a loooong update

(Warning: this is a looooong one. I thought about breaking it up into sections, but most of the “sections” are more connected than I thought… so, 2 pages on Israel, 2 on Peace Corps, 2 in response to a NYTimes article about Peace Corps and 2 are the article. Enjoy! Send me comments!)

I went to Israel for a bit less than two weeks, right before Christmas to right after New Year’s. The impetus for the trip was a good friend from college’s wedding. But what made it reality was that two friends from here said “well, we’ve never been. Soooo, if YOU go, we’ll go!!”

So, I went; with two friends from here! Which was interesting because one, they’d never been; two, I haven’t actually traveled there WITH friends in a while (I usually seem to be stuck at Israeli borders by myself!); and, three because they’re Christian. They put me into the role of tourist that I haven’t been in for a while. I realized while I was there that the first time I was there was 10 years ago this Christmas. (It’s hard to believe that I’m old enough to be able to say “10 years ago…” and remember it!). But really, that’s the last time I was a full-fledged tourist there. I remember then the awe of the Old City, the first time I saw the “mud” at the bottom of Turkish Coffee, the shock that Christmas felt like just another day, and watching carefully from the plane taking off until I literally could not see the land anymore… I guess even then I knew I’d be back.

They also made me a guide to a Jerusalem that I don’t know as well: Christian Jerusalem. We saw more churches than I could keep track of. But, I think my two favorites were the Church where Mary was born on Mt. Zion and the Church of All Nations at Gethsemane. I loved the church at Mt Zion because it was so peaceful, out of the way a little and the paintings and mosaics were beautiful and varied. I felt like I could have sat there for a long time, thinking, praying, loving Jerusalem... The Church at Gethsemane is supposed to be where Jesus prayed before he was arrested, has a garden full of 2,000 year old olive trees and the most beautiful windows made out of very thin, purple alabaster. That garden and a walk up the Mt. of Olives have made me fall in love with olive trees. They’re so beautiful with their winding old trunks that look almost like aged skin, making you ask in your head just what all they’ve seen in their lifetimes…

It was amazing to be back. The wedding was incredible. And instead of feeling incredibly overwhelmed by the fact that a close friend of mine was getting married I was mostly overwhelmed with how wonderful it was. She looked beautiful, they looked happy, it was at Ramat Rachel, an old kibbutz south of Jerusalem, which was gorgeous, the dancing and the music were so much fun, and it was so nice to see so many friends from Brown, some of whom I didn’t even know where there! I was teary for the whole service as his friends and family brought him in to present the engagement and as we all danced with them away from the Chupah when they were finally “man and wife.”

While I was there I also got to see a bunch (but nearly enough!) friends from Seeds of Peace, several of whom were friends from my first summer at camp which I realized (again) was almost ten years ago! Not quite because this summer will be 9 years. But it’s hard to believe that first of all that was so long ago; second, it has impacted my life is so many ways; and third, that I’m still in touch with and close to people I see rarely, communicate with almost solely by e-mail, and who have been in so many different places than me over the last 10 years (the army, school, the west bank, India, camp again…). Seeds of Peace, though, gives us this bond, that I also realized while I was there, was probably the first thing we all approached as adults… suddenly we were given the responsibility and the trust to try something and to be opinionated and we responded with a mature, adult passion.

I think that’s also one of the reasons it was so wonderful to be back. I miss the passion with which I approached so much of my work in the Middle East. Maybe I miss some of the naiveté and the simplicity with which I allowed myself to delve in so deeply. I know that I ended up here in Africa because of a desire to get away from that, if not forever at least for a little while. I wanted an opportunity to compare, to try to understand something else, and maybe by understanding someplace else creating an ability to come back to the Middle East with some distance, some more understanding, and maybe a renewed energy. By my last summer at Seeds, I was burnt out and a little saddened… So much work and so little progress!

