Gone, But Not Forgotten

The goals set by President John F. Kennedy were noble: to create a "peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country." Living like those they had come to help, the volunteers were to bring modern skills to the primitive, the diseased and the ignorant, and to show off America at its best. Twenty-five years after the founding of the Peace Corps, some 6,000 volunteers still labor in 62 nations, but the agency's lofty ideals are tempered by a sense of its limits. Critics, including former volunteers, have questioned whether the corps actually helped or merely provided an exotic interlude for thousands of young Americans. Last month TIME State Department Correspondent Johanna McGeary returned to a remote Kuna Indian village on the island of Playon Chico off the Atlantic coast of Panama, where she lived as a Peace Corps volunteer for 16 months in 1968 and '69. Her report on what the intervening two decades--and the Peace Corps--had wrought there:

I was apprehensive as the bush plane dipped precipitously over the jungleclad mountain to land. I had first made the same scalp-tingling descent in the dark days of June 1968, leaving behind a U.S. that seemed to have betrayed its ideals. Without a doubt, I was more passionately opposed to the Viet Nam War than knowledgeable about my work in Playon Chico. Nevertheless, like so many other idealistic but technically untutored volunteers, I was determined in some vague way to do good. Now I was returning to discover if we had.

My work among the Kuna had been fascinating and frustrating, seemingly ill connected to the noble purpose of Peace Corps service. It was a first-rate anthropological experience for me, I concluded, but what was it worth to them? Had our efforts helped improve the lives of the Kuna? I certainly questioned the very wisdom or possibility of our "doing good." Our vegetable project, a benign attempt to improve the Kuna's subsistence diet, had been a complete failure. The Indians didn't want to grow vegetables, refused to tend them, wouldn't eat them. Eventually, a Kuna friend patiently explained why: the vegetables had to be weeded every day, he said. "But here, each morning I decide what I will do. Today I will pick coconuts. Tomorrow I will fish. The next day I will get water or cut bananas. So you see," he concluded, "on my island I am king."

With that I came to believe that Peace Corps volunteers could not impose our particular notions of civilization on other people. The Kuna culture was poor and primitive, yet it had an idyllic quality that was light-years away from the hardscrabble poverty of the campesinos in the Panamanian interior. I had even for a time come to like a life reduced to basic necessity: fetch water, prepare food, wash clothes, catch fish, paddle the boat.

To my delight, I found that the Kuna still do all these things in the old way. Upon my return, the Indians who welcomed me with warm hugs seemed no more surprised than if I had been gone only a few days--perhaps because the years had changed their lives so little. The Kuna still spend half a day paddling to the river on the mainland to bathe, wash clothes, collect water. Intrusions of modern culture are few: more outboard motors for the wooden cayucos, tape decks and boom boxes everywhere.

Yet inevitably life in the Kuna's San Blas archipelago has subtly changed. Many of the men have left the islands for jobs inland. Tourism and rampant drug smuggling along the coast have transformed the Kuna's former open welcome of Americans into the almost xenophobic suspicion with which they have always regarded Latinos. The number of day trippers, drawn by the Kuna's renowned cloth art, the mola, has multiplied.

It was the mola that also brought the Peace Corps to San Blas. These vibrantly colored, intricately patterned, hand-stitched cloth panels are essential not only to the Kuna woman's traditional dress but to her life. From her first crude attempts at the difficult reverse applique, a Kuna woman will stitch on her mola daily, first for her trousseau, then to sell. Yet when the corps arrived in 1963, Indian women were shedding their artful garb for cheap cotton dresses, and it was feared the unique craft of the mola would be lost, along with the cash it earned the Indians. The volunteers organized a Cooperativa de Productos de Mola. By the time I arrived to organize the eager women on Playon Chico, the co-op had grown to 200 women on seven islands.

I had thought that the cooperative had died when the Peace Corps quit Panama in 1971. Instead, it had blossomed into a cottage industry that brings substantial cash into an economy formerly based on coconuts. Today, 1,365 women on 17 islands turn out thousands of dollars' worth of mola products each year, from pillows and purses to the traditional squares. The co-op runs a store in Panama City that sells wholesale to tourist shops in town and even exports to the U.S. Like everything else in the co-op, the store is run by Kuna women only.

The success of the tribe-wide co-op has taught the Kuna how to apply the same principles to even larger matters. Spurred by the construction of a road into their territory and the threat of forced development from outside, the Kuna men have formed a second tribal cooperative to manage the land and water resources of their nearly autonomous homeland. Their efforts have been impressive enough to win international support, including a $225,000 grant . from the MacArthur Foundation. "The Indians have made it into the 20th century intact," says Ann Wenzel, an American friend in Panama. "On the way they have learned to live in contact with the Western world without succumbing to it."

The co-op's success surprised and humbled me. The long-departed Peace Corps hardly brought unalloyed good to the Kuna Indians. But unsuspectingly we had given them the political and organizational skills they needed to control their destiny. It is indeed a useful legacy.