During the span of 27 months, Peace Corps volunteers live and work in different countries and cultures all over the globe. The various projects that Peace Corps volunteers work on together with their host country nationals can prove extremely challenging due to many cultural differences. This research assessed the influences of cultural differences on Peace Corps projects that volunteers experienced while working with Guatemalan nationals. The literature review examined the issues of cultural differences and the effects 6 and influences that they could have on projects of host country nationals and Peace Corps volunteers. I have examined literature focusing on intercultural communication, cultural group membership differences, cultural identities, value orientations, and organizational value dimensions. I have also looked deeply into many of the differences between the collectivist culture of Guatemala and the individualistic culture of the United States. I have compiled data from interviews with Peace Corps volunteers that I served with in Guatemala from August 2007 until November 2009. During their service, the volunteers worked in the programs of Municipal Development and Agricultural Development. I hope for this research to provide detail into the influences of cultural differences between Peace Corps volunteers in Guatemala and Guatemalan nationals. I hope that this study can better prepare Guatemalan nationals and Peace Corps volunteers to have a superior understanding of each other's cultural identities to ensure that positive communication can lead to good outcomes for projects in the future. I also hope that Peace Corps facilitators and trainers can use the findings in this study for workshops and training sessions on intercultural relations not only in the Peace Corps Guatemala program, but for all other countries where volunteers are currently serving.

The aim of this thesis is to look at the role of the United States Peace Corps as a tool of soft power in the context of international relations and at the use of soft power as an effective part of diplomacy. This thesis has looks at the role of the Peace Corps in former British colonies in West Africa between 1961 and 1970.The project has focused the relationship of the newly independent British colonies with the United States in a period of intensive ideological interest of the USSR in this part of the world. The primary materials used in the paper have been journals and newspaper articles published by the Peace Corps, testimonials of former Peace Corps volunteers and scholarly publications on the topic of the Peace Corps, West African-American relations and relations between West Africa and the USSR. The Peace Corps played an important role in establishing relations between the US and West African countries in the 1960's with a special emphasis on education.

This paper examines an effort to develop community capacity to engage in sustainability planning as part of a Peace Corps Municipal Services Development project in Areguá, Paraguay. It sketches the context in which the initiative occurred, outlines relevant academic research on community sustainability planning, and describes the strategies adopted to assist Areguá in securing the critical mass of community capacity necessary to engage in sustainability planning. The paper concludes with an outline of continuing challenges for sustainability in Areguá and a description of means by which those concerns might be addressed. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

No description available.

Post-development theorist, Arturo Escobar's influential work, Encountering Development as well as other post-development academic works discussed the concept and delivery of "development" based on known antecedents--Western countries as practitioners and non-Western countries as beneficiaries. Even though cultural sensibility has become a significant issue in development today, there is little research that analyzes the construction of non-Western donors' discourse such as those of the Japanese governmental aid agency, Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers. Moreover, non-Western aid donors and practitioners' engagement with indigenous development in Latin America has not been discussed. This dissertation aims to answer the following questions: How do Western and non-Western governmental donor agencies construct and deliver 'development' to 'non-developed' countries in Latin America, particularly to countries with large indigenous populations? How do these donor agencies' volunteer practitioners implement development projects in the field? What are the differences in the aims and delivery of development projects between Western and non-Western donors and their volunteer practitioners, especially in those projects aimed at indigenous populations? A corollary to those questions was to attempt to discover how the agencies and their volunteers negotiated notions of development with indigenous peoples as well as how agencies and volunteers perceived and addressed ethnic differences in the aid recipients' countries. To answer these questions I compared and contrasted two governmental agencies that are the most prominent and with the longest record of volunteer aid in Latin America: the United States Peace Corps and the Japanese agency, Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV). Although the U.S. Peace Corps and its notion of development were models of "development" for the JOCV program, JOCV's discourse of development and its development practices are not the same as the Peace Corps. Both agencies' cross-cultural policies for their volunteers as well as the development practices the agencies adopted likely reflect how the Japanese and United States understand their own societies in general cultural terms, as well as in terms of moral and religious preferences, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The Peace Corps and JOCV volunteers' experiences with indigenous populations showed several limitations to their programs and provided suggestions for the future particularly in the area of indigenous development. / text

Thesis (M.A.)--Humboldt State University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (54-55). Also available via Humboldt Digital Scholar.

