Introduction
This paper asks whether the United States Peace Corps provides an appropriate level of support to its field volunteers in keeping institutional memory of projects, approaches and solutions. The initial question is as follows: Does the Corps assist the volunteers by creating an environment where information gained by months of hard work can be passed along to volunteers that follow (or any other interested parties)? As with the broader aspects of Peace Corps culture, the question might not be as appropriate to the subject as it initially seemed. In fact, research with volunteers past and present, with the Peace Corps's own literature, and with professional literature on how to build organizational memory, reveals a complex memory and cultural issues not initially apparent, even to a returned volunteer.
The program has a structured and functional memory at home and abroad, but its focus is at the "macro" level. That is, there is a great deal of incentive for the agency to keep track of its country level and region level history. But when it comes to the volunteers' individual projects, I have observed a great deal of concern among the volunteers that there is little provision of memory tools by Peace Corps itself. Comments in my survey, mentioned later, include mention of Peace Corps' overemphasis on impressing the public and its funders within the United States government. This, I initially hypothesize, is causing project memory to leak dangerously. During the course of my research, however, I discovered there are a number of reasons not to tinker with the process of deploying volunteers, disseminating information among them, and receiving their input. These include its positive domestic identity as viewed by Congress and the American public; its ability to maintain a mystique as a non-careerist agency; and its focus on knowledge transfer and empowerment of local people rather than pedagogy and direct service. Memory, as it turns out, has many meanings within the Peace Corps experience. Project level memory, where it affects the volunteers and his hosting community, is most likely to succeed when focused at the locus of the project rather than within Peace Corps' multi-level and multi-cultural structure of management.
The Two Year Policy and Organizational Culture
The Peace Corps has a strict policy of allowing its volunteers and staff to work for two year stints, allowing a new "cycle" of personnel to be introduced to the work, sent for service, and returned to "civilian life" within this period of time, plus a training period of one to three months. The average volunteer or staff member serves approximately 26 months. Some extend, but the limit of all extensions is 5 years. After a period of service the staff member or volunteer must stay out of service for at least as long as the most recent period of service in order to re-enter service.
In studying this phenomenon, there are a number of reasons for the establishment of what is widely called the "Two-Year Rule" ("Five year rule" is also used. This refers to the maximum time, including extensions that a non-permanent staff or a volunteer may serve)(Kirschten). My purpose is to link its use to the development of, or lack of, institutional memory, and the notion of "reinvention of the wheel" within the Peace Corps.
The deeper question, reflected in interviews, anecdotal literature and business management journals, is whether Peace Corps would be able to enjoy its unique status among government agencies (Reeves) if it tried harder to build a structured memory within its organization. In the brief thirty nine years since the first public mention of Peace Corps by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, the agency has endured significant change in United States foreign and domestic policy. Vastly differing presidential administrations' range of attitudes toward the agency have ranged from totally supportive to ambivalent to outright hostile. "In an era of widespread belittlement of public service and calls for smaller government, the Peace Corps bucks the trend. Volunteer applications are on the rise, and Congress recently approved an unprecedented four-year authorization that...will increase the agency's budget by a dramatic 50 percent from 1998 to 2003" (Kirschten).
Peace Corps has to a large degree resisted the attacks on "big government" programs, for a number of reasons. First of all, it is viewed as a program with bipartisan support; returned volunteers in senior posts represent both parties and now serve in hundreds of public service posts; their advocacy of the continuation of the program has been consistent. Secondly, the leadership has centered on serving the volunteers rather than the agency itself, which has established a reputation that the Peace Corps is leaner and more efficient than many other government programs. Also, Peace Corps programs overseas have impacted unusually large populations of individuals. This is possible for the simple reason that American dollars funding projects in developing nations can- usually with tremendously depressed local currencies- purchase far more supplies, travel and accommodation for staffers and volunteers, than could possibly be purchased at home. This produces significant efficiency when compared to domestic programs. Finally, the (generally) positive image of Americans projected in developing countries is regarded as an asset by the government.
