That presented difficult problems. He had not been accepted by a university, and he did not have funds to live on while studying. Nancy and Joel, after their Peace Corps tours ended, began graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley and helped Alejandro enroll in a special program for foreign students at the University of San Francisco. They also helped finance the first year.
Although his poor English made studies difficult, Alejando showed a talent for soccer that won him a partial athletic scholarship. With the help of odd jobs like pumping gas at a station at night, he managed to pay his tuition and expenses for the next three years. After his graduation from the University of San Francisco, he won a Ford Foundation fellowship to study at Stanford University, where he earned a master’s in education, a master’s in economics, and a PhD in economic development and education.
A distinguished career followed. He worked for the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Harvard University, Waseda University in Japan, and the Peruvian government as an economics advisor. He later entered Peruvian politics. Then, in 2000, the teenager who once pleaded with his parents to let a Peace Corps gringa live in their crowded home was elected president of Peru.
After that, the Peace Corps community liked to call Toledo “the Peace Corps president.” Both Nancy and Joel attended his inauguration. His single term was not a successful one. Governing Peru after the havoc of the years of President Alberto Fujimori proved bitterly difficult, and he steadily grew more and more unpopular. Although Toledo’s economic policies improved conditions substantially, his administration was beset by accusations of corruption, sex scandals, and the forging of electoral signatures. Under the Peruvian constitution, Toledo could not succeed himself for a second term.
Toledo did manage to bring the Peace Corps back to Peru. The program had been halted in 1975 by leftist army officers who had taken over the country in an earlier coup. Toledo never forgot his debt. As he said in a lecture to Peace Corps staff and others in Washington, “A large portion of the path that I took—through my education, leaving the shanty town in Chimbote—Peace Corps had a lot to do with . . . . You people are responsible for this president!”
From time to time, some critics—even a few who know the developing world well—dismiss the accomplishments of the Peace Corps. They acknowledge that the Volunteers make a lot of friends overseas but insist they do little or nothing for economic, social, and political development. In his op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert L. Strauss, the former Cameroon country director, wrote that the overwhelming majority of Volunteers “lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.” A cynical professor once proposed that the Peace Corps reimburse a Latin American country for the harm wreaked on its economy by the Volunteers. It is worth keeping the Alejandro Toledo story in mind when considering this issue.
For the most part, the numbers of the Volunteers have been too small to have an obvious impact on the countries that host them. In the early days of the Peace Corps, Warren Wiggins, his imagination aflame, envisioned sending 50,000 Volunteers to India, 5,000 to the Philippines, and 5,000 to 10,000 to Nigeria. The Peace Corps never recruited Volunteers in such numbers and, if it had, the programs would have been disastrous. Only in Ethiopia did the numbers of Volunteers have a discernable impact on a country, and the unhappy consequence was not something the Peace Corps recognized as an achievement. The Peace Corps has become a small and elite agency focusing on crucial projects, but a limited number of them.
The Peace Corps tries hard to quantify some of its accomplishments for Congress and the public. In its 2008 annual report, the Peace Corps said that in the past year, its 7,750 Volunteers had worked with 2.1 million people, helped train 126,000 teachers, health workers, and other service providers, and assisted 24,000 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations throughout the world.
In its country-by-country summaries, the Peace Corps report also provided statistics illustrating the achievements of the Volunteers. In Burkina Faso, for example, the Volunteers helped seventy community organizations educate their villages about HIV/AIDS, malaria, polio, tuberculosis, family planning, and other health matters. In Cameroon, they helped farmers establish ninety-one nurseries that produced more than 88,000 tree seedlings and cuttings.
In El Salvador, a Volunteer persuaded a U.S. charity to donate 400 computers for distribution to schools in twenty-seven communities, where Volunteers trained teachers to use them in classroom work. In Ghana, Volunteers taught science, math, computer skills, and visual arts to 7,600 students in rural schools. In Honduras, Volunteers helped build or restore potable water systems to eighty-seven communities for the benefit of more than 50,000 Salvadorans. In Kenya, a Volunteer trained 300 Kenyans in beekeeping and helped redesign a new beehive in a project that enabled the new beekeepers to earn four times the normal income from the sale of honey. These are just a few of the numerous examples.
