DaytonDailyNews.com

A Dayton Daily News editorial

The Peace Corps' prestige and standing with the American public are grounded in the agency's image of youthful idealism. But the mystique doesn't square with the agency's performance in the field.

Indeed, the agency has jeopardized its mission by neglecting its volunteers — a systemic failure of long-standing that goes to the heart of the Peace Corps' integrity.

The problems can't be ignored — especially in light of President George W. Bush's goal to double the number of volunteers during the next several years. Image and reality are so wildly out of alignment Congress should reappraise the agency from top to bottom.

In response to this week's Dayton Daily News' series "Casualties of Peace," U.S. Sens. George Voinovich and Mike DeWine have requested that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee schedule hearings. The goal should be to strengthen the corps by focusing its mission and ensuring it adequately prepares and protects volunteers.

Throughout its more than 40-year history, the Peace Corps has occupied a singular place in America's foreign service that's unconventional and inspiring.

Peace Corps personnel aren't careerists learned in foreign affairs; they're citizen volunteers recruited to bring an American presence to remote lands and provide humanitarian aid during two-year tours.

The volunteers represent the United States as citizens, seeking to build good will abroad as ordinary Americans living among and working with the indigenous people.

For tens of thousands, the Peace Corps has provided an unsurpassed sense of achievement and wonderment. Most cherish the experience.

But objective measurements of the agency's performance have revealed serious flaws, virtually since the agency's inception. The problems have a common theme: Chronic lack of discipline in organization and accountability in operations.

In their stories this week, Dayton Daily News reporters describe disturbing accounts of young volunteers being posted in remote and dangerous parts of the world — often alone — with little orientation, inadequate training and almost no supervision.

These aren't aberrations. Officials charged with assessing Peace Corps management and security during the past decade attest to that.

What the agency must do to turn this situation around is well understood (and was recorded as early as 1978, in Keeping Kennedy's Promise: The Peace Corps' Unmet Hope of the New Frontier, a remarkable account of agency dysfunction during its first 15 years that continues to this day).

Reform means professionalizing Peace Corps management and operations abroad.

Congress, for instance, must require the agency to improve and implement specific standards for volunteer training, orientation and security — standards that are commensurate with the complexities and risks of different foreign posts.

The agency ethos of young generalists serving as volunteers has real value. But for volunteers to remain safe, and their service to amount to more than make-work, they must be supported by highly qualified hands abroad.

Professionalizing the Peace Corps management in this way will be expensive, and require the agency to be more selective in where it sends volunteers. But an ideal that cuts corners and endangers its people isn't worth pursuing, much less expanding.

[From the Dayton Daily News: 11.01.2003]