I HAVE BEEN EMPLOYED BY THE PEACE CORPS for more than three years, first as an overseas staff member, then as an evaluator of the Peace Corps’ overseas programs. During this time I have naturally formed some notions as to what the real work of the Peace Corps is. I do not mean the breakdown as between teaching, agriculture, public health and so on. I mean the character of the work underlying all these assignments, for there is a common element that I have observed overseas in all types of Peace Corps jobs when performed well. What I am describing is a personal view. My interest in the work of the Peace Corps is, if anything, stronger now than it was when I came to the organization in the first year of existence; but it is a different kind of interest.
When I came to the Peace Corps I came attracted by an idea. Now that idea has become a demonstrated reality. What interests me now is effectiveness. I think most who have worked with the Peace Corps share my shift in emphasis.
The Peace Corps is important and has relevance only so long as it is effective in assisting the development of those nations which have requested its help. This is the criterion by which the Peace Corps will eventually be judged, not only by the host countries, but by the Americans who agree to volunteer their services for two years.
The Developing World
What is meant by development assistance? In the nineteenth century, one gets the feeling that all too much of the assistance being rendered those parts of the world that we now call “developing” was rationalized as assistance to bring them qualities of mind and spirit which, it was felt, would result in their eventual ennoblement. Today, with the vast majority of those areas recently freed from colonial rule, many people feel that we have no business messing with their qualities of mind and spirit but instead must assist them in every way possible to overcome their problems of hunger, sickness, poverty, ignorance and fear. There are, in fact, few people who still believe that development can occur as a result of the single-handed efforts of outsiders. More and more people are coming to see that each nation and ethnic grouping must take a sizeable, even a dominant, role in its own development if any significant change is to take place. It is my view of development assistance that it must be aimed at those basic problems — hunger, sickness, poverty, ignorance and fear — and leave the qualities of mind and spirit to the peoples who must eventually live with them. By discovering solutions of those hard problems — not global solutions, but solutions that are appropriate to each local situation in which those problem are the agonizing facts of life — the people that we are trying to help will learn the process through which problems are solved. The attitudes and values thus formed will be their values, their attitudes, and will be a source of increasing self-esteem.
Peace Corps Reality
The foregoing is the substance of the idea that has become a reality in the Peace Corps. But how does one go about solving those problems of low agricultural productivity, poor distribution of what is produced, low gross national product, lack of foreign monetary reserves, non-existent public health measures, school systems that do not reach out to the mass of the population with anything like an educational program geared to the needs of the people, and patchworks of divided, suspicious communities unable to unite for collective action so as to alleviate the personal, local and national insecurity which increasingly threatens the future of civilization? Does one send American food and dollars, transported in American planes and ships, parachuted on isolated villages? Does one supply the doctors and nurses to set up and run a health establishment? Does one build and staff a school system with American money and teachers? Does one set up a political administration patterned along lines that Americans think to be workable? These solutions, which smack more of disaster relief than development, have been tried singly or in various combinations and have not worked in the past, and show no sign of working in the future. Colonialism, whether of the dollar-plus-food variety or by political administration, is also a dead letter, whether for benign or sinister purposes.
Development assistance, to have any effect at all, must work at a much more basic level, and it must involve at every turn the people who are receiving it. And this brings me to a consideration of what I have called the “real” work of the Peace Corps. It does no good to send an agronomist overseas to tell people what crops they should be planting. Any agriculturist, to be effective must go beyond the immediate problems of technology and study why it is that people farm the way they do, and what are the religious, economic and social characteristics that make them resist vaccination of their herds and furrow irrigation of their crops. Any nurse or doctor, to be effective, must learn what local health practices are being used, and what is their utility for the whole man — as well as the whole complex of human forces that go to make up people’s attitudes toward life and death. A teacher, to be effective, must know the home life of his students, and he must not only concern himself with matters of teaching technique, but he must examine at every turn the educational needs of the people he is serving in order to help them to acquire wisdom that will be relevant to their own purposes.
