The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

principles and guiding philosophy must remain constant. Otherwise, it will die. The Peace Corps’ second and third goals — to help promote better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served and a bet- ter understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans — remain just as important as the first goal — to help interested countries meet their needs for trained men and women. Or to put it another way: The Peace Corps is primarily about building rela- tionships, not about building things. A Different Sort of Development Another fundamental flaw in much criticism of the Peace Corps is the equation of development with infra- structure projects such as wells, schools, roads and clin- ics. Infrastructure is indeed an important part of devel- opment, but it is not the only part — perhaps not even the most important one. Development, at least for the purposes of the Peace Corps and similar organizations, can best be thought of not as a project in which things get built, but a process in which people are changed. Even the best infrastructure projects are only successful in the long run to the extent they facilitate changes in people — new attitudes, new knowledge, new ways of doing things. When I was in Niger, we emphasized this approach to development in our training. Most of the volunteers came to understand it, not just as an intellectual principle but on a personal, experiential level. Examples include Korey Welch and Katie Dick, who created the first girls’ soccer teams in Zinder, the most religiously conservative part of this overwhelmingly Muslim country; Don Johnson, who got Niamey bar owners to install condom machines — the first coin-operated vending machines of any sort in Niger — as part of an HIV/AIDS prevention campaign; Scott and Andrea Webb, married volunteers who helped the women of their village organize a savings and loan group to finance their own small entrepreneur- ial projects; and Carol Grimes, who told me about her gratification in overhearing one of the women in her vil- lage explaining to some neighbors almost word for word what Carol had been telling her for several months about the benefits of breastfeeding. Such stories are a constant of the Peace Corps experience, not just in Niger but worldwide. Peace Corps Volunteers can be very successful in promoting develop- ment without leaving behind a single thing that one could take a picture of or point out to a visitor. Their most important legacies are people who think and act differently. It does not require a high level of technical skill or training to achieve the most important sort of devel- opment: inspiring positive change in people. In this broader sense of “development,” volunteers have an impact that can be significant even on a national basis over long periods of time, though it is not easily measured. Rejuvenation Needed Although the Peace Corps should be counted as one of America’s great international successes, the agency could use some rejuvenation as it approaches its 50th birthday in 2011. Toward that end, here are some con- crete recommendations: • Soon after taking office, the next president should issue a call to national and international service compara- ble to Kennedy’s “ask not” challenge, coupled with greater high-level public recognition of Peace Corps Volunteers. • He should then follow up on that rhetoric by seek- ing sufficient congressional appropriations to achieve gradual but steady growth to at least 10,000 volunteers by the end of his first term. After all, we are not talking big bucks here; the Peace Corps’ Fiscal Year 2008 budget comes to just $331 million, a sum that could be lost as a rounding error in the total federal budget. • The new Peace Corps director should be someone who can rekindle the enthusiasm and optimism of the agency’s early years — the can-do spirit that led Time magazine to put Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver on its cover in July 1963 under the headline, “The Peace Corps: A U.S. Ideal Abroad.” That article called the Peace Corps “the single greatest success the Kennedy administration has produced.” How did Shriver and his colleagues achieve this success? In his 2004 biography of Shriver ( Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver ), Scott Stossel says, “The early F O C U S 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 A common criticism of the Peace Corps revolves around its role as a development organization.