Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Five hundred and thirty-five people volunteered for the project. Entirely by hand, they built two pump houses, two holding tanks, three reserve tanks, and 1,236 stone steps—said to be the longest staircase in eastern Nepal. When an agent from the district engineering office visited, he was shocked that an American like Rajeev would depend so heavily on the uneducated Karna Magar. “Rajeev Sir, you’re from a developed country, and you don’t have an engineer on this project?” the agent said in disbelief. Rajeev answered, “Our guy is as good as any engineer.” But after sixteen months of work, they turned on the power and nothing happened.

  Rajeev had only a month left in the Peace Corps. After repeatedly failing to get the pump to work, he became so discouraged that he hardly listened when a local electrician suggested the problem might be voltage. “All those bastards in India, they’re using too much electricity,” the electrician said. “We have to wait until the middle of the night, when all those people in India will be asleep.”

  A group of men hiked to the lowest pump station, where they fished for salamanders while waiting for India to go to bed. Rajeev was so depressed that he stayed home. At three o’clock in the morning, a neighbor woke him up. “Pani aayo!” he shouted. “The water has come!” Rajeev ran to the staircase, where he heard a sound like rain: water was rising in the pipes. He and others followed the noise up the mountain, step by step. It became louder at the summit, as water poured into the series of reserve tanks, which held almost twenty thousand gallons. Tanka Bhujel, who knew the politically correct response to any occasion, went out and slaughtered a goat.

  People usually assume that the Peace Corps came out of a grand idea, but its beginnings may have had more to do with emotions associated with village politics. In October 1960, during the third debate of the presidential campaign, Richard Nixon attacked John F. Kennedy by claiming that Democratic presidents had been responsible for leading Americans into every war of the past half century. Immediately afterward, Kennedy flew to Michigan, where, at two o’clock in the morning, he made an unplanned speech on the Ann Arbor campus. He challenged the students: “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” As Stanley Meisler describes in When the World Calls, Harris Wofford, an aide who later became a senator, believes that Kennedy made the speech because he was angry about Nixon’s insinuation.

  Thousands of students sent letters of interest to Kennedy, and the idea also tapped into the popular feeling that the United States needed more grassroots efforts to fight communism. After the election, Kennedy founded the Peace Corps and appointed his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as director. Shriver moved fast—in less than six months, the first volunteers were sent to Ghana, where they had an immediate impact on the education system. Without the Peace Corps, roughly a sixth of Ghanaian secondary schools would have had to shut down owing to lack of teachers. Soon there were nearly five hundred instructors in Ethiopia alone. By 1966, more than fifteen thousand volunteers were working in various jobs around the world, and the agency received forty-two thousand applications that year. Plans for expansion were ambitious: Kennedy once remarked that the Peace Corps would start to become significant when it reached a hundred thousand volunteers.

  But 1966 turned out to be the high-water mark. Applications plummeted during the Vietnam years, when idealistic young people weren’t inclined to have anything to do with a government agency. During the 1970s and 1980s, volunteers continued to go overseas, where they often had a major impact on communities, but the agency’s U.S. profile diminished. Support depended on the whim of a president or a few politicians. Nixon tried to kill the Peace Corps entirely—he hated anything associated with Kennedy. Carter appointed a director who turned out to be incompetent. Reagan was surprisingly supportive, especially after a 1983 meeting with the prime minister of Fiji, who effusively praised the volunteers who had served in his country. A week after that meeting, a staffer presented Reagan with a proposal for slashing the federal budget. “Don’t cut the Peace Corps,” Reagan reportedly said. “It’s the only thing I got thanked for last week.”

  Over time, though, the Peace Corps came to embody the empty campaign promise. Everybody had heard of it, and impressions were vaguely positive, but there was no real awareness of what volunteers did or how their activities were funded. Clinton claimed that he would increase the size of the organization from fewer than seven thousand volunteers to ten thousand; George W. Bush said he wanted fifteen thousand. Obama promised to double the Peace Corps by its fiftieth anniversary. But none of them pushed hard for more money, and volunteer numbers stayed at roughly half the level of 1966, despite the fact that applications increased significantly after 9/11. In 2008, the Peace Corps budget was $342 million—less than what the federal government spent on military bands.

