October 6, 2011 • 42 mins
Since its inception, the Peace Corps has sent 200,000 members to 193 countries to deliver aid and good will through know-how rather than direct funding. Learn about the successes, criticisms and dangers of the Peace Corps in this gung-ho episode of SYSK.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah,
there we go. We were caught off guard by guest
(00:22):
producer Casey. He gave us the Caseys the man the
quick punch. What's it called the quick punt? The haymaker.
The Haymaker's what we're calling it now. At least he
was like, we're recording. Yeah, He's like, okay, we're rolling
be funny monkeys. It's rather than start over. I did
my cheeks afterward. All right. It's unusual. It's an unusual
(00:42):
reversal of order, but we're gonna have to go with
it because we are low on tape. No one's gone
to Staples, so we just have to use this one.
We can't record over it again or else it'll snap.
That's funny. That used to be an issue. Yeah on something. Uh.
Now there's an abundance of everything. We have all supplies
(01:03):
out the yin Yang remember that ad for e trade.
He's got money coming out the wazoo. It was like
this e er team who were like hustling this guy
in a gurney to the to the emergency room and
they're like, what's wrong with them? And they're like, he's
got money coming out the wazoo and it was coming
out of his his bottom. That's good his bottom, Chuck, Yes,
(01:26):
I think we should say that. Um. This is a
special uh episode dedicated to the countless Peace Corps volunteers
who listened to Stuff you should Know and who have
written in over the years to say, hi, you guys
who were my best friends in you know, Benine, Turkmenistan. Um, yeah, wherever, Yeah,
(01:49):
and uh, we're finally doing that episode how Peace Corps works.
We've had quite a few right in over the years
and they're all super nice folks and uh it seemed
to really be enjoying their time wherever they are. Yeah,
they're there. Um, goodhearted hustlers is how I would describe them. Really. Yea,
as of right the second Yeah, all right, so um,
(02:12):
let me take you back a little bit, chuck. Right,
I don't think we need to go on the way
back machine. Not far, but it's not that far back.
But we're just gonna go to UM. October nine, Chile night, Uh,
two am. And in ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University
of Michigan, a young senator named John Fitzgerald Kennedy was
(02:36):
working the campaign trail as his father worked to buy
votes in other states. And he gave a little impromptu
UM speech again at two a m. And at the
University of Michigan. I'm prepared for marks in front of
ten thousand UM wolverines, and he said, Chuck, as follows,
how many of you who are going to be doctors
(02:57):
are willing to spend your days in Ghana ERA? Technicians
or engineers? How many of you are willing to work
in the Foreign Service and spend your days and your
lives traveling around the world ERA. On your willingness to
do that, not merely to serve one or two years
in the service, but on your willingness to contribute parts
of your life to this country. I think it will
(03:20):
depend the answer whether a free society can compete. So
I pressed their own button. I accidentally pressed the Catherine
Hepburn button. But that was what JFK said, Uh, And
that was the outline that was very good. Chuck, I'm kidny. Yeah, Um,
that was the outline, the initial outline. The first time
you ever spoke publicly about his idea for the Peace Corps,
(03:43):
Mayor Quimby, I wish I could say my favorite line,
shout out which one calm down everyone. I know you're
all frightened and blank. Oh yeah, it was close. I
almost said it for you, um Sin, since fans will
recognize it and it's pretty will and we have plenty
of those crossover fans. Um. So that was the first
(04:04):
time he ever spoke publicly about what would become the
Peace Corps. Uh. And two weeks later he gave another
speech in San Francisco at the famous Cow Palace. Grateful
Dead played a pretty good show there in nineteen seventy.
I think the Allman Brothers did too. Yeah. I'm sure
you were there drinking beers at age eighteen. Uh and uh.
After that second speech two weeks later in San Francisco,
(04:26):
he said, Hey, basically, let me know how you think
about this, and he got twenty five thousand letters in
response saying I would do that. So um. One of
the first things he did when he um gained the
presidency was to sign an executive order saying, okay, now
there's officially a Peace Corps. It was on March first,
(04:46):
nineteen sixty one, that he wrote the executive order and
it was placed into the budget the nineteen sixty two budget,
and Congress passed the budget officially enacting the Peace Corps
by default. Aniversary. Yeah this year it is, isn't it.
I didn't even think about that. Yeah. They had some
you know, the graphics all over the website that didn't
(05:06):
sink in that I was looking at. Yeah. Uh. And
then shortly after that, well, a little while after that, Nixon,
who um JFK soundly beaten that that presidential debate, the
televised one. UM said well, I've always hated JFK. So
I'm gonna take his his little pet project and just
(05:27):
put it over here. And Jimmy Carter came in and
went and hold on a minute, and he made it
its own independent federal agency with an appointment uh by
the president. And it's part of the foreign aid budget
usually about one percent, right, Yeah, this year it's and
last year I believe four hundred million dollars, which is
(05:48):
not chump change. Not only is it not chump change,
they asked for three hundred and seventy three million, and
they got four hundred millions. Yeah, I didn't know that
federal agencies got more than they asked for in the budget. Well, Bush,
h W and Obama have both pushed for expansion of
the Peace Corps. I think Bush wanted to double the
number of volunteers. He wanted to double the number of
(06:09):
CIA agents in the field. We'll get to that in
a little bit. Why is Obama want to double it?
I would assume everyone has pure intentions here, goosh, Okay,
maybe not all right. Um, it's been a resounding success
over the last fifty years. Um, there have been a
hundred and ninety three countries, surf chuck, I believe. Um,
(06:34):
there have been more than two hundred thousand volunteers total,
eighteen directors. The guy who's directing now Aaron S. Williams.
He is the fourth director to have been a Peace
Corps volunteer. Back in the day, I figured they all were.
I would have too. Um. One of the more famous
ones who wasn't it was Paul Coverdell. Remember the statue
(06:56):
just behind us. Yeah, it says Peace Corps somewhere on it. Yeah.
You know what I like about the Peace Corps site.
When you're trudging through it is when you see like
an Aaron Williams or whoever. They have their service in
parentheses next to their name, like Dominican Republic sixty seven
to seventy was where he was, right, pretty cool? Um.
Probably the most famous Peace Corps volunteers Chris Matthews from Hardball.
(07:20):
He really yeah, he did Swazzi Land to seventy. Well,
I thought you're gonna say, Evangeline Lily, I've lost fame.
Oh yeah, I guess she's But I know Chris Matthews,
I'm not familiar with the other lady. She may be
the hottest. Which one was she was? She like the
main female lead. Okay, very pretty lady. Um. Although she
(07:40):
was Canadian, she must have gotten her citizenship because you
have to be American. Yeah, that's a good point. Huh.
Something's fishy that we may have just uncovered in this podcast.
Or maybe she just flashed her smile and they're like,
who don't care where you're from? So Um, the purpose
of this, as you said, you you assume every buddy's
intensives are good, and I think that that's a nice
(08:02):
thing to assume. Um. The purpose of establishing the Peace
Corps threefold. It's the type of foreign aid, right, and
we have huge enormous foreign aid packages in the in
the um in the way of like surplus food and
just straight up money supplies, equipment, weapons, whatever, building things.
But Peace Corps, Uh, it's unique in that it's a
(08:23):
supply of foreign aid in the form of no how
and hands on, get it done. It's like the Toyota
tundra of foreign eight. Give him manifest Josh, and you'll
feed him for a day. And what they say, Yeah,
it's based on this right. Teach him to fish, he'll
eat for a lifetime. Yes, if he, if he, if
he gets good at fishing, unless he sticks, should we should?
(08:46):
We say what Their three part official mission statement is
help the people of interested countries and meeting their need
for trained men and women, helping promote a better understanding
of Americans on the part of the people served, and
to help promote a better understanding of other people's on
the part of the Americans. That's a bureaucratic mission statement
if I've ever heard it is. And I just read
(09:07):
something on NPR from a couple of years ago called
the Peace Corps Blues and the each country has their
own director and the former director and Cameroon said that
he thinks one of the things we're failing on now
is that a lot of people in these countries don't
realize that it's actually a U. S. Government program. Like
they know they're volunteers, but I think they think it's
(09:29):
some great nonprofit or like a mission group. Yeah, so
that kind of fails at one aspect of the mission
statement in his eyes that these countries. One of the
big deals is for these countries to know, hey, this
is the U. S. Government coming over here and helping
us out. It's your uncle Sam. It's exactly who you
now owe a favorite to. He has some other problems,
but out with the program now, but I'll go over
(09:49):
those later. So, um, right now, there you have programs
in seventies six countries, but overall, I think a hundred
and ninety three countries have had programs at one time
or another, including country Choose that don't exist. The first
two to join the program. The interesting countries, as you
mentioned in the mission statement were um, let me see
if I got this right, uh, Tanganyika. Tanganyika, which later
(10:14):
got together as in Zabar to form what we now
recognize as Tanzania. You knew that? Oh yeah? And Ghana
was the other two who JFK mentioned in his speech
in University of Michigan. So, um, it's had a at
the very least um of widespread impact. We'll talk about
(10:34):
measuring the impact later, but um, let's get down a
new gritty right. I think just what we've said already
has caused some people will be like, where do I
sign up? Josh and Chucker are endorsing this, so let's
just skip to the end. Well, the first thing you
should know if you want to sign up is that
you're gonna be committing to twenty seven months of service
of volunteerism or a tour. A tour, you're gonna be
(10:57):
living for free. They're gonna provide your living accommodation while
you're there and give you a small stipend to spend money,
which evidently though, is more money than most of the
people you'll be helping. Hap That's like that old thing
where if you have a hundred dollars, you can live
for like ten years in Peru or something like that exactly,
and when you come back home they're gonna give you
six thousand dollars two get you back going. You know
(11:20):
that they don't want to leave you broke because you
haven't had any real work for two and a half
or twenty seven months. So to give you six grand
to get you going again, put that down payment on
the apartment, yeah, to get you back in and right exactly.
