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DEDZA, MALAWI – More than a year after COVID-19 began sweeping the world, abruptly cutting short her Peace Corps stint, Cameron Beach is once again living in rural Malawi — this time on her own dime.

The Peace Corps, a U.S. government program marking its 60th anniversary this year, boasted 7,000 volunteers in 62 countries in March 2020. They were given little time to pack before being put on a plane and sent back to the United States that month.

“It was especially painful for me because I was given 24 hours to leave a place that I’d called home for almost two years,” Beach said during a recent video call from her home in Malawi, a landlocked country in southern Africa.

Beach was trained to speak Chichewa and had been teaching English at the Mkomera Community Day Secondary School in Dedza, located in a compound about 40 kilometers southeast of the capital, Lilongwe. The 25-year-old Greenville, South Carolina, native paid her own way back to her post nine months after evacuation and is living on savings, but says she would “absolutely” rejoin the Peace Corps if it became possible.

It might be: The organization hopes to begin returning volunteers to the field late this year or early next year.

While Peace Corps volunteers would be required to be vaccinated, sending them back will depend on the situation in individual countries. Initially, about 2,400 evacuated volunteers expressed interest in going back and there are about 10,000 applications on file, Acting Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn told The Associated Press.

“Immediately after the evacuation we had tremendous interest from volunteers who were evacuated in returning to their country of service,” Spahn said. “Clearly, as time goes on, you know, people do move on with their lives, but I will say we have a robust pipeline of both people who were evacuated as well as those who were invited, but were unable to go and those who are expressing new interest.”

How soon they can be sent overseas depends on the worldwide fight against the virus, complicated by the recent emergence of the more transmissible delta variant and the slow rollout of vaccines in developing countries — many of which host Peace Corps programs.

Spahn estimates it will be several years before the Peace Corps is back to its full strength. After all, while volunteers in select countries had been evacuated before, March 2020 marked the first time since the organization was founded by President John F. Kennedy that it had to evacuate all its volunteers at the same time.

Since its creation in 1961, more than 240,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers in scores of countries. The goal is to help the countries meet their development needs with a wide variety of programs — from education to health and agriculture programs — while helping promote a better understanding of Americans.

Typical service lasts two years after a training period, the length of which depends on the country and the program. During the pandemic most Peace Corps staff, both U.S. citizens and local hires, remained in place and, in some cases, kept up some programs.

Some former volunteers even worked remotely on development projects from the United States, receiving a small stipend for their work.

Heading back overseas is nonetheless a daunting undertaking between the required training and rebuilding of programs. Areas that have few returning volunteers will also lose the institutional, cross-cultural and local knowledge typically passed on by departing volunteers to their successors.

It’s not just the Peace Corps that has had to recall thousands from remote reaches of the globe and navigate the aftermath.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had to send home about 26,000 missionaries tasked with recruiting new members to the faith known widely as the Mormon church. Many pivoted to doing missions in their home countries with a focus on online work.

In November, the church began sending missionaries back into the field and, in June of this year, the church reopened its missionary training centers in Utah, the Philippines and Mexico.

All missionaries from the United States who serve overseas are required to be vaccinated, said church spokesperson Sam Penrod. Missionaries who do not want to be vaccinated will be assigned to missions in their home countries.

“The church is taking a careful approach when assigning missionaries outside of their home country, based upon local conditions and following the guidance of government and health officials,” he said in an email.

As time goes by, potential recruits and returnees are moving on.

Cullen O’Donnell, 25, originally from Mentor, Ohio, served two years with the Peace Corps in Ecuador teaching English and then extended for a third year. He was planning another year, working on the Galapagos Islands, when COVID-19 hit.

He’d still like to go back — “then again with Peace Corps it’s very vague: ‘Yeah we’re hoping to get back to the field,’ but it keeps getting pushed back.”

So he’s getting on with his life. He now has a fulfilling job at a school for at-risk students in Pennsylvania and was just accepted to graduate school.

The Peace Corps has been accepting new applications throughout the pandemic, but in June the agency began planning for a return to Belize after the government there asked for volunteers who could help local schools recover from the pandemic’s disruptions.

But there is no indication when the first trainees would be sent to the tiny country tucked between Mexico and Guatemala.

A few volunteers refused to be evacuated but their Peace Corps service was ended, Spahn said. Despite their truncated service, volunteers are eligible for the variety of benefits typically afforded those who complete the two years — including resettlement payments, preferred hiring status for federal jobs and special scholarships.

But those former volunteers — like Beach — could help seed the revived Peace Corps, Spahn said.

Beach hadn’t been able to say goodbye. Her students had missed her.

“The time when Madam Beach left Malawi, lots of things went wrong especially in our class,” said Aness Leman Filimoni, who is in her last year of high school. “Madam Beach was teaching us English but when she left, the school could not find a suitable replacement.”

Beach is now teaching her usual two classes a day, five days a week. She’s also helping finish up a girls’ dormitory built in part with a Peace Corps grant.

Just before the pandemic, there were 108 volunteers in Malawi. Peace Corps Malawi Director Amber Lucero-Dwyer, who stayed, has seen a handful of former volunteers return on their own — although she thought most were visiting, not staying indefinitely as Beach is.

“We have tried to be as creative as possible to determine what can we do, what core Peace Corps work can we do in the absence of volunteers,” Lucero-Dwyer said.

Beach was originally sent to Malawi just weeks after her college graduation, and was scheduled to complete her service in August 2020; if she’s able to return to service, she doesn’t know how long the stint would last.

Regardless, she’s found her niche.

“It’s what I feel I’m meant to do,” Beach said of what she sees as the calling that drew her to the Peace Corps and ultimately Malawi. “It wasn’t a very windy road.”

Source: Voice of America

China’s global ambitions may have taken a hit in the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan and India, but in Africa, its sustained power and influence are forcing Washington to recalibrate its strategy toward the continent, home to 54 nations.

The United States recently committed $217 million to finance a power plant in Sierra Leone through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. When finished, this America-financed power plant will stand alongside eight key government structures China has built for Sierra Leone, including parliamentary offices, army and police headquarters, and the building that houses the West African country’s ministry of foreign affairs.

“It’s overstating to say that the continent has largely been taken over by China, though my assessment is that Beijing is the most influential foreign actor on the continent,” says Joshua Meservey, senior analyst for Africa and the Middle East at the Heritage Foundation.

“China does dominate certain important sectors,” Meservey told VOA, listing construction and telecoms among those sectors. But, he said, “the U.S. is still influential.”

In a study published in December 2020, Meservey presented a list of 186 government buildings that Chinese companies have built in Africa in recent years, many of which house parliamentary offices, presidential palaces, ministries of foreign affairs and military facilities. Beijing has also built more than a dozen intra-governmental telecommunication networks on the continent, Meservey noted.

While Washington has persuaded some allies to keep Chinese telecom giant Huawei out of their 5G networks, the company is working on 25 projects in Africa, having already carved out 70% of the continent’s 4G network and primed itself for the next step.

In June, the president of Senegal instructed his government to “rapidly repatriate all national data hosted out of the country” to a state data center built by Huawei.

“If you look at the Belt and Road, 50 African countries have signed up. That makes Africa the biggest bloc within China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI),” said Paul Nantulya, a research associate at the U.S. National Defense University’s Africa Studies Center, in a phone interview with VOA.

“The question then becomes, how does United States compete with China [on the African continent]?”

According to studies done by the China Africa Research Initiative based at Johns Hopkins University, Chinese foreign direct investment to Africa has been increasing steadily since 2003 and surpassed that of the U.S. in 2014. U.S. FDI to Africa has been declining since 2010, according to data collected by the group.

To beef up the U.S. overseas presence in the face of competition from China, a growing number of American thought leaders are calling for the government to rethink its role in strengthening U.S. corporate and strategic interests abroad.

“The genius, if you will, of the Chinese economic system is that they are working to align the company interest and the state interest together,” said Robert D. Atkinson, an economist who has served in both Democratic and Republican administrations. “What the Chinese have that we don’t is they have a strongly held view that certain industries are more important than others.”

Given that the Chinese government pours “massive subsidies” into these strategic sectors to fund its global expansion, Atkinson believes Washington could fight back by increasing foreign aid and backing private companies’ strategic ventures abroad.

“Does that mean we do everything China does? Of course not,” he said. The U.S. government should avoid “over-involvement,” he added, but “continuing what we have been doing is clearly not enough.”

Atkinson, who heads the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, believes there is a middle ground.

“The whole notion that we shouldn’t have our own national industrial policy – that’s an idea that only works if you’re not facing a competitor like China; the reality is, we are facing a competitor like China,” he said. “We can either get China to change – that’s not going to happen, we tried and failed – or we can adapt our own policies.”

Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told VOA the aggregate U.S. foreign aid budget directed toward Africa “is around 25 to 30 billion dollars a year,” a figure he said “certainly rivals Chinese lending.”

But, he said, most of the U.S. aid goes to global health programs, disease eradication and humanitarian assistance. He also acknowledged that a significant portion of the U.S. foreign aid budget goes toward multilateral institutional lending and developmental agencies, such as the World Bank.

“Where we clearly see a difference is that China is very concentrated in the very area the U.S. is largely absent, and that is [country-to-country] infrastructure financing,” Morris said. “Allowing China to finance and/or control much of the enabling infrastructure in key sectors could harm U.S. prospects in Africa going forward.”

Nantulya thinks that America could benefit from a reevaluation of what the continent means for the United States.

“Do we view Africa as a partner? Do we view Africa as a place that generates security threats that must be met with military force? Or do we view Africa as a place that, yes, has its security problems, but where strategic opportunities outweigh security risks?”

While questions linger on the American side, he said, Beijing made up its mind what Africa means for its strategic aims long ago.

Nantulya said China’s official foreign policy doctrine casts big powers as the key, neighboring countries as the priority, developing countries as “the foundation” and “multilateral platforms as the stage.”

Cast in this light, Africa is a continent where China sees “tremendous opportunities in spite of risks” and has no doubt seized upon those opportunities in political, economic and military areas alike, Nantulya told VOA.

Ultimately, the challenge that China represents is “first and foremost ideological,” he said, and that this is where the United States has an opening to compete with Beijing on a continent where China is now widely regarded the most influential foreign power.

“Values matter; Africans are fighting for and championing the values that have also guided the American experiment and the American story,” said Nantulya, a native of Tanzania who studied in Kenya and South Africa and worked across the continent before moving to the United States.

He hopes that Americans can understand that the two sides have a shared future and look at the relationship as an opportunity, rather than one where the United States is constantly coming in to put out fires.

Source: Voice of America