Peace Corps Volunteers in Rural Botswana

Abstract

Hoyt S. Alverson is Associate Professor in the Department o f Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. He has conducted research and has lived among the Tswana both in Botswana and in South Africa for three years. His work there concerns the effects of colonial industrialism on the values and identities o f the Tswana. This paper 1s based on work conducted for the US Peace Corps, Botswana, June 3 through June 29, 1974. The author thanks Mr. Charles Frankel, Country Director, US Peace Corps, Botswana, for the opportunity to undertake and publish the results of this investigation. I N 1974, I WAS ENGAGED by the United States Peace Corps to assist it in developing a training program to help Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) adjust to, and effectively live within, the confines of Botswana, a newly developing African country. The majority population of Botswana, the Tswana, are known through the writings of Isaac Schapera (1940, 1953, 1955). The Tswana are a constituent of the congeries of southeastern Bantu-speaking peoples. They were, until one hundred years ago, a predominately agricultural people with a very important ancillary tradition of animal (especially cattle) husbandry. Since 1867 they have been incorporated more and more into the vortex of colonial industrialism in southern Africa, a process which continues apace today. The Peace Corps has been in Botswana only a few years, but has quickly established a conspicuous presence there through its relatively large numbersabout 100 to 200 volunteers at any one time serve a country with a total population of less than 750,000. Also, PCVs usually work either in traditional villages or within small industrial, administrative, or commercial centers, where they form a highly visible constituency of daily community life. Despite the commitment of time and resources to prepare the volunteers to cope with the exotic surroundings found in Botswana, it became apparent to the Peace Corps that many of the volunteers were not able to meet the three Peace Corps goals as effectively as they might. In particular, some were unable to purvey the skills which they were presumably there to offer. Failing to complete contracts; retreating to enclaves of European settlement; not mixing, nor otherwise establishing rapport with the local people; failing to learn the local language; not understanding the setting of their job, and as a consequence, becoming spiteful of and bitter toward many individuals with whom they had to work; untimely nervous breakdowns; these were among the symptoms of anxiety and stress shown by volunteers. Part of my job was to work with the volunteers and secondarily with certain host-country nationals (Tswana) to discover whether there existed some fairly straightforward reasons for this state of affairs. Since at this time I had completed 15 months of close participation in a very small and rather isolated Tswana village with my family, I had quite a reservoir of remembered anxieties, doubts, and blunders (as well as successes) to draw upon in formulating hypotheses for beginning my work with the PCVs. In this paper I report two aspects of this investigation: first, the nature of, and reasons for, using a phenomenological approach; and second, the substance