During the George W. Bush administration there was a great deal of talk, some of it contentious, concerning ‘faith-based’ social programs. The amount of heated comment this caused came as a surprise to me because we had regularly used such associations in our Peace Corps programs in the Philippines during the 70s (and very likely during the 60s) without anyone thinking it inappropriate or controversial. (For those needing clarification, ‘faith-based’ means channeling U.S. government assistance through organizations whose primary identity comes from their affiliation with a specific religious entity.)
While most PC/P volunteer programs were administered in conjunction with Philippine governmental institutions at the federal, provincial, or local level there were more than a handful of volunteers working directly with religious groups. Sometimes the volunteer assignment was official, but more often it was the result of a recognition on the part of both parties that the volunteer mission and that of the religious organization were complementary, although not exactly the same.
One such assignment that comes to mind is that of a volunteer working with a Dutch Catholic missionary who was ministering to a group of near stone-age indigenous people (the Mangyans) on the island of Mindoro. Remote and primitive, the Mangyans were accessible only by a long trudge up a mountain. Volunteers lived in straw huts and welcomed the unusual challenges and opportunities they encountered as they worked with a group of people deeply interested in becoming modern. For Father Postma the primary point was saving souls, but that was mixed with a genuine passion for social and economic development. Postma’s religious affiliation was unmistakable, but flexible. (He reworked his religious observances so that they contained elements of the local cultural traditions.) He and his non-Catholic volunteer worked together very effectively on those mutual concerns and left the others for another time. All of this with full support of the Peace Corps.
On the Protestant side volunteers often worked with representatives of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a long-established organization of Bible translators who travel the world translating the Bible into local languages. The SIL folks were always well provisioned by their U.S. headquarters; volunteers had access to the community that the short-term translators lacked. The value of what each could give the other was readily apparent. Volunteers made it easier for the translators to become part of the community; SIL shared their greater resources with the volunteers for their own projects. The cooperation between Peace Corps and SIL in the Philippines continued for years. (Perhaps it still does around the world?)
Far north of Manila in the rugged hinterlands of Luzon a group of Catholic friars had established a central maintenance and supply post to service their missionaries working with another of the many indigenous Filipino groups, the Ifugaos. One of their frequent ‘customers’ was the Peace Corps regional director for northern Luzon. Our man could ‘destroy’ a jeep faster than anyone could imagine. His specialty was breaking engine mounts as he sped up and down the dreadful mountain roads. The friars repeatedly stopped what they were doing, replaced the engine mounts and sent the regional director on his way. They and the Peace Corps knew instinctively that both organizations were doing the same thing: one might emphasize religion and the other creating friendships and understanding, but there was considerable overlap. And it goes without saying that without the help of the Christian brothers the dozens of volunteers working in the far-flung north of Luzon would rarely have seen their regional director.
Members of this same group provided ‘institutional’ support for the Peace Corps by regularly including us in their radio and TV broadcasts, which reached large audiences throughout the country. ‘Father Bob’ once spent nearly the full hour of his TV program showing photos of PCVs at work … and giving them ample accolades. There were no adverse consequences for our being associated with a Catholic priest and even Peace Corps can use good PR!
At the other end of the Philippines, on the island of Jolo, we found ourselves working with Muslims. One of our PCVs, an American Muslim from Michigan, was stationed there and became deeply involved in the community - and that means deeply involved in Islam. He worked as a community organizer specializing in health and nutrition. The Peace Corps staff was a bit taken aback when he announced that he was marrying a young local Muslim teenager, which while shocking to some of us was well within accepted local practices. He later went on to get his MD in the Philippines and last I heard he was practicing in Jolo and had raised a fine family there.
PC/P’s close and productive relationship with Muslim universities on the island of Mindanao went back at least 10 years at that time. One day Phil Lilienthal and I had good reason to be thankful for that. During Ramadan, as we approached a small university town where we planned to spend the night we discovered that the one hotel in town was a burning hulk. Insurgents - in the Philippines there always seemed to be active insurgents, especially in Mindanao - had destroyed it earlier in the day. The university president, a Muslim woman, opened her home to us, fed us, and ushered us away to our room while she and her family gathered and broke the Ramadan fast.