Is adherence to the 39-year-old policy of limiting volunteers' terms of service a higher priority than the agency's duty to its own volunteers and the countries it aims to serve? Would a change of policy be a way of improving memory within Peace Corps? Are there solutions to improving memory among the organizational structures that are already in existence but underutilized? Answers to this question are buried deep within the complex fabric of a resilient and expanding United States government program.
For the incoming volunteer there are many faces of Peace Corps to prepare him for his overseas assignment. It is likely that he will be living and working in a community of totally different language, one that doesn't necessarily understand what his role is supposed to be. In order that the volunteer be able to succeed in spite of these potentially difficult and stressful circumstances there is a training infrastructure in place that takes him through the process. To simplify the explanation I will give my own case as an example. This will illustrate the degree to which Peace Corps supports its volunteers during his term of service. The experience will be divided into pre-service, training, service, and post-service. For ease of use, terms specific to Peace Corps will be bolded and explained.
Pre-service
Peace Corps Washington received and processed the application for service, which included three personal references, an FBI background check, extensive medical clearance, and an application that summarized virtual every form of employment I had engaged in since the age of 12. Once the acceptance decision was made, my file was passed on to the country desk officer for the Solomon Islands. This individual is the eyes and ears of the post . The post is the actual Peace Corps office located in Honiara, Solomon Islands. The desk officer was my contact as I prepared to leave for service. Information on preparing to leave the country, including detailed packing lists and question and answer sheets were provided by the post, through the desk officer.
Training
As the date of departure for my service drew near, the desk officer sent a complete file on myself and 23 other volunteers in my training group, SI 46, literally the 46th group of volunteers since the Solomon Islands program began in 1972. The group would all get to know one another quite well, as each day of training activity and in-service programs during our two years would be spent together. In July of 1993, the group met in San Francisco for 3 days of orientation, led almost exclusively by returned volunteers (RPCVs) before flying together to Honiara. For the next 8 weeks we were trained by various staff members and a consultant who was hired for the purpose of training only. The trainer was also an RPCV. A staff of 8 young local people assisted in the training by giving daily language and cultural lessons. This part of the training would be universally considered the most valuable tool we were given on our arrival in the Solomons. Other types of volunteers we met during our service would constantly lament that their language skills were totally inadequate compared to the Peace Corps volunteers. The local people observed that we understood the culture quite well for having lived such a short time in country.
During training we were introduced to our post's host country staff. This included the following group of professionals: country director (CD), Peace Corps medical officer (PCMO), program and training officer (PTO), administrative officer (AO),cashier, program assistant(s), administrative assistant, and secretary. The director, the program officer, and the administrative officer were all Americans serving limited terms of two years, extensible to five in most cases. The medical officer was a British nurse. The rest of the staff were Solomon Islanders, working "permanent" jobs. The host country staff reported to a regional-level heads (the regions are Inter-America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa). For instance, the AO reported to a regional Administrative officer, the PCMO reported to a regional medical officer, and so on.
Months before we arrived in country the programming staff were involved in building a list of possible sites for the incoming training group by taking applications from various communities, visiting to check whether communities' infrastructures were strong enough to support a foreigner for two years, and dealing with any political issues arising out of Peace Corps' placement choices. During our service we depended on the staff to provide us with publications on best practices, medical support, delivery of our mail from home, allowances to purchase our supplies, and mediation in issues that came up during our work. We were responsible with furnishing a monthly report on our progress, which was reviewed by the PTO and filed at the office.
The complex interaction between the various staff members, the volunteers and their counterparts warranted special attention on the part of the PCV in order to simply know how to communicate and live in this strange new world. It was common in group 46 that six months of sorting-out was required before the "real" work actually began. As we shall discuss further on, it was within this set of interactions that my survey respondents focused their observation about their perceptions of the Peace Corps' institutional memory.
Service
After our 8 weeks of training we graduated from being trainees to Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). At this point we were sent to live at our sites, Peace Corps language for the village, city, school, substation or town to which a volunteer is actually assigned. Our work at the local level was requested and supervised by counterpart, usually a leader within the community who had prepared the community for our arrival, created plans for how to utilize our skills during our stay, and dealt with the basic living arrangements, such as a house, a water supply, and a toilet. Difficulties around counterparts' understanding of their own commitment to the project were frequent. Mediating such occurrences was the responsibility of the programming staff. Because of the delicate nature of the counterpart/PCV relationship and the high likelihood of cultural miscommunication, it was of particular importance that the programming staff consisted at least partly of local people. In fact, wherever Peace Corps can successfully do so, the entire programming staff were locals, including the PTO.
