Rajeev did not like law school. He found most classes boring, and he got the only D that was handed out in criminal procedure. But he graduated, and he passed the New York bar exam easily. Still, much of his energy went into organizing fund-raisers, and he returned regularly to Namje. By 2004, the Maoist conflict was so bad that all Peace Corps volunteers were evacuated from Nepal, but Rajeev started a series of school-building projects. Some local communities had terrible facilities, and the Namje crew could build a seven-room school for about $25,000. They always applied Harka Lama’s strategy of dividing villages into volunteer work groups—other Nepali NGOs have since adopted this method. Karna Magar, now nicknamed “Local Engineer,” helped with technical issues. Priyanka Bista, a Nepali-Canadian architecture student, designed two of the schools with him. Through these projects she met Rajeev, and they fell in love, marrying in Queens, where priests from both India and Nepal officiated.
Kishan Agrawal, the pipe salesman whose family had come from the same region as Rajeev’s, became more active in the projects. Kishan was a Rotary Club member in the city of Dharan, and one of Rajeev’s uncles was a Rotarian in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Somebody in the New Jersey club suggested that they raise funds and have them matched by Rotary grants. The only problem was that Rotary International has a policy against using matching grant funds for construction, in part because of legal and liability concerns. But the Rotarians assured Rajeev that this wouldn’t be a problem; they could build facilities and simply describe them as “school supplies.” Nobody would ever know the difference unless Rotary International sent somebody all the way to the Himalayas to audit the project. Rajeev raised $28,000 at NYU, and Rotary contributed another $20,000 in grants, and two schools were built. Tanka Bhujel bought $40 worth of school uniforms, pens, and notebooks, took photos of smiling children with the gear, and mailed them off with letters certifying that the project had been for supplies.
Rotary International announced that it was sending a member from South India to audit the project. On a hot day, he arrived wearing a button-down shirt, a necktie, and a white loincloth. When I asked Kishan what the auditor looked like, he said, “He was very healthy,” which is the Nepali way of saying “massively obese.” In the town of Karkichap, the Rotarian became emotional when children poured out of the beautiful new school building and adorned him with ceremonial flower necklaces. He tried to continue on foot to the second Rotary-funded school, but after five minutes he was overwhelmed by healthiness and had to sit down. The teachers from the other school hiked up to visit him there instead. “You’ve done a great thing,” Kishan remembers him saying.
“So everything is fine?” Kishan asked.
“No, I’m afraid you’re in big trouble,” the Rotarian said. “You’re not supposed to build schools.”
For the next year, Rajeev engaged in evasive correspondence with Rotary International, which wanted its money back. His uncle stopped attending Rotary meetings in Plainsboro, which along with the Dharan chapter was suspended from Rotary grant programs until the dispute was settled. Finally, Rajeev and Tanka decided to blame everything on the Maoists. They wrote letters claiming that they had fully intended to purchase school supplies, but Maoists came to the village and forced them to build the schools instead. Rajeev dipped into his law school loans, and he and his uncle and various Rotarians sent a total of seven thousand dollars to Rotary International, which finally resolved the matter. “It completely wiped me out,” Rajeev said.
When I met Kishan in Nepal, he told me proudly that he no longer attends Rotary meetings. “I didn’t go according to the Rotary system,” he said. “I went according to Rajeev’s system.” He said that even during terrible times Namje and nearby communities didn’t become violent, because people were busy with development work. And Kishan said that Rajeev had changed his life. “I realized that every person should be involved,” he said. “You need to do something for other people.”
I stopped by the school in Karkichap, which looked deceptively peaceful, considering that it had destroyed Rotary careers all the way from Dharan to Plainsboro. On the bright-blue roof, somebody had painted an enormous white Rotary symbol that could be admired from any low-flying aircraft. The headmaster told me that Nepali and Indian Rotarians sometimes travel long distances to see the building. The library had a beautiful door made of sisau wood, more valuable than mahogany, into which had been carved a riot of figures: Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge; a lotus flower; a Buddhist swastika; a Nepali flag; and a Rotary wheel.
