How the Peace Corps Works

was like, we're recording. Yeah, He's like, okay, we're rolling be funny monkeys. It's rather than start over. I did my cheeks afterward. All right. It's unusual. It's an unusual reversal of order, but we're gonna have to go with it because we are low on tape. No one's gone to Staples, so we just have to use this one. We can't record over it again or else it'll snap. That's funny. That used to be an issue. Yeah on something. Uh.

Now there's an abundance of everything. We have all supplies out the yin Yang remember that ad for e trade. He's got money coming out the wazoo. It was like this e er team who were like hustling this guy in a gurney to the to the emergency room and they're like, what's wrong with them? And they're like, he's got money coming out the wazoo and it was coming out of his his bottom. That's good his bottom, Chuck, Yes,

I think we should say that. Um. This is a special uh episode dedicated to the countless Peace Corps volunteers who listened to Stuff you should Know and who have written in over the years to say, hi, you guys who were my best friends in you know, Benine, Turkmenistan. Um, yeah, wherever, Yeah, and uh, we're finally doing that episode how Peace Corps works. We've had quite a few right in over the years and they're all super nice folks and uh it seemed

to really be enjoying their time wherever they are. Yeah, they're there. Um, goodhearted hustlers is how I would describe them. Really. Yea, as of right the second Yeah, all right, so um, let me take you back a little bit, chuck. Right, I don't think we need to go on the way back machine. Not far, but it's not that far back. But we're just gonna go to UM. October nine, Chile night, Uh,

two am. And in ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University of Michigan, a young senator named John Fitzgerald Kennedy was working the campaign trail as his father worked to buy votes in other states. And he gave a little impromptu UM speech again at two a m. And at the University of Michigan. I'm prepared for marks in front of ten thousand UM wolverines, and he said, Chuck, as follows, how many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana ERA? Technicians

or engineers? How many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your days and your lives traveling around the world ERA. On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute parts of your life to this country. I think it will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. So I pressed their own button. I accidentally pressed the Catherine Hepburn button. But that was what JFK said, Uh, And

that was the outline that was very good. Chuck, I'm kidny. Yeah, Um, that was the outline, the initial outline. The first time you ever spoke publicly about his idea for the Peace Corps, Mayor Quimby, I wish I could say my favorite line, shout out which one calm down everyone. I know you're all frightened and blank. Oh yeah, it was close. I almost said it for you, um Sin, since fans will recognize it and it's pretty will and we have plenty

of those crossover fans. Um. So that was the first time he ever spoke publicly about what would become the Peace Corps. Uh. And two weeks later he gave another speech in San Francisco at the famous Cow Palace. Grateful Dead played a pretty good show there in nineteen seventy. I think the Allman Brothers did too. Yeah. I'm sure you were there drinking beers at age eighteen. Uh and uh.

After that second speech two weeks later in San Francisco, he said, Hey, basically, let me know how you think about this, and he got twenty five thousand letters in response saying I would do that. So um. One of the first things he did when he um gained the presidency was to sign an executive order saying, okay, now

there's officially a Peace Corps. It was on March first, nineteen sixty one, that he wrote the executive order and it was placed into the budget the nineteen sixty two budget, and Congress passed the budget officially enacting the Peace Corps by default. Aniversary. Yeah this year it is, isn't it. I didn't even think about that. Yeah. They had some you know, the graphics all over the website that didn't

sink in that I was looking at. Yeah. Uh. And then shortly after that, well, a little while after that, Nixon, who um JFK soundly beaten that that presidential debate, the televised one. UM said well, I've always hated JFK. So I'm gonna take his his little pet project and just put it over here. And Jimmy Carter came in and went and hold on a minute, and he made it its own independent federal agency with an appointment uh by

the president. And it's part of the foreign aid budget usually about one percent, right, Yeah, this year it's and last year I believe four hundred million dollars, which is not chump change. Not only is it not chump change, they asked for three hundred and seventy three million, and they got four hundred millions. Yeah, I didn't know that federal agencies got more than they asked for in the budget. Well, Bush, h W and Obama have both pushed for expansion of

