Tawk amongst yurselfs

Below is an article published recently in the NYTimes.
It is a debate that every Peace Corps volunteer that I've ever known had with himself/herself at some point in their service. Basically it's: Do we do more harm than good? Are we helping ourselves more than we're helping them?
Strauss' main beef seems to be that too many unqualified young punks go out there and waste a lot of resources. He's right, in my opinion, but to a point. If someone were actually qualified to do development work, they'd be a fool to join the Peace Corps with it's limited resources, restricted political clout and horrible pay. Go join USAID or UNICEF or something that has a real budget and far-reaching access.
The Peace Corps is at its heart a cultural exchange. In that sense, it's been wildly successful. Thoughts, my fellow RPCV's? Leave a comment.

Too Many Innocents Abroad

By ROBERT L. STRAUSS
Published: January 9, 2008 in the New York Times

Antananarivo, Madagascar

THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps’ country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.

However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.

This wasn’t the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it’s much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.

In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad’s backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma’s cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.

For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.

Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.

This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.

The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.

Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.

We're still here

Sorry if you missed the LaPCA King Cake party that kicked off a frigid Carnival Season. Glad to hear if you made it.
To sum: Beer was drunken. Stories of flaming rats and hippo-tortoise love abound. King Cake was devoured. Thanks to the ever-gracious host Tierney.
Before going any further I want to apologize for neglecting this blog. I will try harder to not do so in the future, especially since I will be busy on blogger with other work for my real job.
Yes, that was a shameless attempt to send traffic to my other blog.
2008 will surely contain some service projects and ethnic dinners. Hopefully, King Cake will not be the only reason La.'s RPCVs gather to drink and trade war stories.
As for the service projects, the board seems pretty open to ideas right now. Here's a list of ideas from Jeff Grimes.
Check in more often. Send your ideas and suggestions. And, contribute please to this blog. It ain't hard. I'll gladly make you an author with full access, just email me.

Dec. 9 meeting minutes

Louisiana Peace Corps Association

Board of Directors Meeting

December 9, 2007

10:00 a.m.

CC’s Coffee House

2917 Magazine Street

New Orleans

Susannah Coolidge, presiding

Tierney Davis

Bruce Ingber

Brian Luckett

Brett Montague (guest)

Welcome and Approval of Minutes of the June 24, 2007 meeting:

The minutes of the June 24 meeting were approved with one addition: the Deaf School in Ghana received a $150 donation from LPCA on May 5, 2007.

LPCA Newsletter

o Tierney Davis, Editor of the Newsletter, will coordinate with Josh Norman to post the next edition of the newsletter on the LPCA blog.



o Tierney will post the newsletter by mid-January 2008.



o Brett Montague offered to contribute an article on his recent service to the newsletter.



Follow-up report on Rebuilding Together

o Bruce Ingber announced that the Rebuilding Together project was successfully completed in two weekends.



o In response to an email from Camille Lopez, an RPCV and Assistant Director of Rebuilding Together who requested that LPCA coordinate with NPCA for Rebuilding Together Projects throughout the year, Susannah offered to contact Camille for further information and clarification.





Next Social Event

Tierney Davis offered to host a King Cake Party on January 6 at her home uptown.

Future Service Projects

Suggestions for future service projects included the following:

+ City Park Clean-up
+ Cemetery Clean –up in coordination with Save Our Cemeteries (a suggested date for this was between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest)
+ Possible Project in coordination with Arbor Day on April 5



Peace Corps Week

o Peace Corps Week in 2008 will be February 24-March 1.



o In 2007 13 RPCVs spoke to three schools in New Orleans about their experience in Peace Corps. Susannah said she would contact the MI Coordinators at Tulane School of Public Health and Jason Denlinger, a teacher at Rabouin High School to see if he can assist with the coordination of Peace Corps week for 2008.

Adjournment

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 11:15 a.m.