Another response

Tyler McNish, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala, writes in:

 

Based on my own observations, I think your criticisms are right on point. However, with respect to the root causes of the shortcoming you correctly diagnose, I think you over-emphasize the extent to which un-motivated, inexperienced, or low-aptitude volunteers are to blame for Peace Corps’ shortcomings. I think the real problem is the way those volunteers are utilized by Peace Corps as an organization.

 

There are many organizations in the United States that are able to take fresh-out-of-college employees of modest talents and harness them to tasks in a way that creates value for the organization.  How? By directing their work. A good organization creates an environment where knowledge flows from experienced employees to less-experienced employees. Similarly, the experience of the older employees is "leveraged" by the relatively cheap younger employees.  With this insight in mind, I think your argument would be strengthed by more explicitly recognizing the following two points.

 

First, we should lament that Peace Corps insists on being an "anti-organization," where inadequate direction of entry-level employees (i.e. volunteers) and reinvention of the wheel are counted as virtues. We have done ourselves a disservice by canonizing "The Peace Corps Experience," in which a young volunteer is inspired to question his beliefs and his place in the world by confronting the challenge of working in a foreign environment….  Personally, I found my own Peace Corps experience so intoxicating and rewarding in large part because of the extent to which I was forced to rely on myself.  However, I can’t deny that my work would have been a lot more beneficial to Guatemala if it had been better directed. By casting cultural adaptation as an end in itself rather than a means to doing effective development work, we have made Peace Corps an experience that is valuable to volunteers personally but not to the country in which they work.  I think this is a sacred cow that we have to challenge along with what you delightfully call "the myth of immaculate conception."

 

Second, change has to come from Peace Corps staff, not from volunteers.  The country director I worked under had two priorities for her organization: (1) improving safety & security and (2) rooting out what she called "the Peace Corps party subculture."  She didn’t seem to care what I was doing as long as I was (1) in site and (2) sober.  That I might be sober and in site, but agonizing over how to be more effective in my work and hungry for more support from Peace Corps staff appeared to be of no interest to her. Worse, her approach to her second goal was to terminate volunteers she thought were "bad apples" who indoctrinated new volunteers into the "subculture."  Twelve volunteers were sent home during my two years; the rationale in every case was not that they weren’t working, but that they were endangering themselves through their "party" behavior.  I think that she missed the true root cause of the problem–that Peace Corps staff failed to engage volunteers in their work. More specifically, they consistently failed to put them in positions where there work was hard enough to keep them interested but not so hard that the volunteers gave up and wrote off their two years as a travel experience.

 

I recognize that these complaints are specific to the Peace Corps country in which I worked, and that other Peace Corps missions do take more of an interest in volunteers’ work. Nevertheless, I detect a little of the "bad apples" thinking in your article. Therefore, I would ask you to consider the following: Are the bad apples the main problem, or are they a distraction from the main problem?  How can we expect that PCVs treat their two years as more than a travel/cultural experience when PC doesn’t set them up to do good, relevant development work and doesn’t care whether they succeed in their work or not? And how can we say that Peace Corps needs more talented volunteers when the talented volunteers it does attract are under-utilized?  Volunteers are the raw material; staff are the artisans. We shouldn’t blame the raw material if the finished work doesn’t come out right.