New Peace Corps Volunteer Has Big Plans; Two Years Later He Is Watching the Clock

Efrem J. Sigal '64, a former associate managing editor of the CRIMSON, spent his two years in the Peace Corps teaching English in the Ivory Coast. He is now at the Harvard Business School. This article originally appeared in the Reporter Magazine, and excerpts are reprinted by permission.--Ed. note.

Peace Corps volunteers arrive in the tropics loaded down with many sorts of equipment, not all of it physical. In addition to cameras, tape recorders, spray deodorants, and insecet repellent, they carry with them a whole train of mental baggage: a set of attitudes and expectations about their new environment.....

With Africa, as with other things, distance lends enchantment. Instead of comparing their experience to an ordinary job at home, the young corpsmen weigh it against the intensity of Conrad's portraits of Graham Greene's matter-of-fact spirituality, and their anticipations resist all attempts to bring them into line with actuality; the ideas have a life of their own....

Always a "But..."

A typical message [in the Peace Corps recruiting literature] went something like this: "The days will be long and hot. The people may be unfriendly. You won't be paid anything. You probably won't accomplish much either. But..." There was always a but. Already I had two images: Kurtz paddling his lonely canoe up the river, and Churchill enumerating all the obstacles to victory and pledging a fight to the finish. I told myself: "It may be tough, and I won't surrender either."

* * *

On the questionnaire given at my termination conference, we were asked to note periods of particular elation or depression over the two-year stint. What emerged, however, was "no pattern whatsover." Rather than a neatly oscillating curve of ups and downs, what seemed to characterize the attitudes of the volunteers I knew was a new way of looking at the world. From all the evidence, we were great idealists before reaching our assignments and great cynics afterwards. Not all of the change was due to disappointment. A good deal of it, I think, was simply growing up....

Despite their basic similarity of outlook, volunteers reveal subtle yet important differences in the way they go about their work. No two volunteers use the same classroom methods, interest themselves in the same activities, bring the same devotion to their task, or put the same value on their contribution.... The spirit that the volunteers brought to their work varied so widely that one sometimes could hardly believe that two Peace Corpsmen had been in the same country....

Cases where a volunteer fails to meet the minimum demands of his job are rare, especially in an area like teaching that has well-defined working hours. Much more common is the teacher who does a conscientious day-to-day job of teaching but does not extend himself in any other direction. I asked a Peace Corps evaluator how he went about judging the effectiveness of volunteers in out-of-the-class activities. "It's easy," he replied. "I just ask him, 'What are you doing in the community?' Most of the time the answer is 'Nothing.'"

One volunteer who did make strenuous efforts to work with his students outside school passed a bitter judgment on his fellow volunteers in a special memorandum written for Peace Corps officials. After outlining ways in which he thought volunteers could improve education in their schools, he concluded by saying: "Oddly enough, the most vehement opposition to such proposals will doubtless come from the most unlikely of sources: volunteers themselves. We already know that Ivory Coast Peace Corps teachers are the highest paid, best lodged, best fed in the world. It is surprising that no one has as yet come up with the rest of it--that they are the laziest. I doubt that many other PCV's in the world would have the gall to claim that 22 hours of English a week fulfills their PC contract. Ours do."

Any judgment is speculative, but my own guess is that Ivory Coast volunteers have no monopoly on clock watching and that they rate perfectly well in comparison with other volunteers in Africa....

One explanation of such behavior is that volunteers are lazy. A more balanced conclusion, however, would try to match volunteers' behavior against the condiitons in which they live. Feelings about job or extracurricular activities usually grow out of firsthand experiences. Ths was certainly true of my own efforts to lead a Red Cross Club....

At home, before going to the hospital, I had prepared some materials for a lesson on infant feeding. I had had in mind making a talk to assembled expectant mothers in the prenatal clinic. "I'm ready to give my course," I announced to the head midwife. The waiting room was crowded with silent women holding bottles. The midwife, an educated woman, smiled noncomitally. "I'll talk in French, of course; all I need is someone to interpret," I continued.

