Standard Course
With respect to our first concern,
the program of study adopted
closely resembled a standard academic
course of studies. Besides
physical conditioning, courses in
first aid, courses in jeep driving,
etc., Volunteers received heavy
doses of Area Studies, dealing with
the politics, economics, sociology,
and anthropology of Africa in
general and Sierre Leone in particular.
We not only made use of
Cornell students and faculty with
competencies in African studies,
but imported numerous specialists.
In addition, Volunteers received
intensive language training in the
two major languages of Sierre
Leone, Mende and Temne, and also
in the Creole dialect used in the
major cities and towns. A full time
linguist supervised class and laboratory
sessions. He was assisted by six
Sierre Leone students who ate with
the Volunteers and participated in
all their training and extra-curricular
social activities. In addition,
Volunteers received lectures and
film sessions on African art, the day
to day activities in villages and
towns, history and geography, etc.
With respect to our second
concern, the kinds of Volunteers
who would most likely be successful,
we had no preconceptions. In
those early, idealistic years of the
Peace Corps there was no way of
knowing which or what kinds of
measures to use in predicting
success. Hence all measures were
used: college grades, personal
recommendations, the results of
individual and group psychiatric
sessions, sociometric tests, psychological
tests, grades in Peace Corps
training activities, evaluations by
Peace Corps instructors (ourselves),
and Volunteers' self-reports of their
prior educational experiences and
life histories. We selected a number
of criteria of success: dropping out,
or being "selected out," of the
Program; leaving Africa before the
two year period of service was up,
for other than health reasons;
expressed dissatisfaction or inn-effectiveness
by the Volunteers
and/or by their supervisors in
Africa. While by the time this group
of Volunteers had finished their
two years of service most of us who
had trained then had scattered, we
were able through correspondence
with each other and with the
Volunteers to begin to draw some
tentative conclusions.