the Peace Corps. I think Bush wanted to double the number of volunteers. He wanted to double the number of CIA agents in the field. We'll get to that in a little bit. Why is Obama want to double it? I would assume everyone has pure intentions here, goosh, Okay, maybe not all right. Um, it's been a resounding success over the last fifty years. Um, there have been a hundred and ninety three countries, surf chuck, I believe. Um, there have been more than two hundred thousand volunteers total,

eighteen directors. The guy who's directing now Aaron S. Williams. He is the fourth director to have been a Peace Corps volunteer. Back in the day, I figured they all were. I would have too. Um. One of the more famous ones who wasn't it was Paul Coverdell. Remember the statue just behind us. Yeah, it says Peace Corps somewhere on it. Yeah. You know what I like about the Peace Corps site. When you're trudging through it is when you see like

an Aaron Williams or whoever. They have their service in parentheses next to their name, like Dominican Republic sixty seven to seventy was where he was, right, pretty cool? Um. Probably the most famous Peace Corps volunteers Chris Matthews from Hardball. He really yeah, he did Swazzi Land to seventy. Well, I thought you're gonna say, Evangeline Lily, I've lost fame. Oh yeah, I guess she's But I know Chris Matthews, I'm not familiar with the other lady. She may be

the hottest. Which one was she was? She like the main female lead. Okay, very pretty lady. Um. Although she was Canadian, she must have gotten her citizenship because you have to be American. Yeah, that's a good point. Huh. Something's fishy that we may have just uncovered in this podcast. Or maybe she just flashed her smile and they're like, who don't care where you're from? So Um, the purpose of this, as you said, you you assume every buddy's intensives are good, and I think that that's a nice

thing to assume. Um. The purpose of establishing the Peace Corps threefold. It's the type of foreign aid, right, and we have huge enormous foreign aid packages in the in the um in the way of like surplus food and just straight up money supplies, equipment, weapons, whatever, building things. But Peace Corps, Uh, it's unique in that it's a supply of foreign aid in the form of no how and hands on, get it done. It's like the Toyota tundra of foreign eight. Give him manifest Josh, and you'll

feed him for a day. And what they say, Yeah, it's based on this right. Teach him to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. Yes, if he, if he, if he gets good at fishing, unless he sticks, should we should? We say what Their three part official mission statement is help the people of interested countries and meeting their need for trained men and women, helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served, and to help promote a better understanding of other people's on

the part of the Americans. That's a bureaucratic mission statement if I've ever heard it is. And I just read something on NPR from a couple of years ago called the Peace Corps Blues and the each country has their own director and the former director and Cameroon said that he thinks one of the things we're failing on now is that a lot of people in these countries don't realize that it's actually a U. S. Government program. Like they know they're volunteers, but I think they think it's

some great nonprofit or like a mission group. Yeah, so that kind of fails at one aspect of the mission statement in his eyes that these countries. One of the big deals is for these countries to know, hey, this is the U. S. Government coming over here and helping us out. It's your uncle Sam. It's exactly who you now owe a favorite to. He has some other problems, but out with the program now, but I'll go over

those later. So, um, right now, there you have programs in seventies six countries, but overall, I think a hundred and ninety three countries have had programs at one time or another, including country Choose that don't exist. The first two to join the program. The interesting countries, as you mentioned in the mission statement were um, let me see if I got this right, uh, Tanganyika. Tanganyika, which later got together as in Zabar to form what we now

recognize as Tanzania. You knew that? Oh yeah? And Ghana was the other two who JFK mentioned in his speech in University of Michigan. So, um, it's had a at the very least um of widespread impact. We'll talk about measuring the impact later, but um, let's get down a new gritty right. I think just what we've said already has caused some people will be like, where do I sign up? Josh and Chucker are endorsing this, so let's