"Well, there are many languages," she said.

"If you translate into Dioula and Appolo, won't that do?"

No Accomplishment

"Som eare Aboure, some are Agni. They won't understand." Her unspoken question was: What would it all accomplish, beyond satisfying my own need to make a gesture? I saw that I was really debating with myself and losing. "Well," I said, shamefaced, abashed at my own lack of resolution, "why don't we put it off, then?" "Putting it off," of course, meant dropping the whole idea. I backed out quickly and disappeared. In retrospect the memory is painful....

The volunteer who fails does not lack good intentions. He is probably

Teaching is hard enough. The obstacles to extra-curricular projects is overwhelming. The Nationals are not eager to help themselves. For the volunteer, 'there is a crisis of commitment. The answer may be to make the job easier. cursed with a too reasonable turn of mind; he cannot stop asking himself what good any particular action would serve. This is the genuine crisis of commitment for Peace Corps volunteers.... If there is an answer, it is to make the volunteer's job easier, not harder--to give him a task where he will have a stake in commitment. A job that is a treadmill of frustration cannot stimulate enthusiasm....

Again for Learning

"Would you do it again?" the volunteers are asked on questionnaires at the end of their Peace Corps service. Nine out of ten say "Yes.". "We learned a lot," is the common theme. But there is all the difference in the world between young Americans learning "a lot" and official claims that the work of the Peace Corps is laying the foundation for a new world community. Jack Vaughn, the Peace Corps director, quoted with approval a Dominican official who sobbed that the Dominican Republic might have been spared its revolution and bloodshed if the Peace Corps had only sent four hundred volunteers as requested....

Helping a country sidestep revolution, building a new nation, promoting world peace--these are large achievements. Few activities of the Peace Corps seem to merit such grandiose description. In the Dominican Republic, volunteers in urban-development projects are organizing neighborhood clinics or helping to obtain piped water for a barrio; those in rural-community development are setting up agrarian leagues and advising on local school construction.

In Ten Years

This is important work, the kind that, if carried out on a large scale, might begin bearing fruit in eight or ten years. But it is hard to see how five times as many volunteers would have affected either the rebels who tried to take over the government in 1965 or the unyielding miiltary junta that resisted them.

Peace Corps teachers in Malawi may be working in classrooms in large numbers, but African officials there and elsewhere are not about to turn over the task of charting national policy to young American volunteers. Malawi, in fact, is one of the few countries where volunteer activities have drawn an offcial reprimand: President Hastings Banda complained in a speech that volunteers were trying too hard to live like the people, when as teachers their job was to take a more professional, more aloof attitude. Instead, here were Americans living in huts, dressing sloppily, sleeping with local girls, and, worst of all, getting mixed up in local politics.

It is with good reason that volunteers are impatient with official over-years of the Peace Corps, a comic dialogue developed between volunteers and staff that went something like this:

"We didn't accomplish anything."

"Of course you did. You were just too close to the situation to appreciate what you had done."...

Into Disrepute

Fortunately, this logic has fallen somewhat into disrepute, and much of the shifting emphasis in Peace Corps programming and operations has in fact come from listening closely to what volunteers have said.

Those who listen closely cannot fail to observe that the difficulties cited most frequently on the questionnaires given to corpsmen at the end of their tour of duty were "frustrating work experience" and "lack of activity of nationals in helping themselves."

From my own experience, I would say that it is the second problem, the one of host-country attitudes, that shapes the views of the volunteers about their own contributions, whether or not they are conscious of it. As in the case of Japan or China, the initial stimulus to development may come from outside--in the shattering influence of a technologically more developed society. But the drive itself depends on a local leadership disciplined enough to forgo its own pleasures in order to promote advancement. This is the consideration that should inform all programs of assistance, whether monetary, technical, or human