Sister Sylvia was an American nun who left her convent in Pittsburgh, joined the Peace Corps, set up shop in a Filipino convent, and taught at a local Catholic university. Her letters home to her former colleagues offer some of the best descriptions of volunteer life - both its highs and its lows - that I have ever read. (They are now in the JFK library in Boston.) As far as I know it never entered anyone’s head to question the appropriateness of this ‘faith-based’ activity.
I don’t think that PC/P was unique in working with faith-based groups. Mike Tidwell tells a wonderful story in The Ponds of Kalambayi about his own attempts to engage the faith-based community in solving a drainage problem with one of his fish ponds. He has never accepted the fact that the problem was solved by his reluctant attendance at an Africanized Catholic worship service, or by his equally reluctant attendance at an animistic healing service featuring fire-walking priests. He insists that it was the clay bottom later installed in the pond that did the trick. This, despite the fact that some of his neighbors believed whole-heartedly that the work of the faith-based communities deserved credit. Tidwell also had reason, personally, to thank the presence of medical missionaries nearby when he was struck by bilharzias, a very serious tropical disease.
And how could volunteers working in South America not become involved with, or at least sympathetic to, ‘liberation theology.’ (Liberation theology has as its central idea the need to eliminate the rigid class structure that impoverishes most South Americans. It is a favorite whipping boy of Glen Beck these days.) USAID dispensed a goodly amount of its ‘do-gooder’ funds through agencies like Catholic Relief, Save the Children, and similar organizations, many of which helped and supported PCVs and their projects in countries around the world. Surely, all of this was happening throughout the Peace Corps world in the 70s. Is it still happening?
There were some problems, of course, with working closely with religious organizations. Volunteers working in health and nutrition programs were often asked for advice on family planning, and this was troublesome. We all knew that the government of the Philippines, the powerful Catholic Church there, and even the U.S. government forbade providing such information. Officially, I shut my eyes to all that, and volunteers did as their consciences dictated. Some of the literalists among the Protestant groups were preaching theologies some of us found misguided, but we managed to set our personal theologies aside and concentrate on the far more important benefits of cooperation. And Islam was so new to us that we just didn’t think about it, let alone wonder whether there might be things to worry about. (Remember, this was the 1970s, not the twenty-first century.)
All in all, I’m comfortable with the many religions in the world being able to hold in peace their own separate creeds. There is no rationale for Peace Corps to formally endorse any of them, or, equally, to disparage any of them. But, when it comes to ‘Making a Difference,’ I say all hands are welcome, and the ‘faith-based’ organizations have proven their worth many times over!
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David
Thanks for a long overdue statement on this subject.
Well done.
David, What a comprehensive, excellent review. Like so many of your posts, I am left feeling that there should be fourteen or fifteen books to expand on what you have described! This is just a beginning.
I would like to take the US “faith-based initiative” program out of the mix. The US Constitution prohibits the government from the “establishment of religion” and this is very different from those countries were religion is so closely integrated with the government.
Remember, the first director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives resigned because he felt that the office was too political.
Colombia had a Concordat with the Vatican; the clergy exercised civil as well as religious authority. Many of us in my training group were Catholic women. We were perhaps the last pre-Vatican II generation. I was not unfamiliar with clerical authority. My site partner was not Catholic and was not comfortable with the situation, although always gracious. The village priest did not hesitiate to assert his authority over us, as women and me, as a Catholic.
The issue of birth control has been critical throughout, I believe, the Health Education programs of Peace Corps. Peace Corps was asked to leave Bolivia because of it. This is a topic for one of those books!
In my site, the women in the maternal health education program counted their children in terms of children living and children dead. They were so poor that they were not sure how they would feed their families, each day. They desperately wanted to control their fertility to protect the very lives of the children they already had.
The priest denied permission to teach the so-called rhythm method of birth control. The dllemna was not that of my conscience but the consequences to the women in this rural area if it were thought that we were teaching birth control. They could have been subject to brutual social and economic reprisals. So, we didn’t teach it. The doctor said that women could buy the pill in the village. However, the cost was so prohibitive that this really was not a solution.
Wit the exception of the so-called rhythm method, family planning is not just education, supplies and medical support are also needed. So how this matter has been handled by Volunteers through “time and space” is really important information. I do know that by the 80s, PC nurses were routinely dispensing the pill in some Latin countries through public health clinics.
