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Confessions of a White Savior: Peace Corps and the White Savior Complex (Pt 2)
Pt. 2: The Contradictions of Peace Corps as an Organization
In my last blog post, I discussed the white savior complex and how it plays out in today’s society, especially in the field of international development. Read part one here before continuing to part two of the series.
In this blog post, I will discuss how Peace Corps is problematically intertwined with the white savior complex on a systemic and organizational level.
First, let's hear from President Kennedy, the founder of the Peace Corps, himself:
Are you even a PCV if you haven't seen this?
The work of the U.S. Peace Corps, as our staff explained during initial training sessions on international development practice and theory in the Cambodian context, is part of the solution to the harm and negligence of the many so-called ‘aid’ organizations around the world.
The structure of the Peace Corps volunteer program differs widely from most NGO programs. At the interest and invitation of the host country, cohorts of volunteers apply to serve for two years (much longer than a typical volunteer program). In an intense, two-to-three month training program, they learn the local language, explore in-country context enveloping their line of work, develop intercultural nuance, and acquire necessary technical skills. After they are sworn-in, the volunteers travel to their assigned communities and spend a longer period of time (informally, at least three months, but truly during their whole service) integrating, improving language skills, forming relationships with key players in the community, and understanding community issues. As a result, the volunteer is able to work closely with local counterparts and create sustainable change through their primary work assignments and secondary projects.
Peace Corps emphasizes the process over the outcome – passing down knowledge and skills that yield sustained, profound change. Volunteers, with only a two-year service, will often not see the fruits of their labor. We can only hope to plant small seeds of change that will grow to fruition many years down the road. One volunteer on her own might not be able to change a whole country, or even a whole village, but years of successive volunteers and robust programming can create a large-scale impact.
This is the Peace Corps ideal - that we are the solution to the ‘white savior complex’ which plagues many aid organizations by providing the tools and training to help locals empower themselves rather than coming in as a God-like figure and telling people what they need. Peace Corps volunteers are invited into the country and requested by communities. We work with the host country, not for them. Our work boils down to an emphasis on people-to-people relationships – meeting people where they are at, and learning from each other. This ideal is visible in the three long-standing goals of Peace Corps:
1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.
Goal One focuses on working with the host country to identify what areas need development and to provide suitable volunteers to help work in those specified fields. Meanwhile, Goals Two and Three focus on intercultural exchange between the host country and the US in the pursuit of world peace.
While this narrative of real-world, impactful, people-to-people change does have ideological truth to it (and I am not discrediting the very real, impactful work that many volunteers achieve with, and because of, their local counterparts, including the work that my counterparts and I are doing), I have discovered through personal experience and discussions with other volunteers that it frequently plays out differently both on a organizational and programmatic level.
Now, let’s examine what I consider to be a fundamental weakness of the Peace Corps.
Here is Goal One again:
“To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.”
And, in contrast to this:
A running joke between Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) of all countries is that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing. The self-deprecating nature of our interactions with each other is one part humor as a coping mechanism for difficult and unfamiliar situations, and one part truth.
On the surface, it seems fair. PCVs are thrown into an entirely new culture with only two to three months of training. The workplace and host family dynamics are often quite different from our home cultures, and we have to start from scratch when it comes to understanding the context of our communities and forming new relationships. Basically, the way of getting things done is often extremely different than anything we are used to. Even if a volunteer has years and years of relevant work experience, it can take a while to find her bearings within her new, unfamiliar lifestyle.
However, the problem is often this: many volunteers do not have years and years of experience, thus compounding the learning curve.
I, like many of my peers, applied and was accepted into the Peace Corps right after I graduated from undergraduate school. This often translates into little relevant work experience. When I applied for my position (community health educator), I thought I was well-qualified: a pre-med degree, lots of volunteer hours logged in various hospitals, plenty of leadership experience, four weeks of international health development trips. However, I was surprised to find myself, very soon into my pre-service training period, coming face-to-face with the reality that very little of that was actually useful. I am envious of my peers who studied Master’s-level international development or global health, or had years of related public health work or medical experience before they joined It seems like I could have skipped a long period of uncertainty and learning what was going on if only I was more qualified for this job.
Me, freshly graduated with a B.S in Neuroscience and ready to get out and 'change the world!'
The volunteers who come in with work experience and higher education are often the most industrious and the most successful. Yet, Peace Corps continues to recruit community health educators who have never educated about health or English teachers who don’t have teaching certificates.
