News from Wilanene and Reflections on the Peace Corps

I was surprised and touched to find an email in my inbox this weekend from a Peace Corps volunteer who is now in my village. I was unaware that there were even any PCVs there, but this is the third PCV to be placed in my village since I in left in November 2005. I had been in contact with the volunteer who directly replaced me until she was medically separated. Then I heard through the grapevine that another volunteer had been placed in Wilanene after the second volunteer, but she also left after only a few months.

The current volunteer wrote this to me:

Because the other two volunteers didn't stay too long, the family and the village often speak about you only, and very fondly. Keba (my host father) in particular is now asking for your address in the States. You gave it to him once, he said, but its now lost. If you feel comfortable with the family contacting you, they would very much like your mailing address. They say you had plans of returning to Senegal and are wondering where you are. I found your email on one of the proposals you wrote and said I would try to contact you. Let me know. Everyone greets you and only says the most wonderful things.

I nearly cried for such sweet words and because I miss the village and the villagers. I still dream about Senegal sometimes. Most recently, I dreamed that I came back from being absent for an extended period and found my oldest host brother had taken over my hut. I tried to tell him I hadn't left--that I still lived there, but my Wolof kept getting mixed up with Spanish, and I was having trouble communicating.

I'd really like to go back someday before too much time has elapsed. I have been thinking a lot about Peace Corps this week after the NPR short on an article at foreignpolicy.com written by Robert Strauss, a former volunteer, recruiter, and country director. This follows an op-ed he wrote for The New York Times several months ago. In both of these commentaries, he bemoans the current state of the Peace Corps: how it's failed to acheive it's goals of being an informal dipolmatic agency and and failed to place volunteers where development is most needed, that they are not recruiting the most competitive volunteers with useful technical skills, that some volunteers sour the reputation of the agency, etc. He is overly harsh in his criticisms, though I think he is right on many points.

I was a fresh, liberal arts college graduate with Spanish language skills and a bit of biology knowledge, but not a lot a lot of environmental technical skills. I was placed as an AgroForestry volunteer in French-speaking Senegal. Perhaps I'm the sterotype that Robert Strauss writes about, but I had the energy and freedom from responsibility to drop everything in the U.S. and spend over two years abroad. In three months of training, I had the technical skills I needed to begin work and Wolof language skills to commuicate my personal needs and my work intentions. The Peace Corps has more difficulties recruiting older volunteers (not many people are free from responsibilities and children and mortages to live abroad and essentially have no income for two years), and I find the older volunteers struggle more with the language, the culture, and the general hardships of living in the third world. Young volunteers can make a two year commitment more easily, but they are less likely to have technical skills. It is difficult to recruit the best of the best when it is a volunteer situation. I'm not saying that it should change from being a volunteer commitment but with there must be recognition that the quality may be affected as a result.

For better or worse, I think I came in with some of the young enthusiasm and naivete that I was "going to make a difference" in my village. After my first year of work, I found that 85% of the 11,000 trees we had planted in the fields died. I had the typical disillusionment period that I think most volunteers experience. At that point, I readjusted my goals to focus more on the two cultural pillars of Peace Corps. And perhaps it was more like an extended semester abroad program as Robert Strauss writes, but I was able to accept that.

I struggled with the issue of development during most of my time in Senegal. I watched other NGOs put up schools, health huts, and bring running water to my village. Those projects require money, which the Peace Corps did not have. I could not even get the most basic supplies for my work. They gave me $10/every quarter that was supposed to go to supplies (watering cans, shovels, wheelbarrows), but was not enough to buy all the tools I needed. And the hard-to-obtain plastic sacks that worked perfectly for planting trees were not even available from the Peace Corps. So in the end, the Peace Corps Volunteers are able to tout that they bring knowledge to the villagers, which theoretically, should mobilize the host country nationals and allow development to proceed from within. But after 40 years in Senegal (and now approaching 50 years in some countries), is the years of "knowlege" the volunteers have been imparting even noticeable? It wasn't to me.

Another cofounding factor is culture. The villagers in Senegal saw development agencies implementing these projects and lost motivation to seek anything themselves; they assumed if they waited long enough, someone in a flashy, white SUV would bring it to them. For an individual to get ahead and produce more crops or make extra money would mean he would have to share it with his neighbor. That is just expected: if you have something and your neighbor doesn't, you share it. So there is nothing motivating individuals. It all becomes circular: Peace Corps does not have money to implement the truly effective infrastructure that is needed, but if they did, it might promote the fatalistic attitude that has been created toward development because no one is going to do anything themselves if someone else will do it or if they have to share their profit for doing it themselves.

Robert Struass writes:
Based predominantly on the life-changing experiences volunteers had while serving, the Peace Corps continues to generate strong support from the American people. But for the agency to approach its potential, deep, substantive changes must be made.

This is probably true. But being the cheap, informal diplomatic agency for now might be all the Peace Corps can do without significantly increasing the budget. If the volunteers do not get paid (and therefore they are unable recruit the best and brightest) nor do they have resources to do their job (I couldn't even get tree planting sacks from the Peace Corps), how can you have quality development work?