I don’t know if going back to the Middle East is what I will want or will do eventually, but being there definitely made me realize how much I miss it. I miss speaking Hebrew; I miss speaking Arabic; I miss the beauty of the call to prayer as many different mosques call it out at the same time and their beautiful tones play games with each other in your ear; I miss trying to understand and explain “the conflict” or “the situation”; I miss the connection I feel personally to the land; I miss the desert and the beauty of the trees in an oasis or a kibbutz in the middle of all that brown; I miss hummus, falafel, fatoush, and food with different spices; I miss having a Jewish community… so, needless to say, it was hard to get back on that Ethiopian Air plane.

Yet, even after the exhaustion of many hours of overnight travel we landed back in Zambia and the first thing I realized was that I do know how to live here… I can greet, I can joke, I can negotiate a cab, I increasingly know my way around Lusaka, I can hitch up north, when we stopped for gas in Mpika for 10 minutes I saw friends. I can’t believe that I’ve lived here for a year almost now. That’s longer that I’ve actually LIVED anywhere since high school.

Getting back to site I was exhausted. Exhausted from traveling, from the emotion of Israel and seeing friends, and from the news that my dog died while I was away… I felt a bit like I had abandoned her to the craziness of my village. There were rumors that she was poisoned, more likely she was stupid and ate something bad… but either way it was hard to get back and feel guilty, that I could have done something.

All of the exhaustion, the fact that I’m coming up on a year, and an interesting article that many of you may have seen (copied at the bottom of this. It’s from the NYTimes, by Robert Strauss on January 9th, 2008) has made this week mostly about trying, again, to get to a point where I understand and can talk or write about what I’m doing here…

I spent time thinking about my schedule and whether I feel productive. I’m working on a lot, I have a lot of ideas, and yet at the same time, often feel like I’m working very little. I get a lot of sleep and my pace of life is slow. I get to the internet café and updates on the computers that, in America, should have been done before the store opened, are being started as I walk in. Things like that make me late to meetings, not get to the Ministry on time, miss a counterpart at the district, or just slow down my time getting home or buying food for dinner… Yet, they also allow for relationships. I talked with the people at the internet while I waited to for the updates to download. I have my friends at the market who I buy dried fish for my cats from or tomatoes and cabbage for my dinner. Everyone I pass seems to know my name and most people greet me, even in town. I walk or ride my bike everywhere so travel that in the states would be fast fast, takes an hour. Sometimes I think I could get so much more done if I could just speed up processes, but people also move slower. A guy who gave us a ride to the Peace Corps house the other day had traveled to America and said “oh, it’s too fast! I couldn’t wait to be back!” So, am I here to teach about efficiency or to learn to slow down?

Many Peace Corps volunteers see our work as a process where we, unlike NGOs, bring skills to teach and information to pass on. I often feel that as an education volunteer who does NOT have formal training as a teacher, but IS working with teachers who have formal training as teachers, my strengths are not the trainings I do. Who am I to teach teachers how to teach? A health volunteer working with community health groups has much more space for expertise I think. They do know more science and can teach it. Yes, I have been part of educational system that may be light years ahead of this one in its organization and its student pass rate; yes, I have a ideas for things that could be done better… but I also have to realize that things here are done certain ways for certain reasons. Should they continue that way? Sometimes, often not. Students here may not pass because teachers aren’t stellar but maybe also because they aren’t fed enough, their parents are dying, they don’t have clothes and shoes, they don’t have books to practice with or adults who encourage them to think and question. Probably, all of the above. This school system needs resources.

So, I see my strength as much more about my ability to help people here with a vision access resources… there really is so much money going into development now, so if I can help people think through a project, find funding for it and make it a reality I can help them do several things. First, I help them think of what they need. They prioritize what they want and need (I, of course, am somewhat selective because my interests and expertise mean I’m more interested in a youth center than, say, a study on fertilizers… though that would be good too!). Then we think about what will work, what won’t work, and how to run the idea or project they are thinking of. Finally, we think about ways to access funding and then actually implement the idea. I can’t give it to them, so who can? A bank? A loan from a microfinance institution? Peace Corps? A ministry or the district? The World Bank? The American Embassy?