And by the old thing, of course, I mean the
strength of the dollar. Um. So when you are applying Chuckers,
(11:43):
you you start out online. Apparently you can do it
in writing if you like, if you're like an Amish
kid who wants to write, who wants to sign up
for traditionalist right, Um, But for the most part, you
do this application online. And I looked at it and
it is extensive. Sure you're all of your education background,
any criminal history, how much you like to drink? Um?
(12:06):
Oh yeah, any military service because one of the first
things they try to root out is whether or not
you have any intelligence background. And if you did, sorry,
I wonder when you build that out for the drinking,
if you just put like a lot well yeah, like,
I don't know. There's even a section where they say, like, well,
let us just define what we mean by problem drinking.
How many drinks per week is one of those, right?
(12:27):
How many sexual partners do you have a night? Any
things that you lie to your doctor about right, Um
there's also any any financial obligations you might have e g.
Student loans or um mortgages, car payments. Basically, they're like,
you can't just use us to escape your creditors. So
(12:48):
they want to They want to know not not only
like what you have, but how you're going to arrange
to pay them, and any kind of documentation you need references.
I mean, this is like the first application and it's
very extensive. We want to weed out as many people
as possible right off the bat, right, and if your
application is selected, right, they were lucky. First of all.
(13:09):
I think yeah, I would imagine it's a fairly low
percentage because there's just so many um red flags that
they're looking for. So many alcoholics, right, so many problem drinkers.
That's what they call it. Um that that you know
if you if you raise one, they're going to be like, no,
there's ten other people who are applying who don't have
that red flag. So if you make it through the
initial application process, they're going to ask you to come
(13:31):
in for an interview and they weed out more people here. Um. Basically,
what they're trying to figure out mainly is if you
are likely to complete your term of service. What they
don't like is people that have to leave. I'm sure
that's highly discouraged to leave the Peace Corps during your tour.
So they want to know if you have like a
(13:53):
serious if you're in a serious relationship. They want to
know stories about your childhood, where you've motivated others to
comp fleet tasks. Um, they want to know, um, how
you how? Yeah, any medical conditions. I think that's in
the initial application. Yeah, but it's sort of like the
army and that you can be denied because of medical
conditions obviously, right. Um. The one of the one of
(14:15):
the interview questions I saw was, uh, tell us about
a rule that you have trouble following. And the correct
answer for that is, uh, the rule I have trouble
following is the rule that asks me to stop when
I've done just enough the bare minimum. That's the right answer. Yeah. Um,
would you modify your appearance to fit in with the
(14:36):
local culture, like would you shave your mohawk or take
out your piercings? Or whatever. How will you stave off
boardom The correct answer to that is an iPod full
of stuff you should Yeah, that's what it sounds like.
So there you go. There's your all your crib notes
for the interview. Yeah, and if you pass the interview,
it gets really exciting from that point because if you
(14:56):
get an official invitation, it's pretty neat. You get ten
days to decide, and it's fairly vague. Send some guy there,
he's like, come on, come on, because basically they want
to know if you're in for the Peace Corps, not
if you're in to go to Indonesia and teach English
or surf, because exactly there might be other reasons. Uh.
(15:20):
So what they do is to give you ten days
to decide, and they leave it fairly vague. They give
you a probably like a probably not even a country,
probably like a continent like Asia, Yeah, where we're gonna
send you, and they do detail a little bit about
what the job you'll have, but they basically want to
know are you in for the Peace Corps no matter
where we send you, And if you say yeah, then
(15:42):
you're gonna get your departure date and then that's when
you're gonna get some more specific information. He's like, come on,
high fives. He's like, all right, I'll be back in
like a couple of weeks with their other letter, like
you're going to Turkey, and then he goes, uh, sorry,
no surfing in Turkey, although there probably is, you think
on the Boss verse surfing Turkey. Yeah, alright, surf Turkey. Man.
(16:04):
You get a little orientation appointment and then you get
sent off to that country for a three month training period. Yeah,
if you're eighteen, if you're a US resident, no upper
age limit, you can be no depending only really old
and still go to the Peace Corps. I guess if
you pass everything no dependence, I just noticed that. I
didn't realize. I guess they're like, yeah, we want you
(16:26):
to not just abandon your family. That's a nice move. Yeah,
and you have to have a high school diploma, yes, Josh,
and you do need that diploma. And you also can
be married. But it's a pretty small percentage. Think about
three percent or married couples or is it seven percent? Yes?
Seven percent married single. I think it waffles. So um, yeah,
(16:47):
one percent is undecided, and that they will send you
with your married partner. They can there are some assignments
where they'll send both of you to the same place
to work together, but apparently those are kind of few
and far between. You can't put in for your girlfriend boyfriend, No,
you can't at all, and you both have to be
accepted fully as Peace Corps volunteers who could be sent
to different corners of the earth. I think they'd like
(17:08):
to help people out there. I'm sure they do. UM,
but you can't have any kids there, and you can't
take your pets, which is not a surprise, a little
field mouse, not a surprise at all. You can't take
your pets. So if you have pets, like you gotta
look at your life. You know, if you are a
homeowner with pets, then you probably shouldn't volunteer for the
(17:29):
Peace Corps. You can volunteer here at home join them.
I don't know a A. But if you are single
and you're living in Brooklyn, you don't have any cats,
and you got time to kill and a in a
heart that wants to serve the world, and you know
about UM. I don't know repairing motorbikes in Indonesia or
(17:54):
you speak of foreign language. These are all things like
these hobbies, they really get into that. And it's not
like when you put down your hobbies for a college
education or a college application and no one really cares
about that. I hate to break it to you, but
do they really do? In the Peace Corps, if you
have skills as a as a gardener, they want to
know about that, or if you were like a landscape
(18:15):
or something like that. Yeah, and what what they're gonna say,
here are all of our programs. Choose. Then you're gonna choose,
and then they're gonna be like, Okay, no, this is
where we really need you. And they will send you
where they need you ultimately based on your skills, your background,
your hobbies. You could always get sent where you might
like to go. And if you have know that language,
that's a big leg up in that direction, I think.
(18:36):
But I think you should be prepared to know that
they they may send you wherever. Yeah, that's part of it.
But you're doing this for the love of helping others,
and really it doesn't matter because there's only one race,
the human race. I just think that's really exciting. Yeah,
I did not know where you're going to go, and
to be I wish I would, I would join, I
would go back and do it all over again. I
(18:57):
would do it different. I would join the piece for
for a couple of years. You can of what I
always think of when I think of the Peace Corps.
I think of um, Julie Haggarty and the League guy
from Airplane when they went and told him, yeah, she
has a party and he's teaching basketball and Harlem Globe
Chottera dancing. That was that was different. I was thinking
the discos scene when he was yeah, that's different. Yeah,
(19:19):
but yeah, that's what I think of when I think
of Peace Corps. I think of the Tom Hanks movie Volunteers.
I never saw that one, but that's where he met
his wife Frida Wilson. Oh yeah, I guess so, huh. Yeah.
