PERHAPS the only manual tasks for which one can safely predict volunteers will always be necessary are those resulting from natural catastrophes. Disaster aid has been an early and continuing activity of workcampers, as well as a special concern of Red Cross, Civil Defence and other volunteers. Workcamps have, for instance, helped rebuild Agadir and Skopje. At the time of writing, student volunteers are restoring some of the six million books and manuscripts of the Florence National Library damaged by the November 1966 floods. But most voluntary agencies immediately on the scene provide only summary relief (first aid, coffee, shelter for a night) and victims often wait long desperate months before government administrations help them dig out and rebuild.
Until recently workcamp organizations have suffered from the same defect. It took a year to mount the 1928 Liechtenstein operation and six months elapsed before UNA volunteers arrived in Holland after the 1953 floods. SCI's French branch solved the problem by pioneering an International Emergency Action system. Two meticulously kept and periodically updated card-files are the heart of the system. One lists volunteers from various SCI branches available to go to a disaster area when ordered to by Emergency Action's special secretariat, often within twenty-four hours of notification. The other file lists civilists pledged to loan money, vehicles and equipment to teams on just as short notice.
An early test of the system's efficiency came on 2 December 1959 when a dam-burst inundated the French Riviera resort of Fréjus, claiming some three hundred lives and leaving the badly damaged town wallowing feet deep in muck. The next day an SCI representative was on the spot and three days later 120 volunteers began work. In the following seven weeks 325 campers from 13 countries (including Vietnam, India, Spain and Poland) cleared and cleaned 150 houses, and dug out streets, orchards and vineyards.
There have been many problems with Emergency Service, as when hastily mobilized non-civilist volunteers were found to be selling SCI material at one camp. Another draw-back is that small emergency shock-teams can never hope to render decisive service when a major flood, avalanche or earthquake has struck. 'But the value of our work is not measured simply in terms of volunteer work-days, nor in cubic yards of carted earth,' says SCI viewing its efficacy, as usual, in the long-term perspective of its origins and goals.
Our presence at the place of need has a moral and symbolic importance which cannot be ignored --- we are among the advanced patrols of that 'army of peace' which Pierre Ceresole foresaw. The emergency service is an example of what we hope will one day take place on a much larger scale under the aegis of the United Nations.(1)
Alongside Emergency Action another hard-to-define group of workcamp programmes may not seem particularly urgent. The similarity between these programmes, which vary widely in work and size, is precisely that they tackle tasks that even the best organized welfare or socialist state places, rightly or wrongly, at the end of its priority list. Typifying these is volunteer participation in archaeological digs. 'Young people,' as the Paris daily newspaper, Le Monde, recently put it, 'are more and more interested in old stones.'(2) Over recent years, workcamps have been held at the Herculaneum (Italy) site and sponsored by the semi-official National Youth Delegation in Spain. In France --- where one group is called 'Operation Mole' --- 10,000 foreign and local apprentices, students and young workers have since 1954 helped restore the Château de Guise. More widespread, in Europe at least, is the situation exemplified by Britain.
There, relatively few workcamps are specifically organized to excavate. Rather, according to the Council for British Archaeology, where an archaeological society 'is able to arrange an excavation either on its own or at the request of the Ministry of Public Building and Works, it often relies for part of its labour force on members of the public (of every age group) prepared to give their services either voluntarily or for a small subsistence allowance.'(3)
More usual in the low-priority category are workcamp projects having a clear local, social and material significance for a rural community which, though grateful for a helping hand, is not in acute distress. Indeed, such projects make up the bulk of present-day international workcamping in Britain, France, Poland, West Germany, Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia.
Until recently, many organizers felt that workcamping in the industrialized countries would henceforth be limited to low-priority tasks. They were wrong, for in the 1960s volunteers, both manual and non-manual, are serving as troops in assaults mounted by several rich nations on the vestiges of domestic underdevelopment.
Ten years ago, the word 'underdeveloped' was coined to describe newly awakening countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Then, their eyes opened to squalor and stagnation abroad, Europeans and North Americans detected barren patches in their own back-gardens. The extent of poverty came as a surprise to many, who assumed that post-war prosperity and welfare programmes had somehow overcome it once and for all. The closer one looked at pockets of backwardness, however, the deeper and more numerous they became. There were underdeveloped continents overseas, but there were just as surely underdeveloped areas at home.
One form of underdevelopment stemmed as much from geographical location as from social history. Coal deposits had run out in Appalachia, rural exodus had drained vigorous elements from the population of parts of Scotland and France, and in spite of earlier efforts vast tracts of the American South and Soviet Asia were only slightly more advanced than, say, rural Mexico.
Chairman Khruschev was among the first to understand that regional development could transform a local liability into a national asset. By launching the Virgin Land scheme, he hoped to develop in Kazakhstan a second breadbasket for the USSR, counterbalancing unpredictable Ukranian yields. To grow grain, however, one needs people. And in a modern nation people --- even on the frontier --- must be housed and educated provided with electricity and roads. In 1959 the first team of summer volunteers, 339 physics students from Moscow State University, worked on 16 'objects' in Kazakhstan, mainly involving the construction of adobe houses.
