A Little Spare Time from Work

I'm literaly months behind the ball on this one. But since I was in a feverish writing mood this weekend, I thought that it was more than about time to finally wrap up my response to Robert Strauss's diatribe but young Peace Corps volunteers. First, is the poop sandwich of an article that he wrote, second is mine. My views don't reflect the Peace Corps' blah blah blah.

Too Many Innocents Abroad
by Robert L Strauss
Published: January 9, 2008
The New York Times

THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps’ country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.

However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.

This wasn’t the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it’s much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.

In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad’s backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma’s cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.

For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.

Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.

This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.

The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.

Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.


For all of Mr. Strauss’ article’s rhetorical merits – he does present a convincing, albeit limited argument, his article contains one glaring flaw: sheer ignorance. Mr. Strauss has absolutely no understanding of the Peace Corps and has especially no understanding of the individual volunteer experience. How this can be the case with a former country director is entirely beyond me. Then again, Mr. Strauss’ general tone doesn’t exactly convey a willingness to be completely involved in the lives of the volunteers that he oversaw. Peace Corps Volunteers are much more than “fussy innocents with nothing more than a liberal arts degree.” Mr. Strauss’ blatant unwillingness to acknowledge this shows incredible disrespect to the thousands of men and women who have sacrificed two years of their lives in hopes of spreading peace and friendship through the underdeveloped world. Seriously, who the hell has the gall to piss on Peace Corps Volunteers?

In general, Mr. Strauss’ intentions are good; he wishes to improve the effectiveness of the Peace Corps. He plans to accomplish this by encouraging the recruitment of older volunteers while at the same time decreasing the number of younger volunteers in the field. Older volunteers, those holy grails of the baby boomer generation, are a largely untapped resource; one that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter has already proposed catering towards. By 2010, the Peace Corps hopes that 15% of each recruiting class will be comprised of “more experienced” volunteers. But unlike Mr. Strauss’ proposal, the Peace Corps plans to do this while doubling the number of current volunteers in the field. Mr. Strauss’ proposed reforms would hobble the Peace Corps. The voicing of his opinion only demonstrates public ignorance towards the daily workings of the Peace Corps and its overall goals as an organization.

In relation to the strength of the myth that Peace Corps holds within the general American consciousness, actual knowledge of Peace Corps service in America is shockingly limited. This is the result of few processes. Few Americans have never heard of the Peace Corps, yet at the same time, the number of returned volunteers is very small, barely 190,000 over a span of 40 years. In and of itself, this is a recipe for substantial myth making. The majority of Americans still believe that Peace Corps volunteers are doing the exact same thing that the highly publicized first groups of volunteers were doing in the sixties. This is clearly evinced by the overwhelming number of volunteers who, during the first few months of service, are overwhelmed because “they never imagined the Peace Corps to be like this” (The Europe, Mediterranean, and Asia region, generally the most developed group countries to still host Peace Corps Volunteers, has the highest attrition rate in the Peace Corps for this very reason). Furthermore, the vast majority of “work” within the Peace Corps is very unglamorous. Few people care to hear about how a volunteer went to work everyday, did they job as well as they could, even if that entailed killing a lot of time, and then went right back home. Outside of only a handful of “flash” projects existing in each country, most volunteer work is just that: showing up, trying hard, building connections with coworkers.

But even if the number of volunteers was greatly increased – into the millions that John F Kennedy imagined by this time when he originally signed the Peace Corps act, and the nature of their service was better disseminated, this would not do much to alleviate the general problem. Peace Corps service is, for better or worse, a highly individualized experience, varying not only between decades, service fields and regions, but also differing incredibly from volunteer to volunteer serving in the same country and field at the exact same time. In general, living standards and economic resources throughout the developing world vary wildly from one town to the next. It shouldn’t be surprising then that living in the developing world for an extended period of time would yield a myriad of contrasting, and often contradictory, experiences.

To risk the danger of skirting generalization, here’s a rough description of life in the 21st century Peace Corps in a highly developed country like Kazakhstan. While life here is certainly less comfortable than the traditional Western standard, the living conditions are far from unmanageable. The majority of volunteers have access to relatively normal amenities, and when they don’t it is usually the more result of Peace Corps’ expectation that volunteers live modestly within their communities than actual lacking infrastructure. That’s not to say that many volunteers face intense physical hardship, after all the weather here often touches negative 40 degrees below zero, but the number of those that do is dwindling rapidly as this country quickly modernizes.

