The West at Its Best

When the U.S. Peace Corps contingent arrived in Tanganyika nine months ago, recalled Corpsman Eugene Schrieber, 23, an engineer from University City, Mo., "a mere sign on a golf course fairway startled us into the realization that at long last we really made it." Planted near the jungle rough, the sign said: BEWARE OF LIONS.

Since then, the 35 corpsmen have become accustomed to lions, rhinos and other wild life while working with native trainees on a threeyear, $67 million road-building program. Geologist Allen Tamura, 23, from Pasadena, Calif., has also become an honorary blood brother in the nomadic Wagogo tribe for saving the life of a pregnant tribeswoman by rushing her in his truck over pitted jungle roads to a doctor 30 miles away. Said Tanganyikan Gabriel Bakari, assistant to a surveying team: "I can mix with the Peace Corpsmen in a way I never could before with white men and Asians. The Americans do not consider themselves superior to the Africans. They are extraordinary people."

This week, as Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver sent a massive report to the President on the first year of field operations, echoes of such praise are heard round the world. Even anti-Western Ghana has asked for more Peace Corpsmen. At home, the Corps has won approval from the initially skeptical U.S. Congress, which has agreed to double the first-year budget of $30 million. More than 1,000 members (one-third of them women) are now at work in 15 countries, and by the end of next month, 3,100 others will be in training for jobs in 22 other nations. Says Historian Arnold Toynbee: "In the Peace Corps volunteer, non-Westerners are getting an example of Western man at his best."

Muddy Shoes. Most countries that invited the Peace Corps asked for schoolteachers and instructors to train their own people in such trades as carpentry, plumbing, home economics, nursing. In the village of Rio Negro in southern Chile, Janet Boegli, 22, from Austin, Texas, shares a small house with two Chilean girls, teaches women how to use a sewing machine, knit, mix powdered milk, clean beer bottles to use for babies' formulas. Chilean volunteers have organized communities of 20-30 houses, called centros. They raise money to buy sewing machines and other needed equipment by organizing fiestas and raffles. "What's important," writes Volunteer Boegli, "is that we have shown that gringos don't mind getting their shoes muddy and their hands dirty."*

In Buenaventura Valley, Colombia, William F. Woudenberg, 32, a draftsman from Paterson, N.J., developed a loom to make forms for concrete out of plentiful bamboo instead of hard-to-find wood or expensive steel. In the East Pakistan village of Comilla, another inventive corpsman Robert Taylor, 24, from Oakdale, Calif., solved the problem of parboiling rice without using scarce wood; he uses rice husks instead, does the job ten times faster. Stephen L. Keller, 24, from Brooklyn, New York, watched a worker in a Punjab bicycle factory count 6,800 ball bearings one by one, built a ball-bearing counter that dispenses ten at a time.

Winning Esteem. Such small, practical accomplishments are hardly the answer to the massive problems faced by the new nations, nor will the Peace Corps solve the U.S. foreign policy difficulties with many of the staunchly neutralist host countries. Nevertheless, in its limited but significant way, the Peace Corps experiment is a laboratory for freedom through selfhelp. A big part of its meaning lies in the way the volunteers are winning the esteem of local populations. On the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, 15 volunteers are affectionately known as the Peace Cops, Pisco (a Latin brandy), Peace Core and Peace Corks. Whatever name they go by, the young men and women are making themselves popular.

In Malaya, where foreigners usually ride trishaws or drive cars, volunteers all ride bicycles, earning a local nickname as "the pedaling Americans." As a rule, they are paid allowances roughly the same as the salary of a local member of the same profession (e.g., $52 a month for a teacher in the Philippines), plus $75 a month that is banked for them in Washington. Corpsmen are briefed intensively on national customs. In Accra's Lido nightclub, two volunteers proudly won second place in a Ghanaian High Life dance contest. In Bangkok, Corpsman Robert Pitts, 25, from Red Bank, N.J., trained for three weeks, fought a Thai-style boxing match (using hands and feet) to a spectacular draw. Not all such off-hour activities are fun and games. Corpsmen in Lyallpur, West Pakistan, adopted a group of 44 lepers living in a run-down Hindu temple on a barren strip of land ten miles out of town, regularly bicycle the distance to carry food and clothing to them after the day's work.

Mail Home. In the Philippines, with the largest group of volunteers (279, to be increased by 400 more by the end of the year), U.S. teachers' aides found themselves with nothing to do during the summer vacation, organized 52 extracurricular projects ranging from a production of The King and I to working with maladjusted children. The most spectacular project was the launching of a summer camp for 600 young boys, the first free camp in the country, in the province of Negros Occidental, on the slopes of an extinct volcano.

Since the unfortunate episode of Margery Michelmore's intercepted postcard from Nigeria last year, no other embarrassments have been reported from abroad. Papa Shriver's young family (the average age is 26 1/2, but five are older than 60) has had its share of milestones: one baby has been born to a Peace Corps couple (Nigeria), there have been 17 marriages in nine countries, and three corpsmen have died. David L. Crozier, 23, from West Plains, Mo., one of the two volunteers killed in a Colombia airplane crash, left the Peace Corps with what could well serve as its credo. Wrote Crozier to his parents during the early days of his work with Colombian peasants as a builder-farmer-teacher: "Should it come to it, I had rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them."

* In 1899, while the Philippines were fighting the U.S., Rudyard Kipling, that much derided hard of empire, had formed his own Victorian vision of the Peace Corps. It bears rereading, despite the fact that it is now widely certified as offensive corn:

Take up the White Man's burden--

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain.

To seek another's profit,

And work another's gain.

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