Peace Corps Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

On March 1, 1961, United States president John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women; helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served; and helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Nearly 200,000 volunteers have served in 139 host countries to work on issues ranging from HIV/ AIDS education to information technology and environmental preservation. According to the Fallen Peace Corps Volunteers Memorial Project, as of November 2009, over 270 volunteers had died serving.

Five years after the Peace Corps was established, over 15,000 volunteers were working in the field, the largest number in its history. In 1971, President Richard Nixon moved the corps and several other federal volunteer programs into a new federal volunteer agency, and by December 1974, there were corps volunteers in sixty-nine countries. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order that granted the Peace Corps full autonomy, and in 1981 it became an independent federal agency. The following year, the number of volunteers fell to 5,380 (the lowest number since 1962), but by 1986 had increased to 6,264. In 1989, President George H. Bush announced that volunteers would go to Hungary, thereby establishing the first Peace Corps program in an Eastern European country.

Changes continued into the 1990s and twenty-first century. In 1992, the first group of volunteers left for the former Soviet Union to work in small-business enterprise projects in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The first group of English teacher volunteers left for China in 1993 and the Crisis Corps, a new program allowing returned volunteers to provide short-term assistance during natural disasters and humanitarian crises, was launched in 1995; this program was renamed the Peace Corps Response in 2007. By 1996, nearly 7,300 volunteers were serving in ninety-four developing countries. Volunteers were deployed domestically for the first time in 2005 when the Crisis Corps aided relief operations in the Gulf Coast region following Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. That year, volunteer numbers reached a thirty-year high with 7,810 Americans serving in the Peace Corps in seventy-seven countries.

In September 2009, there were 7,671 volunteers and trainees. The average age of volunteers was twenty-eight years and 60 percent were female. The highest percentage of volunteers worked in education (35 percent), health and HIV/AIDS (22 percent), business development (15 percent), and the environment (14 percent). In December 2009, Peace Corps’s members served in seventy-six countries, particularly in Africa (37 percent) and Latin America (24 percent). Under the directorship of Aaron S.Williams, the Peace Corps’s fiscal year 2010 budget was $400 million.

The Peace Corps has occasionally been a target for criticism. In October 1961, protests arose in Nigeria over a letter written by a volunteer who described primitive living conditions in the country. In 2008 Robert L. Strauss, a former Peace Corps country director, said that the organization lacked a strategy, volunteers were rarely sent where they were most needed, and the quality of volunteers was questionable.

Bibliography:

Dodd, Chris. “Expand the Peace Corp.” New York Times, January 14, 2008. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404E2D7103BF937A25752C0A96E9C8B63.
Fallen Peace Corps Volunteers Memorial Project. www.fpcv.org/. Peace Corps. www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm.
Strauss, Robert L. “Think Again:The Peace Corps.” Foreign Policy, April 2008. www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4295&page=0.

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