ICWA@100: Peace Corps in Colombia
Pat Holt on the early days of the US volunteer agency.
Pat M. Holt was a reporter and leading Latin American affairs expert and journalist who served as chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Just before his ICWA fellowship in Latin America (1961–1962), he wrote a memorandum outlining his thoughts on Cuba to the committee’s chair J. William Fulbright, who objected to the US-backed invasion of Cuba in a memo to President John F. Kennedy shortly before the Bay of Pigs debacle. Later, the president told the senator: “You’re the only guy in town who can say, ‘I told you so.’”
Pat spent his fellowship in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, British Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. In spring 1962, he wrote a dispatch looking into the newly created Peace Corps’ arrival in Colombia. The young volunteers faced extreme conditions in rural villages—many began their tours sickened with dysentery—but locals welcomed their presence even if the mission was not always well understood. Today, Peace Corps Colombia supports more than 120 communities.
BOGOTÁ (April 1962) — Rural Colombia is a paradox. It is overwhelmingly traditional, but it is capable of being radical. It is resistant to small, gradual change; but if it is not persuaded to make small, constructive changes gradually, it is likely to make big, destructive changes suddenly and violently. This is the challenge of the Peace Corps, and nobody is under fewer illusions about it than the volunteers themselves.
I first met these young men when they were in training at Rutgers University last July. I saw them again during their advanced training at Tibaitata, an agricultural experiment station near Bogota, in September. And I have since bounced in a jeep over many a rough kilometer to visit them in the villages where they are working: from Minca, near the Caribbean coast and the Venezuela border, to Sandona, near the Pacific coast and the Ecuador border. Taken as a group (I can think of only two or three exceptions) they are extremely intelligent, and they are mature and perceptive beyond their average age of 23.
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The volunteers were greeted in Colombia with a burst of favorable publicity, which created a public image linking them with the popular President Kennedy and the Alianza para el Progreso [Alliance for Progress]. When they reached their villages toward the end of October, many of them were received with parades, banners, makeshift bands, speeches and general celebrating—as well as general expectations that they had Alianza para el Progreso dollars in their suitcases. The volunteers were there to help the villagers, and to many villagers this meant cash. In one place, for example, a man came to the volunteers and said he would like some help building a house. They said they would be glad to help him. He beamed and asked what percentage of the cost they would pay. When they explained they could not pay anything, he departed and nothing more was heard of his house-building plans. Incidents similar to this were repeated many times, and it took quite a while for the volunteers to get across the point that they were not disbursing officers.
Many of the volunteers were also troubled by sickness when they first arrived in their villages. This was mainly simple, but persistent, dysentery, though there were a few cases of the amoebic variety. It was in these first days that the team idea proved a good one, apart from linguistic considerations. The teams helped reduce cultural shock and reinforced each other’s morale.
Although a few of the volunteers have rented small houses, most of them live two to a room in a local resident’s house. A typical room may be perhaps 15 feet square or a little larger. It has two beds with thin mattresses placed over boards (no springs), maybe a couple of straight chairs and some homemade shelves, and little if any other furniture. Trunks, books, saddles and clothes are stacked haphazardly here and there, giving the overall effect of a cross between a college dormitory and a warehouse. Jackie Kennedy outpolls the more traditional type of pinup girl by at least two to one. The room is usually plastered, and the plaster is usually cracked, sometimes enough to permit the ingress and egress of mice and other rodents. If the town has running water, the house where the volunteers live has a shower and may have a flush toilet, shared by perhaps 12 to 14 people. There being no facilities to heat water, except in a pan over a fire, the water comes out of the shower (when there is water pressure) at a uniform temperature: cold. And in high altitudes, even close to the Equator, this can be very cold indeed.
Most of the volunteers eat either with the family where they are living or in a local joint, which may be called variously a hotel, a restaurant or a pension, but which invariably is the same. A few volunteers have hired local women to cook for them. A few even cook for themselves, thereby getting better food at the expense of flouting the local mores that cooking is woman’s work. By and large, the food is plain, unappetizing and edible. Although the meat in Colombia’s cities is very good, most of the animals that are slaughtered in small towns have led long and active lives. A predictable meal is soup, meat or chicken, boiled rice, boiled potatoes, yucca and bread. Some volunteers supplement this with canned goods (which they buy in the nearest city and which range from fairly to very expensive). Some receive frequent shipments of delicatessen goods from home. These shipments also occasionally contain less useful items; for example, the latest LP records for a boy a hundred kilometers from the nearest record player.
Except for these frills in their diet, the volunteers by and large live just about like the more affluent Colombians in their communities. This is a good bit better than the farmers in the surrounding veredas and a good bit worse than the middle class in the cities. The volunteers really don’t have much choice in the matter, because the facilities for more ostentatious living simply are not available. The volunteers’ clothes (especially their heavy work shoes supplied by the Peace Corps) are better than their neighbors. Most of the volunteers have cameras, always a sign of wealth and a cause of wonder, and radios, which are common even in poor communities.
