Peasants Come Last eBook J Larry Brown
Download As PDF : Peasants Come Last eBook J Larry Brown 
Why is doing good in the developing world so hard?
Today, the original vision President John F. Kennedy and Sargent Shriver had for the Peace Corps as a powerful arm of support for the world’s dispossessed lies buried in layers of bureaucratic blindness and political expediency. But there is yet hope, as former Peace Corps Country Director J. Larry Brown explains in this powerful memoir.
This is the book every Peace Corps Volunteer, Country Director, and Washington policymaker needs to read.
Peasants Come Last eBook J Larry Brown
As a Peace Corps Volunteer from the early days who went back again in to serve in 2005, I share much of Dr. Brown's perspective. The Peace Corps of the early days wasn't perfect, but it was generally flexible, humane, and invigorated by a passion to help the world. While volunteers and many staff are, fifty years on, still motivated by the same high ideals, the agency which manages them has become hidebound, authoritarian, and often apparently more concerned with protecting its own structure than with its mission.More than that, though, shines forth in Dr. Brown's book. Larry Brown was appointed Peace Corps Country Director for Uganda, one of the most difficult possible assignments for Peace Corps staff or volunteers. Most of the book is about the challenges, joys, horrors, and difficulties of that particular assignment, and what comes across most strongly is how important the Peace Corps mission is, and how rewarding it can be, perhaps especially when it is that challenging. In this book you see the country of Uganda, its people, its wildlife, its prejudices and conflicts, in living color.
I found a deeply moving irony in the contrast between Dr. Brown's heroic efforts to actually deal with real problems on the ground and the mindless, humorless attitudes which the overarching bureaucracy used, first to try and tame his spirit--as if it needed taming!--and finally to remove him in a most dishonorable way.
I hesitate to call any book a "must-read." Different people will respond to different books. But I would highly recommend "Peasants Come Last" as giving about as clear a snapshot of Peace Corps today, warts and all, as I can imagine.
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Peasants Come Last eBook J Larry Brown Reviews
We have all had experience of one kind or another of the annoying qualities of bureaucracy. J. Larry Brown's experience of it, as the Peace Corps's Uganda Country Director, can more truthfully be described as something worse than frustrating - more like slow strangulation.
Brown's book,"Peasants Come Last," underscores the essential disconnect between bureaucracy and the actual work done on the ground in any government-sponsored project - between people who have committed to spend years of their lives in third world nations doing the complex and sometimes dangerous work mandated by the project, and the office careerists sitting safely at desks who shift lives and fates like pawns across a chessboard.
The Peace Corps is a prime example of an idea born of an idealism which rode the wave of social change and dynamic altruism that washed over the 1960s, but which tended to find itself increasingly in danger of being beached on the gritty sandbanks of bureaucratic procedure, political posturing, and the petty one-upmanship without which no office, federal or otherwise, would be complete.
Dr. Brown's book is well titled, because it is the people being served, as much as those serving them, who suffer from this disconnect. Brown celebrates the people he served without failing to note their faults, but acknowledges what they have taught him even as he tried to bring to them a new way of living on their own terms, and showing how much more could be done without interference from what Billy Connolly aptly calls "beigists".
Yet for all his indictment of the artery-hardening of the Peace Corps on its fiftieth anniversary, Brown's book is also bright with the same inspiration that led him to the Peace Corps in the first place. As he points out, the idealism that powered the Peace Corps in 1961 can be part of what rejuvenates the organization and its ideals in the next half century. That, and making sure peasants come first.
A true story of a man's real-time experiences of being an in-country director for the Peace Corps, after having been a Peace Corps Volunteer in the late 1960s. He planned his distinguished career for the directorship to be his capping achievement. Instead, lame-brained D.C. mired bureaucrats made incredibly naieve demands in short time frames which could not be met -- such as find out a particular, nuanced view of something-or-other from every PCV scattered throughout the country within 24 hrs and report back using a specific format, in a place where computers, e-mail and sometimes even phone service is unreliable. Then blaming the in country office and officers for non-cooperation. From my experiences with the Peace Corps I believe this is true. And apparently it struck a nerve with the entrenched Peace Corps heirarchy because they forbade J. Larry Brown from the reception for authors of books about the Peace Corps at the 50th anniversary "celebration" of creation of the P.C. Silly twits.
My wife and I are currently living and working in Cambodia on a Fulbright grant and are surrounded by Peace Corp Volunteers. We have offered assistance to so many that we have come to be known as the Peace Corp Rescue Mission. The stories these volunteers tell of their difficulties and challenges in the field, along with the management from those in charge often disturbing. I bought this book in hopes of J. Larry Brown giving me some insights into how and why the Peace Corps does what they do. The story he paints is not a pretty one and while his experiences were in Uganda, his story sounds much like it could have happened here.
The Peace Corp was a wonderful idea that has, like so many other government institutions, become bogged down by folks in Washington who want to use it for their own purposes. Rather than listening to the people in the field, decisions are made by people who have traveled little and seldom leave the comfort found inside the beltway. If the institution is to survive, and it most certainly should, then the politicians need to get out of the way of those actually doing the work.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer from the early days who went back again in to serve in 2005, I share much of Dr. Brown's perspective. The Peace Corps of the early days wasn't perfect, but it was generally flexible, humane, and invigorated by a passion to help the world. While volunteers and many staff are, fifty years on, still motivated by the same high ideals, the agency which manages them has become hidebound, authoritarian, and often apparently more concerned with protecting its own structure than with its mission.
More than that, though, shines forth in Dr. Brown's book. Larry Brown was appointed Peace Corps Country Director for Uganda, one of the most difficult possible assignments for Peace Corps staff or volunteers. Most of the book is about the challenges, joys, horrors, and difficulties of that particular assignment, and what comes across most strongly is how important the Peace Corps mission is, and how rewarding it can be, perhaps especially when it is that challenging. In this book you see the country of Uganda, its people, its wildlife, its prejudices and conflicts, in living color.
I found a deeply moving irony in the contrast between Dr. Brown's heroic efforts to actually deal with real problems on the ground and the mindless, humorless attitudes which the overarching bureaucracy used, first to try and tame his spirit--as if it needed taming!--and finally to remove him in a most dishonorable way.
I hesitate to call any book a "must-read." Different people will respond to different books. But I would highly recommend "Peasants Come Last" as giving about as clear a snapshot of Peace Corps today, warts and all, as I can imagine.
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