Yet the numbers never seem fully satisfying. No one can demean a 400 percent increase in the profits from honey or the supply of healthy water to 50,000 poor people or the gentle whirring of 400 new computers in public schools. But much of Peace Corps achievement cannot be measured in numbers.
There is a good deal of testimony and anecdotal evidence about the elusiveness of capturing and measuring the essence of the Peace Corps experience. Some Volunteers simply feel and know that what they are doing helps the people around them. When they evaluate their work, they usually spurn measurements.
In 1977, Debbie Erickson, a Volunteer in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua, told Terence Smith, a reporter for the New York Times, “I know some Americans think what we do is patronizing, a form of cultural imperialism. And the Nicaraguans—most of them don’t know what in God’s name we are doing here. About half think we are CIA agents, and the other half think we are crazy. But I work among these women and children, I see their needs, and that’s the only justification I need. If I am able to help them organize themselves and improve their life, then it is worth it as far as I am concerned.”
Judy Guskin and her husband, Alan, were among the pioneers of the Peace Corps. Among the first accepted as Volunteers, they taught in the Philippines. After the Guskins returned to the Philippines for a visit, Judy wrote a brief essay on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Peace Corps. “It is possible to count the number of wells dug or acres sown by Peace Corps Volunteers,” she wrote, “but how do you measure the results of teaching? It’s hard to measure the impact of a teacher anywhere, and Peace Corps teachers are no exception. What matters for teachers is not only what their students learn, but that they learn to love learning, to have faith in their own abilities, to want to give themselves fully to whatever they do . . . . I think Al and I can say, like most Peace Corps Volunteers, that we affected the lives of a few individuals. For them, we thought, we had somehow made a difference.”
One of the most eloquent and sensitive portrayals of the best work of Volunteers came from evaluator Leslie Hanscom after he visited Afghanistan in 1966. Hanscom, a renowned writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, joined Newsday after leaving the Peace Corps and served for many years as the New York newspaper’s book critic and columnist.
Describing Peace Corps nurses in Afghan hospitals, Hanscom wrote, “To see them work is to be struck by the power that can be exerted by a little common decency. Moreover, it is not just the visiting outsider who is struck, but the local hospital workers who are there to stay.”
Even patients are surprised. “There are strong reasons why it has an almost startling effect upon people to see an American girl in a white uniform appearing to take their troubles to heart,” Hanscom went on. “They themselves have been conditioned by life to stifle human sympathy in their own natures. Most of them, by the time they are ten years old, have witnessed
more misery and disaster than an American would see in several lifetimes.”
“The practical instinct to shrink from the suffering of others is fully shared by Afghan nurses,” said Hanscom. “Their attitude toward the ill is ironically close to the ancient Oriental attitude toward the leper—‘unclean, don’t touch.’ Before the advent of the Peace Corps, there was almost nobody to drum it into them that not turning aside from the spectacle of suffering is what their trade is all about.
“From all signs,” Hanscom concluded, “the lesson is now taking hold. Afghan nurses see the patients’ surging response to the Peace Corps girls, and—out of plain jealousy—try to divert some of this to themselves. That the response exists is unmistakable.”
How do you measure the value of the brush of a nurse’s fingers against the brow of a patient? Or the success of a teacher’s desire to instill the love of learning? Or the worth of bringing women and children together in Nicaragua? How do you measure the power of a young girl’s talks by kerosene lamp with a poor boy who will become the president of Peru?
I do not want to suggest that all Peace Corps Volunteers are successful agents of change who do wonderful things beyond measure. The Peace Corps has its share of failure. But the best Volunteers do accomplish a kind of magic that is not caught by the statistics of an annual report.
The least-known side of Peace Corps service is that for many, it never ends. That is why the Volunteers like to call themselves Returned Volunteers, not ex-Volunteers or former Volunteers, when they come home after their tours of overseas duty. Their links with the Peace Corps and fellow Volunteers, and their service to their countries and friends abroad, go on.
