Fifty Years of Service

 

At our swearing-in, our Country Director asked the question, then as we celebrated Peace Corps’ fiftieth anniversary, and this year move into the fiftieth year of Peace Corps presence in Cameroon, have we succeeded?
This is an important question to consider.  In any organization, any action plan must include measurable outcomes; how will we know when we’ve reached our goal?
She said that during celebrations worldwide, there were reports of people saying how much Peace Corps Volunteers of the past had affected their lives for the better.  She went on to describe the three goals of Peace Corps: to provide technical training to host country nationals at the invitation of their government; to share American culture with host country nationals; and to share host country culture with Americans.
There are common jokes here that “it’s all about goals two and three,” and that drinking a 33, a popular beer here, constitutes 33% of our job.
She then wished us all well on our journeys to our posts.

Did you notice what was missing there?

We’ve read descriptions of Cameroon from explorers of the past, from sixty years ago, one hundred and twenty years ago, and we recognize the descriptions, because if we hadn’t known what years these accounts had been written in, we’d have though they were describing circumstances here today.  What does it say that after fifty years of Peace Corps presence, not to mention the numerous other development workers sent in from around the world annually, descriptions of Cameroon are exactly the same as they were one hundred years ago?  Have we succeeded?
Missionaries have, after a fashion.  Everywhere you turn in the Anglophone region you hear a variety of God-talk, and find strange snippets of misspelled misquotes from the Bible on the back of most taxis.  The Francophone region is slightly more secular, but still most everyone attends one church or another, or a mosque, and you find the same snippets of biblical sounding phrases in French.
The country still has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, and has been rated the most corrupt nation in the world.  Single motherhood and thirty-something grandmothers are common enough to not bear mention.  Mistreatment of women and girls is frequent.  Alcoholism is rampant.  Officials often require financial “motivation” to do their jobs or assure that paperwork doesn’t go missing.  Even in picking up a package from the post office, one may be required to give a “gift” of money or something from the package to the postmaster in order to have the package released (we are very grateful for the arrangements made by our regional office manager to avoid this).  And that’s just the social ills.
Have we succeeded?
That doesn’t even get into cholera outbreaks and routine illness due to such simple things as a failure to wash hands; constant threat of malaria; starvation in the north because the roads haven’t been paved or maintained; drought; lack of nutrition; limited access to health resources; lack of education across the board.

Have we succeeded?

Have we?

During a National Peace Corps Association event before coming into Peace Corps service, we were told that Sargent Shriver said in an essay about Peace Corps that the ideal situation would be for Peace Corps Volunteers to be in and out of a developing nation within one decade.  That our objective, as with any kind of development or aid work, should be to work ourselves out of a job.  Granted, ideals are about what would happen in a perfect world, which none of us live in.  And after living and working in Cameroon with Peace Corps, we’ve learned that any timeline must be the “worst case scenario” timeline, then doubled.  But isn’t five times longer than anticipated a bit excessive?  Is staying in Cameroon for another decade, two, five, really going to make the difference, when after one hundred years descriptions of the place remain unchanged?  Is that the best use of tax-payer dollars?  Of the time, effort, resources, skills of the volunteers who have believed in the mission and vision of Peace Corps, and left our homes, families and lives behind to follow it?  Are we making a difference?  Have we succeeded? 

We still believe in Peace Corps, the vision of world peace through understanding.  The mission of sharing knowledge to equip people to find their own solutions to the problems they face.  We still believe in the ability of a few passionate, motivated individuals to change the world.  But perhaps Cameroon is simply not ready to receive the training and skills that Peace Corps is prepared to offer, when motivation and commitment to make change is so sorely lacking.  Is it perhaps time to start thinking about an exit strategy?  And come back when the most common request is not for money and resources, but for the training to achieve things for Cameroon, by Cameroonians, without the need to rely on continual support from the West.