2008.01.09: January 9, 2008: Headlines: COS - Liberia: Country Directors - Cameroon: Speaking Out: New York Times: Liberia RPCV Robert L. Strauss writes: Too often young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Liberia: Peace Corps Liberia : Peace Corps Liberia: Newest Stories: 2008.01.09: January 9, 2008: Headlines: COS - Liberia: Country Directors - Cameroon: Speaking Out: New York Times: Liberia RPCV Robert L. Strauss writes: Too often young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century

By Admin1 (admin) (pool-151-196-42-169.balt.east.verizon.net - 151.196.42.169) on Thursday, January 10, 2008 - 7:13 am: Edit Post

Liberia RPCV Robert L. Strauss writes: Too often young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century

Liberia RPCV Robert L. Strauss writes:  Too often young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century

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.

Liberia RPCV Robert L. Strauss writes: Too often young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century

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.




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Headlines: January, 2008; Peace Corps Liberia; Directory of Liberia RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Liberia RPCVs; Country Directors - Cameroon; Speaking Out





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By Anonymous (mail.flmicro.com - 155.212.44.108) on Wednesday, February 06, 2008 - 4:52 pm: Edit Post

Dear Editor:

I am in my mid 30s and have been nominated to serve in the Peace Corps. I have over 15 years of experience in management and finance and life experience that the majority of fresh out of college volunteers do not have. What I also have is a history.

I am finding that the down fall of being an older volunteer is how difficult it can be to get medical clearance. I am stuck in the limbo that is the mental health screening process and it is proving to be a challenge.

Fresh out of college volunteers who appear to have no prior health history issues are not better qualified to serve, they simply have not reached an age where they have had enough life experience to allow those issues to come to the surface. Most of the people I know who seek therapy as a means of personal growth do so in their 30s or later. The younger volunteers are no less prone to mental health or medical issues, they simply have not yet presented in their lives and therefore have not been documented.

Being an older volunteer puts one at a disadvantage simply because they have a longer medical history. I had a history of mild eating disorder patterns over 15 years ago. That one factor has become a stumbling block in my application process. How many college aged students who volunteer most likely have, to one degree or another, some form of eating disorder symptoms that simply have never been diagnosed or brought to light? I would wager a bet on "many". Perhaps it is due to the common occurrence of such issues in the college environment that so many are able to go for years without diagnoses or treatment. And yet those students are cleared without reservation -- not because they are less at risk, but because their issues have yet to be documented.

I understand the need for screening, but in my experience it seems that the lack of common sense in deferring or denying a candidate based solely on history is not productive and can result in inadvertently turning away valuable and useful volunteers who possess a greater breadth of experience not easily matched by recent graduates.

If the Peace Corps wishes to attract more experienced volunteers, they may wish to revisit how they screen their volunteers and the way in which they treat those who are eager to use their experience to serve in a meaningful and useful way.

By Anonymous (mail.flmicro.com - 155.212.44.108) on Wednesday, February 06, 2008 - 4:45 pm: Edit Post

Dear Editor:

I am in my mid 30s and have been nominated to serve in the Peace Corps. I have over 15 years of experience in management and finance and life experience that the majority of fresh out of college volunteers do not have. What I also have is a history.

I am finding that the down fall of being an older volunteer is how difficult it can be to get medical clearance. I am stuck in the limbo that is the mental health screening process and it is proving to be a challenge.

Fresh out of college volunteers who appear to have no prior health history issues are not better qualified to serve, they simply have not reached an age where they have had enough life experience to allow those issues to come to the surface. Most of the people I know who seek therapy as a means of personal growth do so in their 30s or later. The younger volunteers are no less prone to mental health or medical issues, they simply have not yet presented in their lives and therefore have not been documented.

Being an older volunteer puts one at a disadvantage simply because they have a longer medical history. I had a history of mild eating disorder patterns over 15 years ago. That one factor has become a stumbling block in my application process. How many college aged students who volunteer most likely have to one degree or another some form of Eating Disorders symptoms that simply have never been diagnosed or brought to light? I would wager a bet on "many". Perhaps it is due to the common occurrence of such issues in the college environment that so many are able to go for years without diagnoses or treatment. And yet those students are cleared without reservation -- not because they are less at risk, but because their issues have yet to be documented.

I understand the need for screening, but in my experience it seems that the lack of common sense in deferring or denying a candidate based solely on history is not productive and can result in inadvertently turning away valuable and useful volunteers with a greater breadth of experience not easily matched by recent graduates.

If the Peace Corps wishes to attract more experienced volunteers, they may wish to revisit how they screen their volunteers and the way in which they treat those who are eager to use their experience to serve in a meaningful and useful way.


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