Conclusion and Personal Reflections
*Bonus Post**
Continued from previous posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3|
This is part 4.
I wanted to share the last part of my Major Paper, which is a bit different because it actually shares my own personal reflections based on everything I wrote about.
We live in a time that everything is measured with statistics and figures, but not all impacts can be measured in that way. What I believe many international organizations and most host countries appreciate Peace Corps volunteers for is their ability to go into their communities and serve, without any preconceived plan about what they think the community needs. Although they may join the Peace Corps with a certain ideal, when they reach their country of service this is usually abandoned. As they go through training they soon begin to realize that an approach where they go into their communities with their biases will not work. In fact Peace Corps volunteers are trained extensively on community cooperation and doing projects with the community. Volunteers enter their communities and learn what is needed by integrating for two years. This trait of Peace Corps volunteers is seen as unique in the international field. I believe that while a lot of development workers who work for NGOs or other government agencies go into villages to deliver mosquito nets, medications and more, they are rarely found living in the community, learning the local languages, eating the local cuisine and exchanging culture. This is the perspective that volunteers bring back to the U.S.; their community experiences, experiences of the world that most Americans cannot obtain from just listening to the radio, reading the news or watching television.
As Wofford (1980) noted, “The one constant throughout the Peace Corps’ history has been the work of the Volunteers. Once overseas, they are virtually immune to the political vagaries and leadership changes in Washington” (preface). Therein lays the heart of most Peace Corps volunteer work. As a Peace Corps volunteer from 2010 to 2012, I saw that many volunteers once overseas feel untouchable by the bureaucracy that goes on in the agency. Most are simply motivated by the feeling of wanting to help the village, town or city, family or whoever they are working with and wherever they are working. Even if volunteers went with a preconceived notion of what they wanted to do, just a month in their posts will open their eyes to the realities of their situation. Some have questioned the “good hearted” nature of the volunteers and state that they are merely there to serve themselves and get what they want out of the experience. I say that there are many other ways to feel good about yourself without leaving your country to move away for two years to (sometimes) remote locations in order to teach school children, help farmers, train business owners and more.
Just as in the 1960s, volunteers today recognize that “love” is not enough, “to change the harsh conditions of poverty, yet only an emotional willingness to share in that suffering persuaded many volunteers to keep getting up for work every day” (Cobbs 1998: 9). Even though many question this “all you need is love” mentality, I believe that is a vital part of the work that volunteers do. Many would not have the motivation or the ambition to endure the harsh conditions that they do if they did not truly believe in helping or if they did not love what they were doing. Yet, because times have changed and Peace Corps is not the only American or international volunteer organization operating internationally, it has to change and modify the way it operates in order to compete. To do this it needs to adopt a new way to recruit as one of its central goals and with a newer model it could draw the attention of the best volunteers. It seems that the agency does recognize this and has placed this in its strategic approach for the future.
Not long after the Peace Corps was created, William Haddad, the Associate Director, convinced Sargent Shriver to create an evaluation division. The results from the evaluation were enlightening, with major problems in a few countries. For example “only fifteen of the fifty-nine Volunteers” posted in Pakistan were given actual jobs. The evaluators expressed that it was “painful to see the idealism of the Volunteers squandered as they sat there with nothing to do.” In Somalia, the problem was with a director who detested the volunteers and called them “crybabies” (Meisler 2011: 45–46). This evaluation process is what is needed in such an agency and something that the Peace Corps continues to do and what I believe contributes to its success and the fact that it has lasted this long. When Peace Corps director Aaron Williams was appointed Peace Corps director by President Obama, he declared three goals for the Peace Corps:
1. Measured, targeted growth by entering new countries and by expanding successful projects;
2. Creation of an office of innovation to look into new approaches like partnerships with international humanitarian organizations overseas;
3. An increased effort to help Americans understand the Third World (Meisler 2011: 215).
This seems like a step in the right direction; less focus on the number of volunteers and more on their projects. Despite this, one of the main aspects of the director’s career that concerned volunteers, staff, and RPCVS was “his strong association with USAID” (Meisler 2011: 215). USAID’s web site even states that part of its goal is “furthering America’s foreign policy interests” and during George W. Bush’s administration USAID became a part of the State Department (Meisler 2011: 215).
The Peace Corps’ Comprehensive Agency Assessment states that the original goals are no longer sufficient for the agency’s future direction since, “Americans hold the Peace Corps accountable for using scarce resources in the most effective ways possible” (Peace Corps 2010: 1–2). This has not been the case from my experience or from my analysis of the Peace Corps budget. Most of the funds allocated to the Peace Corps stay in the U.S. to run the various Peace Corps offices in the U.S. (see Appendices). The funds that finally make it to each regional post are so small it is a surprise that volunteers are even able to earn about $200 a month, as I did in Guinea. The agency acknowledges that it, “needs to maximize its impact, and doing so requires a rigorous decision-making process to optimize resource allocation, and an active monitoring and evaluation function that measures progress and strengthens management decisions” (Peace Corps 2010: 1–2). I definitely agree with this because the Peace Corps has one of the smallest budgets in the federal government (McCarron 2000).
