THE VIEW FROM INSIDE THE PEACE CORPS
Bayley, Edwin R.
The View from inside the Peace Corps by EDWIN R. BAYLEY IN THE MINDS of many people, both in the United States and abroad, the Peace Corps is the New Frontier. The idea of the Peace Corps,...
...Recently there have been newspaper and magazine stories sounding the theme that the Peace Corps was a wild idea at the start but it has now calmed down, and that its policymakers are becoming cautious and careful...
...The experience of selection for the first few projects showed that the first ratio need be only ten to one, and that only a few more than are needed for the project must be placed in training...
...The purpose of this directive was to prevent the buildup of too much enthusiasm, either here or overseas...
...There are about sixty in each group...
...The Ghana volunteers are training at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Nigerian group at Harvard University...
...A high school graduate, he will work on construction projects in Colombia...
...One of the Peace Corps advocates in Congress summed it up by saying: "If the bill gets to the floor, it will breeze right through...
...one-fifth of these have done graduate work...
...There are differing opinions about the Corps' relationships with religiously-motivated service agencies...
...Most of the newly developing nations have food shortages, and officials are eager to improve farming methods and production...
...One month later—a month of seven day weeks and eighteen hour days—the basic policies of the Peace Corps had been established and the staff was beginning to carry out its newly created functions...
...Those who choose to become Peace Corps volunteers will discover that their service will bring great rewards in the form of new experience and in the growth of understanding and character...
...Despite this progress, and perhaps because of it, there remains some uncertainty, at this writing, about the fate of legislation to give permanent status to the Peace Corps now being operated under executive order...
...You guys had a good day today," he said cheerfully...
...Much of the bureaucratic wreckage has yet to be cleared away, but progress, four months later, is clearly visible...
...Peace Corps legislation has made some progress through the Congress...
...and Mrs...
...Both of these African countries are making great efforts to extend educational opportunities, and while there are other needs in these new nations, education holds the top priority...
...Of those who were employed full time, the largest number were teachers and engineers...
...one Congressman recently ascribed this to the belief on the part of constituents that the program is functioning and that no legislation is needed...
...a group of 150 who will teach English as a second language in the Philippine elementary schools...
...the approach has always been careful...
...Typical of those in training are: Richard E. Van Loenen, twentythree years old...
...In the midst of this turmoil, Shriver and his little staff struggled to hammer out the policies of the Peace Corps and to create an organization that could put these policies into operation...
...But we live day by day, and we make friends one by one...
...Stanley graduated from Amherst College, majoring in government, in 1958, and has just received his law degree from Harvard...
...a geologist training for Tanganyika, a graduate of Kansas State University who has worked as a carpenter, plumber, electrician, and surveyor...
...To accomplish the aims of the Peace Corps, there must be sustained enthusiasm on the part of potential volunteers...
...In a world where idealists apologize, where hard-headedness seems the supreme qualification for those who govern, and where military strategists speak calmly of the loss of fifty million lives in an exchange of nuclear bombs, the Peace Corps touches our desire for a world in which one can live in peace and friendship with his neighbor and where personal relationships, homely virtues, and good works count for something...
...Of the first 224 volunteers to be selected for training, sixty per cent are in the twenty-two to twenty-four age group...
...Recruitment and selection systems have been devised and put into operation...
...Projects are based upon requests from foreign governments, requests which might be channeled through an embassy, a United States overseas mission, or a private agency...
...At the same time, they believe that highly trained and experienced persons are necessary for this work, and the Peace Corps intends to launch a special recruiting program this fall to induce farm technicians to volunteer...
...He is twenty-five...
...they are idealists, but they are practical...
...The Tanganyika group includes one who was earning $10,000, several who earned from $5,000 to $7,500, and one who was an alderman...
...Overseas, the volunteers will receive allowances that will enable them to live on a modest scale in close association with the nationals of the other country...
...Of these, sixtyfive will go abroad...
...Its reliance upon individual enterprise and its relatively low cost make it a less objectionable form of foreign aid to conservatives...
...projects are being developed in about twenty countries...
...There was an urgency about this organizational drive that reflected not only the urgency that has marked the entire Kennedy Administration but also the personalities of Shriver and the men he recruited to work with him...
...In the rainy season, they will teach surveying and engineering to Tanganyikans...
...Mathew M. DeForest, thirty-one, of Chicago, a truck and tractor driver and mechanic...
...But those who qualify after completing the training courses now in progress will have skills that are needed where they are going...
...Perhaps the most important cause of the popularity of the Peace Corps is that its concept is hopeful...
