Efrem J. Sigal '64, a former associate managing editor of the CRIMSON, spent his two years in the Peace Corps teaching English in the Ivory Coast. He is now at the Harvard Business School. This article originally appeared in the Reporter Magazine, and excerpts are reprinted by permission.--Ed. note.

Peace Corps volunteers arrive in the tropics loaded down with many sorts of equipment, not all of it physical. In addition to cameras, tape recorders, spray deodorants, and insecet repellent, they carry with them a whole train of mental baggage: a set of attitudes and expectations about their new environment.....

With Africa, as with other things, distance lends enchantment. Instead of comparing their experience to an ordinary job at home, the young corpsmen weigh it against the intensity of Conrad's portraits of Graham Greene's matter-of-fact spirituality, and their anticipations resist all attempts to bring them into line with actuality; the ideas have a life of their own....

Always a "But..."

A typical message [in the Peace Corps recruiting literature] went something like this: "The days will be long and hot. The people may be unfriendly. You won't be paid anything. You probably won't accomplish much either. But..." There was always a but. Already I had two images: Kurtz paddling his lonely canoe up the river, and Churchill enumerating all the obstacles to victory and pledging a fight to the finish. I told myself: "It may be tough, and I won't surrender either."

* * *

On the questionnaire given at my termination conference, we were asked to note periods of particular elation or depression over the two-year stint. What emerged, however, was "no pattern whatsover." Rather than a neatly oscillating curve of ups and downs, what seemed to characterize the attitudes of the volunteers I knew was a new way of looking at the world. From all the evidence, we were great idealists before reaching our assignments and great cynics afterwards. Not all of the change was due to disappointment. A good deal of it, I think, was simply growing up....

Despite their basic similarity of outlook, volunteers reveal subtle yet important differences in the way they go about their work. No two volunteers use the same classroom methods, interest themselves in the same activities, bring the same devotion to their task, or put the same value on their contribution.... The spirit that the volunteers brought to their work varied so widely that one sometimes could hardly believe that two Peace Corpsmen had been in the same country....

Cases where a volunteer fails to meet the minimum demands of his job are rare, especially in an area like teaching that has well-defined working hours. Much more common is the teacher who does a conscientious day-to-day job of teaching but does not extend himself in any other direction. I asked a Peace Corps evaluator how he went about judging the effectiveness of volunteers in out-of-the-class activities. "It's easy," he replied. "I just ask him, 'What are you doing in the community?' Most of the time the answer is 'Nothing.'"

One volunteer who did make strenuous efforts to work with his students outside school passed a bitter judgment on his fellow volunteers in a special memorandum written for Peace Corps officials. After outlining ways in which he thought volunteers could improve education in their schools, he concluded by saying: "Oddly enough, the most vehement opposition to such proposals will doubtless come from the most unlikely of sources: volunteers themselves. We already know that Ivory Coast Peace Corps teachers are the highest paid, best lodged, best fed in the world. It is surprising that no one has as yet come up with the rest of it--that they are the laziest. I doubt that many other PCV's in the world would have the gall to claim that 22 hours of English a week fulfills their PC contract. Ours do."

Any judgment is speculative, but my own guess is that Ivory Coast volunteers have no monopoly on clock watching and that they rate perfectly well in comparison with other volunteers in Africa....

One explanation of such behavior is that volunteers are lazy. A more balanced conclusion, however, would try to match volunteers' behavior against the condiitons in which they live. Feelings about job or extracurricular activities usually grow out of firsthand experiences. Ths was certainly true of my own efforts to lead a Red Cross Club....

At home, before going to the hospital, I had prepared some materials for a lesson on infant feeding. I had had in mind making a talk to assembled expectant mothers in the prenatal clinic. "I'm ready to give my course," I announced to the head midwife. The waiting room was crowded with silent women holding bottles. The midwife, an educated woman, smiled noncomitally. "I'll talk in French, of course; all I need is someone to interpret," I continued.

"Well, there are many languages," she said.

"If you translate into Dioula and Appolo, won't that do?"