Your Peace Corps continues its vital mission

I have just returned from a 50th-year reunion of the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. Based upon my findings, the Peace Corps may be one of the best investments that you ever made, either as a taxpayer or as an actual volunteer.   

As I was flying from Honolulu to the Caribbean, I had my usual doubts about the Peace Corps. I wondered if my years as a volunteer in a Dominican farm village near the Haitian border, from 1965 to 1967, had made any real difference in the lives of those folks. And I wondered if the present-day Peace Corps was relevant, given our nation’s foreign policy that relies so heavily on costly military action, helping to generate new generations of anti-American sentiment.  

But then I spent three days laughing and crying with my old fellow Peace Corps friends, two days listening to current volunteers and their Dominican counterparts, and finally five days in the villages where had I worked so many years ago.

I realized I can stop worrying: The Peace Corps is alive and well.

The current American volunteers working in rural and urban areas of the Dominican Republic continue to do many of the things that my cohorts did — working with youth groups, promoting agriculture, encouraging conservation of natural resources, facilitating community-based tourism — but they are also doing many things we never dreamed of.

For example, some are promoting a television soap opera that will get teenagers talking about societal issues facing their generation, including sex, friendship and family relations. Once the volunteers and their teen associates finish their 10-episode series and a teaching manual, they’ll reach hundreds of thousands of young Dominicans, encouraging them to make positive life choices in a complex world.

Early Peace Corps volunteers were known as “Kennedy’s Kids.” We left our homes in a Cold War, pre-Vietnam tension, hoping a can-do American idealism could steer the world right.

Many Dominican citizens who spoke during our reunion are today leaders in their communities, directing health care, agricultural development, environmental protection efforts. Each Dominican who spoke with us passionately recalled how they had been influenced by Peace Corps volunteers many years ago. They spoke of the process of befriending us, learning to trust us and work with us, and then gave many examples of how volunteers helped them to set career and community goals greatly superseding their wildest dreams.

One Dominican leader said to us, “We saw these young Americans move into our rural villages and share our rural hardships without ever complaining. We saw these Americans daily demonstrate persistence, hard work and confidence in our ability to improve ourselves and our communities. And with those examples before us, we Dominicans had no choice but to follow their example and help ourselves.”

That session ended with a long list of accomplishments that these citizen leaders felt the American volunteers had made toward the development of their country. Imagine that. Great accomplishments in all phases of the development of the Dominican Republic without the expenditure of a single bullet.

After this uplifting reunion, I went for my fourth return to the communities where I had served so many years ago. I remember the many nights I sat with impoverished farmers in dark, dirt-floor houses holding their little kids on my lap while preaching the possibility of a better life for those children. Over time, my Dominican neighbors began to trust me that progress could be achieved if they worked together to improve their communities, and that is how their idea of a six-room school for their small crossroads town eventually saw the light of day.  

Since we finished that school in 1967, it has produced students who have become doctors, engineers, an attorney in Paris, a veterinarian at the country’s major airport and, recently, a student in the country’s first class of air traffic controllers. These success stories represent a dramatic and positive change from decades past, when nothing beyond subsistence farming seemed possible.

Truly, any investment in the Peace Corps may be the best foreign policy investment ever made.  

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Joe Zuiker, a Honolulu atttorney, was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic from 1965 to 1967.