Project work during a volunteer's period of service can encompass a wide variety of duties. Ours included a beekeeping project, administration of a grant by the European Community for the establishment of a rural training center, various small enterprises, and the training of teachers. As the project developed, a sizeable file on the details of our work also accumulated. Much of our work in fulfilling the three goals involved dozens of informal interactions that amounted to exchange of ideas or tools to assist in problem solving. Many of these interactions were too brief and minute to record. When we were replaced at site, something that is common during the course of a post's placement of new volunteers, the next volunteers to enter the community were not shown the records we kept.
How should organizational memory work within an organization?
In the for-profit world the bottom line on institutional memory is in measurable losses or gains based on studies of how efficiency or lack thereof is affected by use or misuse of memory. Direct action can be taken once the problem area is identified.
A body of literature has emerged, detailing corporate strategies for preventing loss of memory due to, for example, the recent shortening of the average job tenure of the American worker.
The dramatic shift in the nature of employment toward short-term tenure is among the biggest damaging influences on productivity and competitiveness in companies today. That's because short term tenure translates into short-term organizational memory. And when a company loses its medium and long-term memory, it repeats past mistakes, fails to learn from past successes and often forfeits its identity...(while risking) a drain of cash and creativity (Roth and Kleiner)
Since profitability is not a bottom line in the volunteer service realm, there may be some lack of incentive to focus on the losses created by institutional forgetfulness. What would be lost, and how could the agency keep track of it? What would be the cost of redirecting the program's energies toward preventing such losses? One wonders whether the lack of quantifiability of volunteer success is a direct cause for an agency's undervaluing its own memory.
A Success story in organizational memory use
Current research from corporate culture (Roth and Kleiner) appears to contain important approaches of how to preserve the vital memory of organizations. A strikingly appropriate example is found in recent documentation of the "learning history". Management utilizes not only workers' efforts, but also their opinions, their perceptions of the work process, and their retrospective analysis of the completed job. One company utilized internal managers, historians from outside, and the design of a game based on work teams' routines to extract a living record of the process. Profitability (via reduced loss) of the project was judged high, and analysis of the results was positive (Roth & Kleiner, 1998).
Analysis of group process is not necessarily revolutionary in the business world, yet new attention given by management to the thoughts and reactions of individuals who participate in specific manufacturing procedures is heralding a widely successful change in American businesses. Third party consultants interview employees after project completion or at retirement, to accompany the traditional exit questionnaire. Questions focus not solely on work process itself, but also probe the opinions of the individual. What skills did he use in doing his job? Was the workplace effectively structured? How would he have changed the project if he were in charge? What different interests affected the work product, and in what ways? What were the most important pieces of knowledge he had obtained, and from where? Results from the interview are used to analyze what skills are needed for new employees. Manuals can be written based on the "brain dump" from this outgoing employee. If systemic problems are revealed during this process, management can take steps to correcting them. Finally, Roth and Kleiner's study observes, the memory of the employee, complete with his personal input, can be used by the company to create a more complete memory and prevent the loss that happens when employees leave their positions without such an opportunity to share.
Surprisingly, solutions from corporate America to memory-related problems bear similarities to knowledge sharing practices I personally observed in rural Melanesian villages during my own volunteer service. In fact, the above research amazingly cites the "learning history" process as much like "a tribal gathering- a group of people sitting around a campfire, each with his or her own piece of the narrative to offer." Roth and Kleiner's study focuses on the use of this approach to curb losses of an ineffective team by looking at production from every angle.