By 1965 the scheme had aroused widespread enthusiasm among both Soviet and foreign youth. That year, some 25,000 students from 330 faculties and institutes in 80 cities spent three months, in the Virgin Lands building 5,654 'objects', including schools, high-tension power lines and a 132-metre bridge on the all-important highway linking the Kazakh industrial centre of Karaganda with Tselinograd ('Virgin Land City'). Most brigades were national, but one included 30 volunteers from the Moscow Institute of Power and 53 representing 18 countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America from Lumumba University in Moscow.
An Iraqi member of this team --- called 'The Planet's Youth'---was warned, when he volunteered, 'that the work would be hard, that we would be living in tents, preparing our own meals, and working in all sorts of weather.' Once at the Novo-Nikolsky State Farm, the students received a warm welcome from the people,
both at work and in their homes; many of us made good friends among them, they hid nothing from us and treated us not only as guests but as work-mates.... This sincerity and hospitality hardened our will to work and our team was an example of how people from different countries, brought up differently, can by working together on a joint task successfully solve many problems.(4)
At the end of the summer, 'The Planet's Youth' had built twelve model homes and a coop for 12,000 hens.
Although most students in the Virgin Land brigades are new to shovel and trowel, the quality of their work, which is executed under the watchful eye of professional foremen, compares with that of the best. In 1965 an experimental school built from blueprints to lightning-rod by student volunteers won third prize in the Construction Ministry's All-Union Competition for Quality Construction. The farmers who have to live in student-built houses and ride on student-laid roads are delighted. 'We're looking forward to having the students again,' the Director of the Novo-Nikolsky sovkhoz where 'The Planet's Youth' worked told an Izvestia correspondent at the beginning of the 1966 season. 'The kids work well.' The Virgin Land workcamp programme has been nicknamed 'The Third Term', wrote the Izvestia reporter; 'there's no mucking about. Here you're evaluated according to your WORK.'(5)
A large part of the 450,000 Polish, 400,000 Bulgarian and 30,000 Hungarian volunteers mobilized each year for all forms of service, ranging from a day to three months, labour in backward areas of their countries.
Mobilization of volunteers for development of blighted regions in wealthy Western nations is not nearly so massive because, until recently, government support has been niggardly. Also, the problems faced are more diffuse. Kazakhstan is a frontier of industrialization. Sutherland, in northern Scotland, for instance, is a backwater left by the Industrial Revolution. Between 1951 and 1961 Sutherland's population fell by 1.2 per cent. School-leavers go south to industrial centres because of antiquated agricultural methods and the county's isolation and the often primitive living conditions found there. Deprived of its young labour force, Sutherland neither improves its crofting nor attracts tourists. International Voluntary Service, SCI's British branch., began to help Sutherlanders break the vicious circle with a 1961 workcamp that installed a water supply in the village of Badcall.
Since then, IVS camps have aided various coastal townships of Sutherland to improve tourist amenities and modernize crofting. Here, development is more than electrification, bracken-clearing and road building, for 'in close-knit Highland communities . . . social consequences are as important as the practical work.'(6) One of the important social consequences of IVS's work in Sutherland has been the immediate ending of isolation.
Workcampers were not day trippers, and friendships formed between them and the villagers. In one port, Fanagmore, a 1963 camp trebled the population. The townspeople only found a more popular topic of conversation when, one afternoon a few months later, the Royal Yacht popped in to anchor.
Social work has also achieved prominence --- even pre-eminence --- in volunteer programmes in America's underdeveloped regions. After a decade of self-satisfaction, 'the torch,' announced President Kennedy in his Inaugural Address, 'passed to a new generation of Americans.' For this generation, in Arthur Schlesinger's words, 'self-criticism became not only legitimate but patriotic.'(7) One particularly vociferous group of New Frontier muckrakers incensed by J. K. Galbraith's incisive 1958 analysis of The Affluent Society and Michael Harrington's vivid 1962 description of The Other America, focused their criticism and proposals on America's underdeveloped regions and underprivileged citizens. Preoccupied with other, mainly foreign, issues and crises, the Kennedy administration did not have time to draw up a comprehensive programme designed to get the poor off the dole and back into the mainstream of the nation's prosperity.
Nevertheless, the critics did not content themselves with analysing and describing misery. They wanted action and fired the first shots in the War on Poverty. Prompted by the pioneering efforts of the American Friends Service Committee and similar groups, and encouraged by the Peace Corps' demonstration that the spirit of self-sacrifice was far from dead in young Americans, a spate of voluntary service associations sprang up around the country. Some attacked regional backwardness as a global problem, encompassing the several challenges of racism, illiteracy, sickness, slums and debilitating apathy. Among the regional agencies were the Massachusetts Commonwealth Service Corps and the North Carolina Volunteers (NCV).
