The Trouble With the Peace Corps

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  04.23.08 | 1:54 PM ET

“Today, the Peace Corps remains a Peter Pan organization, afraid to grow up, yet also afraid to question the thinking of its founding fathers,” writes former Peace Corps country director Robert L. Strauss in Foreign Policy.



3 Comments for The Trouble With the Peace Corps

John M. Edwards 04.23.08 | 4:05 PM ET

Hi Jim;

Abroad I’ve noticed that Peace Corp Worker is slang for “spy.”

Which is amusing enough.

But I met a disgruntled former Peace Corp Worker who said she spent 2 years in Africa trying to teach local villagers how to grow rice—when they already had been doing a crackup job at it for, oh I don’t know, centuries at least.

I secretly suspected she would have rather been laying on the beach in the Hamptons, slathered with baby oil.

Chris Winters 04.23.08 | 5:32 PM ET

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer (we don’t use “Worker”) myself, I’m a bit sensitive to the notion that we’re somehow similar to spies—whoever says that either is unfamiliar with the Peace Corps and how it functions or they don’t care. (Or they’re in one of those few countries where, early on, the intelligence community did manage to infiltrate the local Peace Corps contingencies before they got the boot.) The Peace Corps goes to a great extent to remove itself from all government/diplomatic influence, especially with regard to intelligence. In my group, one person was packed off back to the U.S. for shooting his mouth off in public about how we were just a CIA front. Time in-country for him: four weeks. Public policy types who advocate that the Peace Corps be used for intelligence gathering usually get slapped down pretty quickly.
Which doesn’t dismiss Strauss’ concerns. He’s right on a number of issues, including (especially) the schizoid mission of the Peace Corps; we were told as much that we’re not there to show the locals how to live, and yet we’re expected by the various “metrics” (i.e. surveys) they use in evaluating us to do just that… Peace Corps service is truly life-changing, often good for the volunteers, sometimes for the host country as well, but its impact is mostly measurable only on the local level. To expect it to do more would require it become a more conventional development agency, which I don’t think anyone truly wants, as it would remove what is truly a unique from a special program.

Alex 04.23.08 | 6:02 PM ET

Very interesting. Most of the Peace Corps volunteers I’ve met joined hoping to change the world and found themselves quickly disillusioned. But what I wonder is whether the Peace Corps could still be a worthwhile experience for all involved if volunteers went in with lesser expectations…?

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