Kransdorff (1997) agrees that the "oral" approach is central to the memory retention, even though the perceived issue that leads to the approach is totally different: In this case there is a concern with employee turnover, rising rapidly in the United States over the last decade. Whatever methods can be made available, and applied to building collective memory from individual experiences, can and should be utilized. Without application of such methods, hundreds of hours are committed to either training new people or rediscovering knowledge gained by experience, the retention of which can no longer be guaranteed over entire careers. Examples are creative and depend on the combination of multiple approaches: "Three forms of knowledge preservation-exit interviews, oral histories, learning audits, and corporate histories -can time-capsulize today's executives' philosophies, strategies and mindsets- as well as a company's general mission and culture." (Kransdorrf)
Exit interviews and oral histories can take the form of the sample from Roth and Kleiner described above. When the employee input is distributed over time and focused on one particular project (for example, a manager dictating daily notes into a recording device over the course of a three-month project) it becomes a "learning audit", used for analysis and improvement of the decision-making process. Corporate histories are formalized collections of memory-usually in book form, aimed at serving employees on a routine basis when it comes to gaining recall for specific routines.
For Peace Corps volunteers the building of memory can be far more costly than for an individual working at a company back home. The resources spent on one individual's training, including the informal interviewing with people in his community, the requisite several months of getting to know his project, the resources used on his language and culture training, are costly. This is especially meaningful when one considers that from his arrival in the village he has 24 months to pursue his goals.
Important cultural aspects of Peace Corps challenge the effectiveness of applying organizational models taken directly from for-profit enterprise in the United States. For instance, the notion of weighing cost effectiveness of volunteer activity would be problematic, where the capitalist model is in some way grounded in profitability. Yet the experimental nature of these new approaches have too much in common with Peace Corps culture of self-analysis to be dismissed. In fact, an examination of Peace Corps history, including the use of consultants from major corporation, reveals an important connection between current management styles from the for-profit world and Peace Corps' organizational culture shaping efforts (Reeves).
Special memory considerations on the part of Peace Corps
Important factors facing all volunteer service agencies include frequent turnover of volunteers or fieldworkers, longevity of employees and the friction between these two cultures (Harris, 1998). Permanent employees who serve as support staff for the groups of volunteers retain vital, discreet knowledge which is prized by the agency. Competing political interests inside agencies create imbalances or contradictory priorities, which must be faced head-on in order to preserve the organization's ability to operate.
Factors of perceived iniquity strain the post's office environment. A salary disparity exists between the volunteers and the staff members. Volunteers enjoy prestige and specialized support, while staffers work long hours to provide that support. These additional strains create cultural divides between the staff and the volunteers. The importance of host country staff (as opposed to American staff) becomes recognizable to volunteers almost immediately upon arrival at post. Should a volunteer need to ask for directions, for information on transport in some small town, on what language is spoken in a remote corner of the nation, it is only natural that information gathering with a native of the country should take place. Just as these individuals have become versed in their nation from a lifetime of experience, so too do they become versed in the customs and routines of Peace Corps and its policies and organizational structure over their tenure of employment.
The synthesis of knowledge that occurs for the host country national working for the Peace Corps office, then, frequently causes this person to become more valued by the volunteers than most other sources of information. If any one single factor contributes to Peace Corps's succeeding despite a formalized memory mechanism for individual projects, it is this person. "The national staff members had a ton of local collective memory. Any predicament we found ourselves in was old had to those pros that worked in the office. They coached us through a bunch of tough and not-so-tough times."
For field workers, project-level memory is central to a successful term of service. What is his project? Who has worked on the project before him? What mistakes and successes of his former colleague can current projects benefit from? If the central management structure of the agency could devise some way of answering these questions for the field worker, success rates would improve at the ground level. The image of the agency in the eyes of the host country would improve. Impact of the project might widen to include greater numbers of host country nationals.
The Peace Corps avoids addressing vital issues of project-critical memory retention at volunteer project level, that is, best practices and procedural knowledge relating to actual project work. Volunteers cooperate with the communities that host them to discover the routines necessary to complete their project work. Complex political details about the project and the community are learned. This memory is particularly important when we consider the agency goal of providing support to local projects with American "manpower", defined in the next section. Lack of support to volunteers' connections to their host communities on the Part of Peace Corps, assuming I am correct in considering it an issue, may result not from a disinterest in organizational memory but from a number of clashing priorities that, despite their contradictory nature, keep the agency "youthful", "streamlined". And hence quite attractive to both the United States voters and the lawmakers who deal out the budget money.