During their training period at Rutgers, the volunteers were given $14 a week in spending money. They started their work in Colombia receiving $150 a month, which was paid in pesos and which at that time amounted to a little more than 1,300 pesos. This was cut in January to 1,050 pesos a month after a survey indicated that they did not really need 1,300; furthermore, the new allowance is fixed in pesos instead of dollars. In addition, the volunteers accumulate $75 a month in the United States, which will be paid to them in a lump sum when they complete their service.
The reduction to 1,050 pesos caused loud and bitter complaints, even talk of strikes, though most of the volunteers are now reconciled to it. They are still the best-paid people in their communities, so much so that some of them are a little embarrassed and take great pains to conceal it. (Some of their counterparts are paid 600 to 800 pesos a month; an elementary school teacher gets 450 plus a place to live.) Perhaps the most lasting result of the pay cut has been the increase in paperwork for CARE and Peace Corps administrators. Since the cut, volunteers have been claiming reimbursement for petty expenses connected with their work and have produced a flood of vouchers for two-peso bus fares and similar items.
One of the volunteers’ greatest problems in adjusting to life in the cultural environment of rural Colombia has been the drinking patterns that are a prominent part of that environment. Colombians in general consume formidable quantities of alcoholic beverages, and the farther one gets away from Bogota, the more formidable these become, both in quantity and quality. The basic drink is beer, followed closely by aguardiente, a distant and potent cousin of rum. Also popular in the countryside is guarapo, which is white lightning distilled from sugarcane. The worst of all is chicha, which has supposedly been illegal since colonial days, but which is still in evidence in remote rural areas. To make chicha, you chew corn, spit it out, and let it ferment.
Drinking is an integral, indispensable part of rural community life; and drinks, from beer to chicha, are constantly being pressed on Peace Corps volunteers as a gesture of hospitality and friendship. If one of them goes into a local shop for a package of cigarettes, everybody in the place is likely to insist on buying him a beer, and then social custom dictates that he buy everybody else a beer, and by that time it may be four o’clock in the morning.
One result of this is that many volunteers have become gun-shy of casual social mixing and have sometimes appeared to be stand-offish when they really have not been. Some of them have also shown considerable ingenuity in inventing reasons why they cannot drink. One of them gave up aguardiente for Lent, thereby not only avoiding aguardiente but impressing everyone with his strength of character. When I saw him in late March, he was already worrying about what would happen after Easter. While discussing the same problem, another volunteer remarked with mock-wistfulness, “On my next birthday, I’ll be 21 and then I can buy liquor legally in the States.”
As everybody expected, the substantive work of the Peace Corps has gone slowly. Although the volunteers’ real purpose was understood by Colombian government officials in Bogota, it was not understood by most of the villagers among whom they worked. Many a village meeting called to discuss and plan community action flopped when nobody, or only a handful, showed up. One team of volunteers built a latrine, both for their own use and to serve as a demonstration project. Villagers gathered to wonder at this gringo gadget, but not to copy it. However, little by little, things are getting done. People are turning out to work on schools, health centers, roads and water pipelines. People are putting in latrines. There are even cases on record in which a community has raised its own money (usually through a bazaar where everybody gets drunk) to match central government funds.
To get this done involves an enormous amount of visiting and talking, trying to find out what (if anything) the peasants really want and suggesting how they might get it through community action. The trick is to suggest it so that they think it’s their idea—to help them, but not to do it for them. This takes patience, tact and wisdom. To win public confidence, some volunteers have organized classes in English or in simple techniques of hygiene, animal husbandry or construction. Sometimes there is surprising resistance. One of the things that many communities have wanted first is a water supply—not necessarily potable water, but any kind so that people won’t have to carry water in a bucket for as long as a kilometer or more. One water pipeline project was at least temporarily squelched when an old man argued against it. He had been carrying water for 60 years, he said, and now he had enough women in his family to carry it; there wasn’t any use in upsetting things by building a pipeline.
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To sum up: It is far too early to come to a definitive judgment on Peace Corps performance in Colombia, as measured against Peace Corps objectives. One will not be able to do this until at least a year after the Peace Corps has left. To say this is not to downgrade the Peace Corps but rather to emphasize the infinite complexity of what the Corps is trying to do. One would be hard put to think of how the job could be approached much better. If the volunteers fail, it will not be because of any fatal sins of omission or commission on their part; it will be because what they were attempting to do turned out to be impossible—as it may turn out to be.
Although there have been many discouragements and frustrations, and a few of the volunteers have sometimes been on the verge of giving up, there have also been some hopeful signs. What cannot be said yet is whether these hopeful signs are permanent and whether they will spread from the villages where the Peace Corps has worked to the much larger number of villages where it has not worked.
Pat Holt was a true gentleman with a wonderful American Western accent. Smart and understated, he was the model of kindness.