Professionally, Peace Corps volunteers aren’t exactly the pioneers they once were as much as they are now professional consultants. In the Peace Corps’ largest field of service in Kazakhstan, education, a volunteer’s main duty is to increase the teaching capacity of local teachers. Most prominently, volunteers do this simply through exposure. Considering that, for many Kazakhstanis, meeting a volunteer might be the first time they’ve ever seen an American, having a native English speaker in the classroom, and having to interact with this native speaker on a daily basis, is immensely beneficial for local teachers. The effect on an individual volunteer on a classroom is universal. It’s obvious, when meeting a local teacher, whether they’ve worked with a volunteer before or not; they speak English substantially better than anyone else around them. Beyond simple exposure, Peace Corps volunteers typically offer methodological approaches that local teachers have never been exposed to. Particularly in former Soviet countries, education systems throughout the developing world often rely on outdated models of education that can be easily improved with the elimination of a few bad habits. Peace Corps volunteers also have access to resources that their local counterparts don’t, such as teaching materials, technological fluency, and grants.

The Peace Corps is unique, among all service organizations in the United States, in the length of time that all volunteers are required to serve in the field. Cut any way, 27 months is a very long time to sacrifice for almost no material return. But it’s vital to the overall success of service that volunteers remain in country for this long, because, as Mr. Strauss so perfunctorily points out, volunteers aren’t especially good at their jobs upon arrival. Why anyone would assume otherwise, even when three intensive months of training are factored in, is absolutely ludicrous. Even with a substantial background in their field, which the majority of volunteers don’t even have, Peace Corps volunteers are confronted from day one with immense language and cultural challenges. Most volunteers report that they don’t feel comfortable in their job, or particularly effective, until nearly a year into their service.

What’s even more ludicrous on Mr. Strauss’ part, though, is his neglect of the fact that volunteers rapidly improve both their abilities to do their jobs and their understanding of the language and (once unfamiliar) culture around them. Although Mr. Strauss condemns the Peace Corps’ focus on integration when determining a volunteer’s effectiveness during service, integration is in fact the key factor in determining a volunteer’s effectiveness. At the end of service, volunteers possess a unique, hard-earned expertise on the community they live in, having experienced from both the out and inside. Unfortunately, spending time, meeting locals, making friends, reflecting on the surrounding situation is the only route to obtain this kind of knowledge. Hopefully, the volunteer acquired this expertise with enough time left in their service to create substantial, lasting benefits before they have to leave.

The truth of it all is that individually, the majority Peace Corps volunteers do not have incredible impacts on their communities. Even the best stories of service in Peace Corps lore - a woman who started a credit union that eventually transformed an entire community or a young man that taught a community to plant watermelon and become the biggest watermelon producer in the region, illustrate change that was started by the volunteer, but took decades to fully develop. In my opinion, truly great volunteers create a significant impact on only a handful of people, but this effect transforms them (and eventually the people around them) for the rest of their lives. For English teachers, it may be sending a student to America or encouraging a counterpart to use only English in the classroom. Taken case by case, this may not seem like much. But there are over 5,000 volunteers serving around the world right now, and enough of these small pools of change add up to something truly significant over time.

The greatest of an idea is often the result of its simplicity, and in this regard, the Peace Corps is not unique. While it is true that cost of living is increasing globally, and the American economy is significantly slowing down, the Peace Corps remains a remarkably inexpensive organization to manage. All told, Peace Corps uses less than one percent of the overall foreign policy budget for the State Department. Considering that all volunteers live with host families for a significant portion of service, and that many volunteers stay with families throughout, it’s very inexpensive to keep a volunteer in the field. All told, I make around 350 dollars month, and as a volunteer in Kazakhstan I’m one of the best paid volunteers in the world. While it is important to increase volunteer accountability and have more specific project plans and goals as the Peace Corps grows into the 21st century, the Peace Corps’ three underlying goals – supplying manpower, increasing exposure of America and American values, and making Americans more aware of the rest of the world – are eternal.

But perhaps most importantly, Strauss completely ignores the effect that Peace Corps service has on a young person; how service can transform them and create a more responsible, publicly active individual. Returned volunteers constantly talk about the forging of values, growth of character, public awareness, and development of survival skills that only the Peace Corps offers. If we are to continue using the Peace Corps as not only a tool for international development, but also for the further strengthening of America after service, it makes only sense to continue to send as many young people abroad as possible.