The Peace Corps the volunteer looks outside the agency itself to informal channels of information, including the community in which he lives; the host community and the host agency where he is assigned (some times but not always one in the same); professional connections with the same professional objectives; other Peace Corps volunteers; other volunteers from different programs around the world; newsletters; and social communication (in the Pacific Islands, also referred to as the "coconut wireless").
All the activities of the Peace Corps are founded around three simple goals, which serve as a powerful tool for grounding the most heated debates on its purpose:
The Congress of the United States declares that it is the policy of the United States and the Purpose of this Act to promote world peace and friendship through a Peace Corps, which shall (1) make available to interested countries and areas men and women of the united States qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower, particularly in meeting the basic needs of those living in the poorest areas of such countries, and (2) to help promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served and (3) a better understanding of other peoples on the Part of the American People
Any discussion of the Peace Corps, its effectiveness abroad, and the level of personal success achieved by its volunteers, eventually comes around to the three goals. To underestimate the value of the three goals is to altogether misunderstand the culture of the program. Any solution which may be offered to the Peace Corps as a means of improving the program is evaluated by demonstrating how the reaching of Peace Corps goals will be promoted or hindered by its introduction. More importantly, perception of a challenge for Peace Corps leadership to face necessarily demands that the challenge relate somehow to the goals.
The first year of my Peace Corps service in a Guadalcanal village a local man asked me if I knew Marilyn and Tom, the two Americans who had served nearby ten years or so previously. At first it was astounding to think that in my home country of 260 million people I might have, by chance, known the other two volunteers. But here was and illustration of a vital difference in mine and a villager's notion of memory: In his lifetime he might meet as meet as many people as an American would pass one day on the highway on the way to work. This surprised me, yet his culture's tools for memory would prove only slightly less complex those used within the Peace Corps' own organization: he would typically ask an older man in the village for certain historical or procedural instruction; a Peace Corps programming officer might look to the host country office staff for similar knowledge. Despite fairly complex tools and organizational structure mandated by a complex manual, simple questions and answers provide a great deal of knowledge access. This was when I first asked the question does this agency have a memory? Only much later would I unearth the challenging query, equally compelling: does the agency feel the need for a memory?
Within the United States, perceptions of the Peace Corps affect its growth and funding. One important perception that runs through much of the literature on management is that the Peace Corps avoids a "top heavy structure" (Goldberg). Perhaps building more capacity to remember might involve a perception that the bureaucracy is growing. But the question remains unanswered at the grass roots level: what if I did know Tom and Marilyn? Whom would I tell the story, so the memory of their visit to the village could be conveyed?
Another important factor here is the "intelligence gathering" issue, one which follows the volunteers to the ends of the earth. "Are you with the CIA?" is almost as common a question as "Do you know Marilyn and Tom?" Since the first ever group of Peace Corps volunteers began their service in 1961 (Amin), there has been a firm effort to distance Peace Corps from both the intelligence gathering community and formal diplomacy. "Most volunteers...would be terrible spies...but I have been told that this fact (brief terms of service) is reassuring to host governments who might harbor suspicions." Volunteers' varied efforts in teaching, administration, sanitation, civil engineering and a host of other areas has been focused much more on the sharing of-rather than the gathering of- knowledge.
Projects abroad and their need for memory
Volunteers suffer from the absence of project specific historical information, though the individuals tend to attribute this issue to causes other than consistent employee turnover.
I really don't think that it is the limited tenure of volunteers or staff makes PC amnesic, but rather the complete lack of infrastructure developed to keep track of what has been done. You should be given the Close Of Service reports of any and all volunteers in your sight. Furthermore, you should be asked to fill out a form for future volunteers that will go to your area. I also think that PC should have money to pay volunteers to write in country "how to" manuals that describe specific experiences with successful projects. It just seems like such a waste that every time a new volunteer goes out, you have to reinvent the wheel.
Among 16 respondents to a brief survey addressing Peace Corps's memory, there was acknowledgement that some sort of gap in information about individual projects frequently exists. Volunteers had varying degrees of concern. Some thought this was part of why the Corps offers such valuable experiences to its ranks. "The lack of coherent collective memory helps amplify the vividness and importance of individual memory. What is the value of deadwood memories?" The suggestion that one's service is a desirable and rare opportunity is not lost on the agency: the number of applicants each year continually outstrips the supply of new volunteer positions available.
