DaytonDailyNews.com

A Dayton Daily News editorial

The Peace Corps' good intentions and its public image as an army of ambassadors doing good around the world shouldn’t exempt the agency from accountability.

In Casualties of Peace, a seven-part series that begins today, Dayton Daily News reporters identify Peace Corps practices and procedures that should shame those in charge and anger Congress and the president.

Volunteers — mostly young people and women — are being sent into places that are far more dangerous than the Peace Corps admits publicly or tells trusting recruits.

Many young people are finding themselves in villages and jungles without a buddy, radio or sufficient information to keep themselves safe. Assaults have more than doubled since 1991, and evidence gathered by this newspaper suggests that many crimes against volunteers aren't reported at all.

Meanwhile, volunteers have been brutally raped, violently assaulted, even killed.

The agency's lack of urgency about violence that has increased over the years is indicative of a deeper problem. The Peace Corps isn't sufficiently focused on the success and security of its volunteers once they're in the field.

Volunteers are untethered from the agency for weeks and months at a time. Some complain they are asked to do make-work or jobs they aren't qualified to do. These shouldn't be seen as the complaints of unrealistic idealists who dream of making everything right in the world, but rather of volunteers who didn't get basic tools and help they need.

Congress should want to know more. It should call for hearings.

The Peace Corps' ideal and mission is a powerful way to make the lives of desperate people better. It’s also a means for Americans to experience other cultures in ways that inform and influence them throughout their careers and lives. And it’s a way to show that, as a country, America is not obsessively self-indulgent or oblivious to poverty and hardship around the world.

The Peace Corps was the vision of President John F. Kennedy. It has endured for the four decades since as a proud institution that is a small, but valuable, footnote to this country’s foreign policy. Some 170,000 people have served in dozens of countries.

Although many volunteers cherish the opportunities and experiences they have had, hundreds have been let down in important and life-threatening ways.

Most recruits understand that signing up for the Peace Corps means they’ll come face to face with deprivation, most likely danger. But assigning women singly to sites where supervisors rarely go; without knowing where or if the volunteers will have safe housing; and giving them no reliable means of contacting others is irresponsible.

Meanwhile, the Peace Corps masks the dangers to volunteers created by its absentee-management policies by understating the horrors that have happened.

When tragedies have happened, in too many instances, the instinct has been to hush up the incident rather than tell other volunteers or even families of the victims what they deserve to know.

The Peace Corps' strength is its ideal of individuals showing decency and humanity. The people who make that commitment deserve not just gratitude, but the earnest promise that they'll be protected to the degree possible and supported so their sacrifice will matter.

The Peace Corps isn't meeting its part of the bargain.

[From the Dayton Daily News: 10.26.2003]