will show “Third Goal” activities that we are wrapping up this weekend in Buffalo, NY. Our Webmaster and Operations Officer, Terry Dougherty has done a great job in making the navigation fun and easy.

But we have a lot more going on and we are actively involved in supporting programs in country. My students funded construction of an Internet Cafe at SOLA in Kabul and we think that it may be the only Internet Cafe built exclusively for women in Afghanistan.

I returned in 2003 & 2006 to facilitate a number of student funded, gender equity educational initiatives including school construction projects. I may go back again this summer in between the reunions.

Peace, Tony Agnello
President, Friends of Afghanistan

Let us agree to this: Somewhere during the sixities, the administrative or political decision was made, either deliberately or by default, not to make successful service as a Peace Corps Volunteer a prerequisite for employment, either civil service or by political appointment. The historical record of when, by whom, and why this decision was made, is blank . I think the decision was critical. There is a historical record, which I cited, that this was intended at one time.

We disagree on whether or not this was a good decision. You say yes, I say no.

This is whay I say no. The argument about “new blood” and “sweeping clean” and getting rid of the “nay sayers,” is, IMHO, self serving. The language sounds like you are selling soap. I think it reflects the values of corporate , for profit institutions in a consumer economy. Absent planned obsolescence and the selling of new “improved” products, the consumer economy slows down. To keep the engine going, products have to be reinvented and consumer demand stoked up. I think those values are what you brought to the Peace Corps. Also, the Peace Corps became a political patronage plum cake. All of this reflected commerical values and political agendas which had nothing to do with what was happening in the field with real people, both HCN and Volunteers. As a matter of fact, what RPCVs would bring to the agency would have been anathema to all of the above.

What I believe was missing was the systematic evaluation and monitoring of all peace corps projects , through time and space, to identify what was not working and attempt to find out why; to replicate what was working and to monitor the majority of the project were the outcomes were not clear or did not fit a 21 or 27 month timeframe. I believe that this was impossible to do without the expertise gained from actual fieldwork. The failure to create an all RPCV staff was disasterous for the agency, IMHO.

Now, it may well be that the staff now is almost RPCV, I don’t know.
I do know that my FOIA request is being handled at PC/W by a lovely man, retired military, who does not know peace corps from the proverbial hole in the ground.

Finally, David, Do you realize what you did with my Marine analogy?
You immediately identified with the “elite” officer corps, and the serving Volunteers the perpetural “grunts.” You then said if the Pentagon tried that with the Marines, the result would be an increase in “fragging.” Yet, you seem blissfully oblivious to a non-violent but similiar reaction on the part of Volunteers.

I always enjoy hearing from you. It keeps me on my toes!

Let me start with your point about the staff role of RPCVs in the early 70s. When making my comment about mid- and senior level staff not being RPCVs I arbitrarily decided that country director positions were mid level and those above were senior positions. Generally these were men (and the occasional woman) between 40 and 50 years old with work and life experiences not yet achieved by all but a handful of RPCVs. Now, there were many, many RPCVs on staff as regional directors in-country, as desk officers in Washington, as recruiters throughout the US, and in other lower level positions. My guess is that all of that changed by the end of the 70s and we have the situation now where most positions (as I understand it) are filled by RPCVs.

I can’t find my copy of Redmon’s books but I’m sure you read it right. However, by the 70s the ‘make way for RPCVs’ element had been totally forgotten, abandoned, or maybe it didn’t even survive an initial review by Schriver while the ‘new blood’ element had become a mantra. The ‘five-year rule’ was even written into the original Peace Corps Act in 1961 without any mention of a purpose other than to keep bureaucratic calcification at bay.

In the chapter, “In, Up and Out”, pages 129 - 131, she discusses the origin of the five year rule and attributes it to an assistant of Franklin Williams who argued that to keep the Peace Corps young and dynamic, it should go from an agency staffed by people who had never seved a Peace Corps Volunteers to an agency staffed totally by RPCVs. The five-year rule was suggested as the best way to facilitate this transition. If I am reading correctly, it was suggested that this could have been accomplished in eight years.

You note that there were no RPCVs in mid and upper management when you arrived in 1971 because the agency was so new. Yet, the agency was ten years old. Your own corporate career parallels the time line of Peace Corps and you had corporate experience. Why was it assumed that no RPCV could have accumulated comparable management experience?

I would welcome your comment.
I

Many thanks for the compliment on the early swearing-in program. I don’t remember exactly what triggered my dislike for the existing system, but I didn’t like it from day one. That system emphasized frequent closed-door shrink-led evaluations sessions, FYB exercises (if you don’t know what ‘FYB’ means, I can’t explain it in a family-friendly site), an ‘us against them’ mentality, and, if on rare occasion it wanted to be nice, it ‘counseled trainees out’ rather than simply sending them home. It all went against everything I knew about team building, human relations, theory ‘Y’ management (which was all the rage in the late 60s and early 70s), and what I had learned in my recently completed MAT degree program.