The Peace Corps legacy of satisfied returnees (in 1988 92% of respondents said they would willingly re-apply for a second term of service, and one third of the current force of volunteers are on their second term of service). Gradually a mythic image is built by both the public relations efforts of the Corps itself, and by the individual Returned volunteers (referred to as RPCVs) in their own publicly produced works. An active RPCV membership, numbering 7,100, exercises both support and pressure on the Washington leadership. In fact there have been cases where the RPCVs themselves committed their strength to pressuring the Corps to re-define its image during the heightening of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. This included petitions directly to President Johnson (Reeves, 52) decrying what they saw as the hypocrisy of deploying soldiers and Peace Corps volunteers simultaneously.
Multiple parties lay claim to Peace Corps primacy, but one example of its growing symbolic meaning as a distinctly American phenomenon. While Zeitlin identifies his training group in Ghana in 1961 as the "first group of Peace Corps volunteers to ever go anywhere", Stein (1966) recounts his tales in Columbia the same year as "the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to be in a rural development program." The importance of having a connection to the program's origins heightens as the Peace Corps mystique grows.
This mystique grows from, in part, a body of like-minded literature produced by Peace Corps's public relations machine and RPCVs alike. Collections of stories by volunteers focus on the memory of the field experience as transforming and inspirational in a personal sense, while several Peace Corps books attempt to capture the spirit of success of the projects themselves, as well as the connection to the local people (referred to as the "third goal") (Stein, Zeitlin). Peace Corps even keeps a bibliography of currently available volunteer written literature. The web site also features a huge backfile of links to "media stories" featured in home-town newspapers about the work of local sons and daughters who have made good on their commitments to serve. These literary affirmations of the value of Peace Corps service build memory in various and necessary ways.
The volunteer-written monograph serves to build a "(perception) of congruence between volunteer role expectations and the actual experiences on the job" (Mesch). As one survey participant told me, "the self-confidence that results from being successfully creative" is a living issue while the volunteers are at their assignments. The relatively wide selection of anecdotal sources by volunteers suggests that the need continues to exist as the service becomes a part of the volunteer's past.
When President Clinton stated to an audience including the president of Ghana (the first country to ever invite a group of Peace Corps volunteers) that volunteer "service does not end when they come home"(Clinton, 1988), he might have unwittingly captured the function of memory in the RPCVs lives.
The degree to which such anecdotal literature plays a role in present functioning of the Corps is difficult to establish. The written sources published by Peace Corps for the purposes of knowledge transfer are handled by the department of Information Collection and Exchange (ICE). The literature disseminated by this department sticks mostly to the mechanics of dealing with specific tasks volunteers might need to deal with at post, such as Wells Construction: Hand Dug and Hand or Aquaculture Training Manual.
For the sake of having near-universal appeal across a worldwide corps of volunteers there must be some universality to most of the literature that ICE produces:
Feel free to submit your contributions to ICE through your Peace Corps staff members in country. Through ICE you can share with others your technical and program experience, and contribute to the ongoing assessment of development efforts.. .Your contribution can range from a new mouse trap design to a...two-year project concept.
Formalized channels do exists for PCVs to share the details of the trap, but what of the mouse himself? If the project, rather than the method of approaching it, is potentially valuable for future volunteers to know in detail, particularly for those volunteers who might be serving in or near the same community of a previous volunteer, what routines exist to pass along the vital information? "You may be asked to contribute by completing questionnaires, being interviewed or preparing a written report on your experiences." The fate of the reports may vary. "I know of one case where a volunteer wrote a really long report (at the close of his service) and Peace Corps lost it before his replacement arrived."
On a macro level Peace Corps has a theoretically very are encouraged to order from the extensive catalog provided by ICE. But despite a former director's assertion that "...the volunteers-where they serve- are the heart and soul of the Peace Corps" (Goldberg) the knowledge base built up by one volunteer is likely to leave the country when the volunteer departs.
