Poland hosts the largest contingent of volunteers, who spend two years on assignment. Elizabeth Metcalf, 48, is an accountant from California who now advises a railroad-repair facility in southeastern Poland on accounting methods and financial analysis. James Cason, 51, is a water-treatment specialist from Florida who offers advice on sewage systems and waste disposal to towns in the same area.David Allen, 30, is a junior-high-school teacher from Rhode Island who now instructs highly motivated students at the new English Teachers’ College in Warsaw. “There’s definitely a feeling for me that I’m part of a new Peace Corps,” he says.
The breakup of the Soviet Union itself presents additional opportunities. With the Baltic States, Ukraine and Armenia requesting assistance and other former Soviet republics expected to follow suit, the Peace Corps plans to send 600 more volunteers to points farther East. So far, however, Eastern Europe hasn’t always been an easy or successful assignment. The 55 volunteers in Poland’s ambitious “small-enterprise development” program got relatively little language training, and they are often frustrated by the need to operate through translators.
But most volunteers are gifted improvisers. Wall Street trader John Wienke’s most significant contribution to the town of Jaroslaw (population: 45,000) proved to be a spur-of-the-moment idea. “I arrived and asked for a business directory to see where I could get my laundry done,” he recalls. “They all looked at me as if I was crazy.” With local encouragement and American financing, Wienke produced a directory with 100 paid ads in the first edition. Ann Newman, who ran a car-rental agency in Texas, discovered that she could not carry out her mission of helping to privatize the state sanitariums in Rymanow, because the appropriate legislation has not been passed. Instead, she is lobbying Jewish organizations in New York and Israel to pay for the restoration of the town’s synagogue, once considered among the most beautiful in Europe, as a means of promoting tourism.
Despite the increasing emphasis on business and environmental assignments, instruction in the English language remains the mainstay of most programs in the area. East Europeans see English as their passport to the modern world and are desperately short of teachers. The volunteers impart not only the language but a more informal style of teaching. “He’s very different from the Hungarian teachers,” says Viktoria Illes, a Budapest high-school student in a class taught by David Billett, a 29-year-old New Yorker. “It’s not really like school-we talk all the time.”
Unlike some Third World militants, no East Europeans are telling the Yankees to go home. “I’ve never been in a more pro-American country,” says Stephen Hanchey, the director of the program in Czechoslovakia. The receptive attitude has inspired a first for the Peace Corps: private funding. Polish-American businessman Edward Piszek donated $1.2 million through his Liberty Bell Foundation to pay for an extra 60 volunteer English teachers in Poland.
Within the Peace Corps, some veterans have carped that the new volunteers have a much softer life than their counterparts in the Third World, questioning whether Eastern Europe is legitimate Peace Corps terrain. In fact, volunteers have had to endure harsh winters, phone systems that are often worse than in the Third World and a rash of burglaries as traditional law enforcement has broken down. Timothy Carroll, the director of the Polish program, implies that the critics are hidebound bureaucrats. “Development is actually happening here,” he says. “That is a little bit frightening for people who have been in development for 30 years.” The Peace Corps expects that, unlike many of its activities in the Third World, the Polish program will no longer be needed in 10 years, allowing it to go happily out of business.
A World for Helping Hands The number of Peace Corps volunteers deployed around the world has declined since its peak in the 1960s, but the former Soviet empire offers fertile new fields to work. Region Peace Corps Volunteers 1992 1967 Africa 2,375 3,203 Latin America 1,635 4,318 Asia/Pacific 848 4,804* Eastern Europe 502 0 *INCLUDES NORTH AFRICA. SOURCES: THE PEACE CORPS, SATURDAY REVIEW