I never saw that because I always hated the Tennessee Volunteers,
so I refused to see that movie in case it
helped them anyway. Yeah, and I still do right, Oh
Josh packing, They only allow you to take two bags
(19:42):
for twenty seven months, which doesn't sound like a lot. Well,
not only that, there's a weight limit, yeah, eighty pounds
right a k A thirty six point to eight seven
kilograms for our non imperial measurement friends. So what they
suggest is take things that you cannot get elsewhere, and
then when you get there you can buy some of
(20:02):
the other things, like don't don't bother packing crock pot
because you can get a crock pot in Benin. Yeah,
or can you Well, there's going to be some other
cookware that you don't wear. Yeah, it's just stupid that's
going to take up everything. But they said bring you know,
bring some good old fashioned American undy's and rain gear
(20:23):
and hiking boots and stuff like that you probably can't
get in these other countries. Yeah, so you want to
you want to blow your weight on um, the the
the essentials that you're not gonna be able to find
anywhere else. Maybe that iPod. They said, you can bring
a laptop. But one thing you're not guaranteed is electricity. Yeah,
there's a there's a pretty common misconception that it's like
all thatched huts and no municipal water supply, no electricity,
(20:47):
And that's not true at all. The no thatched hut
thing is not true at all. The no municipal water
supply and no electricity. Think, that's extremely true in a
lot of cases. Well so is the thatched hut here
and there. Okay, but you can volunteer to go to
those places. You can you can also be sent to
those places. But you can also say I want to
go to a place that has no running water and
no electricity and I want to help there. Um. But
(21:10):
there are a lot of assignments where even if you
say no, I don't want that, they'll be like, yeah,
I think they call those people the hard core yes
of the Peace Corps, Like you know what I signed
up for this, send me to the edge of the cliff.
Here's my iPod. Even that's crazy. Yeah, A lot of
(21:31):
a lot of these people are teach in these in
like local schools though that you know, they have power
and water and they're they're more. It's not as third
world as you might think it is in many cases.
I would imagine in a lot of cases, it's like, um,
some of the places we went in Guatemala or they
didn't have anything resembling in municipal water supplies. It was
just like there's a there's a pond over there. But
(21:53):
it wasn't printive, no, I mean there were buildings and
structures and people wear clothes and things like that. It's
not like living with the Yana Mamo exactly. So what's
day to day life like, Josh, if you're a peace
war volunteer, um, well, day to day life is actually
a lot looser than you would think. Basically, they give
you an assignment like say, um, we want you to
(22:14):
teach agricultural techniques, modern agricultural techniques or maybe sustainable agricultural
techniques to these people in Guam. Great well Guam even
qualified though it's a U S territory, I would think
it'd be outside of the US foreign policy scope. Let's
just say someplace in Africa. Then let's go again with
(22:36):
um tanga yaka, tanga yeika, Yeah, tanga yika um. And
you go and you say, okay, well this is here's
some ideas for how I'm going to teach these people
sustainable agriculture and tangan yika uh and um that you
get there and they're like, there is no tangan yika anymore, jackass,
(22:56):
it's all Tanzania. And you go, well, it's still applies.
So here's what I'm going to do. And your day
to day, your hours, um, how you interact with people,
what you teach them. Probably it's a lot up to you.
There's nobody looking over your shoulder like they pretty much
just give you a parachute and drop you off, say
see you later, good luck. That's not true. You do
(23:18):
go alone, though, and depending on how remote you are,
you may be the only American face you see for
a while, although in other places there might be other
volunteers that you know within the town, but you're still
technically sent alone. One of the things I think we've
skipped over is you are allowed to receive friends. Your
friends can come visit you on their own dimes. I
(23:39):
didn't know that. I didn't either, but they can come
hang out with you if you want. Yeah, you need
to see a friendly face or whatever. Um packages you
can get packages. You can go, um travel at your
own expense. You can go to the capital city. You
can go wherever there's WiFi and load up on your stuff.
You should know episodes. Um you can do a little
sight seeing whatever you want. Again, you're stutting your own hours.
(24:01):
But I think for the most part, they imagine that
if you are the kind of go getter who volunteers
for a peace corps, you're not just gonna like lay
around all day. True enough, although that same guy mentioned earlier.
Robert Strauss, who was the director former director in Cameroon,
said he does feel like these days some volunteers use
(24:21):
it as quote employer of last resort, and that, uh,
some recruits use it as an extended spring break from college.
I can see that, and I think that's rare. But
he says that is a problem, and he wants the
standard to be what you talked about. Well, you know
that's Peace Corps problem. Their their process is not rooting
them out. Yeah, you know it needs to be like
(24:44):
are you a pothead? Yes, no, there's your there's your
rooting out system. And depending on if you were a pothead,
it would depend on where they would send you. Like
just how bad of a pothead exactly? Um, you mentioned
packages to Chuck you can't get packages. But our good
friend Um grab Banowski, who wrote this, he says that
(25:05):
there are there is such a thing as quote corrupt
mail workers who pill for your packages sometimes. Um, it
could take forever. So he recommends that you have friends
and family start sending you packages and letters before you
even leave the US, so that when you get there,
you'll get some stuff in the first few months and
it'll keep you from being so homesick. I would send
(25:26):
myself a bunch of stuff, you know, I wouldn't count
of my family to do it eighty pounds because they'd
be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wouldn't get any
packages to like the end of year one if I
left it to my family. That's not true, that's not
I don't know. I didn't get a lot of college packages.
Let's just say that I neither care packages. Yeah. I
was like, do you even know what that is? I
(25:48):
want you to send you one of these? And I
basically just walked my dad around the store, like put
this in there, put that in there. Yeah, it's getting
a little heavy. I mean, we can take the can
goods out right. Yeah. But of course now went to
school sixty miles from where I lived, So if I
would have gone like across country, I might have got
more care packages. Maybe you just keep telling yourself that exactly, So,
(26:09):
Chuck Um, there's some advantages once you return your tours over.
There's some advantages to um being a Peace Corps volunteer.
Uh didn't hurt any resume. It shows a lot of
stick to itiveness and get uppitude and beyond the fact
that it like proves your commitment as a human to
a task, which is huge. You also get the inside
(26:31):
scoop on getting a government job if you're interested in
that kind of thing. Yes, like you get um you're
available to list that other people might not see. Your
privy to information. You're also given priority hiring priority over
somebody who may even have better qualifications than you but
wasn't a Peace Corps volunteer, sorry, sucker, which is one
(26:52):
of the reasons our government functions like it does. Um,
So what is the stunt, Chuck? How do you measure
the success of something like the three points of the
mission statement? You said, Strauss criticized one of them. Let's
talk about the accomplishments. Well, that's one of the problems
(27:14):
is it's tough to measure that in any sort of
sort of statistical way. So the only way you can
really measure it is to talk to the volunteers themselves.
And usually when you talk to them afterwards, they're like,
you know what, I learned pretty quick that I was
gonna have to kind of reset my goals and make
them a little smaller in scope, like going from I
(27:37):
want to help the world too, I want to help
this village. Yeah, which is good, and that's helping the
world because seven thousand people doing that in villages all
over the world, so combine collectively, it seems to be
doing that. Yeah. But it is tough when you have
a four dred million dollar program, even though it's a
scant fraction of the of the but of the budget. Um,
you still have to show metrics, I imagine, and pretty
(28:00):
tough in this case. You know. Uh, yeah, I guess,
but I mean, like you said, there's no quantitative way
to spell it out because you can't. I mean, I
guess you could go pull people where there have been
um uh Peace Corps volunteers and ask them, do you
like America more or less? Now? Yeah, and if it's
(28:20):
more than awesome, there you go quantified. There's a check
right there. They do say that most volunteers come back
feeling like they gained a lot from it, for sure.
So that's one of the three right there. You go,
at least at least one third of it is accomplished. Um.
There are also a lot of criticisms as I think
(28:41):
we've kind of leaked out here there of Peace Corps,
which is you know, that's any any noble experiment is
going to um result in criticism. There's always going to
be poopooers, people who you know, don't put their money
where their mouth is, but yet have plenty of time
to point out all the problems with something e g. Me,
(29:05):
So what are they? Uh, Well, sadly, should we go
ahead and get into the crime thing? Sure. One of
the criticisms is that there has been crime committed by
and against Peace Corps volunteers over the years, and um
that the Peace Corps hasn't done a very good job
of backing these people, and some alleged they've even tried
(29:30):
pretty hard to cover up a lot of this stuff. Yeah,
there was UM it was I think last year. This year,
UM in Washington there was a bit of a stir
when Congress was basically forced to start inquiring into how
the Peace Corps handles reports of, say like sexual violence
against volunteers. UM. A group of volunteers was organized by
(29:52):
a former volunteer named Casey Frazy, and she started UM
First Response Action, which is basically like it's the group
former volunteers who were subject to sexual violence and who
were mistreated by the Peace Corps when they returned a
lot of them reported basically being implied that it was
their fault. What had they been drinking, what were they wearing,
(30:14):
had they been like sleeping around? Basically were they asking
for it? Which is not what you do to your people. Know,
And uh, Statistically, every year, on average, twenty two Peace
Corps women report being victims of rape or attempted rape,
and more than one thousand from two thousand to two
thousand nine reported sexual assaults. And you know a lot
(30:36):
of these go unreported still, so that number may be higher.
And that's We're not trying to poop anything, but that's
really sad. And you know, Obama and the and the
new guy Aaron Williams have said that they need to
take this way more seriously and make it a more
victim centered approach, taking more victim centered approach to this.