There are more than 140 organizations of returned Volunteers, almost all involved in helping the developing world. Half are made up of Volunteers who worked in the same country and bear names like Friends of Liberia, Amigos de Honduras, and the Peace Corps Alumni Foundation for Philippine Development. The others mainly comprise former Volunteers from the same areas of the United States, like the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Wisconsin—Madison, the Heart of Texas Peace Corps Association, and the Cincinnati Area Returned Volunteers.
There are also a handful of small national groups—like the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Returned Peace Corps Volunteers—and one major national organization, the National Peace Corps Association. The latter has a membership of 30,000. Almost all the various Volunteer groups are affiliated with the National Peace Corps Association, and it usually speaks in the name of the returned Volunteer community.
One of the most successful activities is the annual calendar produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Former Volunteers throughout the United States submit photos of life in Peace Corps countries, and more than fifty members of the Madison group donate their time to produce a calendar brimming with spectacular pictures and miscellaneous facts about the Peace Corps and the countries pictured. There is an array of details, noting, for example, that January 6 is Maroon Day in Jamaica, April 27 is Independence Day in Togo, July 13 is the Jagannath Festival in India, and November 9 is Sargent Shriver’s birthday.
Since 1988, sales of the calendars have brought in more than $820,000, all of it spent in giving small grants to the projects of Volunteers throughout the world. In 2008, for example, calendar proceeds were used to buy a mimeograph machine for the Tubman School in Liberia, build fifteen latrines in the Dominican Republic, help train birth attendants in Morocco, sponsor a chess club in Bolivia, and fund parts of sixty-five other small projects.
Similar good works come from other associations. The Peace Corps Alumni Foundation for Philippine Development, for example, has funded scholarships for more than two hundred young Filipinos to study in Filipino universities. The Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of South Florida have worked with the enormous swell of families displaced by the insurrections in Colombia, offering them interest-free micro-loans to start small businesses. The Marafiki wa Tanzania (the name is Swahili for “Friends of Tanzania”), which spends more than $25,000 a year in grants, donated $7,000 over three years to the Mkombozi Vocational and Community Center, located in Moshi near Mount Kilimanjaro, for the vocational training and health education of women and youths.
There also are many examples of individual Volunteers who become so attached to their countries that they go back there to work after their service is over. Matt Marek, a Volunteer in Jacmel in Haiti from 2000 to 2002, joined several fellow Volunteers in founding Haiti Innovation, a nonprofit organization offering advice for development projects in the country.
Marek worked for the National Peace Corps Association in Washington for two years. But when the turmoil of an insurgency drove the Peace Corps out of Haiti in 2004, he set up residence in Haiti once again. He soon joined the American Red Cross as chief of its Haiti operations. When Haiti was devastated by the earthquake of January 2010, Marek, a relief worker on the scene, took on the added role of describing the extent of the horrors to U.S. television news shows and newspapers before their own correspondents could reach Haiti.
Alice O’Grady was part of the first contingent of Peace Corps Volunteers ever to reach their host country. In fact, she did most of the singing when the group of teachers alighted from their plane in Ghana in 1961 and sang an anthem in the Twi language. After her service ended, she returned to Ghana in 1968 to teach science at the Accra Academy for four years. Afterwards, she went back for brief trips to collect material for a children’s novel she was writing about the history of Ghana.
In 2008, almost fifty years after Alice first set foot in Ghana, some of her old students at the Accra Academy, now successful doctors and engineers, endowed a scholarship in her name at the school. The donors praised Miss Alice for her “dedication, tirelessness, discipline, and enthusiasm” and said she had “ignited in her students a passion for scientific knowledge.” They also paid for her to fly to Accra to present the scholarship to the first winner.
