Trump Needs to Listen to the Far Left on the Peace Corps
Some Volunteers Benefit Careerwise, But Locals? Not So Much
The author near Lake Kivu, Bukavu, Zaire, 1987.
As strange as it sounds, President Donald Trump needs to pay close attention to a group of leftists who started a movement called, “Decolonize the Peace Corps” a few years back. The organization has a bracing message: the only people who are really helped by the Peace Corps are its volunteers and that it’s time to shut the organization down. Speaking as a former volunteer who served in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the 1980s, I think they’re right.
Writing on Medium in an article that was reprinted here in 2020, returned Peace Corps Volunteer Shanna Loga, who served in Morocco from 2006 to 2008, reports that for Decolonize members, the Peace Corps experience “primarily benefits volunteers” who get to live in a foreign country, boost their résumé and enjoy non-Competitive eligibility for government jobs “and not the international communities they serve.”
CPR Training? Really?
I winced when I read a passage from Loga’s interview with another volunteer, Lindsay Allen, who served in Mozambique from April 2019 to March 2020—when she was sent home in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: “I studied public health for two years before I changed my major, but I maintain that I wasn’t qualified to be a health volunteer.”
Lindsay, I don’t know you, but rest assured that with two years of undergraduate training in public health, you were infinitely more qualified than I was to serve as a public health volunteer when I got sent to Africa in 1987. I had a bachelor's degree in politics and government from a liberal arts school in the Pacific Northwest (which regularly boasts about how many of its graduates join the Peace Corps. Given what I know, I’m not impressed.)
Aside from getting the first aid merit badge in Boy Scouts as a teenager, I knew nothing—absolutely nothing—about public health or medical care. To buttress my résumé for service as a public health volunteer, I was instructed by the Peace Corps to get a certificate in training people how to perform CPR on heart attack victims. After getting the certificate, which I dutifully obtained, I would be qualified to serve as a public health agent in Africa, after, of course a few weeks of in-country training, the story went.
The notion that being able to train people in CPR was a useful skill in Zaire where I served in the late 1980s was laughable. It’s not as if the nurses who worked at the hospital where I was stationed could keep heart attack victims alive in the back of an ambulance as they were transported to an operating room where a doctor would perform heart surgery. Where I worked, there was no ambulance and no heart surgeon capable of saving a heart attack victim’s life on the operating table. In fact, for much of the time I was at my post, there was no doctor present at the hospital I was stationed at.
Maybe I’m putting it a bit too dramatically, but my gut tells me that if you had a heart attack in the area where I served, you either got better on your own, or you died. Getting the CPR certificate was just a bureaucratic hoop to jump through to demonstrate I was committed to the path of being a white savior in the heart of Africa. To be fair, I was given several weeks of training in public health issues at a Peace Corps training center in Zaire where I was also given instruction in French and Tshiluba, a Bantu language.
Outside Saviors Create Dependency
It was a great experience for me, but the professional training I received could just as easily been given to the nurses and administrators at the hospital where I was sent to work. About the only qualifications I had was my white skin, an overweening sense of moral superiority over those who hadn’t joined the Peace Corps, and profound overconfidence in my own abilities to make the world a better place. (If I hadn’t been stripped of these last two characteristics—which I had in great abundance—by my time in the Peace Corps, I would have made a perfect pastor in the American mainline, but I digress.)
Once I got to my post, I was not asked to give CPR training to the medical professionals at the hospital but was instead put in charge of the health zone’s pharmacy. I was given a lock box filled with local currency and medicine that I was charged with distributing to health centers throughout the health zone. I rode around on the back of a motorcycle and handed out medicine to health center nurses who sold the medicine to their patients and then gave me the receipts so I could buy more medicine in the regional capital. I had no accounting skills, and was in fact, trained by a hospital administrator, a local Zairian, in how to keep track of the money and medicine.
Creating Dependency
Being so desperate to help, I ignored the fact that I was doing a job that a local Zairian already knew how to do and consequently, was creating a dependency. I was forced to confront this reality when I listened to two of my co-workers at the health zone explain why they put me, a white guy, in charge of the money and medicine for the dozen or so health centers spread throughout the health zone.
“Where there is a white, it’s like this,” he said, making a decisive chopping gesture with his right hand, indicating that everything is in order when a white guy is in charge.
“But among us, it’s like this,” he said, moving his hand back and forth like a snake moving in the grass. The fact was the Zairians didn’t trust one another with the money. They knew that as a white kid from the United States I didn’t need to steal money to feed my family while their co-workers might have to do exactly that. (Years later, I was told by someone that I trust that Christian church organizations in Africa sometimes recruited missionaries from Europe to serve as their treasurers as insurance against embezzlement using this same logic.)