One day while reading the Peace Corps Manual (which spelled out the rules and regulations we were to live by) I read a paragraph which gave the country director the authority to decide which trainees were to be sworn in and when that was to take place. Having been given an inch, I took the mile!

I am almost embarrassed to report that no one followed my lead, although I’m told it created a lot of ‘tsk, tsk’ noises in the background. Even in the Philippines the system reverted to the ‘approved’ version once I was safely away from the scene. So much for thinking outside the box!

As for the Peace Corps staff I have to say I favor one that consists of both RPCVs and appropriately chosen men and women without Peace Corps volunteer experience. My ‘op ed’ piece on the five year rule explains why I favor a constant supply of new blood in Peace Corps administration, and much of the reasoning would apply also to my advocacy of a ‘mixed’ staff. In my time, of course, the mid-level and senior staff was all non-RPCV, because of the agency’s relative newness. I think it worked very well, all things considered. In later years the reverse mixture has been the case (except at the Peace Corps Director level) and so I’ll ask for some recent and current staff members to weigh in on the topic.

Now, for the USMC. The first point I’d make, and this goes back to the swearing in process, is that the storied Marine Corps boot camp exercise is based on the overriding objective of turning every recruit into a serving marine. Drill Instructors are graded on their ability to bring recruits through to graduation, not on their ability to ferret out the slackers.

Your point about officer selection doesn’t quite hold. Very few officers have served as enlisted marines, and there is a ‘class’ structure inherent in the military. However, the USMC officer selection process and basic training is such that in the end there is very much a shared ‘espirit’ which ensures a common sense of mission. I would think that the same approach would do for the Peace Corps.

As for contracting the officer corps out to a private company I fear the result would be an exponential increase in ‘fragging,’ a practice we don’t want to encourage. By the way, can I admit to having been influenced by those John Wayne movies without losing my ‘street creds?’

Although, I believe that all Peace Corps staff should first have successfully completed a tour as a Volunteer, the training/selection process is the one area that I don’t believe RPCVs could ever have changed. The training/selection became part of the Peace Corps mythology, a rite of passage, a boot camp for “candy asses,” a way that a Trainee could prove that that he/she had the “right stuff.” Your outside perspective saw a better way.

You focus on volunteer management in your book, “the conscious, systematic and continuing effort to organize and direct volunteer activities in order to accomplish desirable objectives.” You argue that this the job of incountry staff, and is critical to the operation of Peace Corps. You assert that this function has been ignored in Peace Corps literature in favor of recollections from PC/W staff and individual Volunteers. You also acknowledge that the concept of volunteer management was anathema to most Volunteers. I believe that the problem is that successful completion of Volunteer service is not a prerequisite for staff positions in Peace Corps. Let me ask you two questions:

You are a former Marine. Suppose the Pentagon, in its infinite wisdom, decided to outsource the entire Marine command structure, above the squad level, to a private company, whose staff had never served in the Marines; where all the staff were political appointees, who had the authority to discharge any Marine, at any time, for any reason, with a dishonorable discharge; a staff who claimed an affinity with the tradition of the Marines because they really liked those John Wayne war movies and that Semper Fi whoop thing; and who had little or no experience in a war zone. My questions:

1) What do you think the reaction of an average Marine would be?

2) How effective a fighting force would the Marines be under such an organization?

As usual you make good sense. I should have read Blass’s comments more carefully. I paid attention mainly to those that described volunteer experiences rather than those that described a management style which I certainly do not endorse (and like to think I did not follow). The fact that he was called ‘Mr. Blass’ by volunteers suggests a hierarchy that has no business in the Peace Corps. The closest I got to that was to be called (with some affection, I hope) ‘Big Daddy up in Manila.’

As a country director I considered the whole question of ‘terminations’ as one that needed and deserved much closer and more sympathetic attention than the one it ususlly received during the 70s. As you will read in the book we took a very different approach to ‘qualifying’ trainees (a term we stopped using soon after my arrival) in the Philippines. One of these days I’ll address the topic of ‘early terminations’ more fully. I think it was then, and may still be, an example of ‘opportunity lost,’ for both the individuals involved, the host country and the Peace Corps itself.

Thanks for adding a needed perspective to my Afghanistan comments.

To RPCVs and serving Volunteers, I do recommend that you read Blass’s article, Part I and Part II. He presents an excellent demonstration for why Volunteer service should be contractual; spelling out mutual rights and responsibilities. Blass took delight in terminating a trainee incountry, before Blass received the guidelines from PC/W on how to proceed with such a termination; he diagnosed “conversation hysteria” in four Volunteers, using the clinical expertise from his Psych 101 course, and he ridiculed the legtimate ethical concerns of Peace Corps nurses, The power to terminate at will and to deny reimbursement for travel home seems to give him particular pleasure.