...When the President issued his executive order establishing the Peace Corps Ion a pilot basis, it consisted of a handful of men and women without organization, policies, or even office space...
...Stanley Berman, of Louisville, Kentucky, headed for Nigeria...
...Next, the applicant is invited to take an examination, either for general service or for special kinds of teaching...
...Shriver, who is President Kennedy's brother-in-law, runs the Peace Corps as if it were in the last stage of a political campaign...
...Again, the Peace Corps idea is attractive because it involves people rather than dollars or machinery or even food, and, as newspaper editors especially know, people are interested in people...
...It should not promise more than it can produce, nor has it done so...
...in these days the repositories of hope are few...
...This has been our emphasis since then, and it is both the strength and the limitation of the program...
...The appeal of the New Frontier is a call to action, a challenge to the ordinary citizen to do something for his country and the world...
...The Peace Corps offers to meet only what its director calls "middle manpower" needs...
...Many held highly responsible jobs...
...The Peace Corps, to be effective, must work quietly and steadily...
...President Kennedy set the "practical" tone for the Peace Corps in his special message to Congress March 1 when he called for sending trained men and women abroad to meet needs for skilled manpower...
...That much is certain...
...To other critics of foreign aid, it is a welcome change in the direction of the kind of help advocated in The Ugly American, a book which has influenced many attitudes in this area of government activity...
...the Peace Corps office was jammed with volunteers, job seekers, well-wishers, reporters, and television men...
...As a secular missionary program, it appeals to the strong American tradition of unselfish service, which persists even in the absence of denominational religious motivation...
...There is some grumbling about executive action as the means of starting the program...
...It seems likely that there will be an adequate number, but there is some fear that there will be too few in certain fields of skill that are badly needed by most newly developing countries...
...Everything has to be done instantly...
...The most commonly voiced criticism is that the Corps intends to send abroad callow, starry-eyed, impressionable, unskilled youths who will be chewed up by Communists, an idea nourished by the writings of a few hostile newspaper columnists...
...Instead of being a sacrifice, Peace Corps service represents an exceptional, unprecedented opportunity...
...The statements of the volunteers who have been selected for training have been astonishingly moderate...
...The chief functon of the Peace Corps men will be to lay out farm-to-market roads, a vital need in the effort to improve agriculture in Tanganyika...
...Many of them worked their way through college and have a surprisingly solid backlog of practical experience...
...That is the way the Peace Corps will work, doing what it can in the service of man, as long as there is hope...
...So far, there have been enough with the right skills...
...So far, they fit the stated purpose of the Corps, which is to send abroad mature, skilled, balanced men and women who know the country to which they are assigned...
...About eighty volunteers are in training at Rutgers University for the Colombia project, which is to be administered through contract with the CARE organization...
...If he is selected, he is assigned to a training center at a university with which the Peace Corps has a training contract...
...The quality, skill, and stability of the volunteers who have appeared for training has changed estimates of manpower needs and put to rest many fears...
...Thus the identification of the Peace Corps with the New Frontier follows naturally for it is the most direct avenue of personal involvement that has been opened by President John F. Kennedy...
...In addition, a payment of $75 a month will accrue in the United States, to be paid upon separation and intended to tide over the volunteer until he resumes a regular career...
...Peace Corps program developers work out details with foreign ministries...
...She is in training for teaching in Ghana...
...The demand for agricultural workers and advisers threatens to outrun the supply available to the Peace Corps...
...But keep it up, we're making progress...
...The pressure of public support has fallen off since March...
...The usual Peace Corps volunteer might be a college graduate, perhaps with a few years work experience, or a high school graduate with greater practical experience...
...Some of these were rebels from the bureaucracy...
...it is a long range program...
...Neither the staff nor the volunteers count on saving the world, but the Peace Corps program might help save it, along with a lot of other things...
...Generally, the volunteers are well educated...
...It was first thought that twenty applicants would be needed for each volunteer selected, and that twice as many should be placed in training as were needed for a project...
...The requests vary, but the most numerous have been for teachers, agricultural extension workers, health and sanitation experts, and for those with engineering and construction skills...
...This is, of course, wishful thinking, but the wish is real even though the Peace Corps is not going to change the world overnight...
...Some Congressmen believe that the Peace Corps ought to be part of the foreign aid program...
...The idea of the Peace Corps, the idea of individual service to individuals in other countries, is a simple, strong, appealing one, easily understood...
...They will receive medical care and annual leave...