The Peace Corps annual report (2011) indicates that:
The main focus of volunteer activities is to build individual capacities so community members (students, farmers, clients served by a nongovernmental organization (NGO) or others) are empowered to improve their own quality of life (Peace Corps annual report 2011: 5).
Despite such goals, two-thirds of volunteer assignments focus on education and health (see Figure 6). One of the central programs in the formative days of the Peace Corps was teaching in Africa, so this program focus has not changed (Meisler 2011: 50). Moreover, the Peace Corps is now allocating few resources to the poorest countries.
Although there will be resistance that the agency should be independent and autonomous and some may argue it should not be used as an instrument of U.S. “soft power,” being used in this way does serve some good and can be used to the agency’s advantage, especially when it comes to demanding more funds from the government. It is probably one of the few agencies of the government actively providing the U.S. a positive image. During times of war, especially, whether the U.S. is involved directly or indirectly, there are great misperceptions of the U.S. and having volunteers in the field may help to counter these perceptions.
To create a more balanced idea of what the United States is, just as the second goal of the Peace Corps states, the United States needs to be less reliant on hard power. As Sharif Shuja (2008: 18) points out, the U.S.’ “inconsistent unilateral actions, using hard power” has “both caused distrust by allies and increased suspicions by many nations who believe that the United States masks evil goals behind the rhetoric of idealism.” Shuja has argued that “There is an urgent need for the US to evolve and develop an overall foreign policy which has coherent principles and acknowledges the merits of soft power” (2008: 18). The Peace Corps is a great example of that quiet agency that promotes U.S. around the world.
Reductions in Peace Corps funding has been an issue during much of the agency’s history and support and effort by certain administrations has been small. Shuja (2008: 20) stated that “there is currently no coherent public diplomacy strategy to communicate American values and mould public opinion worldwide.” There is the Peace Corps, but instead of being used in a positive way, it has suffered for many years by certain administrations to the point that many do not even know the agency exists. There is recognition by many that there needs to be a much better use of soft power. For example Defense Secretary, Robert Gates “called for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian efforts to project US soft power globally, through diplomacy, foreign aid and public relations.” He said:
We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian instruments of national security -diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstructions and development…. I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power (Shuja 2008: 21).
The Peace Corps thus has progressed, but has also had some setbacks. Much of the original message delivered by Kennedy at Ann Arbor was not taken into consideration by later presidential administrations and officials. On the other hand though, the spirit of the volunteers continues on and clashes with that of the officials frequently. While certain congressmen are obsessed with the quantity and just see the Peace Corps as a tool to put a good “face” on for the world, many volunteers despise this orientation.
Even during my recent service from 2010 to 2012 I noticed the same focus on quantity over anything else. Instead of focusing on the amount of volunteers the staff could focus more on better training and programs. In my experience, volunteers complained about the lack of support that they received, both financially and otherwise. The volunteers wondered how the Peace Corps country was receiving more volunteers and spending money on training new volunteers, while the old volunteers were not receiving enough support. Many volunteers that have been in country for more than six months feel like older siblings when a new baby arrives in a family. They receive less attention and believe that the staff is more concerned about the agency’s image rather than focusing on the programs and projects that volunteers are doing.
What statements that refer to the “inexperience” of volunteers misunderstand is that most volunteers are educated individuals, with a lot of experience volunteering and usually, with at least a Bachelors degree in the sector to which they are assigned. While some Congressmen and others may question their ability to make any impact, it is good to recall Meisler’s statement again, that the Peace Corps work cannot be measured in the same way that other efforts can be assessed, with statistics and numbers. Though the Peace Corps’ original mission has never been officially rewritten, the organization’s goals and implementation strategies have changed with different presidential administrations. As U.S. foreign policy has shifted, especially after the Cold War, the relevance and the impact of the Peace Corps has been questioned by presidents, politicians, former Peace Corps volunteers, and other organizations.
References
- Cobbs, Hoffman Elizabeth. 1998. All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
- McCarron, Kevin M. 2000. “Job Corps, AmeriCorps, and Peace Corps: An Overview.” Occupational Outlook Quarterly. pp.18–24.
- Meisler, Stanley. 2011. When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years. N.p.: Beacon.
- Peace Corps website: http://www.peacecorps.gov/about/history/decades/1960/.
- Shuja, Sharif. 2008. “Why America cannot ignore soft power.” Contemporary Review: Spring 2008, Vol. 290 Issue 1688, p16.
