My old Peace Corps Country Director had an Op-Ed in the New York Times this morning. It's called Too Many Innocents Abroad and it is about the lack of quality volunteers that the Peace Corps is able to place in the field. He explains that "freshly minted" college students who have little experience in something like agricultural work are nonetheless sent to a strange country, given a 3 month crash course, and then expected to provide services that people need.
My first thought on reading the article was this: would the article have been more effective if it had been entitled Too Much Innocence Abroad?
My second thought was this: Hey he's talking about me. And he was.
Near the end of the article he writes this:
"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."
I am nearly positive that I am the volunteer that he was referring to.
I remember it like it was yesterday. We were riding back from my post to the capital city Yaounde, a roughly 7 hour trip, and discussing many of the issues that he discusses in his column. I commented on how I thought that the experience was incredible for the volunteers themselves, but the returns for the country were more suspect. I also commented on how I thought that there should be a more stringent screening process and a demonstration of a minimum level of competence within a field before being selected.
He said that he agreed, I made my funny native English speaker comment noted above, he laughed, and then we pulled off the road because a logging truck had tipped over and 17 giant logs were strewn across the road. *
AAHH. I miss Cameroon and all of its unpredictable transportation predicaments. Those were the days.
Anyway, the Nick Gregory NYT ticker stands like this:
1. November 2003, photo on the front page, above the fold, of the NYT style section. The last section I ever thought I would conquer.
2. January 8, 2007, indirect reference from country director on the op-ed page.
*Incidentally, the bit about the trees strewn over the road is actually kind of a funny story. These enormous bulgy muscled locals had begun to clear a way around the logs and were letting cars pass through for a small fee. This put my country director in an awkward situation. On the one hand, Peace Corps has a staunch "no bribe" policy. I don't remember exactly what the sanctions were for bribing officials, but it easily could have been dismissal from the country. On the other, this wasn't a bribe. This was a bunch of people putting in a lot of work to clear a path through dense jungle so that circulation could continue. These people were not government workers, in fact, they were probably unemployed, and rightly expected to be compensated for their labor.
I saw cars passing through in front of us with little dispute. When we rolled up, however, I could see the hesitation on our director's face. He was torn. Set a bad example, or hold up traffic and refuse to pay. There was some minor banter with the man taking the money, but eventually, of course, there was really only one option. He paid and we moved on. But I remember driving away thinking about how odd that interaction was. I noted the way he held out for a little while we sat in the middle of nowhere, 100's of miles from the capital, as if the men who had spent time clearing the jungle would just give us their charity. In a way it was kind of cute. Kind of, oh, I don't know. . .
Innocent.