  To former volunteers, it seemed a wasted resource. The Peace Corps had sent Americans to Afghanistan for seventeen years, and more than forty-five thousand people had served in predominantly Muslim countries, but these things seemed to have no effect on post-9/11 policy. Kevin Quigley, the president of the National Peace Corps Association, a group for returned volunteers, believed it was time for a campaign to expand the organization. But this had to be done independently of the Peace Corps—by law, a government agency can’t lobby. Quigley told me that the community of former volunteers had been too passive. “You have to get organized,” he said. “You need a mechanism so legislators know that this is a significant issue.”

  Quigley met with Donald Ross, a former volunteer in Nigeria who had organized public campaigns for Ralph Nader and others. With a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, they hired Rajeev Goyal, who, since leaving Nepal, had attended law school at New York University. Rajeev had continued doing development work in Namje, but he had never had any contact with Capitol Hill. At first, he tried to read up on the legislative process. “They have those books, How Our Government Works, whatever,” Rajeev told me. “It’s the most useless waste of time.” He realized that there’s no legal or democratic element—agencies like the Peace Corps are funded through appropriations committees, which aren’t outlined in the Constitution. All that matters is the personal decisions of committee members, and how they can be influenced by constituents, colleagues, and other people.

  The grassroots part was relatively easy. There are more than two hundred thousand former volunteers, and Rajeev eventually developed an e-mail list of thirty-three thousand. He installed computer software that detected whether a message had been opened, which taught him what kind of e-mail inspired people to read and forward. He also tracked his targets. Once, when I visited him in Washington, he checked his computer and told me that a recent message had been opened 133 times by staffers in the office of a certain senator. “That means I did something right,” he said. With his list, he generated enormous numbers of phone calls and e-mails from former volunteers across the country. During the week of one key funding decision, so many people called the office of Representative Nita Lowey, the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, that Lowey’s phones were completely tied up. An aide finally begged an intermediary to convince Rajeev to stop. “Call off the dogs,” the intermediary said. “The interns need to go to lunch.”

  Meanwhile, Rajeev contacted the kind of influential people who are known as “grasstops.” He looked for Peace Corps connections: the MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews had been a volunteer in Swaziland; the chairman of the Chicago Bears served in Ethiopia; Jimmy Carter’s mother had been in India, and his grandson in South Africa. When it came to asking for favors, Rajeev was fearless—he once tried to get all four living former presidents to sign a letter to Obama, inspiring Jimmy Carter to write back, “This is no way to approach a former President of the United States.” But Carter made a call on behalf of the campaign. (I first met Rajeev when he asked me to write a letter about my years in the Peace Corps in China.) After Rajeev heard that Obama’s half-sister once considered joinin
g the Peace Corps, he solicited airline miles from another former volunteer, flew to Honolulu, put on a Hawaiian shirt, and met with Maya Soetoro-Ng. By the time he left Hawaii, he had one letter from her and another from Obama’s former high school teachers. For good measure, he also stopped by the president’s favorite shaved-ice stand and got a pro–Peace Corps message from the proprietor.

  Maya Soetoro-Ng told me that she had never endorsed another campaign of this sort. But as an educator who had grown up in Indonesia, she supported overseas service, and Rajeev impressed her. “He seemed very professional, very affable,” she told me. “But he wasn’t particularly slick about it. He was very natural and pleasant.” She emphasized that she didn’t represent her brother or his administration, which until that time had issued no public statements about the Peace Corps. But a week after Rajeev’s Hawaii trip, Michelle Obama gave a speech in which she said, “My husband is committed to substantially expanding the number of opportunities to serve in the Peace Corps.”