One of the reasons that that's going on, apparently is
(30:58):
because there's a clause in the nineteen Peace Corps Act
that says, if you're a Peace Corps employee, you mean
as a Peace cor employees, do you know that she
worked at h Q, Yeah, you can't be you can't
work there for longer than five years. And the whole
point is to keep the keep the place young, keep
the ideas fresh, or keep it you know, really um
(31:20):
um rolling with the punches. But one of the one
of the problems with that is that it has no
institutional memory. If no one's been there longer than five years,
there are some who are grandfathered in, but if no
one's been there for longer than five years, and your
director comes aboard like every three or four five years,
maybe um, there's no memory on how to handle big
(31:41):
problems like this. So things can very easily be brushed
under the carpet. And sadly, Josh, there have been by
my count, three murders the Peace Corps volunteers. One just
in two thousand nine, Kate Pusey was murdered in Benin,
and uh this one drew a lot of a ten
because Kate was essentially ratting out a local employee of
(32:06):
the school she was working at, who she believed was
h sexually assaulting the girls at the school. She wrote
the Peace Corps office and somehow this got back to
him and he tied her to a porch and slit
her throat, and the parents were pretty upset that this
was leaked. And although I don't think they like verified
(32:30):
if the Peace Corps leaked it, surely they wouldn't do
anything like that. But they're pretty upset that it wasn't
as confidential as it should have been and that it
led to her murder. And then, most famously, um was
in the nineteen seventies. Deborah Gardner was stabbed to death
by another volunteer in Tonga in ninety six. And he
(32:51):
is still walking streets of Brooklyn. Yeah, I've read a
New Yorker article on this. It was really interesting. So
what there was a series of legal quirks that led
to him batt Yeah. What happened was she was very
pretty and he liked her very much, and she did
not return the affection. And one night, after a party
(33:14):
in the town where there were some other volunteers, she
got a little too drunk apparently fell down a couple
of times on the dance floor, and one of her
ex boyfriends who was there, took her back to her
hut and you know, put her to bed. Five days later,
Priven comes into her hut and stabs her twenty two times.
And it was um supposed to go a little different.
(33:36):
He had like a pipe and a knife, and like cyanide,
and it was supposed to be he was supposed to
like knock her out and torture her, but she like
a woke up when he got there and fought him off,
and it just led to like, you know, a brutal stabbing.
He was trying to pull her out of the hut.
When people saw him, he fled on a bike. She
(33:57):
was able to name her attacker before she died. And um,
they had a trial in Tongo where he was um
where the American government said he has schizophrenia and we
are going to if you let him go here, we're
gonna commit him to an institution in Washington State when
(34:17):
we get back. And uh, problem is when they got
back to Washington State, you they didn't accept you know,
like you couldn't commit someone at that point. So it
was basically not a ruse, but it was they got
him out of the country and then basically there was
no recourse. They couldn't try him in America and they
couldn't commit him involuntarily, and he went, you know what,
(34:39):
I don't want to go I'm going back to New
York and that's what he did and that's where he
still is. So had he been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Um,
I think that he had by one doctor there. But
then later on he did volunteer to go to this
hospital and get tested and they said that he suffered
(34:59):
from uh from psychosis in the moment, I can't remember
what they called it, but basically went nuts that night.
But he's not schizophrenia, doesn't have schizophrenia. He's walking around
New York still huh. Yeah. Wow. They wrote a book
about it, and he keeps it pretty low pro but
I would imagine he's got a pretty good job. He
worked for Social Security as like a eighty thousand dollar
(35:21):
year computer guy. So it's really sad. Yeah, but that
is the exception. We don't want to pay a negative
picture here, but um, they have. They have called on
the Peace Corps to clean up their act for sure
when it comes to crime. Yeah, and the Peace Corps
first part says we do not place Peace Corps volunteers
in unsafe environments. That's what Aaron Williams said, But he
(35:42):
also said we need to we need to handle like
the any victimization that does happen way better than we are. Um, chuck.
There's also the CIA allegations. I don't know much about this.
So for basically since its inception, just the value of
having said in thousand kids being placed in local environments,
(36:04):
gaining the trust of people, interacting with other nationals from
other countries, uh in a third place, a neutral setting,
just the the intelligence value of them by default is
is incalculable. But the from the outset, the two have
(36:25):
been intended to be separated, right, Peace Corps has nothing
to do with intelligence, Like if you have an intelligence background, sorry,
you can't be in Peace Corps. If you're in Peace Corps,
you have to wait four years before you can get
a any kind of intelligence assignment in the military. Um.
So that on paper they're very much separate. But everybody,
including people who live in these countries that are being
(36:45):
served by Peace Corps, have always assumed Peace Corps volunteers
are often asked to do intelligence field work. And in
two thousand eight some kids came forward in Bolivia and said, hey,
while we're down there, government told us to to start,
you know, keeping reports and filing reports on Venezuelan and
(37:06):
Cuban nationals who were living and working down there. They
wanted to know all about these people. That's intelligence field
work and has that proven Yeah, well yeah, the the US, uh,
the Peace Corps said that this was uh an error,
that it was in violation of Peace Corps policy. But
basically that yeah, enough of these these believing volunteers came
(37:28):
forward that they couldn't say that it wasn't true. So yeah,
it was kind of thing. So apparently it has happened
at least once. Um, and it's not like wet work
or anything like that. I don't think the Peace Corps
volunteers have ever been asked to like Greece a dictator
or anything like that. But wet work I've never heard
of that. Yeah, that's that's hands assassinations. Yeah, what does
(37:50):
wet mean? I imagine blood and gore tissue wet from blood. Yeah.
So um, those are the criticisms. Again the chuck. I
think we should say that my hat is off to
Peace Corps and the volunteers for the work that they do. Absolutely,
and and if you're a female Peace Corps volunteer, be
(38:12):
really careful. We encourage you to be very mindful because
you know you're alone in these countries and bad things
do happen sometimes, and um, just be vigilant and take
care of yourself. Oh yeah, and I think that that
goes for all Peace Corps volunteers. Women are a little
more susceptible to to that kind of crime obviously, but
uh yeah, yeah, got anything else, No, I think that's
(38:33):
it man, Hap Corps. Yeah, hats off to you, and
thank you to all of our listeners who are Peace
Corps volunteers or have been Peace Corps volunteers, and who
have written us to say thanks for being there. We hope,
uh well we we thank you back for taking us
along on your trips. That's pretty cool. Kennedy's children, that's
what they call them, or they used to. I don't
know if they still do. Kennedy's illegitimate children. Well, that's
(38:57):
a whole different batch. So okay, that's Peace Corps. If
you want to know more about it, you can type
in Peace Corps in the handy search bar how stuff
works dot com and that will bring you this fine,
fine article. Um and I said handy search bar, Right
you did, dude. It is time for listener mail. That's right, Josh.
(39:21):
I'm gonna call this from an Irish uh listener. And
I think I've said before I love me some Irish
and Scottish people. You mean I read an Irish bar
the other night. Were there any Irish people there there? Yeah,
there's always at least a couple. So uh, Like I said,
I love I love meet some Irish and Scottish. They're
great folks. I've had some good friends from that part
(39:42):
of the world, and so I'm gonna read this now. Um.
As a longstanding recruit to the stuff you should know Army,
I always expect to hear something new and interesting when
I listen to you guys. So I never expected to
be singled out and spoken to directly, breaking the tenuous
podcast reality barrier. But that's exactly what happened yesterday. A
little relevant detail to begin with. My name doesn't invite nicknames, John,
(40:05):
being too normal in Killeen awkward to manipulate into anything else.
The best that fourteen years of school could give me
was the nickname j K, which is stuck for most
of my life. So anyway, I was stuck in traffic
in Dublin the other day and the Government watch List
podcast was coming to an end. I was I was
beginning to think about how Orwellian Irish slash global society
(40:28):
really is. It started to give me that weird feeling
that someone who I couldn't see was watching me, or
that people were talking about me. Then Josh decided to
confirm this paranoia and said, if you want to know
more about the terrorists watch list and probably end up
on the watch list yourself. J K. I genuinely panicked,
convinced that the US government was after me. Apparently my
(40:50):
reaction to a foreign government pursuing me is to break
sharply and almost cause an accident in the middle of
the city. I came back to reality and kept driving sheepishly,
avoiding looking in my rear view mirror and the angry
driver behind me. So thanks in kudos, and if you
read this out loud, I'd love to give a quick
shout out to Luke and Andrew, to other members of
(41:10):
the Irish Battalion and great friends. So Luke, Andrew and
John and Ireland Ireland, thank you for writing in. Go
eat some Shepherd's pie and drink a beer for me
and me and Josh. Yeah, thanks a lot, j K
H j k UM. If you want to let us
(41:30):
know about the time we've spoken you directly, or if
you want to tell us about your Peace Corps time.