During his first year on the Hill, Rajeev realized that even the president has less power than Senator Patrick Leahy when it comes to Peace Corps funding. The president makes a budget proposal, which moves to the House, and then the Senate committee effectively has the final decision. And Leahy had become disillusioned with the Peace Corps bureaucracy during the George W. Bush administration. People told me that the agency’s Washington office became so poorly managed that staffers often didn’t know who Leahy was. “He would call the Peace Corps and say, ‘This is Patrick Leahy,’ and they would ask him to spell his name,” Rajeev said. “And this is the guy in charge of funding them!”
Rajeev heard that Tim Rieser, Leahy’s top aide for appropriations, was particularly critical. Rieser told me that the agency badly needs reform, especially in terms of directing more resources toward strategic countries. “The number of volunteers in Benin, a country so small that most people wouldn’t know how to find it, is only about twenty-five less than China,” Rieser said. “What we want to have a conversation about is: Does that make sense?” He emphasized that the appropriations committee works with a limited budget. “Every dollar for the Peace Corps comes out of something else,” he said. “It comes out of programs for water, for food aid, for refugee resettlement.” Rajeev told me that Rieser was right about the Peace Corps office’s needing reform, but he believed that the new director, Aaron Williams, who was appointed in the summer of 2009, was committed to making changes. Williams arrived after a successful career as a USAID administrator, and he told me that one of his top priorities was evaluating where volunteers should be sent. In any case, Rajeev thought that Leahy’s perspective would change if he spent more time in the field. “You can’t judge the Peace Corps by what you see in Washington,” Rajeev said. He wanted funding to be taken away from military programs, not aid. “Can you imagine how much bureaucratic waste there is when you give all this money to Pakistan and other foreign militaries?” he said.
But Rajeev couldn’t figure out how to get to Leahy. He knew that the senator likes the Grateful Dead, and he’s such a Batman fan that he had a cameo in The Dark Knight. “I talked to a longtime aide to Senator Kennedy, and I asked what I should do to convince Leahy,” Rajeev told me. “She said, ‘Dress up in a Batman suit and stand outside the Senate.’ She was serious. I thought about it.” Rajeev was able to persuade Jimmy Carter to call Leahy, but he couldn’t get a statement from the Grateful Dead. He called everybody on a list of two hundred former volunteers who live in Vermont, asking them to telephone the senator. One of them happened to be the CEO of the hospice that provided care for Leahy’s father when he was dying, and she agreed to make a call.
By this time, Rajeev’s relationship with the National Peace Corps Association had begun to deteriorate. The organization wouldn’t comment, but I heard from others that it became uncomfortable with Rajeev’s tactics, especially after he and others began publishing editorials that targeted Leahy. Washington people responded in vastly different ways to this unorthodox approach. Republicans could be surprisingly supportive; they seemed to like Rajeev’s individualism and outsider status. Elected officials and other important figures often admired his gall. Negative responses seemed most likely to come from younger people, especially congressional aides. “He makes things personal,” one of them told me, and others complained that he hassled them and didn’t follow the rules. Rajeev told me that each congressional office functions like a miniature village, wit
h complex relations between the various aides and the elected official. In these villages, generational stereotypes are reversed: often, the younger people are most conservatively committed to a system, because they run day-to-day affairs. Marc Hanson, a former staffer for Representative Sam Farr, told me that officials tend to relish the personal and spontaneous side of politics, whereas staff members are focused on logistical issues. “They try to manage and choreograph that stuff,” he said. “And Rajeev interrupted that process and forced members to hear about the Peace Corps on a day when it wasn’t on the schedule.”