  In Namje, Tanka Bhujel had taught Rajeev that individuals often matter more than the system. “His style is to go directly to the most powerful person and ask what he wants,” Rajeev told me. Initially, he found this hard to do in Washington, where somebody without connections can’t get on the schedule for an important member of Congress. But then Rajeev started studying a book with color photographs of everybody in the House and Senate. “Once you know somebody’s name, you can talk to them,” he explained. Over time, faces stuck in his memory, and that was when Washington truly became a village. He recognized Senator Bob Corker and Senator Christopher Dodd at Reagan National Airport. He struck up a conversation with Representative Russ Carnahan at the Starbucks on Pennsylvania Avenue. He ran into Representative Peter Welch late one night outside Così, and he met Representative Dennis Kucinich at Le Pain Quotidien. Anybody can wander around the Senate hallways—you don’t even need an ID to get in—and Rajeev spent days there. He attended committee hearings so that he could approach key officials during breaks. He learned that the best spot in the House is the small underground rotunda that connects the Cannon and Longworth buildings; he met dozens of members there. His second year on the job, 124 House members added their names to a “Dear colleague” letter in support of increased funding for the Peace Corps, which drew more signatures than any other issue.

  People told him that this routine was called “bird-dogging.” Lobbyists rarely work like this, because elected officials don’t want to be seen in public with a special interest, but the Peace Corps is far less threatening, especially when represented by Rajeev. “It’s rare that they see somebody a little bit young and a little bit brown,” he said. In August, I spent time with him on the Hill, and within two and a half days he had talked to fifteen senators without appointments. It was as if the political world had suddenly become very small, and yet it had a distinctly exotic tilt—Rajeev could find a Nepali connection that would start almost any conversation. He approached Mark Udall, the senator from Colorado, by mentioning that Udall’s mother had also served as a volunteer in Nepal. The senator immediately brought his hands together, bowed slightly, and said, “Namaste.” Rajeev introduced himself to Senator Dianne Feinstein by noting that her husband was the honorary consul general to Nepal. At a breakfast for Iowa constituents, Rajeev caught Senator Tom Harkin’s attention by referring to another Midwesterner who exports Tibetan rugs from Kathmandu. When he mentioned the Peace Corps, the senator said, “I wonder how many volunteers we have in Haiti.”

  “None,” Rajeev said. “Zero.”

  “None?” Harkin said. “That’s unconscionable!”

  “There’s no money,” Rajeev said. “They cut the Haiti program a number of years ago, because of unrest, but now they need to bring it back. That’s why we’re asking for an increase. I know that you were in Vietnam recently, and they’d like volunteers as well.”

  “I just got back from Vietnam,” the senator said. “There’s no Peace Corps there?” He called to his foreign affairs aide, who was across the room. “Tom! Tom! Agent Orange and the Peace Corps!” The aide hustled over, no doubt wondering what the short Indian had to do with Agent Orange and the Peace Corps. “That’s what I want you to check on,” the senator explained, mentioning Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, which funds the organization. “Talk to Leahy about the Peace Corps and Agent Orange.”

  When I was with Rajeev, he attended a public confirmation for the ambassador to East Timor, an armed forces hearing about Russian nuclear weapons, and a meeting dedicated to rare and neglected pediatric diseases. To him, this was all background noise; he sat in the back and wrote e-mails to constituents on his iPhone while waiting to bird-dog during breaks. Between sessions, he called Jimmy Carter’s grandson and the daughter of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He studied the proposed budget that had come out of the House, making sure he knew the figures. Certain facts were always on the tip of his tongue: the entire Peace Corps budget is less than the price of two F-22 jet planes. He calculated that it costs approximately $25,000 a year to send a volunteer abroad, versus a million for a Foreign Service officer. The proposed budget for 2011 allocates twelve times as much to the militaries of foreign countries as it does to the Peace Corps. When he approached Senator Feinstein, she explained that a big increase would be hard in this economic climate.

