P. F. Kluge

The groups of volunteers who came to Micronesia were numbered, something like military historians number the days around an invasion, D-Day Plus One, and so forth. I was part of Micronesia Five, but there were still some Micronesia One volunteers around when I completed training and arrived on the island of Saipan, in the Northern Marianas. Finishing up their stints, they regaled us with tales of what it was like, having been the first to hit the island beaches: weeks of receptions, invitations, parties. Everyone knew their names. “A new kind of American” was arriving. That was the impression. Just as the Spanish had yielded to the Germans, the Germans to the Japanese, the Japanese to the Americans, now the American period itself was mutating from naval administration to Department of the Interior control and now . . . Kennedy’s children, who spoke a little of the local language, shunned automobiles, moved into beat-up village houses, enthusiastically sampled local foods. Oh, they’d had a good war all right, the men and women in Micronesia One, but by the time I arrived the honeymoon was over.

People were wising up. Many of the career administrators in the Turst Territory government felt that the Peace Corps made them look bad. Some of them were ex-marines, blood-on-the-reef irredentists, quick to resent the long-haired, pot-smoking, draft dodging hippies who now cluttered what used to be a simple, neo-colonial landscape. Peace Corps volunteers hassled them. The architects didn’t order building supplies through government channels, the lawyers encouraged local clients to sue the government. Down in Yap, some guys showed up with island tattoos, chewed betelnut. A girl or two went topless. What the Peace Corps brought wasn’t a new era or a new regime so much as another level of American presence, a stratum of cut-rate Americans, cheaper by the dozen, a buffer state between the Trust Territory government ….

The Saipanese—all of the Micronesians—were less impressed as well. Game and likable as the volunteers might be, they were youngsters in a place that valued seniority, innocent and unarmed in a place that respected clout and—surprise!—they were poor in a society that esteemed wealth. That was the crushing lesson: Voluntary poverty did not impress. “Living on the level of the people” came off as naïve, as downright wacky, when it was from that level people were trying to escape. We learned local languages while locals learned English. We hitch-hiked while they shot by us in brand new cars. We wore zoris—rubber thonged sandals—while they aspired to white Bally loafers. The conflict was basic, classic, poignant. The Peace Corps worried about American military bases while the islands’ brightest kids rushed off to Guam to enlist in the very war many of us had come to Micronesia to avoid. We worried about identity--theirs, not ours--culture, ecology, the life-giving reefs, the unspoiled islands, dying handicrafts, and clean lagoons, while locals pondered fast roads, new cars, big hotels, and a ticket to Honolulu.

It didn’t take long for the Peace Corps staff to figure out that volunteers did best outside of district centers--modern settlements--like Saipan or Koror. The farther away, the better. Thus, most Peace Corps stints combined the charms of spearfishing on outlying atolls with long, lonely battles on behalf of sanitary waterseal toilets, and hours of teaching English in a baking classroom right out of The Bridge on the River Kwai. I, thank God, escaped all that.

                                                                        from The Edge of Paradise, pp. 18-19