Jay-Z loves the Peace Corps. He’s never said so publicly, and there’s no reference to volunteerism in any of his two hundred and twenty-four songs. But Rajeev Goyal believes that he knows the rapper’s true heart. “Jay-Z and Beyoncé are both very interested in helping the Peace Corps,” Rajeev told me once. He said that last year he was on the phone with somebody who claimed he could arrange for Jay-Z and Beyoncé to speak at a Peace Corps rally that Rajeev was organizing in Washington, D.C. But their appearance fell through, which sometimes happens to Rajeev’s most ambitious plans. He was unable to get an audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala to request a letter from His Holiness asking Congress to give more money to the Peace Corps. Once, he asked Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair and Tim Russert’s widow, to contact Senator Barbara Mikulski, of Maryland, in a manner so roundabout that it was like driving from D.C. to Baltimore via the Deep South. “He asked me to ask James Carville to ask Bill Clinton to call Senator Mikulski,” Orth told me. “And that’s just one of four e-mails that I got from him in a day!” Orth didn’t telephone Carville, but on another occasion she called a senator on his cell phone in the middle of a meeting. “It was outrageous, but I did it for Rajeev,” she said—like everybody, she used his first name when talking about him. Orth admired Rajeev’s willingness to try anything, especially since he had appeared in Washington as if “he was dropped in there from a cloud.” She said, “Who else would fly on miles all the way to Hawaii to try to see Obama’s sister? And get it done! I wish he had been a reality series.”

Rajeev Goyal is thirty-one years old, but he could pass for a college student. He stands only five and a half feet tall, with dark skin and long-lashed eyes. He has the portable confidence of the second-generation immigrant—no matter where he goes, he knows there are benefits to being an outsider. In the part of eastern Nepal where Rajeev served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2001 to 2003, people sometimes weep when his name is mentioned. Locals refer to him as Shiva, the god who is also the source of the Ganges River. Old folks turn on a tap and say, “This is what he gave us.” In the halls of Congress, most people have no idea what to make of him. For the past two years, he has approached the place as if it were just another Nepali settlement with a caste system to untangle. He figured out the Washington equivalent of village-well routes—hallways, hearing rooms, and coffee shops where anybody can hang around and meet a member of Congress. “He just picked off Democrats and Republicans one by one,” Sam Farr, a Democratic congressman from California, told me. “I don’t know lobbyists who are that persistent.” Others complained that his unorthodox approach was too personal, but even critics acknowledged the results. During the past two years, funding for the Peace Corps has increased by record amounts, despite partisanship in Congress and a brutal economic climate. “I’ve been in the Congress for seventeen years, and always lobbying for the Peace Corps, but I’ve never been as effective as I have in the last two sessions,” Farr said. “And I would attribute that to Rajeev.”

In March, the Peace Corps will turn fifty years old. The anniversary is bittersweet: despite the new funding, which has allowed for a significant increase in volunteers, the agency sends fewer than sixty per cent as many people abroad today as it did in 1966. Many Americans aren’t aware that the Peace Corps still exists. Its impact on foreign policy seems minimal, especially in light of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rajeev told me that the agency might have a higher profile if former volunteers applied lessons from the developing world to U.S. politics, which is the opposite of how most people think of the Peace Corps. Instead of introducing American values to some benighted country, Rajeev wants to move in the other direction. “The way we organized this campaign was asking who was in the Peace Corps, and who cares about it. That’s your blood link; that’s your caste. You define your tribe.” He said, “Washington is a village. Decisions in Congress, some of the biggest decisions, are based on a personal act.”

Rajeev Goyal didn’t know his own caste until he joined the Peace Corps. He grew up in Manhasset Hills, Long Island, where his parents, Ravindra and Damyanti Goyal, had settled after immigrating from Rajasthan, India, in the early nineteen-seventies. They raised their three sons to speak Hindi, but they never told them that they were Vaishya, a caste known for its success in business. “To us, everybody is equal,” Ravindra Goyal, who is a pulmonologist, told me, explaining that he didn’t like the caste system. But after the Peace Corps sent Rajeev to Nepal, which has a system similar to India’s, he telephoned his mother. “He asked me, ‘Are we Brahmin, or Vaishya, or Kshatriya, or what?’ ” Damyanti told me. “He said, ‘People want to know what I am.’ So I told him.”

The Goyals had initially opposed their son’s decision to go abroad. They wanted him to become a doctor, and he took premed courses at Brown University before deciding to apply to law school. They didn’t see the point of deferring admission in order to live in an undeveloped country. Damyanti, who had recently undergone chemotherapy for breast cancer, worried about her son being far away, but his arguments finally swayed her. “He said that this country has given us too much,” she told me. “We have a nice house, nice car, we live in a nice neighborhood. It’s time to give something back. When he explained it like that, I liked the idea a little better.”

