The Corps is shying away from contracts calling for experts like the one with the CVSF. Moreover, the volunteers are not longer labelled by the Peace Corps as "experts" in a specific field. They are supposed to be prepared to do almost anything. Instead of working with CVSF counterparts separated from village life, they are now following the Lapa example of working through the townspeople. Not only are they doing better work, they are drawing closer to Brazilian village society.

The volunteers who moved into the interior this summer are having a much better time of it. Profiting from the experience of the first group, the "new wave" volunteers are settling in with the attitude that they must respond to the community's needs. To case then through the difficult first months, the new volunteers took up a few ideas--and animals.

Fifteen rabbits made it safely on a 500-mile Jeep trip from Rio to Barra, Bahia, with two corpsmen last month. The volunteers will do some demonstration rabbit-raising, hoping to move on to rabbit cooperative from there. A Peace Corps couple a Anglical, Bahia have a veritable "two-year plan": illiteracy programs, ceramics industry, youth clubs, a library, a vegetable garden, a health education class, model furniture, privies, water filters, and small dams. The couple, and most of the "new wave," call themselves "community developers."

Modest Approach

What the Brazilian case has shown, above all, is that the Peace Corps profect cannot be run as another kid program. The Corps administrators should have realized that the CVSF contract was putting the Brazil project into a Four Point guise that would inevitably lead to trouble. The project is finally turning out well because the administrators and volunteers are trying a more modest approach. The "helping-out-around-the-village" role of the Brazil volunteers may not sound impressive but it is effective. A favorable sign is that the requests being sent to the Rio Peace Corps office by village mayors call for volunteers to do "more of same."

The new technique is bound to be more popular among the townspeople. With the CVSF, the volunteers worked and lived apart from the village. Association with the federal agency could only bring upon the Peace Corps the mistrust which the town folk feel toward a political organization and its paid technicians, who come to work on specific projects and hurry off as soon as they are finished.

There once had been talk of disbanding the Peace Corps Project in Brazil. The first few months had been a miserable experience. And the Cops' sloppy selection and training program did not help matters. But the Peace Corps has seen its errors, and moved swiftly to correct them. The Corps has learned from its mistakes in Brazil a valuable lesson in how to run a project in the underdeveloped world