My Survey and Volunteer Responses
My survey was emailed to all the Peace Corps volunteers currently on the mailing list of the University of Michigan's campus representative. By chance it was re-sent by a Michigan returned volunteer to a group of current volunteers in the country of Kazakstan. It contained the following questions:
From the 16 volunteers who responded, a range of geographic coverage was represented. Volunteers who had served in Africa, Europe, South America and Asia all responded. The only conclusive finding is that volunteers are happy to discuss the role of memory, both inside Peace Corps as an organization, and within the projects to which Peace Corps assigns them overseas. It is clear that 14 of 16 respondents had spent at least some of their volunteer service considering institutional memory as a concept affecting the quality of their experience in one way or another. Because the volunteers tended to address the issue textually rather than follow the forms of the questions given, analysis of the data included a reformulation of the responses to the following four statements.
| are fine as they are | need to be lengthened | should be removed | (neutral or no response) |
| 8 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| nonexistent | low | Sufficient | high | (neutral or no response) |
| 1 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| PC full time host country staff members | publications by Peace Corps | the volunteers themselves | nowhere | (neutral or no response) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 5 |
| response | count |
|---|---|
| overlap time between new and old volunteers | 1 |
| provide support for creation and storage of electronic records by volunteers | 2 |
| provide support for creation and storage of paper records | 3 |
| extend the term of service so that volunteers could have enough time to build, then use, memory in their work | 2 |
| "use the internet" | 1 |
| not change anything because there is no problem with memory | 2 |
| (neutral or no response) | 3 |
Only one respondent advocated a combination of solutions (in question four above, he suggested that publications and host country staff were the combined keepers of memory). The other 15 focused on one basic fix they felt would allow more effective service.
Responses were-though largely unique-decidedly steeped in Peace Corps's own cultural philosophy of having the proper mindset when approaching project related issues. The Handbook states in its Attitude section that "there is an inherent appearance of arrogance in the posture of a stranger who has come to bring 'change' or 'improvement'". Fittingly, several volunteers rejected the idea that there exists a need to improve the memory of Peace Corps at all. "The question presupposes that this is a desirable objective", responds one RPCV. "Things are quite different between countries and over time". Another response referred to certain memory as "dead wood", calling to mind the perceptions at home of Peace Corps being free of bureaucracy. Since written reports by volunteers to Peace Corps country staff are already a part of culture the culture at post, one volunteer advocates the further systematization of this built-in process.
Sustainability is a word that no Peace Corps volunteer takes lightly. To truly sustain a project at the volunteer level why bother using Peace Corps's own channels at all? Since the volunteer is directly working within a community of people who have established their own routines of how to recall and re-use knowledge, one points out we should avoid fostering "dependence while Peace Corps's expressed goal is sustainability". The local people involved in the project can be the repository of the memory, regardless of the program's ability or, or inability, to remember. Sustainability of projects depend on even distribution between the volunteer and the local counterpart. Ideally both will create some mechanism for memory. Peace Corps itself might violate its own culture image as a streamlined agency by stepping in and attempting to formalize the retention of memory by these two parties. Furthermore, by holding the project information in the Peace Corps country office headquarters, the incentive for other parties to have ownership of its storage might be lost. "How can we expect host country nationals to help themselves if we are always there to push implementation, planning, grant-writing, and critical analysis of progress?"
Possible Improvements to My Research
A better approach to the survey might have been a focus group, judging by the disparity of opinion and what might have been a lack of clarity in the questions. Lively discussion amongst such a group would likely produce fascinating suggestions not only on how Peace Corps memory could be improved, but-more surprisingly-whether Peace Corps is an organization that needs to consider its memory at all. Another forum for creating a dialog as to the nature of the "memory issue" would be a web discussion group with some kind of text log to keep a record of the ideas brought forth. In both cases the focus would be:
Brain Dump and Oral History
Kransdorrf outlines an enviably accessible solution in the recorded oral "brain dump". The solution even bears amazing similarity to the Pacific Islanders' (and many other cultures') own oral tradition of passing on expertise, such as medicinal knowledge, through long sessions of discussion, storytelling, and answering the questions of the neophytes. By preventing the time and profit spent "rediscovering its own prior knowledge", a company can achieve higher levels of profit, job satisfaction, and higher retention rates. Given the value of oral transfers of job procedure related memory, and given the sustainability issue within Peace Corps, the volunteer should perhaps be having "exit interviews" not only with his programming officer but also with the local leadership on his project. If a corporate middle manager is likely to make his memory a part of the broader organizational framework by use of tape recorder, the Peace Corps volunteer seeks an analogy to the tape recording or the transcript within his own work surroundings. Where does his community "place" its important knowledge? Can he use the same repository?
