By Joshua Berman
For 50 years Peace Corps volunteers have shared skills, built friendships and cultivated greater understanding between Americans and other world citizens. Joshua Berman is a travel writer and returned Peace Corps volunteer.
A barefoot boy sat in front of me, steering our horse down the narrow path. I laughed, sang and played at the boy’s school all morning; his father had insisted that I return to my assigned village in style. I accepted.
With a whistle and a kick, the boy brought us to a trot as we approached the river’s edge. When we appeared out of the forest and into maize fields, farmers looked up and waved. On one hand, it was just another day in the Nicaraguan countryside; on the other hand, it was an important moment, the day a stranger had arrived in a remote Nicaraguan schoolhouse, and 40 children had met a foreigner for the first time in their lives.
The two years I spent in the Peace Corps were as unpredictable and rewarding as the ride down that mountain. I served as an environmental education volunteer in La Trinidad, Nicaragua, from 1998 to 2000. I had signed up for the same reason the first volunteers had joined the Peace Corps nearly 40 years earlier — to see the world, to meet its people and to participate in one of the boldest experiments ever conducted in American public service.
The original mission of the Peace Corps — to send Americans abroad to share skills, promote peace and friendship and to improve inter-cultural understanding — is anchored to one of the most optimistic moments in U.S. history. An exhausted John F. Kennedy, the story goes, was campaigning for election as president in 1960. He arrived at the University of Michigan in the middle of the night, ready to sleep, but when he encountered a crowd of 10,000 students who had been patiently waiting for him, candidate Kennedy agreed to speak. For some reason, instead of simply shouting a few campaign slogans and going to bed, JFK issued a historical challenge that would echo across generations:
“How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” he asked. “Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”
Kennedy’s quick and improvised speech looked ahead to the famous line from his inaugural address a few months later: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” But this first challenge to the students in Michigan was more specific, and it struck a strong nerve among those who heard it.
As it turned out, there were plenty of Americans willing to spend their days in Ghana, their lives traveling the world. The idea was not entirely new, but a major government initiative to create and manage such a force of volunteers was new, and in March 1961, only months after being sworn in as president, Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924, providing for the establishment and administration of the Peace Corps.
“Life in the Peace Corps will not be easy,” he warned. “Men and women will be expected to work and live alongside the nationals of the country in which they are stationed — doing the same work, eating the same food, talking the same language.”
Despite these challenges, volunteers signed up by the thousands. As more and more governments invited the Peace Corps to work in their countries, the program quickly expanded from two countries — Ghana and Tanzania — to dozens of developing countries worldwide. They lived deep in their assigned cities and villages. They worked with farmers, teachers, and health workers; they taught English; they helped raise fish and farm animals.
Throughout the 1960s, Peace Corps volunteers were assigned to newly independent but impoverished countries emerging from colonialism. The organization’s lofty goals of peace and development were genuine, and so was the Cold War–inspired mission to promote democracy and improve America’s image and influence.
In the 1970s, assignments became more targeted, and volunteers with more work experience were selected to serve. The average age of volunteers rose during this time — from 22 to 28 — and the percentage of volunteers over the age of 50 also climbed. By 1974, the Peace Corps had been invited to work in 69 countries, an all-time high.
In 1979, the Peace Corps was finally granted full autonomy within the executive branch of the U.S. government (it had previously been an agency within the State Department). During President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, the size of the program and number of volunteers dropped, but new initiatives, especially to promote food security, were launched in the Caribbean, Central America and Africa.
The organization continued to evolve with the times. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, volunteers were assigned to Eastern Europe for the first time, to Lithuania, Estonia and other newly independent nations, where they were asked to help with small business development. These were transitional programs designed to assist countries as they moved from socialist- to market-based economies; within 10 years, the Baltic States programs closed, their job completed.
In 1993, the first volunteers arrived in China, primarily to teach English. Fifteen years later, there were 114 "U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers," as Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) are known there, teaching English in dozens of universities, medical schools and vocational colleges throughout the country.
Whatever the prevailing global political climate, once on the ground Peace Corps volunteers simply struggle to connect, fit in, and find meaningful work. Stanley Meissler, author of “When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years,” says, “Much of what volunteers do is just not quantifiable. Peace Corps annual reports can recite the numbers of fish ponds built or the kilos of honey created, but I have never been satisfied with those recitations.
“I feel the impact is so much greater,” Meissler says. “How do you measure the impact of the Peace Corps when two volunteers befriend a poor adolescent boy and he grows up to become president of Peru? Or how do you measure the impact of a [health volunteer] who shows Afghan nurses that demonstrating love and concern to a patient is part of the job? I simply have never doubted the enormous impact of PCVs on their hosts.”
That impact travels both ways and crosses oceans. Returned Peace Corps volunteers come home to the United States with knowledge of the cultures they’ve visited — and with new world views. They go into education, health care, development work, politics, business and the arts. Most continue working to “strengthen Americans' understanding about the world and its peoples," one of Kennedy’s original goals for the Peace Corps.
Of course “the world and its peoples” continued to change. After September 11, 2001, for example, as U.S. embassies around the world fortified their buildings, security concerns caused the Peace Corps to close some programs in some Central Asian countries and reassign them to areas such as the Caribbean and Latin America, which were perceived as safer.
Today, some 9,000 volunteers are serving in 77 countries. They work on projects in education, health, HIV/AIDS, business, the environment, agriculture and youth development. The U.S. Congress has just approved a historic high $400 million for the Peace Corps budget.
The Peace Corps’ mission remains unique. Despite great changes in the United States and in the world over the decades, the Peace Corps continues to attract bipartisan U.S. political support. More than 200,000 Americans have served in the U.S. Peace Corps in 139 countries.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