It's pretty cool. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Be sure
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
(41:52):
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by
the reinvented tooth and twelve Camry. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah,
there we go. We were caught off guard by guest
(00:22):
producer Casey. He gave us the Caseys the man the
quick punch. What's it called the quick punt? The haymaker.
The Haymaker's what we're calling it now. At least he
was like, we're recording. Yeah, He's like, okay, we're rolling
be funny monkeys. It's rather than start over. I did
my cheeks afterward. All right. It's unusual. It's an unusual
(00:42):
reversal of order, but we're gonna have to go with
it because we are low on tape. No one's gone
to Staples, so we just have to use this one.
We can't record over it again or else it'll snap.
That's funny. That used to be an issue. Yeah on something. Uh.
Now there's an abundance of everything. We have all supplies
(01:03):
out the yin Yang remember that ad for e trade.
He's got money coming out the wazoo. It was like
this e er team who were like hustling this guy
in a gurney to the to the emergency room and
they're like, what's wrong with them? And they're like, he's
got money coming out the wazoo and it was coming
out of his his bottom. That's good his bottom, Chuck, Yes,
(01:26):
I think we should say that. Um. This is a
special uh episode dedicated to the countless Peace Corps volunteers
who listened to Stuff you should Know and who have
written in over the years to say, hi, you guys
who were my best friends in you know, Benine, Turkmenistan. Um, yeah, wherever, Yeah,
(01:49):
and uh, we're finally doing that episode how Peace Corps works.
We've had quite a few right in over the years
and they're all super nice folks and uh it seemed
to really be enjoying their time wherever they are. Yeah,
they're there. Um, goodhearted hustlers is how I would describe them. Really. Yea,
as of right the second Yeah, all right, so um,
(02:12):
let me take you back a little bit, chuck. Right,
I don't think we need to go on the way
back machine. Not far, but it's not that far back.
But we're just gonna go to UM. October nine, Chile night, Uh,
two am. And in ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University
of Michigan, a young senator named John Fitzgerald Kennedy was
(02:36):
working the campaign trail as his father worked to buy
votes in other states. And he gave a little impromptu
UM speech again at two a m. And at the
University of Michigan. I'm prepared for marks in front of
ten thousand UM wolverines, and he said, Chuck, as follows,
how many of you who are going to be doctors
(02:57):
are willing to spend your days in Ghana ERA? Technicians
or engineers? How many of you are willing to work
in the Foreign Service and spend your days and your
lives traveling around the world ERA. On your willingness to
do that, not merely to serve one or two years
in the service, but on your willingness to contribute parts
of your life to this country. I think it will
(03:20):
depend the answer whether a free society can compete. So
I pressed their own button. I accidentally pressed the Catherine
Hepburn button. But that was what JFK said, Uh, And
that was the outline that was very good. Chuck, I'm kidny. Yeah, Um,
that was the outline, the initial outline. The first time
you ever spoke publicly about his idea for the Peace Corps,
(03:43):
Mayor Quimby, I wish I could say my favorite line,
shout out which one calm down everyone. I know you're
all frightened and blank. Oh yeah, it was close. I
almost said it for you, um Sin, since fans will
recognize it and it's pretty will and we have plenty
of those crossover fans. Um. So that was the first
(04:04):
time he ever spoke publicly about what would become the
Peace Corps. Uh. And two weeks later he gave another
speech in San Francisco at the famous Cow Palace. Grateful
Dead played a pretty good show there in nineteen seventy.
I think the Allman Brothers did too. Yeah. I'm sure
you were there drinking beers at age eighteen. Uh and uh.
After that second speech two weeks later in San Francisco,
(04:26):
he said, Hey, basically, let me know how you think
about this, and he got twenty five thousand letters in
response saying I would do that. So um. One of
the first things he did when he um gained the
presidency was to sign an executive order saying, okay, now
there's officially a Peace Corps. It was on March first,
(04:46):
nineteen sixty one, that he wrote the executive order and
it was placed into the budget the nineteen sixty two budget,
and Congress passed the budget officially enacting the Peace Corps
by default. Aniversary. Yeah this year it is, isn't it.
I didn't even think about that. Yeah. They had some
you know, the graphics all over the website that didn't
(05:06):
sink in that I was looking at. Yeah. Uh. And
then shortly after that, well, a little while after that, Nixon,
who um JFK soundly beaten that that presidential debate, the
televised one. UM said well, I've always hated JFK. So
I'm gonna take his his little pet project and just
(05:27):
put it over here. And Jimmy Carter came in and
went and hold on a minute, and he made it
its own independent federal agency with an appointment uh by
the president. And it's part of the foreign aid budget
usually about one percent, right, Yeah, this year it's and
last year I believe four hundred million dollars, which is
(05:48):
not chump change. Not only is it not chump change,
they asked for three hundred and seventy three million, and
they got four hundred millions. Yeah, I didn't know that
federal agencies got more than they asked for in the budget. Well, Bush,
h W and Obama have both pushed for expansion of
the Peace Corps. I think Bush wanted to double the
number of volunteers. He wanted to double the number of
(06:09):
CIA agents in the field. We'll get to that in
a little bit. Why is Obama want to double it?
I would assume everyone has pure intentions here, goosh, Okay,
maybe not all right. Um, it's been a resounding success
over the last fifty years. Um, there have been a
hundred and ninety three countries, surf chuck, I believe. Um,
(06:34):
there have been more than two hundred thousand volunteers total,
eighteen directors. The guy who's directing now Aaron S. Williams.
He is the fourth director to have been a Peace
Corps volunteer. Back in the day, I figured they all were.
I would have too. Um. One of the more famous
ones who wasn't it was Paul Coverdell. Remember the statue
(06:56):
just behind us. Yeah, it says Peace Corps somewhere on it. Yeah.
You know what I like about the Peace Corps site.
When you're trudging through it is when you see like
an Aaron Williams or whoever. They have their service in
parentheses next to their name, like Dominican Republic sixty seven
to seventy was where he was, right, pretty cool? Um.
Probably the most famous Peace Corps volunteers Chris Matthews from Hardball.
(07:20):
He really yeah, he did Swazzi Land to seventy. Well,
I thought you're gonna say, Evangeline Lily, I've lost fame.
Oh yeah, I guess she's But I know Chris Matthews,
I'm not familiar with the other lady. She may be
the hottest. Which one was she was? She like the
main female lead. Okay, very pretty lady. Um. Although she
(07:40):
was Canadian, she must have gotten her citizenship because you
have to be American. Yeah, that's a good point. Huh.
Something's fishy that we may have just uncovered in this podcast.
Or maybe she just flashed her smile and they're like,
who don't care where you're from? So Um, the purpose
of this, as you said, you you assume every buddy's
intensives are good, and I think that that's a nice
(08:02):
thing to assume. Um. The purpose of establishing the Peace
Corps threefold. It's the type of foreign aid, right, and
we have huge enormous foreign aid packages in the in
the um in the way of like surplus food and
just straight up money supplies, equipment, weapons, whatever, building things.
But Peace Corps, Uh, it's unique in that it's a
(08:23):
supply of foreign aid in the form of no how
and hands on, get it done. It's like the Toyota
tundra of foreign eight. Give him manifest Josh, and you'll
feed him for a day. And what they say, Yeah,
it's based on this right. Teach him to fish, he'll
eat for a lifetime. Yes, if he, if he, if
he gets good at fishing, unless he sticks, should we should?
(08:46):
We say what Their three part official mission statement is
help the people of interested countries and meeting their need
for trained men and women, helping promote a better understanding
of Americans on the part of the people served, and
to help promote a better understanding of other people's on
the part of the Americans. That's a bureaucratic mission statement
if I've ever heard it is. And I just read
(09:07):
something on NPR from a couple of years ago called
the Peace Corps Blues and the each country has their
own director and the former director and Cameroon said that
he thinks one of the things we're failing on now
is that a lot of people in these countries don't
realize that it's actually a U. S. Government program. Like
they know they're volunteers, but I think they think it's
(09:29):
some great nonprofit or like a mission group. Yeah, so
that kind of fails at one aspect of the mission
statement in his eyes that these countries. One of the
big deals is for these countries to know, hey, this
is the U. S. Government coming over here and helping
us out. It's your uncle Sam. It's exactly who you
now owe a favorite to. He has some other problems,
but out with the program now, but I'll go over
(09:49):
those later. So, um, right now, there you have programs
in seventies six countries, but overall, I think a hundred
and ninety three countries have had programs at one time
or another, including country Choose that don't exist. The first
two to join the program. The interesting countries, as you
mentioned in the mission statement were um, let me see
if I got this right, uh, Tanganyika. Tanganyika, which later
(10:14):
got together as in Zabar to form what we now
recognize as Tanzania. You knew that? Oh yeah? And Ghana
was the other two who JFK mentioned in his speech
in University of Michigan. So, um, it's had a at
the very least um of widespread impact. We'll talk about
(10:34):
measuring the impact later, but um, let's get down a
new gritty right. I think just what we've said already
has caused some people will be like, where do I
sign up? Josh and Chucker are endorsing this, so let's
just skip to the end. Well, the first thing you
should know if you want to sign up is that
you're gonna be committing to twenty seven months of service
of volunteerism or a tour. A tour, you're gonna be
(10:57):
living for free. They're gonna provide your living accommodation while
you're there and give you a small stipend to spend money,
which evidently though, is more money than most of the
people you'll be helping. Hap That's like that old thing
where if you have a hundred dollars, you can live
for like ten years in Peru or something like that exactly,
and when you come back home they're gonna give you
six thousand dollars two get you back going. You know
(11:20):
that they don't want to leave you broke because you
haven't had any real work for two and a half
or twenty seven months. So to give you six grand
to get you going again, put that down payment on
the apartment, yeah, to get you back in and right exactly.