Liberation Theology covers many strategies. I would love to know the complete story of how Peace Corps Volunteers interfaced with this. Initially, the Pope approved of the “turn to the left” to help the poor. But the theology became confused or complicated by Marxist philosophy.
In Colombia, Camillo Torres was a young progressive priest who was feeding poor children from his rectory. The Cardinal of Bogota told him to stop. Torres refused and was “defrocked,” a penalty which made him, in effect, an outlaw. He joined revoluntary forces in the mountains and was killed by government troops. To the south where I was, a bandit “Tiro Fio” and his soldiers committed acts of terror against the very poor. The self-same government troops protected the poor from these terrorist attacks. And, of course, this was the beginning of FARC. I can’t sort it out.
The history of Peace Corps in the Phillippines is fascinating and there is still much to learn.
Joey, I’m not sure we can take the ‘faith-based’ issue out of my post because I found that working cooperatively with ‘faith-based’ organizations of many different kinds led to better results. The point of the post was to say that doing so was good, and should be encouraged.
The ‘Establishment Clause’ in the constitution has a long history of Supreme Court decisions, but I’m pretty sure that taken together they would not prohibit the kind of cooperation involved here. If government can give religion ‘tax-free’ status — talk about a big donation! — surely it can permit cooperation of this kind.
The politics surrounding the ‘faith-based initiative’ during W’s administration was just that, ‘politics,’ and we should be able to rise above it. Many of my liberal friends were dead set against it because they feared it might help evangelical churches, most of which are conservative politically.
I agree that the history of ‘Liberation Theology’ is fascinating. My sources suggest that it began as a grass roots movement in South America, often at the parish level supported by parish priests. It became a ‘movement’ in 1968 with a conference at Medelline, Columbia. Both the ‘ruling classes’ and the church hierarchy were horrified at the ‘care for the poor’ orientation of Liberation Theology, but in the end the church began to accept it (and tone it down). I’m not sure I got all that right.
Anyway, thanks for always reading and considering my stuff.
By the way I found the history of the Peace Corps in the Philippines so fascinating I wrote a book about it. (I never miss an opportunity to push sales!)
I knew David had itnroduced a topic that would resonate with many. Again, thanks for a long overdue article.
Side item. You may be interested in knowing that the most effective birth control method ever was, believe it or not, television. When I worked in the office of economic research at the State Dept my colleagues doing population research introduced me to this fascinating fact. Apparently bringing television to wide flung rural villages did more to reduce birth rates than any other device.
On the ‘faith-based’ issue during W’s administration I should add that my conservative friends were against it because they felt that this kind of effort should be left to the private sector. And, my non-believer friends didn’t want to have anything done that would help any group doing ‘religion.’ No wonder the fellow in charge left in a huff!
Oh Leo, I don’t really know how to respond to your comment. Surely you understand that I was describing a time when the women with whom I worked did not even have electricity, let along the possibility of TVs. David and I are both talking about a time more than thirty-five to fifty years, ago. That is relevant to the topic. Please do not dismiss the plight of those women.
David, The reason I wanted to take the ‘”faith-based” initiiatives out of the mix is because I think there is a real difference between countries with a secular government and countries where religion is an integral part of the government. I think that “faith-based” agencies do a tremendous job. I did not mean to question their good works.
As for the history of Peace Corps in the Phillipines, the book written by Country Director, P. David Searles, “Peace Corps Experience” is an excellent recounting of the early years of Peace Corps. However, Peace Corps carried on for thirty five years after the time of the book and programs continue today. I think that the Phillippines and Ecuador have the longest continuning Peace Corps programs.
You do note that there was an insurgency:
” Insurgents - in the Philippines there always seemed to be active insurgents, especially in Mindanao -”
As you may know, a Volunteer was kidnapped by insurgents in the Phillippines, ( although he was not held as long as the Colombian PCV was by FARC). In Colombia, Peace Corps withdrew after the Volunteer was privately ransomed. It would be so good to know how Peace Corps programs in the Phillippines survived, given the insurgencies. I wonder if this would help better understand possibilities in Afghanastan. This is what I meant about the “ongoing” history of PC/Phillippines.
We need our friend Mark, now a volunteer in the Philippines to give us an update. Mark, are you there?