Right now my two big projects are one to build a youth center and two to get 20,000 books shipped to Zambia. For both of them the community or the school has expressed interest and we’ve sat down to think about what they might need. For the youth center, we came to realize that with the five government and five private schools in the area there are over 6,000 children (not counting the ones not in school) who have NOTHING to do after school, no extracurricular activities, no place to continue some kind of constructive learning. They have chores and work to do at home, but they are often wandering around, at my house, playing in the street, getting into trouble, or, if they’re older, going to bars or starting to experiment sexually. We have several youths and adults who are interested in making a youth center happen, but they have no funding. So we’re applying for funds. We’ll apply to a couple different places for different parts: the building, the furnishings, the trainings… and when it’s done, I hope, there will be a place where the kids can be and can learn when they are not in school (which is most of the day).

For the library, the school had a structure. They, and the ministry, wanted to make it a library, but because there were no books the school had been using the space as two classrooms for the last couple years. This structure is at the school where the District Resource Center is, meaning that teachers, administrators, and students pass through all the time. If they can re-furbish the building and get books, it will be the first library in the district. And, it has unprecedented access to people from all over the province. So, along with four other PCVs, we’re trying to apply for money to ship 20,000 books (that will be shared between four libraries). If you’re interested in donating books, they can be sent to MD and you can e-mail me for the address. Or, you can give money to help us ship them.

Along with those two projects, I am trying to do some work with teachers to do regular meetings, set up regular discussion groups so that they can problem shoot together, maybe make a zonal resource center where they can talk to each other, access resources, maybe use a computer or (gasp! if it works!) the internet… and also maybe do a project in environmental education with several schools in the area, because I recently learned that Zambia has the highest rate of deforestation in the world! Not sure where that comes from or how that’s true, but it’s true that in my village there are almost no trees! So, we plan to talk about the life cycle of trees, non-wood parts, and then plant some trees at the school. I didn’t get money from Peace Corps, but maybe the Ministry of Forestry or the Environmental Support Program would be able to support us.

Do all of those projects mean I am working all the time? No. In fact there are many days when I say I will stop by and talk with different people and not a single person is there. The DEBS at the ministry isn’t in, the environment officer is in another province, the District Commissioner just ran to a meeting, the internet is down, and there was no food in the market… I get home at 14:00, feeling ready to take a nap even though I didn’t really do anything and think “I’m useless. I do nothing here. This is just a game that the US government plays with us! Or that we thought would be fun to play with ourselves!” Maybe I am, but other days I do feel like I do something. Maybe I just have a good conversation with kids or I watch an interaction that I won’t ever forget or all of the ministry officers are there and think my ideas are good and want to help or I learn things about what I want to do next and what I DON’T want to do next … is that worth it? I don’t know. Is two years a long time? It’s not that long. Sometimes it feels a lot longer than others. Though, right now I can’t believe it’s been a year! Is it an expensive way for me to learn a lot? Maybe. But will I probably do my next job better now that I’ve learned more about development, project implementation, individual motivation, time, and what works or doesn’t work? I think so. Even if it’s not in development!

Which is the perfect link to some comments on this NYTimes article... Strauss raises some good points. There are many volunteers who come in without much training and without much motivation and are thrown into situations where they can’t do much and maybe a Zambian could do better. Those volunteers would be better suited to offer help and to be mentally stable themselves if they had come in with more training or more support or more professional background. Though, the work is undefined and often slow and even volunteers with an extensive professional background struggle, and sometimes more because of expectations of how things “should” work.

Strauss seems to simplify several things. He writes that older volunteers have, “extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers” and that “too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.” Both of these statements make a broad generalization about younger Peace Corps Volunteers that is, I think, unfair. All of the other volunteers that I’ve come in with have life experience that is valuable. Many of us have traveled or worked in different places and come with our struggles, challenges, successes, and our own maturity. Peace Corps, at least in Zambia, would benefit from encouraging us to know those things about each other, to lean on people with specific experiences… I also get much support from the other volunteers who are my age because we are going through the same processes and the same life decisions. “What next?,” for us, is about making a career direction decision. Older volunteers can, of course, shed light on those decisions as well but often forget what it is to making that decision.