Household air pollution contributes to the premature death of more than 4 million people annually. Improved cookstoves are one technological intervention that can potentially reduce exposure to household air pollution. However, improved cookstove implementation programs need to consider measures to increase sustainability and promote long-term adoption. The objectives of this research were 1) to develop and implement a new ferrocement cookstove for Peña Blanca, a rural indigenous community in the Ngäbe-Bugle region of Panama, 2) to evaluate its potential sustainability in comparison to the most common cooking technologies observed in the community, 3) to prepare a construction manual for the stove to promote future development, and 4) to provide guidelines for applying a holistic approach to improved cookstove projects. A bottom-up, community-driven approach to development focused on integration and capacity building was used to design and implement a ferrocement improved cookstove. A survey was administered to 26 households to understand the familial and environmental health of the community as well as knowledge, opinions, and needs related to cooking practices and improved stoves. Finally, the ferrocement stove developed for this study, along with the three stone fire, the ecojusta stove model, and a gas stove were evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively using a sustainability assessment framework developed specifically for improved cookstoves. The results of this study suggest that design and implementation of an improved cookstove in the field that incorporates community feedback and provides educational opportunities may produce solutions that are more likely to be sustainable and meet users’ needs. The process allows for design flexibility to reduce smoke and fuel use while incorporating community preferences such as simplicity and ease of use, ability to control heat, stove features and size. Results from conducting household surveys emphasize the importance of a community-based development process that focuses on meeting community-specific challenges and needs. Conditions such as extreme poverty and lack of support structures pose significant challenges and shape community opinions regarding cooking technology and practices. In fact, the community’s desires in this study differ greatly from that found in the established literature. Specifically, 84% of rural Panamanians from this study felt that reducing smoke indoors was important to them. Sustainability evaluations of improved cookstove implementation programs in Panama highlighted common strengths in the needs assessment and implementation project life stages. These programs excelled at involving the community in identifying project needs and participating in the construction of stoves. On the other hand, the post-implementation and follow-up life stages were assessed to be weaker as these programs generally do not perform evaluation and monitoring of stove use and adoption after the implementation stage or continue user education. Additional qualitative analysis from this study suggest that the traditional stove may be the most sustainable and appropriate stove technology at this time for the community if combined with improving education related to family health, the environment, and stove use that results in behavior change. This approach may have the potential to fulfill the goals of improved cookstove programs globally through education and behavior change as an alternative approach to implementing an inappropriate technology. Moreover, an improved stove that is developed in the community that uses local materials and provides educational opportunities that focus on caring for resources and improving stove operator skill is more likely to be sustainable than other options. General guidelines and lessons learned for applying a holistic approach to improved cookstove development in the field include enhancing community understanding through involvement of local leaders, empowering the community in the decision-making process, providing educational opportunities or facilitating the implementation of a technology that is affordable, effective, and that meets users’ diverse needs, or both. As well as evaluating sustainability likelihood by utilizing comprehensive tools such as surveys, stove testing, program assessment frameworks, life cycle assessments, and incorporating results from post-project monitoring and evaluation iteratively until needs are met and exposure to household air pollution and deforestation rates are reduced. The implications of this work are that 1) technology implementation may not be the best solution, similar investments made in education and behavior change may result in equal or greater sustainability early on, 2) the design and implementation of an improved cookstove in the field with high standards for technical design, that reduce emissions, and with flexibility for elements that do not affect performance can result in meeting users’ needs better with higher adoption rates, and 3) a more holistic approach to development using available tools is suspected to result in improved cookstove programs that improve human and environmental health while meeting users’ needs for the long-term.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the work of the Peace Corps during its first period of volunteer activity in Colombia. To put it into perspective, the relations between Colombia and the United States throughout the XIX and XX centuries are analyzed in the first chapter. The second chapter offers a description of the American government's policies during the Cold War, with emphasis on the influence and scope of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. The third chapter deals with the origin, operation, and development throughout the world of the main programs of the Peace Corps, as a semi-independent federal agency linked to the Presidency of the United States. The fourth and last chapter refers to specific areas of activity, objectives, as well as the positive and negative impacts of the Peace Corps in Colombia. Also included are the reasons for which this program of cooperation came to an end in 1981, its repercussion throughout Colombia, and its return in 2010. Keywords: Peace Corps - United States - Colombia - development - Cold War

This diploma thesis deals with the topic of the U. S. Peace Corps and its possible areas of improvement in the third millennium. The aim of the thesis is to research available documents and to determine and analyze possible areas of improvement during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The thesis focuses on African continent with regards to the Peace Corps presence in individual host countries. The main research questions of this thesis are: "What are the possible areas of improvement within the U. S. Peace Corps organization in the third millennium?", and "Is the agency and the political debates concerning the reforms of the agency reflecting experiences and feedback of the volunteers?" The answers to these questions are sought with the help of research in documents as well as with the help of the analysis of author's one hundred collected surveys from current and former volunteers. Moreover, the areas of the Peace Corps training, recruitment, and support of the volunteers are researched in this thesis alongside with the Washington bureaucracy, mission of the agency, safety and security of the volunteers, sexual assault response, and whistleblower reforms. There are four chapters in the thesis and several subchapters. The first chapter elaborates on the origins of the Peace...

Peace Corps Volunteer teachers have played a significant role in Namibia’s attempts to restructure education in line with its policy of education for all. While we have learned a great deal in recent years about how Peace Corps Volunteer Teachers have achieved their stated goals and objectives of teaching students and training serving teachers, we still know relatively little about the role they may have played in school management. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of Peace Corps volunteers work on the management and leadership of the schools they serve. The study focuses on the work of two volunteers based in a combined school in the Ondangwa West educational region of Namibia. The study adopts a qualitative approach and seeks to establish whether there has been an impact by Peace Corps volunteer’s work on the management and leadership of this school by focusing on (a) activities performed by Peace Corps volunteers; (b) the experiences of both management and staff in working with Peace Corps volunteers; (c) whether the presence of Peace Corps volunteers that served at the school influence the management and leadership of the school; (d) how the duties and activities performed by these volunteers were perceived by the students, teachers and community. The interview questions that were used to collect data from seven respondents were based on the literature from Peace Corps and the Ministry of Basic Education, Culture and Sport as well as education management and leadership literature. The findings indicate that volunteers that served at this school performed management and leadership related activities with the students, teachers and community and that these activities are having an effect on the management and leadership of the school.