The examples of how an agent of development assistance becomes effective could be multiplied many times. But underneath them all lies the need to learn and understand. He must acquire an ability to help the people he is serving to find their own ways to solve their problems, not to show them our way in the sublime and frequently unrealistic faith that it is the only right way. This is the real work of the Peace Corps. It is also the real work of effective development assistance.
Starting from Scratch
Starting nearly from scratch in 1961, the Peace Corps began to find ways of training its Volunteers to be effective. One way has been to make them more sensitive to each other during their training period before going overseas. Through this means, they learn to observe the mechanics of relations between individuals and groups. Upon this base can be built a body of methodology for studying human interrelationships. By the time a Volunteer arrives overseas he can be trained to observe the flow of all resources in a community — how they are procured, how they are distributed and used — and to relate them to the social structure of the people he is working with. But above all, the most important skill a Volunteer learns is the one that helps him to involve the people he is working with in studying themselves so as to achieve an understanding of their own problems.
In this sense the Volunteer becomes a catalyst with every observation he makes, for it is often an observation acquired through discussion with people who are for the first time taking a good look at what they had previously accepted as inevitable. No Volunteer can be effective who does not live closely with the people, nor can he make the grade without being able to communicate with them in their language. That is why the Peace Corps takes no chances — it teaches him the language and assigns him to live and work among the people. These two preconditions of effective work have become more entrenched in Peace Corps programs with every passing year. So has the concept of making the Volunteer a more effective catalyst, or instrument of change.
Making Sense of Development
Looked at this way, development assistance begins to make some sense. It requires the presence of a person — not just advice, commodities and money. This person, whether he be sent to work in a school, a rural clinic, a city slum, or a local or regional council, recognizes his basic job as one of helping people to find out about their problems, and then teaching them the techniques of problem-solving. Learning this job, and applying its techniques overseas, is as challenging and rewarding an enterprise as any American can engage in at the present moment of our country’s history. To engage in it means acquiring intellectual tools that are largely unavailable through any other source in America. It means applying them, often with results that strike right at the heart of the syndrome of dependency and inertia that have consistently nullified efforts to reach the masses of the people in other development assistance programs. It means teaching the techniques of problem-solving to people who desperately need them, people who will welcome the help when it is provided within the framework of their own needs and desires.
This job means developing leadership potential at the grass roots by throwing the prestige, willingness and analytical tools of a visiting foreigner behind those people in the community who appear more eager to involve themselves in change. It means feeding information about resources to the people who can best use it. It means helping people to plan at all levels of society for the more effective use of the human, energy, information and raw material resources that go to make up their environment. It means constantly seeking out people’s opinions, constantly asking questions, constantly feeding information into the various systems which go to make up that nebulous entity we call “community.”
All these aspects of the Peace Corps job can be accomplished by any Volunteer, whether he be working in a school, on an agricultural experiment station, in a department of public works, in slum-based community centers, in a hospital, in a federation of cooperatives, in a firestation project — in short, in any of the many jobs in which Volunteers are now working. The person who makes a success of the Peace Corps is one who is curious, endlessly interested in what is going on about him. He is above all interested in people. The Peace Corps has shown itself capable of taking that kind of person and training him to be effective in development assistance, then assigning him overseas in a place where h can use that interest and training to take the slow, careful, practical steps that are needed to secure peace in a world that badly needs it.
A Whole Generation of Americans
I think it is not extravagant to state that a whole generation of Americans — roughly, those whose conditioning occurred after the Second World War — understand the need for a new approach to development assistance in the have-not world. Their own personal struggles to develop competence and effectiveness have been colored by growing up in an era in which progress does not always seem to go in a forward direction. Their era is one in which nineteenth-century optimism has found its final contradiction in the potential of the human race for complete self-annihilation. These Americans are eager for the intellectual challenge of understanding and using the tools by which competence in problem solving can be created and made a constructive force for peace without coercion.
