By Admin1 (admin) on Saturday, May 24, 2003 - 9:43 am: Edit Post |
Morocco RPCV Jeffrey Tayler on how to recognize bad Peace Corps Writing
There is little that is phonier, more annoying, or more ephemeral that the memoirs of the traveler gone native. One frequently comes across this sort of thing in Peace Corps journals, when the writers vaunt having "assimilated" to their new cultures. To one degree or another, everyone adjusts to being in new places, but claims of conversion make me suspect the writer's maturity and perspective: there is no superior culture, and people everywhere are flawed. If you travel in country X and just don't end up liking something there, just can't understand or accept something, you should say so, and say why, in your story. We are not all alike and we should be forthright about this.Mr. Tayler has lived in Russia since 1993 and previously worked on Peace Corps staff in Uzbekistan. Following this interview are his views on how a program of American aid in Russia consisting of less than crack specialists was a farce of sorts and how the Peace Corps was, at best, irrelevant in Russia. Read the interview at:
The formerly Soviet states possess a population that is often more educated, and in certain crucial ways, more sophisticated, than the Americans, be they staff or Volunteers, who are sent to man Peace Corps programs. The system that the Soviets devised created a population for whom education was sacred and deceit a matter of survival, so Americans learn more from the formerly Soviets (especially about deceit, definitely about deceit), than the other way around — which makes a program of American aid here consisting of less than crack specialists a farce of sorts.Read the entire interview at:
The root problems here in the former USSR are those of nihilism and cynicism — everything is being stolen, people are raped with impunity by any number of actors, killed for nothing and perishing through negligence, and no one here responds, at least in a meaningful or effective way. This is poisoned earth, and we should not deny this because we don’t want to believe it. Living here, one cannot escape the notion that the formerly Soviet states are slipping into extinction, rotting away, losing people to demographic trends caused by an utter and pervasive failure of their civilization. In view of all that, the Peace Corps (and most other foreign aid) is at best irrelevant here.