just skip to the end. Well, the first thing you should know if you want to sign up is that you're gonna be committing to twenty seven months of service of volunteerism or a tour. A tour, you're gonna be living for free. They're gonna provide your living accommodation while you're there and give you a small stipend to spend money, which evidently though, is more money than most of the

people you'll be helping. Hap That's like that old thing where if you have a hundred dollars, you can live for like ten years in Peru or something like that exactly, and when you come back home they're gonna give you six thousand dollars two get you back going. You know that they don't want to leave you broke because you haven't had any real work for two and a half

or twenty seven months. So to give you six grand to get you going again, put that down payment on the apartment, yeah, to get you back in and right exactly. And by the old thing, of course, I mean the strength of the dollar. Um. So when you are applying Chuckers, you you start out online. Apparently you can do it in writing if you like, if you're like an Amish kid who wants to write, who wants to sign up for traditionalist right, Um, But for the most part, you

do this application online. And I looked at it and it is extensive. Sure you're all of your education background, any criminal history, how much you like to drink? Um? Oh yeah, any military service because one of the first things they try to root out is whether or not you have any intelligence background. And if you did, sorry, I wonder when you build that out for the drinking, if you just put like a lot well yeah, like,

I don't know. There's even a section where they say, like, well, let us just define what we mean by problem drinking. How many drinks per week is one of those, right? How many sexual partners do you have a night? Any things that you lie to your doctor about right, Um there's also any any financial obligations you might have e g. Student loans or um mortgages, car payments. Basically, they're like,

you can't just use us to escape your creditors. So they want to They want to know not not only like what you have, but how you're going to arrange to pay them, and any kind of documentation you need references. I mean, this is like the first application and it's very extensive. We want to weed out as many people as possible right off the bat, right, and if your application is selected, right, they were lucky. First of all.

I think yeah, I would imagine it's a fairly low percentage because there's just so many um red flags that they're looking for. So many alcoholics, right, so many problem drinkers. That's what they call it. Um that that you know if you if you raise one, they're going to be like, no, there's ten other people who are applying who don't have that red flag. So if you make it through the initial application process, they're going to ask you to come

in for an interview and they weed out more people here. Um. Basically, what they're trying to figure out mainly is if you are likely to complete your term of service. What they don't like is people that have to leave. I'm sure that's highly discouraged to leave the Peace Corps during your tour. So they want to know if you have like a serious if you're in a serious relationship. They want to know stories about your childhood, where you've motivated others to

comp fleet tasks. Um, they want to know, um, how you how? Yeah, any medical conditions. I think that's in the initial application. Yeah, but it's sort of like the army and that you can be denied because of medical conditions obviously, right. Um. The one of the one of the interview questions I saw was, uh, tell us about a rule that you have trouble following. And the correct answer for that is, uh, the rule I have trouble following is the rule that asks me to stop when

I've done just enough the bare minimum. That's the right answer. Yeah. Um, would you modify your appearance to fit in with the local culture, like would you shave your mohawk or take out your piercings? Or whatever. How will you stave off boardom The correct answer to that is an iPod full of stuff you should Yeah, that's what it sounds like. So there you go. There's your all your crib notes

for the interview. Yeah, and if you pass the interview, it gets really exciting from that point because if you get an official invitation, it's pretty neat. You get ten days to decide, and it's fairly vague. Send some guy there, he's like, come on, come on, because basically they want to know if you're in for the Peace Corps, not if you're in to go to Indonesia and teach English or surf, because exactly there might be other reasons. Uh. So what they do is to give you ten days

to decide, and they leave it fairly vague. They give you a probably like a probably not even a country, probably like a continent like Asia, Yeah, where we're gonna send you, and they do detail a little bit about what the job you'll have, but they basically want to know are you in for the Peace Corps no matter where we send you, And if you say yeah, then you're gonna get your departure date and then that's when you're gonna get some more specific information. He's like, come on,

high fives. He's like, all right, I'll be back in like a couple of weeks with their other letter, like you're going to Turkey, and then he goes, uh, sorry, no surfing in Turkey, although there probably is, you think on the Boss verse surfing Turkey. Yeah, alright, surf Turkey. Man. You get a little orientation appointment and then you get