The Peace Corps in the Philippines does have a great record of presence and accomplishment in the nearly 50 years since Group 1 landed. However, the program went through some tough times in the early 90s. The program was shut down for 1-2 years, although I don’t know which of two competing reasons was the real one.
The Filipinos were hiking their ‘rent’ demands for the U.S. military bases there. The Americans wanted to send a message that the U. S. wasn’t a patsy, so they pulled out the Peace Corps virtually without warning. One day there, the next day gone, so one former Filipina staff member reported.
The other reason, so some say, was that intelligence reports said that the always present insurgents were planning to target volunteers and that PCVs were in grave danger, so the pull out was called without proper consultation with the appropriate Filipinos.
Which ever was the case wiser heads prevailed and volunteers returned in a couple of years, although (I think) that the program has never come close to being the major presence in the country that is was for the first 30 years. (We had about 450 volunteers and trainees in country at the peak in; I suspect it is less that 100 now, although I don’t really know.
I fear that there are no answers in the history of PC/P to deal with Afghanistan. As the lawyers say Afghanistan is ’sui generis.’ (Or something like that.
By the way I think Leo was just adding a bit of humor to lighten the load a bit. Me, I’ve always thought that advancing age was the best birth contro device!
David,
Thank you for the information about the interruption in the PC Phillippine program. I did not know that. I think one of the important reasons to study history is to see what we can learn. Peace Corps has been “intervening by invitation” in other countries for almost fifty years. I would hope that there are lessons to be learned. I look forward to hearing more from Mark.
Let me direct, if anyone is uncomfortable with a discussion of how women’s lives and the lives of their families are impacted by reproductive issues, please say so and I will not comment on the topic again. However, these issues have been and continue to be life and death matters for women and their families, I will never agree to treat them “lightly.”
Joey, don’t hold back! (I’m sure you won’t.)
There is a very distressing article by Trudy Rubin (a columnist for the Philadephia Inquirer) on the subject of women and their future in Afghanistan in today’s (Monday) papers. She quotes leading Afghan women — the ones leading the drive for progressive action there — predicting a drastic retrenchment of women’s rights (limited though they still are) in Afghanistan if the US ever pulls out!
Many of us are anxiously awaiting the time when we can get the hell out of there, and now we have this to consider. Although I will get over it, every once in a while I think fondly of the ‘Fortress America’ isolationists of long ago.
Dave, you are so right. I have friends who have sons deployed to Afghanistan and I am with them in praying for withdrawal of all US troops at the earliest possible moment. Yet, I can appreciate the consequences
for the Afghanistan people who allied with the US and depend on the troops for protection, and wonder what is our moral responsibility, particularly for those of us who are so lucky to be “bystanders.”
I, too, wish for simpler times, whenever they might have been.
Dave and Joey
Yes, my comment about birth control was light. I was speaking about “birth control” and not “women’s rights.” They may overlap but they are separate subjects. the Chinese government has been perhaps the most agressive in bringing down its birth rate. We all know about its one child policy. But the Chinese found that introducing television to rural communities, often using small generators to supply just enough electricity for the machine to function, did more to lower birth rates than any other program.
As for Afghanistan, I suggest reading my blog on the matter. I said some months ago that it appeared that the best outcome, given the Obama administration’s policy, would be, for the “Taliban to regain control with a front man dressed in traditional garb.” Looks like my prediction is coming true.
Leo,
Thank you for the follow-up comment, but it is not exactly relevant to the discussion of birthcontrol and Peace Corps, which was the topic. I was not sure if you were joking or not. The information about the introduction of TV into villages is really nteresting. However, the Chinese government has a one child policy and aggressively acts to impose that policy
.The situation I was describing is almost the mirror reverse. That is one where the government/religious institution has a ridgid policy of opposing any education about family planning or distributing any birth control materials. And, Volunteers. in that country, encounter women who desperately want to control their families and ask the Volunteer for help. That is the moral and political dilemna.
As for your observtion that the best thing would be for the
“Taliban to regain control with a front man dressed in traditional garb.”
what would be the consequence for women’s rights? My assumption is that it would not be a good thing, but I would welcome your opinion.