And by the old thing, of course, I mean the
strength of the dollar. Um. So when you are applying Chuckers,
(11:43):
you you start out online. Apparently you can do it
in writing if you like, if you're like an Amish
kid who wants to write, who wants to sign up
for traditionalist right, Um, But for the most part, you
do this application online. And I looked at it and
it is extensive. Sure you're all of your education background,
any criminal history, how much you like to drink? Um?
(12:06):
Oh yeah, any military service because one of the first
things they try to root out is whether or not
you have any intelligence background. And if you did, sorry,
I wonder when you build that out for the drinking,
if you just put like a lot well yeah, like,
I don't know. There's even a section where they say, like, well,
let us just define what we mean by problem drinking.
How many drinks per week is one of those, right?
(12:27):
How many sexual partners do you have a night? Any
things that you lie to your doctor about right, Um
there's also any any financial obligations you might have e g.
Student loans or um mortgages, car payments. Basically, they're like,
you can't just use us to escape your creditors. So
(12:48):
they want to They want to know not not only
like what you have, but how you're going to arrange
to pay them, and any kind of documentation you need references.
I mean, this is like the first application and it's
very extensive. We want to weed out as many people
as possible right off the bat, right, and if your
application is selected, right, they were lucky. First of all.
(13:09):
I think yeah, I would imagine it's a fairly low
percentage because there's just so many um red flags that
they're looking for. So many alcoholics, right, so many problem drinkers.
That's what they call it. Um that that you know
if you if you raise one, they're going to be like, no,
there's ten other people who are applying who don't have
that red flag. So if you make it through the
initial application process, they're going to ask you to come
(13:31):
in for an interview and they weed out more people here. Um. Basically,
what they're trying to figure out mainly is if you
are likely to complete your term of service. What they
don't like is people that have to leave. I'm sure
that's highly discouraged to leave the Peace Corps during your tour.
So they want to know if you have like a
(13:53):
serious if you're in a serious relationship. They want to
know stories about your childhood, where you've motivated others to
comp fleet tasks. Um, they want to know, um, how
you how? Yeah, any medical conditions. I think that's in
the initial application. Yeah, but it's sort of like the
army and that you can be denied because of medical
conditions obviously, right. Um. The one of the one of
(14:15):
the interview questions I saw was, uh, tell us about
a rule that you have trouble following. And the correct
answer for that is, uh, the rule I have trouble
following is the rule that asks me to stop when
I've done just enough the bare minimum. That's the right answer. Yeah. Um,
would you modify your appearance to fit in with the
(14:36):
local culture, like would you shave your mohawk or take
out your piercings? Or whatever. How will you stave off
boardom The correct answer to that is an iPod full
of stuff you should Yeah, that's what it sounds like.
So there you go. There's your all your crib notes
for the interview. Yeah, and if you pass the interview,
it gets really exciting from that point because if you
(14:56):
get an official invitation, it's pretty neat. You get ten
days to decide, and it's fairly vague. Send some guy there,
he's like, come on, come on, because basically they want
to know if you're in for the Peace Corps, not
if you're in to go to Indonesia and teach English
or surf, because exactly there might be other reasons. Uh.
(15:20):
So what they do is to give you ten days
to decide, and they leave it fairly vague. They give
you a probably like a probably not even a country,
probably like a continent like Asia, Yeah, where we're gonna
send you, and they do detail a little bit about
what the job you'll have, but they basically want to
know are you in for the Peace Corps no matter
where we send you, And if you say yeah, then
(15:42):
you're gonna get your departure date and then that's when
you're gonna get some more specific information. He's like, come on,
high fives. He's like, all right, I'll be back in
like a couple of weeks with their other letter, like
you're going to Turkey, and then he goes, uh, sorry,
no surfing in Turkey, although there probably is, you think
on the Boss verse surfing Turkey. Yeah, alright, surf Turkey. Man.
(16:04):
You get a little orientation appointment and then you get
sent off to that country for a three month training period. Yeah,
if you're eighteen, if you're a US resident, no upper
age limit, you can be no depending only really old
and still go to the Peace Corps. I guess if
you pass everything no dependence, I just noticed that. I
didn't realize. I guess they're like, yeah, we want you
(16:26):
to not just abandon your family. That's a nice move. Yeah,
and you have to have a high school diploma, yes, Josh,
and you do need that diploma. And you also can
be married. But it's a pretty small percentage. Think about
three percent or married couples or is it seven percent? Yes?
Seven percent married single. I think it waffles. So um, yeah,
(16:47):
one percent is undecided, and that they will send you
with your married partner. They can there are some assignments
where they'll send both of you to the same place
to work together, but apparently those are kind of few
and far between. You can't put in for your girlfriend boyfriend, No,
you can't at all, and you both have to be
accepted fully as Peace Corps volunteers who could be sent
to different corners of the earth. I think they'd like
(17:08):
to help people out there. I'm sure they do. UM,
but you can't have any kids there, and you can't
take your pets, which is not a surprise, a little
field mouse, not a surprise at all. You can't take
your pets. So if you have pets, like you gotta
look at your life. You know, if you are a
homeowner with pets, then you probably shouldn't volunteer for the
(17:29):
Peace Corps. You can volunteer here at home join them.
I don't know a A. But if you are single
and you're living in Brooklyn, you don't have any cats,
and you got time to kill and a in a
heart that wants to serve the world, and you know
about UM. I don't know repairing motorbikes in Indonesia or
(17:54):
you speak of foreign language. These are all things like
these hobbies, they really get into that. And it's not
like when you put down your hobbies for a college
education or a college application and no one really cares
about that. I hate to break it to you, but
do they really do? In the Peace Corps, if you
have skills as a as a gardener, they want to
know about that, or if you were like a landscape
(18:15):
or something like that. Yeah, and what what they're gonna say,
here are all of our programs. Choose. Then you're gonna choose,
and then they're gonna be like, Okay, no, this is
where we really need you. And they will send you
where they need you ultimately based on your skills, your background,
your hobbies. You could always get sent where you might
like to go. And if you have know that language,
that's a big leg up in that direction, I think.
(18:36):
But I think you should be prepared to know that
they they may send you wherever. Yeah, that's part of it.
But you're doing this for the love of helping others,
and really it doesn't matter because there's only one race,
the human race. I just think that's really exciting. Yeah,
I did not know where you're going to go, and
to be I wish I would, I would join, I
would go back and do it all over again. I
(18:57):
would do it different. I would join the piece for
for a couple of years. You can of what I
always think of when I think of the Peace Corps.
I think of um, Julie Haggarty and the League guy
from Airplane when they went and told him, yeah, she
has a party and he's teaching basketball and Harlem Globe
Chottera dancing. That was that was different. I was thinking
the discos scene when he was yeah, that's different. Yeah,
(19:19):
but yeah, that's what I think of when I think
of Peace Corps. I think of the Tom Hanks movie Volunteers.
I never saw that one, but that's where he met
his wife Frida Wilson. Oh yeah, I guess so, huh. Yeah.