Strauss also writes, “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.” This is a valuable argument on one level. Yes, there are many unemployed Zambians looking for jobs and yes many of them would benefit from the experience of the work we’re doing.

But it fails on many others. One, many of them wouldn’t volunteer to do. They, understandably want to work their way up their own system and don’t want to spend two years in a village, living in a mud hut, without electricity or cell phone service and working on a very basic community level of development. Second, their government doesn’t have the money to pay them to do it (should ours?). Third, there is always value in having an outsider come in help (that’s the point of consulting companies! Of which, Strauss now runs one). There are parts of the systems here that are so totally lacking that having someone, even someone who has just experienced a functional system, can add on to.


I think Strauss is correct in saying that Peace Corps would strengthen its own position and level of respect if they were more selective about whom they accepted. If they suggested that there was more competition they would not only get better applicants and choose better applicants, but they would add to development by suggesting that development work could also benefit from competition. Peace Corps in each country could also support the development work and could make it more effective if they encouraged more people, throughout the application process as well as throughout training and service, to actually talk about what development is and think about why they are giving two years to a developing country! What IS development anyway? (oh Brown Development Studies, how I love you!)

Peace Corps, I think, in many ways also contributes to some of the issues he brought up. From the beginning of the recruitment process Peace Corps emphasizes flexibility. They ask, “Is place, time [that you leave], or job most important to you?” And then throughout the process they like to question your commitment to do Peace Corps. I was challenged by a recruitment officer when I told her that leaving two weeks after college graduation was not the ideal time. She said “Hannah, are you sure you want to do Peace Corps? Are you ready to commit?” Yes, but not in June was my response!

I had at least one friend (who was another Middle East person) who, after being offered a position in Eastern Europe, kind of scoffed at Peace Corps. How could they, recognizing his skills and area of expertise, not try to take advantage of that?! They must not be very sincere about the work they expected him to do. I have other friends who, for fear of not being offered another position in Peace Corps, accepted the first invitation they got even though it wasn’t where they wanted to go or what they wanted to do or when they wanted to leave! How, and why, does Peace Corps think that by sending volunteers to places they don’t want to go to or to do work that is not connected to their background that their work will be most effective?

Again, encouraging people to think about and explain why they want to go somewhere, what their personal goals are (none of us are completely selfless in this work… we are all getting something out of being here and came TO get something out of being here… even if that was just an experience of helping others), and why they have those goals would help Peace Corps Washington put us in places where we can be most effective and help volunteers understand more thoroughly what they are trying to do here.

All of that said, I think most Zambians ARE thankful that I’m here. I may feel uncomfortable teaching teachers, but they seem to be a lot less uncomfortable. They love when I teach lessons, they love when I come to the schools, they love when I have ideas for the community of for how to get books or other places they could look for funding. They laugh that I always have children at my house or when I talk about my leaking roof or when I say things wrong in Bemba. They’re surprised that I’m young or that I’m not married, but they think I have ideas that are interesting and useful. They see me as kind and they are surprised that I would be willing to live in the village without electricity or water. They, unlike many Americans (farmers or not) appreciate that someone is willing to come and help for sometime. Maybe that’s because I am a distraction or I feed their kids bananas, but if there’s ever discomfort with me it’s more of a resigned acknowledgement that I have more and that I will go back to America. I don’t think there is any resentment. At all. Maybe that’s something we Americans have to learn from?

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Too Many Innocents Abroad
By ROBERT L. STRAUSS
Published: January 9, 2008

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.

ps, i'm reading a really interesting book now called "Innocents Abroad" by Jonathan Zimmerman. it's about teachers abroad in the 20th century, with a large emphasis on Peace Corps Volunteers, and the changing perceptions of their roles and purposes abroad. i'd recommend it!