The United States itself has benefitted enormously from the Peace Corps as well. The evidence is overwhelming. Work overseas has fostered qualities of leadership and innovation and commitment that have propelled many Volunteers into positions of influence. In the political world, for example, two U.S. senators were former Volunteers—the late Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts (Ethiopia) and Chris Dodd of Connecticut (the Dominican Republic). The roster of Volunteers in the House of Representatives, from both parties, has included Steve Dreihaus of Ohio (Senegal), Sam Farr of California (Colombia), John Garamendi of California (Ethiopia), Tony Hall of Ohio (Thailand), Mike Honda of California (El Salvador), Thomas Petri of Wisconsin (Somalia), Christopher Shays of Connecticut (Fiji), James Walsh of New York (Nepal), and Mike Ward of Kentucky (Gambia). Governors Jim Doyle of Wisconsin (Tunisia) and Bob Taft of Ohio (Tanzania) were also Volunteers, as were the mayors of Pittsburgh, San Angelo, Texas, and Urbana, Illinois.
Twenty Volunteers have served as ambassadors—an astounding number considering that in the early days, State Department diplomats resented the Peace Corps. The list includes Christopher Hill (Cameroon), who served the George W. Bush administration as the chief nuclear negotiator with North Korea and then became the Obama administration’s ambassador to Iraq. Robert Gelbard, a veteran diplomat appointed an assistant secretary of state in 2009, served as ambassador to Bolivia from 1988 to 1991 a little more than twenty years after he had worked there as a Volunteer. During Gelbard’s time as ambassador, the Bolivian foreign minister joked to former Peace Corps director Jack Vaughn, “I have no idea if he’s speaking for the U.S. government or the Indians of the altiplano. He knows Indian curse words that I have barely heard in my lifetime.”
Many Volunteers gravitate to AID. A large number have become mission directors overseas. Richard Greene, a former Volunteer in the Ivory Coast who directed AID’s Office of Health, Infectious Diseases, and Nutrition, was selected as Federal Employee of the Year in 2008.
The renowned novelist an
d travel writer Paul Theroux (Malawi) heads a long list of writers who came out of the Peace Corps. Others include detective novelist Dick Lipez (Ethiopia), who uses the pseudonym Richard Stevenson; novelist John Coyne (Ethiopia); best-selling nonfiction writer Peggy Anderson (Togo); and journalist Peter Hessler (China). Among Volunteer journalists are Chris Matthews of MSNBC (Swaziland), George Packer of the New Yorker (Togo), Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair (Colombia), Josh Friedman of Newsday (Costa Rica), Karen De Witt of ABC News (Ethiopia), Al Kamen of the Washington Post (the Dominican Republic), and Loren Jenkins, the foreign editor of National Public Radio’s news division (Sierra Leone).
The list of distinguished alumni includes such well-known names as Carol Bellamy (Guatemala), who became executive director of UNICEF after serving as Peace Corps director, and Donna Shalala (Iran), the president of the University of Miami and former secretary of Health and Human Services. Ten other Volunteers have become presidents of universities and colleges.
All fields are represented. The founders of Netflix and the Nature Company and the board chairs of Levi Strauss and the Chicago Bears are former Volunteers. So are sculptor Joel Shapiro (India) and artist Tomas Belsky (Brazil).
There is another important benefit to the United States beyond the lists of influential alumni. The US now has 200,000 citizens who have lived and worked in the developing world and understand it well. This extensive knowledge of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe is an enormous and vital resource that would not exist without the Peace Corps and its fifty years of service.
Acknowledgments
I am, of course, indebted to the hundreds of Peace Corps Volunteers and the scores of Peace Corps staffers that I met during my two and a half years with the agency during the 1960s. This wonderful experience came after Charles Peters hired me for his elite evaluation division. I gained many insights into the Peace Corps in those years from members of his crew, including Timothy Adams, Peggy Anderson, Meridan Bennett, Maureen Carroll, Russ Chapell, Phil Cook, Kevin Delany, Richard Elwell, Leslie Hanscom, David Hapgood, Richard Lipez, Robert McGuire, Richard Richter, Robert Shogan, and William Tatge. More recently, Peters, Anderson, Delany, Lipez, Richter, and, especially, Carroll spent a good deal of time with me discussing various themes and events for this book.
When the World Calls Page 28