When people discussed the Peace Corps campaign, they often said, in ominous tones, “You know about the ice-cream social, right?” I heard about it again and again, until the words “ice-cream social” began to sound like “Bay of Pigs.” Each summer, there’s a Washington fund-raiser for Patrick Leahy, featuring Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and other Vermont products. At the time of the 2009 event, the Peace Corps’s budget had reached a critical moment. Obama had asked for $373 million, a modest increase over the current $340 million, but the House, responding to the campaign, requested $450 million. Rajeev and Laurence Leamer, a former volunteer in Nepal and an author, attended the ice-cream social. In front of a large group of people, Leamer introduced himself to Leahy.
“Senator, I’m afraid I’ve got something to say that’s not going to make you happy,” he said, and then he read from a statement: “You should listen to your true progressive heart and not your negative aides.” Leahy responded angrily, saying that he relied on his own judgment and was tired of people hassling him. But Leamer refused to back down. He said, “Senator, that’s what democracy is all about.”
An aide finally stepped between the men and ended the exchange. Leamer sent a written apology, but people involved in the campaign sensed that a line had been crossed. As Rieser told me recently, “It’s not a smart way to start a conversation with the person in charge of funding.” Not long after the social, the budget came in at $400 million—the largest single-year increase ever, but far less than the $450 million that had been approved by the House. A member of the House told me that Leahy complained to him about the rudeness of former volunteers, saying, “That’ll cost the Peace Corps fifty million dollars.” Leahy denies this.
Most people viewed the campaign as a resounding success, but Rajeev had mixed feelings. After the ice-cream social, his relations with the NPCA became so bad that he left the organization. For the next year, he worked independently, supported by grants arranged by a group of advisers led by Donald Ross, the former Nader activist. He used a less aggressive approach, and the campaign resulted in the Senate’s proposing a twenty-million-dollar increase for the 2011 budget. But Rajeev believed that critical energy had been lost; he had hoped to have a bigger effect on the Peace Corps itself, whose reforms have been modest to this point.
Rajeev told me that he had taken the personal approach too far. Village politics can be nondemocratic: there’s a point at which a powerful individual hears so many unified voices that his instinct is to ignore them. Leahy had been called by everybody from his father’s hospice administrator to a former president, and he was confronted at the Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream social. As if that weren’t enough, he also received phone calls from both Ben and Jerry. Ben Cohen told me that, after being contacted by Rajeev, he called Leahy and suggested putting more money into the Peace Corps instead of the Pentagon. I asked Cohen how the senator had responded. “His response was ‘Enough already! Everybody and his brother has been calling me about this!’ ”
In September, I accompanied Rajeev on a trip to Nepal. On the way to Namje, we stopped in the nearby town of Bhedetar, where a man named Mani Tamang approached us. Mani had piercing eyes and a dark gaunt face, and he introduced himself by saying that he had been the guerilla commander of local Maoist forces during the years of unrest. In 2008, the monarchy was abolished, and the UN has been monitoring the country’s peace process. The Maoists are now a legitimate political party, but they have not been aboveground for long and Mani seemed nervous. He wore a dirty T-shirt that said “Casual Style.”
“Are you upset with me for some reason?” Rajeev asked.
“I’ve said thank you so many times that ‘thank you’ cannot describe how we feel,” Mani said. “All over the district we have no buildings like the school you built.”
“Do you have any criticisms?”
Mani believed that the Maoists had been excluded from development work. “When you were building the first water project I really wanted to meet you,” he said. “But the people in Namje wouldn’t let me.” He asked Rajeev if he would organize a water project in a nearby community, but Rajeev explained that he wasn’t doing that work anymore. “I can raise the idea with the district irrigation officer,” he said.
Rajeev didn’t want to coordinate more infrastructure projects. Other communities were building their own water systems, which he thought was better. “If you do something well, then other people copy it,” he said. “You don’t need to do it on a huge scale.” He had stopped building schools, too. He saw his role as ever-changing, and he was highly critical of himself. Some projects had failed entirely, like the woolen hats, and the women’s co-op had yet to figure out a productive endeavor. Rajeev believed that the school buildings were too utilitarian; at one dedication, he gave a speech in which he said that the building “looks like a jail.” He told the villagers that they should paint it in brighter colors. Even the water project had some negative effects. Water allowed people to build in cement, and villagers had embarked on a chaotic construction phase. Outside investors had moved in, realizing that Namje could become a resort town for people to escape the heat of the Terai Plain. They had bought so much land that prices had risen tenfold in the span of a year, and locals worried about losing cohesion.
