By Joel Thurtell
I’m not surprised that Peace Corps volunteers are being raped at their work sites overseas, and I’m less surprised that Peace Corps administrators have taken a callous, blame-the-victim attitude.
I’ll be astonished if Congress passes a bill that will correct the problem. And I’d be flabbergasted if such an act of Congress could successfully change the attitudes of a stratum of bureaucrats — Peace Corps management — whose main function is very different from the public concept of doing good that the Peace Corps enjoys.
There is a gigantic tension within the Peace Corps between what volunteers — the grunts — believe they are sent overseas to do and what the bosses know is the prime mission of the Peace Corps.
A volunteer who was raped by local thugs thought her objective as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bangladesh was “to save the world.”
Her Peace Corps bosses acted like it was her fault.
Typically, Peace Corps volunteers are idealists, young or old, who want to accomplish positive things with their lives. They don’t care that their wages are pegged at the subsistence level compared to the career-sized earnings of officials who run the Peace Corps. Volunteers don’t care, or at least recognize that they have no say in Peace Corps policies that determine how they work and live. Those policies are made in Washington, D.C., by desk-based officials with tidy federal salaries and benefits.
Most of all, though, the lives and well-being of volunteers are at the mercy of the real goal of the Peace Corps, which has nothing to do with saving the world.
If the real goal of the U.S. government were to promote benevolent change in the world as a prime means of defusing war and corruption, then the Peace Corps budget would be huge, and the Pentagon budget would be as paltry as the current Peace Corps budget.
But in fact, the real purpose of the Peace Corps is to serve as a cognate of U.S. foreign policy.
Does this sound like the statement of a radical?
Not unless Bob Iglehart, onetime Peace Corps director of Togo, was a wild-eyed radical when he set a bottle of Scotch on the table of our little house in Dapaong, Togo back in 1974 and listened as we Peace Corps volunteers listed our grievances about the Peace Corps’ lack of support for our projects.
Problems at your work site? Little help from the Peace Corps administrators? Not to worry, Iglehart told us. You are achieving Peace Corps goals just by being here in Togo, showing the U.S flag and acting as an American presence and ambassador to your Togolese neighbors.
Saving the world?
Doing good works for the Togolese, whose per-capita income in the 1970s and today is roughly $300 a year?
Not to worry. That is not what the Peace Corps is about. The Peace Corps is all about U.S. diplomacy. Be happy with that big picture, and don’t worry about saving the world, the country director told us.
Here, have a shot of whiskey. Take it easy, live the good life on your subsistence allowance, which after all is much higher and allows you a far better standard of living than your Togolese friends and neighbors.
And oh, by the way, I won’t be visiting the village where you and local residents are building a school under rough conditions. There is no air-conditioned hotel in Dapaong, so I’ll need to leave before nightfall so I can sleep in relative comfort compared to you peons who are the standard bearers of our forign policy.
Meanwhile, a pacified corps of volunteers who don’t ask too many hard questions of administrators like Iglehart was the best thing for that other corps — the well–paid administrators with full federal benefits who got to ramble the country in their air-conditioned, chauffeur-driven cars before heading back to their big houses in the capital with their squadrons of personal servants.
Now, if Bob Iglehart’s pseudo-philosophy of realpolitik still drives the Peace Corps (and I’m sure it does), then I have little hope that reform of administrators’ heartless response to rape victims can be converted to sympathy and understanding on even that limited scale.
I’ll believe it when the Pentagon’s budget is transferred to the Peace Corps.
