Peace Corps should be doubled, not cut

Pia Lopez | Times Writers Group

Budget dust. That’s what the Peace Corps is within the $4 trillion U.S. budget.

Yet President Donald Trump has proposed the largest cut in the last 40 years to the Peace Corps budget.

I noticed this detail in an almost invisible part of the budget immediately.

I joined the Peace Corps during the 20th anniversary year of 1981 — an aspiration since childhood. I taught math to junior high kids, established a school library, worked on capturing rainwater for drinking, and set up a chicken cooperative with adults in the small African nation of Swaziland from June 1981 to December 1984.

The goals that Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey set in introducing the first bill to establish the Peace Corps on June 15, 1960 remain as important today as ever.

His aim was to “develop a genuine people-to-people program” in Asia, Africa and Latin America — which, he said, is “sometimes missing in the way our foreign aid program is carried out.”

Humphrey said, “There is nothing which will build greater people-to-people and government-to-government relationships than to have fine American young men [he later added women] helping the people of the emerging countries to help themselves.”

He touted the low cost per person and low overhead compared to military or other diplomatic service, noting that the Peace Corps program would “get a maximum mileage from a minimum amount of cost.”

Yep.

More than 50 years on, what is the value of sending idealistic young people, who are not experts, to live and work overseas for at least two years?

Peace Corps volunteers live among people in their countries (not barricaded in military bases or diplomatic compounds), at the local standard of living and salary, sharing local family and community life, working side-by-side in small efforts to make life better.

My living allowance was $90 a month. I lived without running water or electricity in a small house with Thobekile Mamba, a geography teacher, her baby, a student and a 12-year-old whose family lived nearby. I brought a group of students from seventh- through ninth-grade math, making sure they passed the national exams.

I worked with Musa Dlamini setting up a chicken co-op, making deliveries with him on the back of a motorcycle, carrying three chickens under each arm.

That immersion in Swazi life taught me so much about the common joys and tragedies we humans face, different ways of self-expression, how we work through ethical dilemmas across cultures, generosity of spirit despite scarce resources, and a deep hunger for education.

By sending thousands of young Americans overseas, a major goal of Peace Corps has been to “break through barriers of mutual suspicion and misinformation by personal associations in constructive work.”

It does that.

President John F. Kennedy, who took up Humphrey’s Peace Corps idea during the 1960 presidential campaign, hoped to have 100,000 volunteers going overseas each year, 1 million a decade.

Sad to say, Peace Corps has never lived up to that promise — peaking at 15,000 volunteers in its fifth anniversary year of 1966. Its status as “budget dust” has meant steady cuts. Today, the Peace Corps is under 7,000 volunteers.

By comparison, the U.S. military has 1.3 million serving in active duty.

Where Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama called on Congress to double the Peace Corps, Trump wants to slash Peace Corps, and the international affairs budget generally, to increase defense spending by $54 billion.

The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget accurately described Trump’s priorities as a “hard-power budget, not a soft-power budget.”

This is so short-sighted. As retired four-star Gen. Colin Powell noted in a New York Times column May 24, “we’re strongest when the face of America isn’t only a soldier carrying a gun but also a diplomat negotiating peace, a Peace Corps volunteer bringing clean water to a village or a relief worker stepping off a cargo plane as floodwaters rise.”

Minnesota, from the beginning, has been a leader in producing Peace Corps volunteers. Our congressional delegation will have to play a leadership role, as Humphrey did, in ensuring the future of Peace Corps.

Let’s renew Kennedy’s call for 100,000 volunteers a year — or at least stick to the Bush/Obama goal of doubling the Peace Corps. Cutting the Peace Corps budget is counter-productive in an era where we need goodwill ambassadors and ways to avoid misunderstanding.

This the opinion of Pia Lopez, whose column is published the fourth Tuesday of the month.