sent off to that country for a three month training period. Yeah, if you're eighteen, if you're a US resident, no upper age limit, you can be no depending only really old and still go to the Peace Corps. I guess if you pass everything no dependence, I just noticed that. I didn't realize. I guess they're like, yeah, we want you to not just abandon your family. That's a nice move. Yeah, and you have to have a high school diploma, yes, Josh, and you do need that diploma. And you also can

be married. But it's a pretty small percentage. Think about three percent or married couples or is it seven percent? Yes? Seven percent married single. I think it waffles. So um, yeah, one percent is undecided, and that they will send you with your married partner. They can there are some assignments where they'll send both of you to the same place to work together, but apparently those are kind of few

and far between. You can't put in for your girlfriend boyfriend, No, you can't at all, and you both have to be accepted fully as Peace Corps volunteers who could be sent to different corners of the earth. I think they'd like to help people out there. I'm sure they do. UM, but you can't have any kids there, and you can't take your pets, which is not a surprise, a little field mouse, not a surprise at all. You can't take your pets. So if you have pets, like you gotta

look at your life. You know, if you are a homeowner with pets, then you probably shouldn't volunteer for the Peace Corps. You can volunteer here at home join them. I don't know a A. But if you are single and you're living in Brooklyn, you don't have any cats, and you got time to kill and a in a heart that wants to serve the world, and you know about UM. I don't know repairing motorbikes in Indonesia or you speak of foreign language. These are all things like

these hobbies, they really get into that. And it's not like when you put down your hobbies for a college education or a college application and no one really cares about that. I hate to break it to you, but do they really do? In the Peace Corps, if you have skills as a as a gardener, they want to know about that, or if you were like a landscape or something like that. Yeah, and what what they're gonna say,

here are all of our programs. Choose. Then you're gonna choose, and then they're gonna be like, Okay, no, this is where we really need you. And they will send you where they need you ultimately based on your skills, your background, your hobbies. You could always get sent where you might like to go. And if you have know that language, that's a big leg up in that direction, I think. But I think you should be prepared to know that they they may send you wherever. Yeah, that's part of it.

But you're doing this for the love of helping others, and really it doesn't matter because there's only one race, the human race. I just think that's really exciting. Yeah, I did not know where you're going to go, and to be I wish I would, I would join, I would go back and do it all over again. I would do it different. I would join the piece for for a couple of years. You can of what I always think of when I think of the Peace Corps.

I think of um, Julie Haggarty and the League guy from Airplane when they went and told him, yeah, she has a party and he's teaching basketball and Harlem Globe Chottera dancing. That was that was different. I was thinking the discos scene when he was yeah, that's different. Yeah, but yeah, that's what I think of when I think of Peace Corps. I think of the Tom Hanks movie Volunteers. I never saw that one, but that's where he met his wife Frida Wilson. Oh yeah, I guess so, huh. Yeah.

I never saw that because I always hated the Tennessee Volunteers, so I refused to see that movie in case it helped them anyway. Yeah, and I still do right, Oh Josh packing, They only allow you to take two bags for twenty seven months, which doesn't sound like a lot. Well, not only that, there's a weight limit, yeah, eighty pounds right a k A thirty six point to eight seven

kilograms for our non imperial measurement friends. So what they suggest is take things that you cannot get elsewhere, and then when you get there you can buy some of the other things, like don't don't bother packing crock pot because you can get a crock pot in Benin. Yeah, or can you Well, there's going to be some other cookware that you don't wear. Yeah, it's just stupid that's

going to take up everything. But they said bring you know, bring some good old fashioned American undy's and rain gear and hiking boots and stuff like that you probably can't get in these other countries. Yeah, so you want to you want to blow your weight on um, the the the essentials that you're not gonna be able to find anywhere else. Maybe that iPod. They said, you can bring