  Rajeev took a copy of the budget out of his pocket. “Look at the foreign military finance,” he said. “It’s almost five and a half billion dollars, and that includes a one-point-two-billion-dollar increase. All we’re asking for is dust compared to that. It’s forty-six million.”

  The senator raised her eyebrows. “Just dust?” she said.

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, we’ll take a look at it.”

  “Look at this money,” Rajeev continued. “A one-point-two-billion-dollar increase for foreign militaries, and nine hundred million for Pakistan counterinsurgency.”

  Feinstein had turned to go, but the numbers caught her attention. “How much is that?”

  Rajeev held out the paper. “One point two billion and nine hundred million.”

  “Let me take a look at that,” she said, and he handed over the paper. She called to an aide: “Give this to Rich.”

  Rajeev told me that he sometimes gets into trouble for being too bold. He had recently got kicked out of a military reception for Rhode Island veterans, where he had hoped to meet a senator. When asked who he was, Rajeev responded that he was a Brown graduate and “a Peace Corps veteran.” “To succeed you have to be a little bit cunning,” he told me. He didn’t believe there was necessarily anything dirty about politics, but he agreed with Tanka Bhujel’s description of it as a game. “It’s part of being human—it’s a human game,” Rajeev said. “Like all games you should relish it and take pleasure in it. People believe that in order to be in politics you have to be a politician. That’s not true at all. You can be the lowest villager and still be involved.”

  Rajeev occasionally got in trouble in Namje, too. Even before the water line was finished, he knew that there would be political complications, especially after workers discovered that somebody had taken a shit in the lower holding tank. That was the simplest political statement: it meant that a neighboring village was unhappy. The Namje residents called a meeting and eventually agreed to give their neighbors a ten-thousand-dollar water line. While Rajeev was at law school, he raised funds, and over the years the villagers steadily extended the project, until it served seven small communities. Water fees allowed Namje to hire three full-time maintenance workers, and they used the extra profits to add another salaried teacher at the local school.

  Rajeev also worried about what Namje women would do now that they no longer spent six hours a day hauling water. Before he left the Peace Corps, he founded a women’s co-op, although he had no clear idea of its future activities. As he was leaving, a woman presented him with a gift of a traditional hand-knit wool
en cap. The craftsmanship impressed Rajeev, who said, “I’m sure you could sell this for fifteen dollars in New York City.”

  The first box of hats arrived as he was beginning law school. It was more than four feet tall, and it had been shipped to the home of Ravindra and Damyanti Goyal, on Long Island. It didn’t take long for the second box to appear. The boxes had not been well packed and they smelled like wool that’s wilted a little after the Himalayan monsoon. The Goyals requested that future shipments be directed to the West Village, where Rajeev was living with his older brother Rishi, who had begun his residency at Columbia University Medical Center. The apartment measured eight hundred square feet and soon the living room was devoted entirely to boxes.

  On weekends, Rajeev stood on Houston Street and sold hats. It was near the law school, and he often saw fellow students and professors, who said, “Rajeev, what the hell are you doing?” Rishi told me that he didn’t like having an apartment full of rotting hats, but there was some consolation in watching his brother work as a vendor. “He wouldn’t get a permit,” Rishi said. “He brings a table from God knows where, and he gets into squabbles with the other people who were supposed to be there. He enjoys that little squabble. He thinks that’s the stuff of life. It was a good show. I’d get a cup of coffee. He’d be standing there in the freezing cold. He would target couples and play the liberal guilt.”

  Back in Namje, it became impossible to buy a hat, because prices were inflated to Manhattan levels. The women’s co-op swelled in membership as people drifted in from other villages to make hats. Finally, after Rajeev had sold five thousand dollars’ worth—he was also hawking them in the back of tax law class at NYU—Tanka Bhujel put a stop to it. He called a village meeting and said, “This is unsustainable.” Five years later, when I visited the Goyals in Long Island, they still had more than six hundred Nepali hats.