Joey
Actually I said in my original blog that the best the Obama team can hope for under the present policy is for the “Taliban to return to power with a front man dressed in traditional garb.” In fact this is what is being proposed now. Given their past performance as well as their current statements I would see the Taliban returning to a program of surpressing women’s rights. Not a happy picture.
On my visit to Afghanistan many years ago I noted the “burka” or gown that covered a woman from head to ankle with a lattice like face opening. The curious thing was that the garb left the woman’s ankles exposed which in some societies is considered to be provocative.
I want us out of Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban in 1991 in a matter of a few days without any loss of American lives. We did it by paying one gang of thugs to knock out the other that happened to be in power. We can always do this again if necessary. Our mistake in Afghanistan, and in Iraq as well, has been staying to “build a new democracy.” Punch them hard as we did in the first Gulf War and leave,
Joey
You no doubt know that Islam discourages birth control and probably has more luck in keeping its followers in line on this count than does the Catholic Church.
Leo, There are really two different scenarios in regard to birth control and government policy. Both may have involved Peace Corps Volunteers. That history could really be important.
The first situation, I think, has to do with macro-economics and development. Here, a governmental goal might be to reduce the rate of population growth, either by persuation or by coercion. I presume that Volunteers would never be involved with any coercive measures, but could well be involved with family planning education, including changing attiudes towards large families. I understand that the birth rate goes down when women are educated, not necessarily in family planning, but in literacy, etc. I wil add tv in the villages as another inducement! Also, I understand that micro loan programs for women help them to better control the size of their families.
The second situation is the one I encountered. Women facing high infant mortality rates within their own families, want to limit the number of children they have for both the health of the mother and the health of existing children. The problem arises when government and/or religious instiutions forbid family planning.
Sanctions against women in both situations can be brutal.
Joey
I agree totally with your two scenarios and that sanctions are brutal. I would appreciate your take on the sanctions in the Islam faith against birth control.
Leo,
I don’t know what those sanctions might be. Based on the brutality directed at women, in some situations, who violate dress codes or behavioral codes, I assume it could be horrible.
Hi David,
We were Peace Corps volunteers at a National Convention Baptist school in Liberia 1962-64 and others in our group also taught at mission schools. You can read a bit about our story in the Postscript to our book Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers to be published in March 2011 by University Press of Kentucky in its oral history series. We quote from your book in our book and note its cover picture is at the bottom of the page on our book in the spring 2011 catalogue.
Angene and Jack Wilson
Since volunteers quibble so much about who’s country program was the most important, I prepared lists and graphes in my new book (Peace Corps Chronology; 1961-2010) which list the real and relative number of volunteers by region and country. More volunteers have served the Philippines than any other (8,369). In second place is Ecuador and third place Honduras. So, even if they pulled volunteers out of the Philippines outback for a time, the PC never left the country. It has been literally our most important host.
Oh, I forgot! The book will be released by X-mas and available on Amazon.com in hardback ($23), trade paperback ($13) and e-book ($9). Just type in the title- Peace Corps Chronology; 1961-2010 or my name- Lawrence F. Lihosit. The Peace Corps itself has changed a bit- it’s top heavy, slower than it used to be (15.5 months from application to arriving in country for training), less training, and much more violent crime against volunteers for which Washington has responded by hiring statisticians and guards for their country offices even though attacks usually occur on young single women in remote villages who are assigned alone. Interesting.
Angene and Jack, Yes I did see in the UP of KY spring announcement that we had another Peace Corps book on the way, and one devoted to KY! I can only claim Kentucky status for the past 22 years, but I’m eagerly awaiting your book.
Isn’t if awful the time from final edit to having a book actually fo sale?
I found great satisfaction in writing my book, and it continues to make my day when someone says “I read it.”
I’ll be your first customer.
And to my friend Lorenzo I say, bring it on! (The rest of you should buy the book!)
David,
You should come to Lexington for the book launch which will be at the Central Library Friday 5:30-7:30 February 25 as part of exhibit on Peace Corps’ 50 years. And/or we could come to Owensboro to do a book event at one of the colleges or ? Sometime in mid/late March or April? Maybe we could bring Rona Roberts, one of your volunteers — she’s one of our Six Volunteers in Five Decades, a section which begins each chapter. We’re trying to do events around KY for the 50th and let folks who are in the book be the readers.
Cheers! Angene