New York Times Op-ed on Peace Corps

Something to think about:

New York Times
January 9, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Too Many Innocents Abroad
By ROBERT L. STRAUSS
Antananarivo, Madagascar

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.

Letters to the Editor:

Who Helps Whom in the Peace Corps?

To the Editor:

In “Too Many Innocents Abroad” (Op-Ed, Jan. 9), Robert L. Strauss criticizes the Peace Corps, saying that often its “young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.”

The agency, he says, “neglects its customers.” In fact, volunteers are trained to integrate into their host communities and listen carefully.

As a volunteer, I spent more than a year in direct dialogue with my Chinese counterparts before helping to set up a weekend program for children. My “customers” — peasant farmers and their children — were immensely grateful.

Mr. Strauss also suggests that the Peace Corps is satisfied if “volunteers are enjoying themselves.” This is, quite frankly, an insult to those who work tirelessly — at great sacrifice and, at times, with little enjoyment — to fulfill their missions.

In applying the metrics of management consulting to the Peace Corps, Mr. Strauss ignores the essence of this marvelous organization: its humanity.

If he wants to deal with “customers,” his matrix for analysis makes sense. The Peace Corps, however, deals with people.

Michael Levy
Northampton, Mass., Jan. 9, 2008

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To the Editor:

I served in Cameroon as just the kind of agricultural volunteer Robert L. Strauss mentions. As a 20-year-old journalism graduate, I’d grown nary a houseplant before trying to teach farmers how to improve their crops.

The audacity of my arrogance in assuming that this time abroad would do Cameroon any good was apparent on Day 1. I lasted just five months before returning home, frustrated, confused and annoyed that I had put so much thought into a system that failed both the host country and a volunteer with the best of intentions.

The Peace Corps is a great program in true need of reorganization.

Kelli M. Donley
Tempe, Ariz., Jan. 9, 2008

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To the Editor:

My wife and I were Peace Corps volunteers in India in the 1960s. Since becoming director, I have seen volunteers in action in more than 30 countries, including Cameroon. The quality of the volunteer experience has not changed, nor has the quality of the volunteers who serve. The Peace Corps remains true to President John F. Kennedy’s vision articulated in 1961.

The Peace Corps recruits the best and brightest, and only one out of every three applicants becomes a volunteer. Volunteers provide trained skills at the grass-roots level and promote a better understanding of Americans and our culture. Government officials throughout the world praise the work of volunteers, and the list of countries requesting new programs continues to grow.

The agency’s success is more than anecdotal. Ninety-one percent of volunteers say they feel integrated into their communities, and we have created evaluation plans to better quantify the volunteers’ impact.

We can all be proud of the volunteers serving today. I encourage Americans of all ages and backgrounds to consider serving.

Ronald A. Tschetter
Peace Corps Director
Washington, Jan. 9, 2008

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To the Editor:

In 2000, when I was a 23-year-old straight out of graduate school, I had very little to offer the Senegalese village I was sent to by the Peace Corps.

Sure, I was the only one in my village with a college degree, but I was in no position to tell the villagers how to run their businesses. Sure, I taught them a little about accounting and some basic math, but my real value was being one extra person to hold a shovel.

The reality was that I was the one who learned the most and got the most from the experience. The Peace Corps is really more of a cultural-exchange program than an international development organization.

Benjamin Y. Clark
Athens, Ga., Jan. 9, 2008

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To the Editor:

Today, a friend and fellow returned Peace Corps volunteer is being buried in Orchard Park, N.Y. He was murdered while working to end the violence in Sudan.

John Granville was nothing like the ill-prepared young people Robert L. Strauss describes. During his Peace Corps service in Cameroon from 1997 to 1999, he was so successful and well loved by the community that he was given an honorary title by the chief of the village.

He returned to Cameroon as a Fulbright scholar to research culturally appropriate approaches to H.I.V. prevention. When I visited him that year, we took many walks through “his” village. It could take hours — every few houses or so, neighbors waved us over to exchange greetings and news. He was welcomed because he understood something about living and working internationally that Mr. Strauss seems not to have grasped — the value of human relationships and the importance of being willing to learn.

The Peace Corps is not just about what “fresh out of college” Americans can teach citizens of other countries. It is an opportunity for Americans to prove to the world that hubris is not the defining characteristic of our country.

While Mr. Strauss worries about how America can fix other nations, former Peace Corps volunteers like me will be putting to good use the skills we learned during our service. We will be listening, learning and sharing anywhere in the world we’re still welcome.

Karen Greiner
Athens, Ohio, Jan. 9, 2008

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To the Editor:

Maybe Robert L. Strauss should talk to the average person in the countries the Peace Corps serves. In my work outside the United States, I am always surprised when people ask me questions about things that are taken for granted by Americans.

Why, I’ve been asked, do Americans wear shoes in their houses? What is the Dow Jones (or who is Dow Jones and why is he average)? And is root beer alcoholic?

The value of the Peace Corps is that people in other countries who may never have seen a foreigner are happy for the opportunity to ask questions directly to an American.

Robert Wong
Khartoum, Sudan, Jan. 9, 2008

The writer is deputy political counselor at the United States Embassy in Khartoum.

My response:

I think that Robert L. Strauss greatly underestimates the young people of our time. It's true, volunteers such as he described "fresh-out-of-college" do exist and I fit nicely into that category. But, to label us all as "lacking maturity and professional experience" is a naive generalization at best.

College graduates these days have much more to offer than simply a degree in their chosen fields. Many universities require students to gain work or volunteer experience before graduation. Graduating from college no longer promises a good-paying job. Graduates are finding more employers are looking for something extra in addition to a college degree. Every year, graduates become more competitive as they add more to their resumes in hopes of landing a job.

There's something else that volunteers of today can offer that volunteers of Kennedy's 1961 could not. Diversity. I'm guessing the demographics of volunteers serving in 1961 were fairly uniform. Volunteers today are constantly trying to disprove the stereotype that all Americans are white. The volunteers of the 21st century physically look a lot different then the original volunteers of 1961.

Although I, too, agree with the Peace Corps' initiative to increase its over-50 crowd, there is something to be said for young volunteers. We're fresh, we're enthusiastic, we're willing to take risks, and most importantly, we're eager to find an outlet to meaningfully serve.

-Jenny