The Peace Corps was born in a time of contradiction between the values being acquired by American youth and the values being expressed abroad by official American agencies caught in the paradoxes of the Cold War. In 1961, for the first time, an agency of the United States Government established itself in overseas operations with the capability of expressing the diversity of American life — a diversity all too often observable only when one gets down deep into the fabric of life at home. The Peace Corps not only has no official foreign policy to promote; it would be incapable of imposing one upon its Volunteers, who come from a great diversity of backgrounds and who, in any case, did not volunteer their services to be told what to think or say. The Peace Corps has therefore been able to remain an official agency and at the same time to a large extent non-partisan in the Cold War.
A Typical Peace Corps Evening
I once ate supper in Latin America with two Volunteers and a Latin friend of theirs. One Volunteer had been active in liberal activities on his campus in America; the other had been a staunch Young Republican. The two Volunteers got to arguing American politics. The Latin said to me, in an aside, “I’m glad to discover that these two gringos are manly enough to argue about politics with each other. Up to now, they only argued with me!” The discussion waxed and waned, gathering a few participants who happened to drift into the restaurant. “Look, friends,” said our Latin companion, “I’m not a Communist, but if your Marines ever land here I’ll join the Communist guerillas and take to the hills — then I’ll have to shoot you both!” Everybody laughed, and the conversation drifted on to women and futbol, then the Volunteers and their friend said goodbye and hurried off to a meeting of their newly-formed credit co-op.
It was a typical Peace Corps evening — nobody got shot, everybody had his say, nobody agreed, and we all put away a satisfactory dinner. When it was all over, the Volunteers and their friend went off to perform the kind of constructive work which somehow cuts neatly across partisan lines and strikes at the root of basic development problems. When the chips are down, Peace Corps Volunteers do not get shot. People everywhere have quickly realized that the kind of help which brings hope is not easily come by.
The Real Work of the Peace Corps
The things that the Peace Corps has learned about its real work it has learned thanks to its Volunteers. They are the ones who have discovered time after time, place after place, what works and what doesn’t. The common element that emerges out of all their experiences, what I have called the real job of the Peace Corps, has been a voyage of discovery, which we have undertaken with the warnings of the seasoned experts and old hands. The Peace Corps believes it has hit upon something vitally important. Yet it is always the Volunteers who come up with new discoveries as to how we can make the work of development assistance more effective. They will continue to do so for a long time. The Peace Corps must still expend a lot of energy to give Volunteers what they want — a meaningful job overseas — and the countries requesting help what they want — development assistance. But a start has been made, and the Peace Corps still depends for direction and substance on the Americans who volunteer their services for two years.
Little by little, these Americans, the Volunteers, have been increasing their effectiveness in development assistance. Little by little the Peace Corps bureaucracy is learning to systematize those methods by which effectiveness is obtained. I sometimes think the pace is too slow; on the other hand, after having seen some of their year’s crop of Volunteers I realize that the Peace Corps is still getting those men and women who see the grave injustice — and the threat — of underdevelopment and who want to do something practical about it beyond simply raising their voices in protest. The Peace Corps still offers them the chance to become instruments of change. It still offers them an alternative to graduate school. It offers those with intelligence and an interest in people a chance to do something other than become mindlessly rich.
What encourages me most: the Peace Corps is learning to train its people to be effective instruments of change. To acquire that training, and to use that skill for peaceful ends, produces a vocational bias in life which, I should imagine, is not easily found at home in this day of the packaging revolution and the two-ton car. The job overseas is not teaching, digging ditches, planting hybrid corn, healing the sick, building the roads and bridges, running the civil service. The job overseas is to help people find out how change operates in the kinship, the economic, the religious, the political and the associational systems of their community. The job is to find out where and how change can be introduced to mitigate the dehumanizing forces of hunger, sickness, poverty, ignorance and fear. This, in my view, is what constitutes effectiveness; it is what constitutes the real work of the Peace Corps.
Meridan Bennett evaluated several overseas programs in the early days of the Peace Corps, and. with David Hapgood (PC/W Evaluation 1964–66), wrote one of the first books that assessed the work of Volunteers entitled, Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps.