The Peace Corps Dialectic

1.
As I frequently try to explain to closer friends in my host community, the Americans who come to Paraguay as Peace Corps volunteers present a rather skewed view of the demography of our home country. It is easy to see this as a short-coming, but, in some senses, could things be too terribly different? Entrance requirements, for instance, introduce an inevitable class and age bias. How many of the volunteers you know got into the Peace Corps based on work experience rather than a college diploma? Self-selection does the rest. The problems attendant on temporarily taking leave of one’s family, church, and career, dissuade many highly religious and, to be frank, more personally as well as politically potential volunteers from considering Peace Corps service.

Thus is born the archetypal volunteer: young, college-educated, progressive, etc. But behind these easy labels, we find a suite of more specific traits that, though by no means universal to all volunteers, apply to a rather large proportion of us. I attended a college where even the institutional dining halls offered vegan options. Yet I am shocked by the sheer numbers of vegetarians, ex-vegetarians, repentant failed vegetarians, and gleeful vegetarian apostates among my fellow volunteers. It’s ultimately trivial to further elaborate on the qualities that many volunteers share, but I’ll isolate one more near-universal volunteer attribute: an ambivalent relationship to the Peace Corps itself.

2.
To put it simply, I will contend that most volunteers simultaneously love and hate the Peace Corps. If you believe that your Peace Corps relationship is one of unequivocal hate, ask yourself how you would feel if the next congressional compromise on raising the debt ceiling threatened to defund the entire program. Think about your relationships with your host families, best Paraguayan friends, and the most adorable mitâ’i you know. Think about the time you taught a neighbor how to brush her teeth properly or made your host father’s face light up by telling a joke in Spanish or Guaraní. If you believe that your service has been nothing but one sublime dream, reflect for a moment on the proportion of your conversations with fellow volunteers that entail complaining. Think about all the rained-out charlas, electronic status reports, and projects that ended with the Paraguayan version of Eliot’s universe-ending whimper: oparei.

This sense of ambivalence is nothing unique to Peace Corps. Realistically, many people have mixed feelings about some of the most important parts of their lives: jobs, spouses, friends, etc. Yet cognitive dissonance theory predicts that this uncomfortable state of believing two incompatible things (i.e. ‘’I love my cell phone for enabling me to be social when I feel like it yet hate it for forcing me to be social when I just want to be left alone.’’) motivates us to ignore information that supports one pole or the other of our ambivalence. We ignore the perceivable and suppress the conceivable. Coping with dissonant narratives about the same topic is a survival skill and one of the keys to emotional well-being. Anybody who has ever said ‘’I love you” must be dishonest, delusional, or simply willing, as most of us are, to suppress dissonant feelings about a loved one.

Yet to me, the love/hate relationship that many volunteers have with the Peace Corps, Paraguay, or their work in Peace Corps Paraguay belies normal rules of cognitive dissonance. Many of us never find a way to fully embrace or reject what we are doing. For 27 months, we refuse to merge our satisfaction into disgruntlement or vice versa and experience peaks and troughs of the two, often within the same day. Gripe sessions split into nine minute, 50 second intervals and hedonistic bacchanals in Asunción relieve the inevitable pressure. Yet something about this dynamic seems uniquely recalcitrant to resolution. That is why I christen the phenomenon The Volunteer Dialectic, an insoluble bipolar condition experienced by Peace Corps volunteers that persists throughout service, inducing constant swings between delight and despair, until it resolves into a higher synthesis of early termination, close of service, or an extension.

3.
Please do not interpret my invocation of the dialectical construct, as willfully obscurantist or outdated. To convince you, I will briefly defend myself against these two charges.

Obscurantist? The dialectic does not have to be a piece of arcane sophistry. Having never read Heraclitus, Fichte, or Hegel, I first encountered the dialectic in the more accessible works of those old Peace Corps favorites, Marx and Engels. Though I can´t claim to do it justice, I will briefly and perhaps incompletely summarize the concept for the purposes of this essay. A dialectic is a set of two broad, perhaps even historical forces. They are opposed to one another and resist compromise, producing conflict whenever they come into contact. By dint of some sort of (often) cataclysmic collision, the two poles of the dialectic may eventually “sublate,” rising above the historical context that created them and creating a new “synthesis.” This moment, however, may quickly decompose into a new set of dialectics. Yet, the progenitors of the theory claimed, this process of dialectic-synthesis-dialectic-etc. is the root of societal progress. Notable dialectics of the past: Hegel´s existence versus nothingness, Nietzsche’s good and bad versus good and evil, Marx’s proletariat versus capital interests, Freud’s eros (erotic drive) versus thanatos (destructive drive), Keynes’s unemployment versus inflation, and George W. Bush’s Coalition of the Willing versus Axis of Evil. These dialectics allegedly power(ed) the development of, respectively, metaphysical existence, morality, history, psychodynamics, domestic fiscal policy, and neoconservative international relations.

Outdated? Alas, because the dialectic ushered in modernity and served as one of its great theoretical frameworks, the advent of postmodern critical discourse took quite a toll on what suddenly seemed an over-determined, rigid, and historically linear way of thought. Yet I posit that as an analytical tool for the psychological state of the Peace Corps volunteer, the dialectic remains apt. Paraguay is, itself, a confusing mix of the premodern, modern, and (dare I?) postmodern. Have you ever witnessed a cell phone call (modern communications technology) conducted between a Paraguayan on an oxcart in Paraguay (premodern agricultural practices) and a relative or friend in Spain (postmodern globalization and cultural dislocation)? Or a tupanoi (premodern Jesuit religious/political custom) granted by a wizened grandmother (witness to modern revolutions in technology and economy) to a post-Stroessner, Asunceño grandchild (of the postmodern “millennial” generation)? And what are we, if not (modern) development workers attempting to protect (premodern) sustainable ways of life and culture by drawing on diverse (postmodern) currents of ecological, political, and social mobilization and change?! I could go on and on, but consider my claim that, in the scrambled milieu of historical (if the concept of history is still valid to you) and cultural (ditto) norms that present-day Paraguay presents to Peace Corps volunteers, a slightly antiquated modernist analysis, the dialectic, may be appropriate.

If you are still confused, think about the (fictional?) dialectic posed in the Star Wars movies: the light side versus the dark side of the Force. They are obviously incompatible, but both are central to (non-)human existence. In the early movies, the Old Republic (light side) is all-powerful, prompting the slaughter of the Jedi and the initiation of the Empire (dark side). But as the Empire consolidates power, the Rebellion (light side) rises up to counteract it. When Luke embraces his father and thus the influence of the dark side within him, he achieves temporary synthesis, transcending the dialectical antagonism in a way that Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader never could and bringing “balance to the Force.” (Readers of the Star Wars novels, however, will note that this synthesis only ushers in new, post-Empire dialectics.)

4.
The Volunteer Dialectic remains of personal importance to Peace Corps volunteers, as a sort of prefigured emotional track upon which play out our myriad successes and failures in Paraguay. But I admit that I introduced it to serve merely as a sort of dialectical appetizer, an introduction to my main thesis, which is that all of us (volunteers, trainers, Peace Corps staff, community counterparts, etc.) are really caught up in a larger and more impersonal ambivalence: The Peace Corps Dialectic.

The Volunteer Dialectic is inherently intrapersonal, a cause and effect of volunteers’ emotions and attitudes during service. The Peace Corps Dialectic, which I will elaborate below, reflects my thoughts, refined over the past 23 months, about the very nature of the Peace Corps. We all know what the Peace Corps website claims about the organization: it is an independent agency of the U.S. government tasked with sending American volunteers to other countries in order to provide technical assistance and propagate intercultural understanding and exchange.

But what does the Peace Corps, in reality, do? And what does this mean? And should it be different? I will go back to my initial point and claim that, in addition to vegetarianism, volunteers usually share other qualities, including a sort of hypertrophied interest in meaning, in asking the big questions, in seeking purpose. Victor Frankl, the heir of Freud and Jung, posited that the most important source of psychological well-being and stability for humans is the sense of self-efficacy and validation arising from our search for meaning in life. This may be true generally for humankind, but I think that, again due to self-selection, Peace Corps volunteers are especially inclined to care about finding meaning. Give a Paraguayan Peace Corps volunteer a few Brahmas, and the resulting discourse abounds in missions, purposes, destinies, ethical dilemmas, career changes, personal discoveries, failures and rebirths, abnegations, and embraces. We are a group of people who still care, despite postmodernity and that last rained-out charla, about sustainability, progress, and “development.” This sense of purposefulness in my fellow volunteers is one of the things that I have loved most about Peace Corps from the beginning. But its flip side is perhaps a certain neuroticism, an eagerness to dive into the Volunteer Dialectic and, furthermore, to think critically and constantly about the previously noted questions dealing with the nature of the Peace Corps.

Thus, the Peace Corps Dialectic. I will define it as a deep ambivalence, among all those involved with the Peace Corps, regarding what the organization should be doing. The two poles entailed in the dialectic are what I call: Socioeconomic Development and Personal Development. Each epitomizes a distinct vision of what the Peace Corps should be as an organization as well as a set of volunteer behaviors that bring this vision into practice.

I’ll start with Socioeconomic Development since this is the pole that, in my opinion, often emerges as the dominant discourse framing internal Peace Corps policy. To view Peace Corps within this context is to see the organization as primarily oriented toward working with people in developing countries to improve systems of education, food production, economic growth, governance, environmental protection, and human health. As a development agency, the Peace Corps is the American government’s counterpart to foreign public (JAICA) and private (Acción contra el Hambre) and Paraguayan public (DEAG) and private (A Todo Pulmón: Paraguay Respira) organizations. The objectives and outcomes of Peace Corps work can be explained by a series of metrics: number of trees planted, number of small business owners capacitated, and number of HIV/AIDS awareness promoters trained. Volunteers, in this discourse, are trained technicians in their fields who arrive in Paraguay and, utilizing skills honed in the American higher education system or workforce, collaborate with Paraguayan counterparts to build institutions, apply for grants, capacitate community members, and take advantage of preexisting local resources. Regional and national talleres, SPA and PCP grants, and cooperation with NGOs, governments, and local institutions are all central to volunteers’ work in the Socioeconomic Development model. A volunteer’s site is where his or her work takes place, a base camp for projects that may be local, regional, or national in scale. When you fill out a VRF, schmooze with your mayor, or take a contact to a workshop in Asunción, you are both responding to and reinforcing the Socioeconomic Development model of Peace Corps.

If the Peace Corps were solely an agency of Socioeconomic Development, I, and many of my colleagues, would be considered at best only marginally successful volunteers. A timesheet for an average week would probably show me logging no more than 15 hours of productive “work” related to explicit project objectives outlined in my sector’s VRFs. Indicators measuring the success of my projects would show anemic results: 8 teachers trained in a taller that took months to plan, 1 farmer out of 6 successfully transplanting trees from his vivero, 0% participant retention of techniques of biodynamic gardening one week after a lecture on the topic. That is why I am glad that Peace Corps is not solely an agency of Socioeconomic Development.

Enter the Peace Corps as an agent of Personal Development.* This is the discourse that, though acknowledged within the organization’s hierarchy, usually remains more visible to the American public and, I believe, to most Paraguayans. Within this context, the Peace Corps is an exchange organization that sends Americans to other countries to spread awareness of our own culture, to learn about other cultures, and to help neighbors and friends in their host countries to make the most of their human potential. This is, succinctly, the vision of Peace Corps volunteer as gentle hippy harbinger of intercultural exchange. In this discourse, language skills take primacy over technical skills, enthusiasm and openness are more important than professionalism, and immersion in one’s community matters more than systematically “helping” anyone there. Some of volunteers’ favorite activities stem from and perpetuate the Personal Development model of Peace Corps. These include: collaborative cooking, field trips, sharing in farm or housework, learning/teaching crafts, informal education, advocating for individuals (e.g. taking a day trip with your host mom to help her get a new ID card), celebrating holidays and birthdays, and, in Paraguay, hours upon hours of tereré, mate, and, as one of my close friends calls it, comentario. I don´t think the Peace Corps has a great way of defining objectives or measuring outcomes pertaining to the pole of Personal Development. But success is easy to pinpoint: a happy volunteer integrated into a loving and nurturing community. As a volunteer, I’ve met many people, especially former contacts and host families, who recount ways in which a past volunteer made it possible for them to grow and prosper in ways that would have been impossible otherwise.

Many people in my host community interpret the Peace Corps exclusively from within the Personal Development discourse. If asked why I live in their village, some will still answer, after two years, that I am here on vacation or to learn how to speak Guaraní. What would Peace Corps be like if volunteers were tasked only with objectives related to cultural exchange and community integration? What if all that mate were the main goal, rather than an enjoyable social custom that sometimes helps us achieve our goals? Service would be less stressful, but I posit that most volunteers would feel a sense of ennui. Purely seen as a mode of Personal Development, either for volunteers or for members of their communities, the Peace Corps seems, frankly, rather self-indulgent.

Because the Peace Corps as Socioeconomic versus Personal Development organization dialectic is so dissonant, volunteers expend a lot of time and energy agonizing over it. Typically, a volunteer will, if only implicitly and temporarily, align him or herself at one of the two poles and, so installed, excoriate the shortcomings of his or her own service or the Peace Corps in general. For instance, a volunteer oriented toward Socioeconomic Development might complain that remote site placement, lack of site development, unmotivated community contacts, and lack of technical training militate against our attainment of project goals. Meanwhile, a volunteer oriented toward Personal Development might claim that frequent mandated trips into Asunción, rigid work goals and status updates, pressure to apply for grants and collaborate with other organizations, and training time devoted to technical rather than linguistic or cultural material detract from our ability to integrate into our communities and respond to individuals´ needs on a local scale.

Another manifestation of this cognitive dissonance is a sort of premature attempt at synthesis: a volunteer’s desire to be in site every weekend and simultaneously keep up a presence at the cooperative and municipality in the town 20 kilometers away, to be isolated from the world and also have a strong wireless signal, to bring in funds to build every family an efficient wood stove while avoiding giving “gifts.” But because the Peace Corps Dialectic is, by its very essence, insoluble, adhering to one of its poles or trying to embrace both usually leaves volunteers severely frustrated.

5.
My thesis is that, for structural reasons, Peace Corps as an organization is unable to synthesize its two identities. However, I also contend that it would be undesirable to do so. Peace Corps is a good, if imperfect, organization in part because Socioeconomic Development and Personal Development are both immanent aspects of it. Peace Corps volunteers sometimes try to be everything to everyone…and that is fine.

Unfortunately, as noted above, many volunteers, contacts, and Peace Corps staff feel the need to align themselves thoroughly with one pole of the dialectic, much like Darth Vader. We all lose out if one of these poles attempts to suppress the other, prompting a Peace Corps version of the Clone Wars, or, at the very least, a lot of unproductive soul-searching and bureaucratic restructuring. Would you want to serve in the Peace Corps if you were required to put in 40 hours a week attempting to meet discrete development metrics? Or if you were told to forget all that development stuff anyway and just have a good time? I would not.

Most of us are able to tolerate the Volunteer Dialectic. I suggest that we need to use this capacity to withstand dissonance and embrace the Peace Corps Dialectic as well. In the organization’s 50th year, it is easy to bemoan missed opportunities and shortcomings. But I think it’s worth celebrating the Peace Corps for what it is: a dialectic, an always-evolving entity that accomplishes different things in different contexts. Whether volunteers are engaging in highly technical or deeply personal development, we should value our work for what it means, either way: working with other people to make life just a little bit better. Whatever synthesis we ultimately reach, it seems like a worthy goal to me.

*Acknowledgement: Conversations with recent Paraguayan visitor Cyrus helped me to name and thus understand the essence of this pole.