Despite the dependency I was creating, I reveled in the self-importance that came with being trusted with the health zone’s money and medicine. I was in all my glory when the administrator sent me to borrow money from the coffers from a local high school to make payroll for the health zone’s staffers who hadn’t been paid in months. I went with two other staffers from the health zone, but it was my signature that was required on the promissory note.
To justify my authority, I followed the example of another volunteer who, oddly enough, had apparently been put in charge of the pharmacy of the health zone where he worked. He had used the cash he had been entrusted with to purchase heavy bags of corn and peanuts as a hedge against inflation. When it was time to buy more medicine for his health centers, he brought the goods to market at the regional capital, sold them at a profit and used them to buy more medicine than he would have been able to do if had merely held onto the cash.
When the time came to buy more medicine, I did not ride on the back of a truck to the regional capital with bags of corn and peanuts to sell in the market and buy medicine. That task was given to the son of the physician who was mostly absent from his post as health zone administrator because he had been reassigned to a more responsible post in the regional capital.
Facilitating Dependency
You know what happened next. Instead of dutifully carrying out his assigned task, the health zone administrator’s son sold the corn and peanuts, absconded with the money, went on a drunk, never to be heard from again (at least while I was in the country). I was disconsolate.
For years, I told myself that the thief who stole the money that I had so carefully husbanded hadn’t done anything that King Leopold of Belgian hadn’t taught Africans to do when he colonized the Congo in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was the story that President Mobutu told his critics who railed against him for stealing money hand over fist from his countrymen when he ruled the country for decades after the Congo achieved independence.
It would have been better for the folks I had been trying to help if I had never showed up. Without my efforts, the nurses in charge of local health centers would have been forced to take what little money they had from their local treasuries and buy what medicine they could, wherever they could get it. It would have been suboptimal, but at least they would have gotten something for their money. By helping to centralize the financial operations at the health zone’s pharmacy, I had facilitated Zaire’s kleptocracy.
Locals Have Internet
During all this, I became insanely jealous of other volunteers who had been trained to teach people how to dig ponds in which they could raise fish, a valuable source of protein. I became jealous of the volunteers who taught locals to place cement caps on freshwater springs to prevent people from getting sick from infected water. These skills were much more concrete than any benefit I could provide.
At one point during all of this, I got sick (that happened a lot) and was driven in a Land Rover to a hospital several a few hundred miles away. When my American doctor discovered I was working in public health, he suggested I try to transfer to one of the other programs I just described above. At the time, I agreed that it would have been better for me to be a fish or water volunteer. My post as a public health volunteer just wasn’t a good medium for my quest to be a white savior.
But these days? There isn’t anything that a college-educated kid from the United States is going to bring to the downtrodden in Africa, Latin America, or Asia that people can’t already learn for themselves on the internet.
Damaged Volunteers
We also need to remember that while many volunteers benefit professionally from their time overseas, some of those who serve are badly damaged. Women are regularly abused and assaulted by men in the communities they are sent to help and the Peace Corps’ record of helping victims of sexual assault has not been so good. Moreover, volunteers get sick, as I did. Some suffer lingering effects of their illnesses for the rest of their lives. Some become daily drinkers, entertain the locals by passing out in bars, and struggle with booze for a long time after coming back home.
Given these realities, it’s no surprise that a significant number of volunteers do not finish their terms of service, which believe me, is a great source of shame for folks early in their careers. In the 1980s, when I served, thirty percent of the volunteers left their posts early, indicating that the organization was setting up a lot of young people to fail—not a good thing to do to a recent college graduate. Maybe the failure I endured was good for me, but it’s not something I would wish on others in a million years.
Maybe we should keep the Peace Corps. There’s a lot of unreasonable anti-Americanism on college campuses these days that would be cured by living a couple of years in places like the Congo. But is it really fair to send young people afflicted with an unreasonable hatred of their own country to get their head straight someone else’s? I don’t think so.
Twofold Message
My message is twofold. To young people thinking of joining, I ask you to think again. The folks overseas have internet connections and understand better than any outsider the challenges their countries face. Outsiders, no matter how well-intentioned, can’t give them the will to solve these problems. In fact, your presence may make things worse for the people you’re trying to help.
President Trump, I ask you to take a cold, hard look at the Peace Corps budget and consider shutting it down altogether. Even folks on the left think it should be shut down and have said so for years.
In addition to asking you to look at the organization’s budget, I ask you to consider the possibility that the organization puts young Americans at risk for questionable benefit. As troubled as our young people are these days, their idealism and energy are valuable assets that should not be squandered by bureaucracy that has set so many people up to fail over the years.
Just ask the folks on the left who’ve been critiquing the organization for years.