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Third World Aid: Send Money, Not Your Kids
January 26, 2006; Page A11

Your article "Kids & Money: Do Service Trips Make Sense?¹" (The Journal Report, Jan. 16) didn't question whether the $7,500 spent by an American family to send their child to the Third World to help the starving masses would have done vastly more good if it had been donated to a charity in that Third World country.

I am a retired American diplomat and have spent some time in the Third World and have questioned the value of money spent to help the needy. My last overseas assignment was in New Delhi from 1997 to 1999. I remember an email exchange with a parent who wanted to pay for his kid to come empty bed pans in one of Mother Teresa's orphanages. I told him that for the same money he would spend to send the kid to India to work one month, the orphanage could hire either a local worker who spoke the language to do the same work, and do it better, for 20 years or a local full-time physician for two years.

While stationed in our embassy in the Philippines, I had some contact with the Peace Corps there. The group had about 65 volunteers, each paid about $10,000 a year, in addition to 69 local-hire full-time employees and one full-time career American. The typical Peace Corps volunteer served two years, but was in country only about 20 months and typically spent four to six months learning the local language and ways. The volunteers were productive for only about 14 months. But even their tiny salary (by U.S. standards) of about $20,000 for two years would have hired equally qualified, locally educated workers for five years.

When the Peace Corps was created in the early 1960s there was a great shortage of educated people in the Third World. The opposite is true now, with our "volunteers" taking jobs away from the many college-educated local workers who have no hope of finding jobs and who would work for one-fourth or one-half or one-tenth the small salary of Peace Corps volunteers.

My view of the Peace Corps is that it is really just a U.S. government program for paid vacations in the Third World.

Peter Rice
Sarasota, Fla.