Among charities, replicability is a key goal, but Rajeev didn’t see the point of a development worker’s repeating the same thing in many areas without ever sticking around to see the long-term results. He believed that construction projects tend to be overvalued, when in fact it’s more important to spend time in one community as it moves forward. He said the access to water in Namje wasn’t nearly as important as the way that villagers had learned to work together. “People often ask me, ‘How many schools has the Peace Corps built? How many hospitals?’ ” he said. “The Peace Corps has been very good about not playing that game. But it’s part of why the organization is still small, and why people don’t know as much about it.” In the Peace Corps, whose twenty-seven-month commitment is longer than that for most service organizations, volunteers often become ambivalent about traditional development work. They’re more likely to see the complexities of change, and less likely to cheerlead for big projects and sweeping plans. The novelist Paul Theroux, who served in Malawi in the 1960s, has written critically about the NGO presence in Africa, and he told me that great ambitions tend to be destructive. He was more positive about small projects he had seen in Costa Rica which were organized at the village level. “We need to inspire people, not intimidate them,” he said. “There’s something about all aid that is somehow subversive.”
When I spoke with former volunteers, they invariably said, “I got so much more out of the experience than I gave.” It was also common to hear that the Peace Corps benefits the United States more than the rest of the world. I didn’t really believe these sentiments—they seemed to be a way of expressing humility and respect. I had always liked the slightly subversive element of the Peace Corps, because it tended to be quiet and personal. But it seemed that the failure of the Peace Corps is that former volunteers rarely play the same outsider role back home, at least politically. Somebody like Rajeev could go from Namje to Congress, where he saw the place through new eyes, which made his presence disruptive. He was unusual, though. The United States is very good at shaking up the rest of the world, but it’s all but impervious to anything that moves in the other direction.
On our last day
in Namje, we attended the dedication of a new building for agricultural training. A year earlier, Rajeev had raised money to buy five acres of prime mountaintop land, and the village hoped to become a center where Nepalis could study organic farming. Namje had enough water to handle the growth, and villagers were becoming ambitious. They had recently organized their own fund-raiser in the city of Dharan, coming away with the staggering sum of $150,000. But plans were even bigger: they wanted $1 million from the Nepali government, so that they could expand the new training center into a real college.
Tanka Bhujel had organized everything for the dedication event. There were big tents and banners, and officials came from all over the district. They received elaborate ceremonial gifts of Buddha statues and Gurkha knives. Rajeev gave a speech about development, and the audience cheered every time he mentioned money.
The next day in Kathmandu, we went to the office of Rakam Chemjong, the minister for Peace and Reconstruction. Tanka Bhujel had prepared three letters requesting government support for the new college, and he asked Rajeev to deliver them. But Rajeev seemed distracted; he told me he had trouble processing the extravagance of yesterday’s event, and he wasn’t sure what to say to the minister.
We met in a high-ceilinged room, where the minister greeted Rajeev warmly. He was accompanied by a couple of aides, known as peons, one of the more satisfying loanwords in the Nepali language. There was also a Maoist official who was helping to draft Nepal’s new constitution. Rajeev began his presentation, but instead of asking for support he said that it would be a mistake to build a full college in Namje. First, the villagers needed to focus on their plot of land. “They will listen if you say a few words to them,” he said.
“I will tell them to be careful and go slowly,” the minister said.
“There’s a lot of danger in the community right now,” Rajeev said. “When I was a Peace Corps volunteer half an acre of land was three hundred dollars. Now it’s ten thousand. It’s like the Wild West.”
Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.) Page 8