Rajeev was assigned to teach English at a school in Namje, a village of fewer than six hundred people, in eastern Nepal, where the Terai Plain gives way suddenly to the foothills of the Himalayas. At an elevation of more than five thousand feet, Namje villagers grow coriander, soybeans, radishes, and other vegetables. Traditionally, they also spent much of their time hauling water. Snowcaps provide Nepal with abundant water resources, but rivers are often inaccessible in mountain towns like Namje. The nearest source was the Saacho Khola, a spring that was more than two hours away by foot on steep mountain paths. People often made three trips a day, carrying sixteen-litre aluminum jugs. “You learn that not everything needs to be washed,” Rajeev told me. “Soap isn’t always necessary. You waste a lot of water with soap. Of course, I didn’t do this as well as they did, so I got sick.”

He caught a case of scabies so bad that it scarred his arm. After visiting a doctor in Kathmandu, he returned to the village and noticed other effects of the water shortage. “One day, a good student didn’t come to class, and I asked him why. He said he was getting water. I brought all the villagers together and asked, ‘If there’s a way to solve this problem, are you willing to donate your labor?’ They were willing to do it.”

Rajeev spoke with engineers in Kathmandu, and he read books about electric pumps, piping, and filtration systems. Using the skills he had acquired in premed physics classes, he learned to calculate water friction. He finally decided that the best option was a two-stage pumping system capable of lifting water thirteen hundred vertical feet. In the city of Dharan, he found a pipe salesman named Kishan Agrawal, whose ancestors came from the same part of India as Rajeev’s. After the two men discussed their family histories, Kishan agreed to order hundreds of pieces of three-inch galvanized-iron pipe on credit, interest-free. In order to raise funds, Rajeev returned to Long Island, where the Goyals invited their doctor friends to dinner, without mentioning that the night’s entertainment would involve Rajeev asking for money. Within ten minutes, he had raised eighteen thousand dollars, which was eventually supplemented by funds from the Peace Corps, U.S.A.I.D., and the American Himalayan Foundation.

For the twenty-two-year-old Rajeev, the most daunting challenge was organizing labor. The villagers had no power tools, and all materials had to be carried via mountain paths to construction sites. Women did much of the work, because many men had gone abroad as laborers. Through his research, Rajeev learned that one of the biggest threats was something called water hammer—the pressure that builds in a long pipe when an outlet is closed. He consulted with engineers, who suggested building a stone staircase more than a mile in length, which would pin down the pipe and also allow access for repairs. In designing the staircase and the pump houses, Rajeev relied heavily on Karna Magar, a villager who was naturally gifted but had only a ninth-grade education. Harka Lama, the headmaster of the local school, organized the village into twenty-five groups, each of which would help coördinate different aspects of the project.

Another teacher, Tanka Bhujel, handled village politics. “I’m only realizing now how much he taught me,” Rajeev told me recently. “We would go to a meeting and he would say, ‘If we can get this one guy, we’ll get everybody.’ And the guy would have three wives and things would be complicated. So much was based on ancestry and bloodlines. It’s the same in Washington. It’s identity.” Tanka was an outsider in the village, a member of an obscure sub-caste, and he relished the political maneuvering. “Tanka would be speaking in Nepali to a group, and then out of nowhere he would say, in English, ‘Po-litics is the dur-ty game,’ ” Rajeev said, mimicking a Nepali accent. “And he wouldn’t translate it! He understood Kathmandu, he understood the Maoists, the military, the family politics.”

At the time, Nepal was ripped apart by unrest. Since the mid-nineties, Maoist groups had been trying to overthrow the monarchy, and after peace talks failed in 2002 there were increased attacks on the Army. Often, the military responded with brutal violence as soldiers searched villages. Thousands of people were killed, and more than a hundred thousand were displaced. Guerrillas set off homemade bombs, which meant that anybody with a pipe was suspect. Rajeev got the local Army commander to issue a letter explaining why villagers were handling so much plumbing equipment, and everybody carried a copy at all times.

Five hundred and thirty-five people volunteered for the project. They built two pump houses, two holding tanks, three reserve tanks, and 1,236 stone steps—said to be the longest staircase in eastern Nepal. When an agent from the district engineering office visited, he couldn’t believe that an American like Rajeev would depend so heavily on the uneducated Karna Magar. “Our guy is as good as any engineer,” Rajeev said. But, after sixteen months of work, they turned on the power and nothing happened.

Rajeev had only a month left in the Peace Corps. After repeatedly failing to get the pump to work, he became so discouraged that he hardly listened when a local electrician suggested that the problem might be voltage. “All those bastards in India, they’re using too much electricity,” the electrician said. “We have to wait until the middle of the night, when all those people in India will be asleep.”

A group of men hiked to the lowest pump station, where they fished for salamanders while waiting for India to go to bed. Rajeev was so depressed that he stayed home. At three o’clock in the morning, a neighbor woke him up. “Pani aayo! ” he shouted. “The water has come!” Rajeev ran to the staircase, where he heard a sound like rain: water was rising in the pipes. He and others followed the noise up the mountain, step by step. It became louder at the summit, as water poured into the series of reserve tanks, which held almost twenty thousand gallons. Tanka Bhujel, who knew the politically correct response for any occasion, went out and slaughtered a goat.