I never saw that because I always hated the Tennessee Volunteers,
so I refused to see that movie in case it
helped them anyway. Yeah, and I still do right, Oh
Josh packing, They only allow you to take two bags
(19:42):
for twenty seven months, which doesn't sound like a lot. Well,
not only that, there's a weight limit, yeah, eighty pounds
right a k A thirty six point to eight seven
kilograms for our non imperial measurement friends. So what they
suggest is take things that you cannot get elsewhere, and
then when you get there you can buy some of
(20:02):
the other things, like don't don't bother packing crock pot
because you can get a crock pot in Benin. Yeah,
or can you Well, there's going to be some other
cookware that you don't wear. Yeah, it's just stupid that's
going to take up everything. But they said bring you know,
bring some good old fashioned American undy's and rain gear
(20:23):
and hiking boots and stuff like that you probably can't
get in these other countries. Yeah, so you want to
you want to blow your weight on um, the the
the essentials that you're not gonna be able to find
anywhere else. Maybe that iPod. They said, you can bring
a laptop. But one thing you're not guaranteed is electricity. Yeah,
there's a there's a pretty common misconception that it's like
all thatched huts and no municipal water supply, no electricity,
(20:47):
And that's not true at all. The no thatched hut
thing is not true at all. The no municipal water
supply and no electricity. Think, that's extremely true in a
lot of cases. Well so is the thatched hut here
and there. Okay, but you can volunteer to go to
those places. You can you can also be sent to
those places. But you can also say I want to
go to a place that has no running water and
no electricity and I want to help there. Um. But
(21:10):
there are a lot of assignments where even if you
say no, I don't want that, they'll be like, yeah,
I think they call those people the hard core yes
of the Peace Corps, Like you know what I signed
up for this, send me to the edge of the cliff.
Here's my iPod. Even that's crazy. Yeah, A lot of
(21:31):
a lot of these people are teach in these in
like local schools though that you know, they have power
and water and they're they're more. It's not as third
world as you might think it is in many cases.
I would imagine in a lot of cases, it's like, um,
some of the places we went in Guatemala or they
didn't have anything resembling in municipal water supplies. It was
just like there's a there's a pond over there. But
(21:53):
it wasn't printive, no, I mean there were buildings and
structures and people wear clothes and things like that. It's
not like living with the Yana Mamo exactly. So what's
day to day life like, Josh, if you're a peace
war volunteer, um, well, day to day life is actually
a lot looser than you would think. Basically, they give
you an assignment like say, um, we want you to
(22:14):
teach agricultural techniques, modern agricultural techniques or maybe sustainable agricultural
techniques to these people in Guam. Great well Guam even
qualified though it's a U S territory, I would think
it'd be outside of the US foreign policy scope. Let's
just say someplace in Africa. Then let's go again with
(22:36):
um tanga yaka, tanga yeika, Yeah, tanga yika um. And
you go and you say, okay, well this is here's
some ideas for how I'm going to teach these people
sustainable agriculture and tangan yika uh and um that you
get there and they're like, there is no tangan yika anymore, jackass,
(22:56):
it's all Tanzania. And you go, well, it's still applies.
So here's what I'm going to do. And your day
to day, your hours, um, how you interact with people,
what you teach them. Probably it's a lot up to you.
There's nobody looking over your shoulder like they pretty much
just give you a parachute and drop you off, say
see you later, good luck. That's not true. You do
(23:18):
go alone, though, and depending on how remote you are,
you may be the only American face you see for
a while, although in other places there might be other
volunteers that you know within the town, but you're still
technically sent alone. One of the things I think we've
skipped over is you are allowed to receive friends. Your
friends can come visit you on their own dimes. I
(23:39):
didn't know that. I didn't either, but they can come
hang out with you if you want. Yeah, you need
to see a friendly face or whatever. Um packages you
can get packages. You can go, um travel at your
own expense. You can go to the capital city. You
can go wherever there's WiFi and load up on your stuff.
You should know episodes. Um you can do a little
sight seeing whatever you want. Again, you're stutting your own hours.
(24:01):
But I think for the most part, they imagine that
if you are the kind of go getter who volunteers
for a peace corps, you're not just gonna like lay
around all day. True enough, although that same guy mentioned earlier.
Robert Strauss, who was the director former director in Cameroon,
said he does feel like these days some volunteers use
(24:21):
it as quote employer of last resort, and that, uh,
some recruits use it as an extended spring break from college.
I can see that, and I think that's rare. But
he says that is a problem, and he wants the
standard to be what you talked about. Well, you know
that's Peace Corps problem. Their their process is not rooting
them out. Yeah, you know it needs to be like
(24:44):
are you a pothead? Yes, no, there's your there's your
rooting out system. And depending on if you were a pothead,
it would depend on where they would send you. Like
just how bad of a pothead exactly? Um, you mentioned
packages to Chuck you can't get packages. But our good
friend Um grab Banowski, who wrote this, he says that
(25:05):
there are there is such a thing as quote corrupt
mail workers who pill for your packages sometimes. Um, it
could take forever. So he recommends that you have friends
and family start sending you packages and letters before you
even leave the US, so that when you get there,
you'll get some stuff in the first few months and
it'll keep you from being so homesick. I would send
(25:26):
myself a bunch of stuff, you know, I wouldn't count
of my family to do it eighty pounds because they'd
be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wouldn't get any
packages to like the end of year one if I
left it to my family. That's not true, that's not
I don't know. I didn't get a lot of college packages.
Let's just say that I neither care packages. Yeah. I
was like, do you even know what that is? I
(25:48):
want you to send you one of these? And I
basically just walked my dad around the store, like put
this in there, put that in there. Yeah, it's getting
a little heavy. I mean, we can take the can
goods out right. Yeah. But of course now went to
school sixty miles from where I lived, So if I
would have gone like across country, I might have got
more care packages. Maybe you just keep telling yourself that exactly, So,
(26:09):
Chuck Um, there's some advantages once you return your tours over.
There's some advantages to um being a Peace Corps volunteer.
Uh didn't hurt any resume. It shows a lot of
stick to itiveness and get uppitude and beyond the fact
that it like proves your commitment as a human to
a task, which is huge. You also get the inside
(26:31):
scoop on getting a government job if you're interested in
that kind of thing. Yes, like you get um you're
available to list that other people might not see. Your
privy to information. You're also given priority hiring priority over
somebody who may even have better qualifications than you but
wasn't a Peace Corps volunteer, sorry, sucker, which is one
(26:52):
of the reasons our government functions like it does. Um,
So what is the stunt, Chuck? How do you measure
the success of something like the three points of the
mission statement? You said, Strauss criticized one of them. Let's
talk about the accomplishments. Well, that's one of the problems
(27:14):
is it's tough to measure that in any sort of
sort of statistical way. So the only way you can
really measure it is to talk to the volunteers themselves.
And usually when you talk to them afterwards, they're like,
you know what, I learned pretty quick that I was
gonna have to kind of reset my goals and make
them a little smaller in scope, like going from I
(27:37):
want to help the world too, I want to help
this village. Yeah, which is good, and that's helping the
world because seven thousand people doing that in villages all
over the world, so combine collectively, it seems to be
doing that. Yeah. But it is tough when you have
a four dred million dollar program, even though it's a
scant fraction of the of the but of the budget. Um,
you still have to show metrics, I imagine, and pretty
(28:00):
tough in this case. You know. Uh, yeah, I guess,
but I mean, like you said, there's no quantitative way
to spell it out because you can't. I mean, I
guess you could go pull people where there have been
um uh Peace Corps volunteers and ask them, do you
like America more or less? Now? Yeah, and if it's
(28:20):
more than awesome, there you go quantified. There's a check
right there. They do say that most volunteers come back
feeling like they gained a lot from it, for sure.
So that's one of the three right there. You go,
at least at least one third of it is accomplished. Um.
There are also a lot of criticisms as I think
(28:41):
we've kind of leaked out here there of Peace Corps,
which is you know, that's any any noble experiment is
going to um result in criticism. There's always going to
be poopooers, people who you know, don't put their money
where their mouth is, but yet have plenty of time
to point out all the problems with something e g. Me,
(29:05):
So what are they? Uh, Well, sadly, should we go
ahead and get into the crime thing? Sure. One of
the criticisms is that there has been crime committed by
and against Peace Corps volunteers over the years, and um
that the Peace Corps hasn't done a very good job
of backing these people, and some alleged they've even tried
(29:30):
pretty hard to cover up a lot of this stuff. Yeah,
there was UM it was I think last year. This year,
UM in Washington there was a bit of a stir
when Congress was basically forced to start inquiring into how
the Peace Corps handles reports of, say like sexual violence
against volunteers. UM. A group of volunteers was organized by
(29:52):
a former volunteer named Casey Frazy, and she started UM
First Response Action, which is basically like it's the group
former volunteers who were subject to sexual violence and who
were mistreated by the Peace Corps when they returned a
lot of them reported basically being implied that it was
their fault. What had they been drinking, what were they wearing,
(30:14):
had they been like sleeping around? Basically were they asking
for it? Which is not what you do to your people. Know,
And uh, Statistically, every year, on average, twenty two Peace
Corps women report being victims of rape or attempted rape,
and more than one thousand from two thousand to two
thousand nine reported sexual assaults. And you know a lot
(30:36):
of these go unreported still, so that number may be higher.
And that's We're not trying to poop anything, but that's
really sad. And you know, Obama and the and the
new guy Aaron Williams have said that they need to
take this way more seriously and make it a more
victim centered approach, taking more victim centered approach to this.