So…for the majority of volunteers, is this so different than the voluntourism experiences I wrote about before - sending unskilled and unqualified people to do work that would never be acceptable in the US? Yes, we are ‘trained’, as Goal One states, but are we effective?
Are we really above the white savior complex, as Peace Corps would like us to think?
It seems that, regardless of the major goals of the Peace Corps, the focus of the organization is mainly on the experience of the volunteer rather than the countries and communities that they work in.
First of all, check out the way that Peace Corps advertises:
"No, you will not have the luxury of choosing between 63 variations of body fragrance. Sound invigorating?"
"The corner office can wait. Some corners of
the world can't."
What do these advertisements focus on? Or rather, the question is, who do these ads focus on?
Answer: The volunteer.
Not only does it speak exclusively to the experience of the volunteer, but also it romanticizes the ‘poor, rural village’ experience; spinning Peace Corps as an adventure to be had before moving on to ‘real life’. Which is, coincidentally (or not), how I thought my Peace Corps service would be.
The top ad further implies that those children in a far-flung, forlorn corner of the world need you and your help. They can’t wait one more minute for a foreigner to swoop in and save them. This is the very substance that contributes to the white savior complex in the West.
Thankfully, these ads are outdated. But, these, and other now out-of-commission ads, have affected how previous generations percieve the Peace Corps and, as an extension, low-income countries.
Current ads, however, continue along the same vein - but more subtly.
“Make the most of your world.”
“Around the world, your voice matters”.
“Take on new challenges.”
“The world is waiting.”
If Peace Corps is so intent on empowering local people and building sustainable solutions as it implies in its goals and mission statement, then why do the ads almost exclusively highlight the experience of the volunteer? It’s almost as if the experience of volunteers is more significant to the organization than the work they do with their community and the impact they will have.
Sound familiar?
From the way that the Peace Corps advertises, it’s easy to see the seductiveness of the two-year program. The romanticism of the simplistic, poverty-ridden lifestyle (who needs 63 types of perfumes anyway?) encourages idealistic young people like me to escape their own lives in search for something more ‘pure’ or ‘fulfilling’. They get to try out a new way of living for two years and then go back to their old life, bettering themselves in the process.
In my own service, I have always felt a bit like a fraud having to come in and learn how to function without the modern conveniences of my lifestyle in the US. Struggling with such inconveniences as washing my laundry by hand, using the bathroom without toilet paper, or dealing with various gastrointestinal issues has always struck me as shallow and privileged because I have known since day one that I was only going to be dealing with it for two years – not for the rest of my life, like those in my host family and community. My personal struggle (not only with the physical aspects of living in rural Cambodia, but also with the cultural adjustment, and other problems that come up while living as the only American in my small community) seems to me at the same time real, but also temporary and, therefore, not significant. See, I get to leave after two years – or sooner if I wish - and retreat back into the safety and relative ease of the US, but my community does not.
Peace Corps Volunteers have the luxury of caring only for two years – and then they can go back home, put their experience on a resume, and continue with their life (many volunteers do keep in touch and work with their community in other ways after their service ends, but many also do not). In this way, we are really not so different than short-term voluntourists. We, too, must eventually leave the attachments we have formed with little host sisters and brothers, close friends, co-workers, and others, behind.
It seems like the most effective development work is done by those who truly devote their career to the cause – and does the way that the Peace Corps program is built really contribute positively to that?
Stare at this for a while. It should make you uncomfortable.
But that's the only way to learn and grow.
Despite what Peace Corps sells itself as, when you get to the core of the agency’s values, it is similar to the other NGOs and international aid organizations that promote Western aid as the answer, despite whether or not it is effective.
And yet... even considering all of this, I still go back and forth between vehemently arguing for those thoughts I wrote above, and the opposite: passionately believing in the human good of the Peace Corps. I obviously have a lot of emotions attached to Peace Corps, and it is difficult to separate my intellectual and critical opinions with my personal feelings.
I do love my counterparts...
Perhaps, despite the larger organizational contradictions, those people-to-people relationships we volunteers are building is actually effective. There have been a lot of success stories in the history of the Peace Corps, but there have also been a lot of under-publicized negative experiences and unforeseen consequences.
In the third part of this series, I will dig deeper into my own personal experiences as a volunteer.