a laptop. But one thing you're not guaranteed is electricity. Yeah, there's a there's a pretty common misconception that it's like all thatched huts and no municipal water supply, no electricity, And that's not true at all. The no thatched hut thing is not true at all. The no municipal water supply and no electricity. Think, that's extremely true in a lot of cases. Well so is the thatched hut here and there. Okay, but you can volunteer to go to those places. You can you can also be sent to

those places. But you can also say I want to go to a place that has no running water and no electricity and I want to help there. Um. But there are a lot of assignments where even if you say no, I don't want that, they'll be like, yeah, I think they call those people the hard core yes of the Peace Corps, Like you know what I signed up for this, send me to the edge of the cliff.

Here's my iPod. Even that's crazy. Yeah, A lot of a lot of these people are teach in these in like local schools though that you know, they have power and water and they're they're more. It's not as third world as you might think it is in many cases. I would imagine in a lot of cases, it's like, um, some of the places we went in Guatemala or they didn't have anything resembling in municipal water supplies. It was

just like there's a there's a pond over there. But it wasn't printive, no, I mean there were buildings and structures and people wear clothes and things like that. It's not like living with the Yana Mamo exactly. So what's day to day life like, Josh, if you're a peace war volunteer, um, well, day to day life is actually

a lot looser than you would think. Basically, they give you an assignment like say, um, we want you to teach agricultural techniques, modern agricultural techniques or maybe sustainable agricultural techniques to these people in Guam. Great well Guam even qualified though it's a U S territory, I would think it'd be outside of the US foreign policy scope. Let's just say someplace in Africa. Then let's go again with

um tanga yaka, tanga yeika, Yeah, tanga yika um. And you go and you say, okay, well this is here's some ideas for how I'm going to teach these people sustainable agriculture and tangan yika uh and um that you get there and they're like, there is no tangan yika anymore, jackass, it's all Tanzania. And you go, well, it's still applies. So here's what I'm going to do. And your day to day, your hours, um, how you interact with people, what you teach them. Probably it's a lot up to you.

There's nobody looking over your shoulder like they pretty much just give you a parachute and drop you off, say see you later, good luck. That's not true. You do go alone, though, and depending on how remote you are, you may be the only American face you see for a while, although in other places there might be other volunteers that you know within the town, but you're still technically sent alone. One of the things I think we've skipped over is you are allowed to receive friends. Your

friends can come visit you on their own dimes. I didn't know that. I didn't either, but they can come hang out with you if you want. Yeah, you need to see a friendly face or whatever. Um packages you can get packages. You can go, um travel at your own expense. You can go to the capital city. You can go wherever there's WiFi and load up on your stuff. You should know episodes. Um you can do a little sight seeing whatever you want. Again, you're stutting your own hours.

But I think for the most part, they imagine that if you are the kind of go getter who volunteers for a peace corps, you're not just gonna like lay around all day. True enough, although that same guy mentioned earlier. Robert Strauss, who was the director former director in Cameroon, said he does feel like these days some volunteers use it as quote employer of last resort, and that, uh, some recruits use it as an extended spring break from college.

I can see that, and I think that's rare. But he says that is a problem, and he wants the standard to be what you talked about. Well, you know that's Peace Corps problem. Their their process is not rooting them out. Yeah, you know it needs to be like are you a pothead? Yes, no, there's your there's your rooting out system. And depending on if you were a pothead, it would depend on where they would send you. Like just how bad of a pothead exactly? Um, you mentioned

packages to Chuck you can't get packages. But our good friend Um grab Banowski, who wrote this, he says that there are there is such a thing as quote corrupt mail workers who pill for your packages sometimes. Um, it could take forever. So he recommends that you have friends and family start sending you packages and letters before you even leave the US, so that when you get there, you'll get some stuff in the first few months and

it'll keep you from being so homesick. I would send myself a bunch of stuff, you know, I wouldn't count of my family to do it eighty pounds because they'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wouldn't get any packages to like the end of year one if I left it to my family. That's not true, that's not I don't know. I didn't get a lot of college packages. Let's just say that I neither care packages. Yeah. I was like, do you even know what that is? I

want you to send you one of these? And I basically just walked my dad around the store, like put this in there, put that in there. Yeah, it's getting a little heavy. I mean, we can take the can goods out right. Yeah. But of course now went to school sixty miles from where I lived, So if I would have gone like across country, I might have got more care packages. Maybe you just keep telling yourself that exactly, So, Chuck Um, there's some advantages once you return your tours over.

