The kids are going home

I was on the bus yesterday when the call came:

Peace Corps is pulling me and the others in my group out of El Salvador in April, 6 months early. After so many rumours and chambre about this, here it is. Unless Dylan and I can appeal and get an extension from Peace Corps Washington’s decision to have an early COS (close of service) for those of us who entered the country in July 2010, we will be coming home to the big USA on April 30.

This decision is part of a massive scale-back of Peace Corps volunteers in Central America’s “Northern Triangle”: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. These three countries have seen elevated levels of gang violence for the last 10 years, and it is getting worse. Honduras recently beat El Salvador for the prize of “most violent country in the world”, measured in homicides.

In El Salvador, the 2 volunteer groups that have come more recently than ours are being allowed to finish their service, albeit with some rather draconian security restrictions (for example, no bus travel) that are currently being implemented. (These may in fact be too restrictive and counterproductive to safety).

So Peace Corps El Salvador is officially not closing down. The number of volunteers will be cut in half (to I think about 50) when we leave.

A lot of Central American volunteers (I think) feel like we have done a good job of handling the risks of living in Central America and we want to finish the projects we have started.

Additionally, many feel that pulling Peace Corps out is counterproductive to addressing the root causes of the violence happening in Central America. Taylor Dippert, a former Central American PCV, writes in the Journal of Foreign Relations, “Pulling Peace Corps volunteers out of violent Central American countries is an inappropriate policy response to a much larger, more complex dilemma. It is disaster mitigation. Washington should address the root causes of the problems in Central America, instead of avoiding them.”

That is why Dylan and I are going to do our best to finish our service and stay until September if possible. Our site is very safe and we feel we can assume the risks (which luckily for us are minimal) and have an obligation to our community. If we can’t appeal… we’ll just have to get it all done by April!

We still haven’t told our community members yet… We will wait until after the All Volunteer Conference Jan. 30-Feb. 1 to see what Peace Corps Washington has to say.