One of the reasons that that's going on, apparently is
(30:58):
because there's a clause in the nineteen Peace Corps Act
that says, if you're a Peace Corps employee, you mean
as a Peace cor employees, do you know that she
worked at h Q, Yeah, you can't be you can't
work there for longer than five years. And the whole
point is to keep the keep the place young, keep
the ideas fresh, or keep it you know, really um
(31:20):
um rolling with the punches. But one of the one
of the problems with that is that it has no
institutional memory. If no one's been there longer than five years,
there are some who are grandfathered in, but if no
one's been there for longer than five years, and your
director comes aboard like every three or four five years,
maybe um, there's no memory on how to handle big
(31:41):
problems like this. So things can very easily be brushed
under the carpet. And sadly, Josh, there have been by
my count, three murders the Peace Corps volunteers. One just
in two thousand nine, Kate Pusey was murdered in Benin,
and uh this one drew a lot of a ten
because Kate was essentially ratting out a local employee of
(32:06):
the school she was working at, who she believed was
h sexually assaulting the girls at the school. She wrote
the Peace Corps office and somehow this got back to
him and he tied her to a porch and slit
her throat, and the parents were pretty upset that this
was leaked. And although I don't think they like verified
(32:30):
if the Peace Corps leaked it, surely they wouldn't do
anything like that. But they're pretty upset that it wasn't
as confidential as it should have been and that it
led to her murder. And then, most famously, um was
in the nineteen seventies. Deborah Gardner was stabbed to death
by another volunteer in Tonga in ninety six. And he
(32:51):
is still walking streets of Brooklyn. Yeah, I've read a
New Yorker article on this. It was really interesting. So
what there was a series of legal quirks that led
to him batt Yeah. What happened was she was very
pretty and he liked her very much, and she did
not return the affection. And one night, after a party
(33:14):
in the town where there were some other volunteers, she
got a little too drunk apparently fell down a couple
of times on the dance floor, and one of her
ex boyfriends who was there, took her back to her
hut and you know, put her to bed. Five days later,
Priven comes into her hut and stabs her twenty two times.
And it was um supposed to go a little different.
(33:36):
He had like a pipe and a knife, and like cyanide,
and it was supposed to be he was supposed to
like knock her out and torture her, but she like
a woke up when he got there and fought him off,
and it just led to like, you know, a brutal stabbing.
He was trying to pull her out of the hut.
When people saw him, he fled on a bike. She
(33:57):
was able to name her attacker before she died. And um,
they had a trial in Tongo where he was um
where the American government said he has schizophrenia and we
are going to if you let him go here, we're
gonna commit him to an institution in Washington State when
(34:17):
we get back. And uh, problem is when they got
back to Washington State, you they didn't accept you know,
like you couldn't commit someone at that point. So it
was basically not a ruse, but it was they got
him out of the country and then basically there was
no recourse. They couldn't try him in America and they
couldn't commit him involuntarily, and he went, you know what,
(34:39):
I don't want to go I'm going back to New
York and that's what he did and that's where he
still is. So had he been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Um,
I think that he had by one doctor there. But
then later on he did volunteer to go to this
hospital and get tested and they said that he suffered
(34:59):
from uh from psychosis in the moment, I can't remember
what they called it, but basically went nuts that night.
But he's not schizophrenia, doesn't have schizophrenia. He's walking around
New York still huh. Yeah. Wow. They wrote a book
about it, and he keeps it pretty low pro but
I would imagine he's got a pretty good job. He
worked for Social Security as like a eighty thousand dollar
(35:21):
year computer guy. So it's really sad. Yeah, but that
is the exception. We don't want to pay a negative
picture here, but um, they have. They have called on
the Peace Corps to clean up their act for sure
when it comes to crime. Yeah, and the Peace Corps
first part says we do not place Peace Corps volunteers
in unsafe environments. That's what Aaron Williams said, But he
(35:42):
also said we need to we need to handle like
the any victimization that does happen way better than we are. Um, chuck.
There's also the CIA allegations. I don't know much about this.
So for basically since its inception, just the value of
having said in thousand kids being placed in local environments,
(36:04):
gaining the trust of people, interacting with other nationals from
other countries, uh in a third place, a neutral setting,
just the the intelligence value of them by default is
is incalculable. But the from the outset, the two have
(36:25):
been intended to be separated, right, Peace Corps has nothing
to do with intelligence, Like if you have an intelligence background, sorry,
you can't be in Peace Corps. If you're in Peace Corps,
you have to wait four years before you can get
a any kind of intelligence assignment in the military. Um.
So that on paper they're very much separate. But everybody,
including people who live in these countries that are being
(36:45):
served by Peace Corps, have always assumed Peace Corps volunteers
are often asked to do intelligence field work. And in
two thousand eight some kids came forward in Bolivia and said, hey,
while we're down there, government told us to to start,
you know, keeping reports and filing reports on Venezuelan and
(37:06):
Cuban nationals who were living and working down there. They
wanted to know all about these people. That's intelligence field
work and has that proven Yeah, well yeah, the the US, uh,
the Peace Corps said that this was uh an error,
that it was in violation of Peace Corps policy. But
basically that yeah, enough of these these believing volunteers came
(37:28):
forward that they couldn't say that it wasn't true. So yeah,
it was kind of thing. So apparently it has happened
at least once. Um, and it's not like wet work
or anything like that. I don't think the Peace Corps
volunteers have ever been asked to like Greece a dictator
or anything like that. But wet work I've never heard
of that. Yeah, that's that's hands assassinations. Yeah, what does
(37:50):
wet mean? I imagine blood and gore tissue wet from blood. Yeah.
So um, those are the criticisms. Again the chuck. I
think we should say that my hat is off to
Peace Corps and the volunteers for the work that they do. Absolutely,
and and if you're a female Peace Corps volunteer, be
(38:12):
really careful. We encourage you to be very mindful because
you know you're alone in these countries and bad things
do happen sometimes, and um, just be vigilant and take
care of yourself. Oh yeah, and I think that that
goes for all Peace Corps volunteers. Women are a little
more susceptible to to that kind of crime obviously, but
uh yeah, yeah, got anything else, No, I think that's
(38:33):
it man, Hap Corps. Yeah, hats off to you, and
thank you to all of our listeners who are Peace
Corps volunteers or have been Peace Corps volunteers, and who
have written us to say thanks for being there. We hope,
uh well we we thank you back for taking us
along on your trips. That's pretty cool. Kennedy's children, that's
what they call them, or they used to. I don't
know if they still do. Kennedy's illegitimate children. Well, that's
(38:57):
a whole different batch. So okay, that's Peace Corps. If
you want to know more about it, you can type
in Peace Corps in the handy search bar how stuff
works dot com and that will bring you this fine,
fine article. Um and I said handy search bar, Right
you did, dude. It is time for listener mail. That's right, Josh.
(39:21):
I'm gonna call this from an Irish uh listener. And
I think I've said before I love me some Irish
and Scottish people. You mean I read an Irish bar
the other night. Were there any Irish people there there? Yeah,
there's always at least a couple. So uh, Like I said,
I love I love meet some Irish and Scottish. They're
great folks. I've had some good friends from that part
(39:42):
of the world, and so I'm gonna read this now. Um.
As a longstanding recruit to the stuff you should know Army,
I always expect to hear something new and interesting when
I listen to you guys. So I never expected to
be singled out and spoken to directly, breaking the tenuous
podcast reality barrier. But that's exactly what happened yesterday. A
little relevant detail to begin with. My name doesn't invite nicknames, John,
(40:05):
being too normal in Killeen awkward to manipulate into anything else.
The best that fourteen years of school could give me
was the nickname j K, which is stuck for most
of my life. So anyway, I was stuck in traffic
in Dublin the other day and the Government watch List
podcast was coming to an end. I was I was
beginning to think about how Orwellian Irish slash global society
(40:28):
really is. It started to give me that weird feeling
that someone who I couldn't see was watching me, or
that people were talking about me. Then Josh decided to
confirm this paranoia and said, if you want to know
more about the terrorists watch list and probably end up
on the watch list yourself. J K. I genuinely panicked,
convinced that the US government was after me. Apparently my
(40:50):
reaction to a foreign government pursuing me is to break
sharply and almost cause an accident in the middle of
the city. I came back to reality and kept driving sheepishly,
avoiding looking in my rear view mirror and the angry
driver behind me. So thanks in kudos, and if you
read this out loud, I'd love to give a quick
shout out to Luke and Andrew, to other members of
(41:10):
the Irish Battalion and great friends. So Luke, Andrew and
John and Ireland Ireland, thank you for writing in. Go
eat some Shepherd's pie and drink a beer for me
and me and Josh. Yeah, thanks a lot, j K
H j k UM. If you want to let us
(41:30):
know about the time we've spoken you directly, or if
you want to tell us about your Peace Corps time.
It's pretty cool. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Be sure
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
(41:52):
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by
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