There's some advantages to um being a Peace Corps volunteer. Uh didn't hurt any resume. It shows a lot of stick to itiveness and get uppitude and beyond the fact that it like proves your commitment as a human to a task, which is huge. You also get the inside scoop on getting a government job if you're interested in that kind of thing. Yes, like you get um you're available to list that other people might not see. Your

privy to information. You're also given priority hiring priority over somebody who may even have better qualifications than you but wasn't a Peace Corps volunteer, sorry, sucker, which is one of the reasons our government functions like it does. Um, So what is the stunt, Chuck? How do you measure the success of something like the three points of the mission statement? You said, Strauss criticized one of them. Let's

talk about the accomplishments. Well, that's one of the problems is it's tough to measure that in any sort of sort of statistical way. So the only way you can really measure it is to talk to the volunteers themselves. And usually when you talk to them afterwards, they're like, you know what, I learned pretty quick that I was gonna have to kind of reset my goals and make them a little smaller in scope, like going from I want to help the world too, I want to help

this village. Yeah, which is good, and that's helping the world because seven thousand people doing that in villages all over the world, so combine collectively, it seems to be doing that. Yeah. But it is tough when you have a four dred million dollar program, even though it's a scant fraction of the of the but of the budget. Um, you still have to show metrics, I imagine, and pretty tough in this case. You know. Uh, yeah, I guess, but I mean, like you said, there's no quantitative way

to spell it out because you can't. I mean, I guess you could go pull people where there have been um uh Peace Corps volunteers and ask them, do you like America more or less? Now? Yeah, and if it's more than awesome, there you go quantified. There's a check right there. They do say that most volunteers come back feeling like they gained a lot from it, for sure. So that's one of the three right there. You go,

at least at least one third of it is accomplished. Um. There are also a lot of criticisms as I think we've kind of leaked out here there of Peace Corps, which is you know, that's any any noble experiment is going to um result in criticism. There's always going to be poopooers, people who you know, don't put their money where their mouth is, but yet have plenty of time to point out all the problems with something e g. Me, So what are they? Uh, Well, sadly, should we go

ahead and get into the crime thing? Sure. One of the criticisms is that there has been crime committed by and against Peace Corps volunteers over the years, and um that the Peace Corps hasn't done a very good job of backing these people, and some alleged they've even tried pretty hard to cover up a lot of this stuff. Yeah,

there was UM it was I think last year. This year, UM in Washington there was a bit of a stir when Congress was basically forced to start inquiring into how the Peace Corps handles reports of, say like sexual violence

against volunteers. UM. A group of volunteers was organized by a former volunteer named Casey Frazy, and she started UM First Response Action, which is basically like it's the group former volunteers who were subject to sexual violence and who were mistreated by the Peace Corps when they returned a lot of them reported basically being implied that it was their fault. What had they been drinking, what were they wearing, had they been like sleeping around? Basically were they asking

for it? Which is not what you do to your people. Know, And uh, Statistically, every year, on average, twenty two Peace Corps women report being victims of rape or attempted rape, and more than one thousand from two thousand to two thousand nine reported sexual assaults. And you know a lot of these go unreported still, so that number may be higher. And that's We're not trying to poop anything, but that's

really sad. And you know, Obama and the and the new guy Aaron Williams have said that they need to take this way more seriously and make it a more victim centered approach, taking more victim centered approach to this. One of the reasons that that's going on, apparently is because there's a clause in the nineteen Peace Corps Act that says, if you're a Peace Corps employee, you mean as a Peace cor employees, do you know that she worked at h Q, Yeah, you can't be you can't

