Former volunteer: ‘Strauss is dead right in many respects’

Garner Woodall, a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo from 2000 to 2001, responds:

I hate to say it, but Robert Strauss is dead right in many respects. In fact, when it comes to his point about Peace Corps sending volunteers where they are needed most, this had a lot to do with my leaving early.

I was sent to a village after Peace Corps Togo had conducted a problematic training stage for their Natural Resource Management program (NRM). The village itself was very divided before Peace Corps arrived, and became further divided as the training program went on. Peace Corps Togo decided to pull its training program out of the village after it was evident that there were too many issues. However, there were a handful of people in the village that asked for a regular volunteer to be posted there. The Country Director himself admitted to me that I was a "consolation volunteer" for this village and gave me the full background of Peace Corps’ involvement there after I had been at post for nearly a year. This was not how I imagined Peace Corps went about chosing villages for PCV placement.

To make it worse, I was a Girls Education Volunteer in a village where roughly a third of middle school students where female, which in Togo, was exceptional. The highest score on school exams in the village had been achieved by girls as well. What the village really wanted a NRM Volunteer, but since my village was in the south where environmental degradation as not as severe compared to the north, (i.e. where the horses had not yet stormed through the barn door)  Peace Corps Togo refused to send a NRM PCV. So my village got what they didn’t want or need.

I left early, because I realized that with the infighting in the village and the lack of interest in my work, I wasn’t going to accomplish much. I didn’t want to be one of those deadbeats Robert Strauss described in his article that just stuck around doing time. Interestingly, despite my precautions in my Close of Service reports, Peace Corps Togo posted another volunteer in the same village. At least this time they got it right and posted a NRM volunteer. However, it appears that a large portion of the work he did was in villages other than the one to which he was posted.

I don’t regret my service with Peace Corps. Of course I wish it had gone better, but in the end it was a life changing experience that opened a whole new world for me. I continue to maintain contact with my host family, and even now when people ask me about my time there, I feel like I am still digesting it.