...The pool from which selectees are drawn must be larger next year, and still larger the year after that...
...The Chile project is administered by the Associated Colleges of Indiana, and the fifty volunteers are training at Notre Dame University...
...Peace Corps staff officers were warned, early in the game, to avoid making unrealistic claims as to what the Peace Corps might accomplish...
...The response to President Kennedy's action was tremendous...
...For many of the volunteers this scale of pay will approximate what they might earn and save during the same two years in the United States...
...others were from outside government, attracted by the Peace Corps idea and recruited by telephone calls from the persuasive Sargent Shriver, who is serving as director of the Corps without pay...
...The expenditure of billions in technical aid to underdeveloped nations has failed to win much affection...
...The Peace Corps list of those who have taken examinations then is combed by an IBM machine to see whether there are people with the qualifications to do the kind of work sought by the foreign governments...
...You can't oppose it...
...Soon to enter training are agricultural teams headed for St...
...And, inevitably, there is partisan opposition...
...There is a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers who have taken the intensive examinations required by the Peace Corps, from which selectees can be drawn to fill all of the present year's needs for manpower...
...Rural community development, an activity which embraces irrigation, road building, school construction, sanitation, home economics, and improvement of agricultural methods, will be the function of the volunteers headed for Colombia and Chile...
...it's like being against Home and Mother...
...But the enthusiasm should last, and should increase as understanding of the program and its opportunities grows...
...The Peace Corps is an effort in the right direction...
...The youngest is nineteen and the oldest thirty-five...
...those technicians with the greatest job opportunities here are those most acutely needed abroad...
...To a young person, it offers purpose and a sense of adventure, elements too often lacking in contemporary 'life...
...however, as it has turned out, it will mean a severe financial sacrifice for many in the first groups of trainees...
...You broke fourteen laws...
...The Peace Corps does not intend to do this, and the first volunteers selected for training certainly do not fit this description...
...Lucia, Malaya, Pakistan, and the Philippines...
...eighty-six per cent are between twenty and twenty-six...
...These volunteers come from thirty-eight states, with the largest groups from California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, and Texas...
...His wife, Clarice, twenty-two, is a Smith College graduate in English...
...In reality, the concept of the Peace Corps has changed very little since its inception...
...As critics point out, church groups and private agencies and universities and dedicated individuals have been doing this kind of thing for decades and centuries, and the world is still a mess...
...Ruth Ann Whitney, twenty-three, df Quincy, Illinois, who majored in mathematics at Marquette University and has taught algebra and English in the ninth grade at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, high school the past year...
...A husband and wife team, Mr...
...Neither we in Peace Corps headquarters nor the men and women who have been volunteering for service abroad see the Peace Corps as a panacea for the world's ills...
...widely varied teams covering work in education, vocational instruction, road building, health, and industrial development, for two countries in Southeast Asia, and another with similar variety for Pakistan...
...About seventy-two per cent are college graduates...
...the more popular the program, the less enthusiastic are President Kennedy's political opponents...
...But they may try to bottle it up in committee...
...These arrangements have been criticized both as being too lavish and too little...
...Jack Young, a management expert loaned by another agency to help set up the Peace Corps, congratulated Shriver and the staff one night during that month...
...In Ghana and Nigeria, two key nations in West Africa, the volunteers will, teach English, mathematics, chemistry, history, physics, or biology in secondary schools...
...Great stacks of mail piled up as 20,000 letters poured in, mostly from wouldbe applicants...
...Road building will be the job of the forty surveyors, geologists, and civil engineers who are in training at Texas Western College in El Paso...
...But the Peace Corps is important far beyond its numbers or its material effect because of its symbolism...
...of that we are convinced...
...Our doubts are those that gather on a day when the Berlin crisis or another crisis darkens the skies, and the Peace Corps seems almost academic and remote...
...about 350 volunteers are in training for assignment to Tanganyika, Colombia, and Ghana, and others will soon begin training for projects in Nigeria, Burma, Chile, India, St...
...If this should happen and no legislation is passed, the Peace Corps would have to be dissolved January 1, 1962—less than a year after its formation—according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...His directives, even those addressed to senior officials in the older, slower, established agencies, carry deadlines...
...Lucia, in the Windward Islands, and for India...
...A man or woman who Wants to serve in the Peace Corps fills out a questionnaire which asks chiefly about educatidn and work experience...
...To some extent, these foreign needs match our own needs for manpower...
...it assumes that the furnishing of highly qualified technical experts is the job of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), which has done this for many years...
Vol. 25 • September 1961 • No. 9
