Volunteers are asking: give Peace Corps a chance

Joining the U.S. Peace Corps is not an easy thing to do in a variety of ways. It is a lengthy procedure to apply, get medical and dental clearance, get invited to a country program and finally to leave. It is difficult to leave your home, your family and your life behind for more than two years and start over in a place with a new language and customs.

For us, the decision to volunteer with the Peace Corps was not quite so difficult. It was the opportunity to spend two years together doing something we both believe in. We believe that understanding other people and other cultures is one of the most important ways we can foster peace and security in the world. This is after all, the overarching goal of the Peace Corps: peace through understanding.

The most difficult part of being a Peace Corps volunteer for us has been serving during an administration and Congress that seems intent on undermining the most basic objective of the Peace Corps with its foreign policy. The administration, with the consent of Congress, has continuously sought peace and security in the world through the violence of war. Witnessing the “war” on terrorism and the war against Iraq from another country has been difficult and illuminating.

President George W. Bush has stated that the reason America has been a target is because the terrorists hate us for our freedom and democracy. This is a gross and dangerous oversimplification for the leader of our country to make. People of the world do not hate concepts like freedom or democracy. Instead, they hate the harsh realities that often result from U.S. foreign policies. One need not look hard or far at the history of our policies to see why many find them objectionable. We have a long and distinguished history of supporting horrible dictators and murderous thugs (the list includes Saddam Hussein himself). However, a history lesson on the errors of U.S. foreign policy should be left to better instructors.

Our purpose in this column is to protest the confused course of action our government is currently pursuing. On one hand, they fund and run the Peace Corps, thereby projecting themselves as seekers of peace through understanding. With the other hand, they produce flawed and biased evidence to justify a war against Iraq, flouting international law with the illegal premise of pre-emptive attack. To anyone who bothered to look critically, U.S. justifications were as illegitimate before the war as they are now.

We would have problems with all of this in and of itself, but as Peace Corps volunteers, we find ourselves in a more awkward position. Peace Corps volunteers are by no means government representatives, however, we are intended to be representatives of American culture and values. When a host country national asks us why the United States actively seeks war, while sending us abroad to profess its desire for peace, how are we to respond? This is what we mean when we say that our government has made our service difficult. How do we reconcile two contrary courses of action to the people of our host community when we cannot reconcile them to ourselves?

We are stuck in an Orwellian conundrum, having been asked to hold two contrary ideas and believe both are correct. Arguably, we can achieve peace through understanding or through war, but certainly not both at the same time.

Our only answer has been to look to our community to see what we can do as individuals, free of our government and its policies. In our community we separate ourselves from our country and it angers us that our government’s actions have forced us to do it.

In the final analysis, we feel that the representatives of our government must make a critical decision. We argue that consistency is the hallmark of justice and if we are to be a just nation, then our government must be consistent in its affairs. We modestly propose that the administration and Congress do one of two things. First, in the name of consistency, the government could disband Peace Corps as an organization contrary to the present policy of using war to promote peace and security.

Obviously, as Peace Corps volunteers, we would hope that looking at the experiences of past volunteers and the history of the organization would prove its value and convince the government not to close it. The other option would be for the government to abandon its policy of utilizing war to promote peace and instead adopt policies that correspond to the stated goal of the Peace Corps: world peace through cultural understanding. In our opinion, this is the better of the two options.

We have absolutely no desire to see the Peace Corps shut down, even though we invite its closure with this essay. This is clearly not the answer. We joined the Peace Corps because it is something we believed in, and still do regardless of our government’s actions. It is a program that in many ways highlights the best of American ideals: a genuine wish for peace, the desire to understand and accept other people, and the hope to improve the lives of those less fortunate. Perhaps if more of our foreign policies kept these ideals in mind the world would be a safer, more secure place. Then people could stop wondering why the U.S. government says one thing while doing another.

David J. Lang and Maureen S. Ross-Lang are U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines. Ross-Lang is a native of Unity and both she and Lang received Masters in Teaching degrees from the University of Maine prior to joining the Peace Corps.