"we understand the incredibly complex social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics of countries better than they know themselves."
Yeah, that's exactly what the qualified ones do. Exactly why we send them. But there are not enough qualified volunteers.
The problem with the Peace Corps, from discussion with my cousin who did his tour in Africa in the 80s and scared me out of even considering it myself, is the PHBs say they only send over qualified volunteers but fundamentally, "we need one thousand warm bodies" so they have a ranked list where he came in very near the top with a recent degree in agronomy and unfortunately somewhere between near the top, and warm body 1000, it drops into the article description of "unskilled inexperienced untrained barely educated laborer white girl or boy". They really needed 1000 agronomists and livestock qualified veterinarians and technician level workers, but what they got was like 100 regional teams of ten or so where on average about one guy per local group had any real idea what he was doing. You're going over there to help modernize farming out of the ancient era and you have no idea what soil chemistry is... well, I guess you get to hold the shovel, not much else you can do while I run this soil analysis. Another problem is it dilutes the brand so to speak of the work they do... there really are useful volunteers, just the ratio of useful/useless depends strongly on who volunteered that year and the demand and a variety of political concerns. Finally he spent most of his time basically managing at a distance and without any official authority his unskilled fellow americans as they attempted to do a highly skilled and technical job, so the locals didn't even get any direct benefit from his work (although via levels of indirection he did benefit them). One interesting perspective is that our world wide logistical distribution system can, in the absence of warfare, quite easily provide people in the middle of nowhere with enough rope to hang themselves, along the lines of just because you can now purchase a certain seed doesn't mean it'll grow, or if one unit of chemicals improves yield 50%, you'd be amazed how many otherwise logical humans will want to try a hundred units of the same chemical, what could possibly go wrong? Not to mention intelligent use of modern tools, finally having the technology to wash all your topsoil downriver doesn't mean its a great idea to do so, trying to make the desert bloom is a fools errand, etc, but I digress.
Now it would not surprise me if there's at least four perspectives opposed to each other, that being what they claim to do, what they actually did in the 80s, what they do now, and my cousin's story. But he did tell a compelling and believable story at the time, as I recall it and there might be some insight in it anyway.
Yeah, that's exactly what the qualified ones do. Exactly why we send them. But there are not enough qualified volunteers.
The problem with the Peace Corps, from discussion with my cousin who did his tour in Africa in the 80s and scared me out of even considering it myself, is the PHBs say they only send over qualified volunteers but fundamentally, "we need one thousand warm bodies" so they have a ranked list where he came in very near the top with a recent degree in agronomy and unfortunately somewhere between near the top, and warm body 1000, it drops into the article description of "unskilled inexperienced untrained barely educated laborer white girl or boy". They really needed 1000 agronomists and livestock qualified veterinarians and technician level workers, but what they got was like 100 regional teams of ten or so where on average about one guy per local group had any real idea what he was doing. You're going over there to help modernize farming out of the ancient era and you have no idea what soil chemistry is... well, I guess you get to hold the shovel, not much else you can do while I run this soil analysis. Another problem is it dilutes the brand so to speak of the work they do... there really are useful volunteers, just the ratio of useful/useless depends strongly on who volunteered that year and the demand and a variety of political concerns. Finally he spent most of his time basically managing at a distance and without any official authority his unskilled fellow americans as they attempted to do a highly skilled and technical job, so the locals didn't even get any direct benefit from his work (although via levels of indirection he did benefit them). One interesting perspective is that our world wide logistical distribution system can, in the absence of warfare, quite easily provide people in the middle of nowhere with enough rope to hang themselves, along the lines of just because you can now purchase a certain seed doesn't mean it'll grow, or if one unit of chemicals improves yield 50%, you'd be amazed how many otherwise logical humans will want to try a hundred units of the same chemical, what could possibly go wrong? Not to mention intelligent use of modern tools, finally having the technology to wash all your topsoil downriver doesn't mean its a great idea to do so, trying to make the desert bloom is a fools errand, etc, but I digress.
Now it would not surprise me if there's at least four perspectives opposed to each other, that being what they claim to do, what they actually did in the 80s, what they do now, and my cousin's story. But he did tell a compelling and believable story at the time, as I recall it and there might be some insight in it anyway.