work there for longer than five years. And the whole point is to keep the keep the place young, keep the ideas fresh, or keep it you know, really um um rolling with the punches. But one of the one of the problems with that is that it has no

institutional memory. If no one's been there longer than five years, there are some who are grandfathered in, but if no one's been there for longer than five years, and your director comes aboard like every three or four five years, maybe um, there's no memory on how to handle big problems like this. So things can very easily be brushed under the carpet. And sadly, Josh, there have been by

my count, three murders the Peace Corps volunteers. One just in two thousand nine, Kate Pusey was murdered in Benin, and uh this one drew a lot of a ten because Kate was essentially ratting out a local employee of the school she was working at, who she believed was h sexually assaulting the girls at the school. She wrote the Peace Corps office and somehow this got back to him and he tied her to a porch and slit her throat, and the parents were pretty upset that this

was leaked. And although I don't think they like verified if the Peace Corps leaked it, surely they wouldn't do anything like that. But they're pretty upset that it wasn't as confidential as it should have been and that it led to her murder. And then, most famously, um was in the nineteen seventies. Deborah Gardner was stabbed to death by another volunteer in Tonga in ninety six. And he is still walking streets of Brooklyn. Yeah, I've read a

New Yorker article on this. It was really interesting. So what there was a series of legal quirks that led to him batt Yeah. What happened was she was very pretty and he liked her very much, and she did not return the affection. And one night, after a party in the town where there were some other volunteers, she got a little too drunk apparently fell down a couple of times on the dance floor, and one of her ex boyfriends who was there, took her back to her

hut and you know, put her to bed. Five days later, Priven comes into her hut and stabs her twenty two times. And it was um supposed to go a little different. He had like a pipe and a knife, and like cyanide, and it was supposed to be he was supposed to like knock her out and torture her, but she like a woke up when he got there and fought him off, and it just led to like, you know, a brutal stabbing. He was trying to pull her out of the hut. When people saw him, he fled on a bike. She

was able to name her attacker before she died. And um, they had a trial in Tongo where he was um where the American government said he has schizophrenia and we are going to if you let him go here, we're gonna commit him to an institution in Washington State when we get back. And uh, problem is when they got back to Washington State, you they didn't accept you know,

like you couldn't commit someone at that point. So it was basically not a ruse, but it was they got him out of the country and then basically there was no recourse. They couldn't try him in America and they couldn't commit him involuntarily, and he went, you know what, I don't want to go I'm going back to New York and that's what he did and that's where he still is. So had he been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Um,

I think that he had by one doctor there. But then later on he did volunteer to go to this hospital and get tested and they said that he suffered from uh from psychosis in the moment, I can't remember what they called it, but basically went nuts that night. But he's not schizophrenia, doesn't have schizophrenia. He's walking around New York still huh. Yeah. Wow. They wrote a book about it, and he keeps it pretty low pro but

I would imagine he's got a pretty good job. He worked for Social Security as like a eighty thousand dollar year computer guy. So it's really sad. Yeah, but that is the exception. We don't want to pay a negative picture here, but um, they have. They have called on the Peace Corps to clean up their act for sure when it comes to crime. Yeah, and the Peace Corps first part says we do not place Peace Corps volunteers

in unsafe environments. That's what Aaron Williams said, But he also said we need to we need to handle like the any victimization that does happen way better than we are. Um, chuck. There's also the CIA allegations. I don't know much about this.

