American Icon: The Peace Corps at 60
• Charity begins at home
IN MARCH 2020, AT THE START OF COVID-19 lockdowns, as flights were grounded and people around the world sheltered in place, 7,000-odd Peace Corps volunteers serving in 61 nations came home to an uncertain future. Many worried that the Peace Corps might even have to shut down permanently. That hasn’t happened, but the nation’s foremost global volunteer organization has no volunteers in the field for the first time since its founding 60 years ago.
Practicing a uniquely American blend of idealism and realpolitik, the agency was conceived in October 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy made a 2 a.m. campaign speech at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Kennedy, then running for president, challenged 10,000 students assembled outside the Student Union to use their skills to help people around the globe—and spread American goodwill along the way. One thousand students responded by signing a petition volunteering to serve abroad.
The emphasis on peace was earnest, but the backdrop for the new agency was the Cold War. The Soviet Union, Kennedy noted, “had hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, and nurses . . . prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism.” Kennedy established the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961, less than two months into his presidency, and the first volunteers headed out in August—to Ghana.
Whether or not the Peace Corps managed to counteract Soviet influence, it has sent nearly 250,000 Americans to serve in 142 countries around the world. The number of active volunteers peaked in 1966, when more than 15,000 served in 52 countries.
Budget cuts in the 1980s slashed the number of volunteers to around 5,000, and the number has hovered between 7,000 and 8,000 for the past ten years. Volunteers go to every continent except Antarctica, with nearly half today serving in sub-Saharan Africa.
I joined the Peace Corps in 2009, and for 32 months I worked with farmers, entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders in Masindi, in western Uganda, teaching skills such as grant writing and business planning. But a Peace Corps volunteer’s activities extend beyond the office or classroom. Sharing a meal of beans and ebitooke (steamed, mashed plantains), helping my 14-year-old host sister with her English homework and learning the correct way to chop fresh sugar cane were considered vital to my Peace Corps experience. So was showing my neighbor how to make guacamole, watching bootleg DVDs of Nigerian soap operas with my host family and learning dance moves to the latest Ugandan pop music. My neighbor still sends me the occasional WhatsApp message with links to music videos of our favorite songs, a joking reminder of how bad I was at the “Bread and Butter” dance.
I found the work rewarding, not least when I helped a farmers’ cooperative start producing seeds for weather-resistant maize they could sell for higher profit. But I also understand why there’s so much talk among Peace Corps alumni questioning whether the agency’s paternalistic approach—rooted in Cold War animosities and developed long before the
OUR INCREASINGLY INTERCONNECTED WORLD DEMANDS GLOBAL SOLIDARITY,
NOT CHARITY.