Volunteer in Ghana
Cook, Philip S.
BOOKS Volunteer in Ghana To the Peace Corps with Love, by Arnold Zeitlin. Doubleday. 351 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Philip S. Cook TVThatever love Arnold Zeitlin " brought to or found in the Peace...
...Reviewed by Philip S. Cook TVThatever love Arnold Zeitlin " brought to or found in the Peace Corps, it has precious little to do with affection for the U.S...
...Perhaps the most telling argument against Zeitlin's concern about the amateurism and irrelevance of the Peace Corps' efforts is one that he makes himself toward the end of his book...
...In it, he alleged that the Peace Corps has sold the public a bill of goods—that it fails to live up to its alleged purpose of providing developing countries with trained Americans who can "help meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower...
...There are a hundred ways that he and the professionally-qualified people he seeks to have serve abroad can teach, heal, build, or advise in the developing world without enduring any of the restrictions which Peace Corps service imposes...
...But more than that, as this amusing and often appealing book delightfully portrays, Arnold Zeitlin and his wife, Marian, discovered those elements of the Peace Corps purpose which made the entire experience something vastly more important and enriching than just providing skilled manpower...
...But more than that, he says, "they also were better, raising the quality of instruction in the schools...
...He regards the Peace Corps' concern for image "paradoxical" in that the ban on private cars and other material comforts "seemed a denial of the legitimate American image" and "almost a proclamation of American self-hate...
...After some 300 pages of affectionate, colorful reminiscence about life in the former Gold Coast with the fellow-Volunteer he wooed and wed there, Zeitlin gets down to business...
...I fail to see why amateurism should have any great appeal to either Congress or the public, but it is true enough that the Peace Corps has had little success recruiting skilled craftsmen (although it has not done badly with teachers, architects, and nurses...
...But is it really startling to discover that journeymen plumbers, carpenters, and sheet-metal workers with families and mortgages (or apprentices looking for their union tickets) regard two years overseas as an unthinkable sacrifice—while the recent college graduate finds it a challenging opportunity...
...The Volunteers in Ghana were more highly qualified by education, if not by experience, and more highly dedicated than their Ghanaian colleagues...
...The Peace Corps, he adds, has failed to enlist the services of really skilled Americans—experienced schoolteachers, carpenters, engineers, and farmers...
...He insists upon describing the Volunteers' monthly subsistence allowance as "wages...
...As an expression of American idealism, he says, the Peace Corps is a bust...
...government agency which sent him to teach school in Ghana for twenty-one months...
...He and his fellow Volunteer teachers in Ghana, he notes, were a windfall to Nkrumah...
...youngsters stirring with idealism and dissatisfaction, oldsters unhappy at being told they no longer were useful...
...The success of the Peace Corps must always, in part, be measured by its ability to attract the Volunteer who is not only handy with his hands but also determined to become a part of the lives of those he has come to serve...
...The bulk of the Peace Corps Volunteers, who have served or are serving overseas, have come from the ranks of the "untried and the retired...
...If one objects to the "hairshirt" postures imposed on Peace Corps volunteers, I think he can properly wonder why Zeitlin does not urge other Americans to go to Africa as private contract teachers...
...Zeitlin concludes that the Peace Corps should forget its imagery, make professional competence the first test of a Volunteer's usefulness, and "sweeten the pot" to attract those with technical skills and experience...
...This final sweetener has already been adopted by the Peace Corps in the case of certain doctors, despite the vehement protests of purists in the agency who regard this as the first drip in what threatens to become an eroding torrent of exceptions that will ultimately destroy one of the essential elements of the Peace Corps—the concept of service...
...Largely because of the incredibly persistent curiosity and determination of his remarkable wife, it seems that Zeitlin was induced to eat African food, to sleep in African hotels, to explore the countryside afoot, to ride in the back of a crowded African truck rather than up front where the white man is supposed to be...
...He would have the government offer more money, draft exemptions, "debt holidays," and let married men take their families overseas...
...In a subsequent Saturday Evening Post article, Zeitlin carried his argument a step further...
...But there is much that is different about the early Peace Corps that Zeitlin served with and the one which today does a reasonably creditable job of preparing Volunteers to do a specific task with a degree of professional competence...
...Zeitlin has a legitimate complaint when he says that the Peace Corps failed to assign a staff member skilled in teaching to assist those Volunteers who had gone to Ghana without previous experience or training to equip them for their classroom chores...
...What is more, he argued, [former] Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver was not really interested in providing professionally-qualified Volunteers because Congress and the public prefer the carefully cultivated image of "fetching amateurism...
...More skilled Americans would have been better," he says, "but even non-professionals like Marian and me did the job...
...They cost substantially less than expatriate contract teachers...
...It strikes me that nowhere, in either his book or his article, does Zeitlin give any indication that he attaches real value to this concept...
...They did the job...
...To the Peace Corps with Love is no valentine...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