So for basically since its inception, just the value of having said in thousand kids being placed in local environments, gaining the trust of people, interacting with other nationals from other countries, uh in a third place, a neutral setting, just the the intelligence value of them by default is is incalculable. But the from the outset, the two have been intended to be separated, right, Peace Corps has nothing to do with intelligence, Like if you have an intelligence background, sorry,

you can't be in Peace Corps. If you're in Peace Corps, you have to wait four years before you can get a any kind of intelligence assignment in the military. Um. So that on paper they're very much separate. But everybody, including people who live in these countries that are being served by Peace Corps, have always assumed Peace Corps volunteers

are often asked to do intelligence field work. And in two thousand eight some kids came forward in Bolivia and said, hey, while we're down there, government told us to to start, you know, keeping reports and filing reports on Venezuelan and Cuban nationals who were living and working down there. They wanted to know all about these people. That's intelligence field work and has that proven Yeah, well yeah, the the US, uh, the Peace Corps said that this was uh an error,

that it was in violation of Peace Corps policy. But basically that yeah, enough of these these believing volunteers came forward that they couldn't say that it wasn't true. So yeah, it was kind of thing. So apparently it has happened at least once. Um, and it's not like wet work or anything like that. I don't think the Peace Corps volunteers have ever been asked to like Greece a dictator or anything like that. But wet work I've never heard

of that. Yeah, that's that's hands assassinations. Yeah, what does wet mean? I imagine blood and gore tissue wet from blood. Yeah. So um, those are the criticisms. Again the chuck. I think we should say that my hat is off to Peace Corps and the volunteers for the work that they do. Absolutely, and and if you're a female Peace Corps volunteer, be

really careful. We encourage you to be very mindful because you know you're alone in these countries and bad things do happen sometimes, and um, just be vigilant and take care of yourself. Oh yeah, and I think that that goes for all Peace Corps volunteers. Women are a little more susceptible to to that kind of crime obviously, but uh yeah, yeah, got anything else, No, I think that's

it man, Hap Corps. Yeah, hats off to you, and thank you to all of our listeners who are Peace Corps volunteers or have been Peace Corps volunteers, and who have written us to say thanks for being there. We hope, uh well we we thank you back for taking us along on your trips. That's pretty cool. Kennedy's children, that's what they call them, or they used to. I don't know if they still do. Kennedy's illegitimate children. Well, that's

a whole different batch. So okay, that's Peace Corps. If you want to know more about it, you can type in Peace Corps in the handy search bar how stuff works dot com and that will bring you this fine, fine article. Um and I said handy search bar, Right you did, dude. It is time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. I'm gonna call this from an Irish uh listener. And I think I've said before I love me some Irish and Scottish people. You mean I read an Irish bar

the other night. Were there any Irish people there there? Yeah, there's always at least a couple. So uh, Like I said, I love I love meet some Irish and Scottish. They're great folks. I've had some good friends from that part of the world, and so I'm gonna read this now. Um. As a longstanding recruit to the stuff you should know Army, I always expect to hear something new and interesting when I listen to you guys. So I never expected to be singled out and spoken to directly, breaking the tenuous

podcast reality barrier. But that's exactly what happened yesterday. A little relevant detail to begin with. My name doesn't invite nicknames, John, being too normal in Killeen awkward to manipulate into anything else. The best that fourteen years of school could give me was the nickname j K, which is stuck for most of my life. So anyway, I was stuck in traffic in Dublin the other day and the Government watch List

podcast was coming to an end. I was I was beginning to think about how Orwellian Irish slash global society really is. It started to give me that weird feeling that someone who I couldn't see was watching me, or that people were talking about me. Then Josh decided to confirm this paranoia and said, if you want to know more about the terrorists watch list and probably end up on the watch list yourself. J K. I genuinely panicked,

convinced that the US government was after me. Apparently my reaction to a foreign government pursuing me is to break sharply and almost cause an accident in the middle of the city. I came back to reality and kept driving sheepishly, avoiding looking in my rear view mirror and the angry driver behind me. So thanks in kudos, and if you read this out loud, I'd love to give a quick shout out to Luke and Andrew, to other members of the Irish Battalion and great friends. So Luke, Andrew and

John and Ireland Ireland, thank you for writing in. Go eat some Shepherd's pie and drink a beer for me and me and Josh. Yeah, thanks a lot, j K H j k UM. If you want to let us know about the time we've spoken you directly, or if you want to tell us about your Peace Corps time. It's pretty cool. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.

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