Private Peace Corps

For better or worse, America is a nation of community organizations. Even if we don't all join the Boy Scouts, Kiwanis, and the PTA, the conventional faith remains that we can solve our problems if we only get together.

But such a proclivity for organizing is alien to impoverished Latin Americans--including those living in the fetid, disease-ridden slums that ring the major cities in Venezuela. These people have grown up under the patron system, dictatorships, and the Catholic Church and have always looked to someone higher up to get things done. By habit and disposition they are simply unable to organize projects to help themselves.

Into this setting come volunteers from ACCION (Americans for Community Action in Other Countries), a sort of private Peace Corps. Their primary job is to develop a community spirit in the barrios (slums) and to stimulate the habit of self-help. What complicates their task is the numbing sense of futility bred by the sprawling poverty. In Caracas, for instance, innumerable tin and cardboard huts perch uncertainly on the scenic hillsides. They are put up overnight and house hundreds of thousands of peasants who flood the city seeking work and a better life. They find neither. Few make more than two hundred dollars a day, a third of which they spend on water, hosed into mud-caked ash cans from carrier trucks.

Volunteers (called Accionista) might help the unskilled poor build a clay pipe to bring in water or teach them basic job skills such as sewing and welding. But for the most part, ACCION is not there to give technical assistance or to dole out aid. In fact, alms-giving charities just hinder ACCION's effort to stimulate the people into initiating projects for themselves.

The Accionista are always working to make themselves superfluous. They exert strong guidance at first by molding the people into a working unit, mobilizing their limited resources, and putting them in contact with other Venezuelans to find materials or technical advice. But when responsible leaders emerge, the Accionista phase themselves out. Already ACCION is managed by Venezuelans and largely staffed by Venezuelans, who are paired off with North American co-workers.

Not surprisingly, ACCION's self-help ideal sometimes falls short in practice. The barrio is a transitory settlement of strangers, and the organizational sense often fades in the rapid population turnover. Moreover, not everyone is interested in progress; sometimes various politicians depend for their power on maintaining the status quo.

Another problem is that ACCION, apolitical and even without foreign policy goals like the Peace Corps, is often at loggerheads with the anti-American majority in Venezuela, particularly at the grass-roots level. Then too, as a private organization, ACCION must rely wholly on foundations and corporations for funds. This is sometimes impossible, since ACCION's chief work involves changing community attitudes.

But the Accionista have learned certain techniques to facilitate their approach. One is to put the men to work first. Invariably this shames the men into action. Also, because there is little formal marriage in the barrios, women stuck with eight or nine children have a greater stake in community development and are more cooperative. Another technique to attract a crowd on workday is to turn the occasion into a fiesta, with music and dance.

Inevitable, ACCION invites comparison with the within already existing institutions, in diverse setting; she Accionista work exclusively in urban slums and start from scratch to build a community organization. ACCION is more selective, taking only about one in ten applicants as compared to one in three for the Peace Corps. ACCION's attrition rate is also higher--15 per cent to the Peace Corp's 5 per cent. This figure doesn't represent a higher dissatisfaction quotient, however. ACCION prefers to let all those go who can't match its demands for professional minded, dedicated activists. Because the Peace Corps likes to show a high return on its investment to Congress, it drops as few volunteers as possible.

ACCION is older than the Peace Corps--by six months. It was founded in 1960 by Joseph Blatchford, who conceived the idea while on a goodwill tour of South America as the captain of the University of California tennis team. According to Blatchford, he felt the need to start a community development group after Vice President Nixon was attacked in his limousine by mobs in Caracas. Although ACCION has helped reverse the tide of militant anti-Americanism, it is possible that Nixon would be attacked again today if he showed his face in Caracas.

With government funds, lots of favorable publicity, and associations with the Kennedy charisma, the Peace Corps has had an easy time gobbling up most of the activists in this area. But ACCION has been doing some intensive local recruiting of its own. From its East Coast office at 17 Dunster Street in Cambridge, ACCION especially likes to bird-dog prospective Peace Corpsmen.