People usually assume that the Peace Corps came out of a grand idea, but its beginnings may have had more to do with emotions associated with village politics. In October, 1960, during the third debate of the Presidential campaign, Richard Nixon attacked John F. Kennedy by claiming that Democratic Presidents had been responsible for leading Americans into every war of the past half century. Immediately afterward, Kennedy flew to Michigan, where, at two o’clock in the morning, he made an unplanned speech on the Ann Arbor campus. He challenged the students: “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” Kennedy had never mentioned an overseas service program, and the comment surprised his staff. As Stanley Meisler describes it in his forthcoming account of the Peace Corps, “When the World Calls,” Harris Wofford, an aide who later became a senator, believes that Kennedy made the speech because he was angry about Nixon’s insinuation.

Thousands of students sent letters of interest to Kennedy, and the idea also tapped into the popular feeling that the United States needed more grass-roots efforts to fight Communism. After the election, Kennedy founded the Peace Corps and appointed his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as director. In less than six months, the first volunteers were sent to Ghana, where they had an immediate impact on the education system. Without the Peace Corps, roughly a sixth of Ghanaian secondary schools would have had to shut down owing to lack of teachers. Soon, there were nearly five hundred instructors in Ethiopia alone. By 1966, more than fifteen thousand volunteers were working various jobs around the world, and the agency received forty-two thousand applications that year. Plans for expansion were ambitious: Kennedy once remarked that the Peace Corps would start to become significant when it reached a hundred thousand volunteers.

But 1966 turned out to be the high-water mark. Applications plummeted during the Vietnam years, when idealistic young people weren’t inclined to have anything to do with a government agency. During the seventies and eighties, volunteers continued to go overseas, where they often had a major influence on communities, but the agency’s U.S. profile diminished. Support depended on the whim of a President or a few politicians. Nixon, who hated anything associated with Kennedy, tried to kill the Peace Corps entirely. Reagan was surprisingly supportive, especially after a 1983 meeting with the Prime Minister of Fiji, who effusively praised the volunteers who had served in his country. A week after that meeting, a staffer presented Reagan with a proposal for slashing the federal budget. “Don’t cut the Peace Corps,” Reagan reportedly said. “It’s the only thing I got thanked for last week.”

Over time, though, the Peace Corps came to embody the empty campaign promise. Everybody had heard of it, and impressions were vaguely positive, but there was no real awareness of what volunteers did or how their activities were funded. Clinton claimed that he would increase the size of the organization from fewer than seven thousand volunteers to ten thousand; George W. Bush said he wanted fifteen thousand. Obama promised to double the Peace Corps by its fiftieth anniversary. But none of them pushed hard for more money, and volunteer numbers stayed at roughly half the level of 1966, despite the fact that applications increased significantly after 9/11. In 2008, the Peace Corps’s budget was $342 million—less than what the federal government spent on military bands.

To former volunteers, it seemed a wasted resource. The Peace Corps had sent Americans to Afghanistan for seventeen years, and more than forty-five thousand people had served in predominantly Muslim countries, but these things seemed to have no effect on post-9/11 policy. Kevin Quigley, the president of the National Peace Corps Association, a group for returned volunteers, believed it was time for a campaign to expand the organization. But this had to be done independently of the Peace Corps—by law, a government agency can’t lobby. Quigley told me that the community of former volunteers had been too passive. “You have to get organized,” he said.

Quigley met with Donald Ross, a former volunteer in Nigeria who had organized public campaigns for Ralph Nader and others. With a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, they hired Rajeev Goyal, who, since leaving Nepal, had attended law school at New York University. Rajeev had continued doing development work in Namje, but he had never had any contact with Capitol Hill. At first, he tried to read up on the legislative process. “They have those books, ‘How Our Government Works,’ whatever,” Rajeev told me. “It’s the most useless waste of time.” He realized that there’s no legal or democratic element—agencies like the Peace Corps are funded through appropriations committees, which aren’t outlined in the Constitution. All that matters is the personal decisions of committee members, and how they can be influenced by constituents, colleagues, and other people.

The grass-roots part was relatively easy. There are more than two hundred thousand former volunteers, and Rajeev eventually developed an e-mail list of thirty-three thousand. He installed computer software that detected whether a message had been opened, which taught him what kind of e-mail inspired people to read and forward. He also tracked his targets. Once, when I visited him in Washington, he checked his computer and told me that a recent message had been opened a hundred and thirty-three times by staffers in the office of a senator. “That means I did something right,” he said. With his list, he generated enormous numbers of phone calls and e-mails from former volunteers across the country. During the week of one key funding decision, so many people called the office of Representative Nita Lowey, the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, that Lowey’s phones were completely tied up. An aide finally begged an intermediary to convince Rajeev to stop. “Call off the dogs,” the intermediary said. “The interns need to go to lunch.”