Where in-country memory succeeds best
Staff dynamics at Peace Corps posts are not consistently supportive of volunteer memory. This is partly because the office has totally different demands to meet than the volunteer does. Another factor is the short term of service of the non-local staffers, whose terms of service range from two to five years. The Country Director is always an American, the Medical Officer, the Administrative Officer, The Programming and Training Officer all might be Americans or other non-nationals working on 2 year terms, but are frequently nationals of the host country working "permanently".
Similarity to the Washington headquarters is clear: memory, leadership, organization and renewal of the post all depend on the demographics of this core group. An ongoing employment of in-country permanent professionals serves as a vital connection to the past. Relationships between the two types of staffers can be affected by the difference in pay, privilege and level of knowledge. During my service the volunteers observed friction at the post when it was revealed to a local staffer, Thomas- a co-programming officer- that his American counterpart Andrea was earning her salary at more than three times his pay rate. As the rumor had it, Thomas felt that the Andrea was not knowledgeable enough to be earning so much pay; the American was frustrated that the local man's permanence at the office made him less motivated to achieve things in the short run.
In this case, the volunteers came away from debating the alleged conflict believing Thomas to be in the right. This was most likely a product of the bond they had established over time with the programmer. A relationship was established wherein Thomas had became a living repository of procedural knowledge and practice. Two dynamics occurred: first, the volunteers trusted him more than others in the office, since he was there for them in uncertain situations. Secondly, his alleged friction with the other programming officer resulted in broken links of communication and incompatible record keeping systems. As soon as one year after our departure from the post, digital and paper records we had left with the programming staff were nowhere to be found. For Thomas this would not be a crisis: he could remember enough details of volunteer projects from one term of service to the other to be functional. For Andrea it was not to cause long-term difficulties in performing her job, since her period of service was guaranteed to be brief. The volunteers who came later would be the only involved parties to lose out as a result of this structure.
Conclusion: Balancing Cultural Priorities with Bureaucratic Realities
The Peace Corps may have forgotten a number of important things in its 38 year history of sending 155,000 volunteers from the United States to 134 different countries Memory loss is most noticeable to volunteers at the grass roots level, where they serve their host community. As one might expect, such lapses occur at the expense of any number of involved parties including the volunteers; the communities hosting them; the Peace Corps office in the individual countries; Peace Corps headquarters in Washington; and the United States as an international presence.
Studying Peace Corps's apparent forgetfulness, however, reveals important lessons the program has not forgotten but utilized. The program's image as a streamlined agency among bloated government programs has led to its unbridled expansion in a time when most budgets are being reduced. The building of a rapport between the volunteer and his community of service are part and parcel of his discovery process, fully one third of the goals for being a volunteer in the first place: "I still think the world is changing and the need for originality is so great it is better to limit the privilege of Peace Corps to a short and finite interval."
Peace Corps has consistently prized the building of cultural understanding as one of its most important priorities. This is a lesson learned over time, and not without conflict, as reflected in a frank, retrospective body of literature. Self-understanding, especially of the Peace Corps own cultural identity, is where memory is important. Governmental requirements at home ironically require that to prolong the life of the agency, there must be a continuation of policies that don't prolong the terms-or the memory- of its volunteers and its staff. While business management literature may offer useful techniques for building more effective volunteer-level organizational memory, the Peace Corps finds its life blood is an agency-wide identity of constant renewal. The volunteer's own experience is one-third work and two- thirds cultural exchange in one form or another. A Peace Corps Volunteer's greatest success would be to walk away from a program with the memory owned not by himself or his agency, or the agency's parent offices in Washington, D.C., but by the population on which his project has been focused.
Appendix A: Peace Corps Organizational Overview
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All material copyright 2007 by Edwin Staples