Created in 1963 by the private, non-profit-making North Carolina Fund as a means of returning 'to the people of poverty their birthright --- the American ideal of self-reliance'(8) the NCV programme is conducted without regard to race, since poverty affects Negroes and whites alike. It was a breakthrough in the South --- and a surprise to many Northern liberals. For eleven weeks each summer, several dozen in- and out-of-State university students do, as one volunteer put it, 'a hundred different things trying to dent the horny crust of poverty.'(9)
Organizers of private volunteer programmes attacking the underdevelopment of impoverished areas of the Western countries seldom if ever attempt to tackle poverty single-handed. Their contribution can, at best, be modest in comparison with the needs, and they are gratified when their example prods local, regional and national authorities to act. By concentrating a series of workcamps in the Pyrenees foot-hill département of Ariège, the energy and ingenuity of which have been severely impaired by rural depopulation, SCI's French branch has sparked off governmental efforts for regional reconstruction.
In Canada, governmental and private co-operation also play a large part in the work of the Travailleurs Etudiants du Québec (TEQ---Student Workers of Quebec). Beginning in 1965, TEQ has served deprived rural and urban areas, from the Gaspé backwoods to Montreal slums, in co-operation with public and private agencies on projects ranging from family budget planning to trade union journalism.(10)
There have been notable successes in volunteer-staffed assaults on geographically caused underdevelopment, where causes and needs can be readily isolated from surrounding affluence. The use of voluntary service to alleviate the plight of economically underprivileged or citizens otherwise at a disadvantage has been more problematic. It is like the difference between snow and fog. Snow falls outside and leaves the observer snug at the window: fog seeps in under the door, chilling and dampening everything in its path. Snow can be shovelled away; fog is a less tangible enemy.
Underdevelopment can be defined and attacked in terms of a province, county, state or département. Unemployability, racism and other social ills afflicting even prosperous areas throughout the industrialized nations result more from a state of mind than a geographical or material setting. Even when economic opportunity presents itself, many of the underprivileged do not want or know how to take advantage of it. One can for instance, manipulate fiscal policy to provide more and better jobs. But this does not suffice to integrate apathetic and uneducated slum-dwellers and other groups who are refugees in their own countries into affluent societies.
As in workcamps with the jobless of the 1930s, shovel and paint-brush programmes can alter squalid surroundings and project a ray of hope into depressed communities. They cannot eradicate the causes. But today the causes are social rather than economic and, unlike their counterparts of three decades ago, volunteers are hacking away as best they can at the roots. The difference is that more often than not voluntary service with underprivileged sectors of the population is social rather than manual. Thus, the changing needs of modern societies modify the nature of volunteers' tasks and the public image of the volunteers themselves. Noting this evolution, Alec Dickson, long-time workcamper and founder of Britain's Voluntary Service Overseas and Community Service Volunteers, has warned that 'It would be disastrous if voluntary service were to become synonymous with visiting old ladies.'(11)
Indeed, on the surface voluntary service in the Western industrialized countries seems to have come the full circle. Physical labour made inroads into smug Victorian charity. Yet today in the West manual tasks are most often of marginal or symbolic worth in aiding the underprivileged. What difference is there between the group of Harvard students who, in 1874, founded a Sunday School in Boston's Chinatown, thus launching the College's service programme, and those who, serving under that programme last year, volunteered an hour or two a week to teach in a near-by prison? Both groups doubtless worked in a spirit of self-sacrifice, but the latter was more modest. Not only do present-day Harvard volunteers not seek to 'save' the people they are serving. They also expect to learn through serving as much about the prisoners, about society, about themselves, as they teach. As Alec Dickson implied, it is not the fact of visiting old ladies that could be disastrous for voluntary service's image, it is the way and spirit in which they are visited. With few exceptions, non-manual volunteers realize, and behave as though they realize, that service today is a reciprocal process, that they receive as well as give.
There is an even more far-reaching difference between Victorian charity and modern voluntary service in the Western industrialized countries. It is that many, perhaps the majority, of young volunteers today serve not out of attachment to a given ideology but from a desire to be useful and have a stimulating experience at the same time. Many youngsters still become volunteers because they are Scouts or Guides, members of the YMCA or YWCA. But just as many, if not more, belong to no youth movement. For them, the ideal framework for service is the organization like Action Seven, a clearing house through which each year hundreds of young German-speaking Swiss youth are placed as volunteers in workcamps, harvest camps, hospitals, children's homes and neighbour-aid projects, for periods ranging from a day to several months.(12
'If Voluntary Service Overseas works in the deserts of Asia and the jungles of Africa,' mused Alec Dickson in 1962, 'why not here? '(13) Not one to dawdle over the finer details once he has a good idea, Alec wasted no time in putting his Community Service Volunteers into action. There was no lack of eighteen-year-olds impatient for something useful to fill the break between apprenticeship and work in industry, cadetship and Police College, school and university or teacher training college.
Finding jobs for them, or rather convincing public and private officials that the hundreds of jobs begging for takers could be filled by inexperienced young people, was something of a headache. At first, the job canvass turned up numerous polite refusals. Then, as the first CSV's made a good reputation in spite of grim working conditions and endlessly complicated tasks, the professionals began to unbend. To date many scores of volunteers have worked for periods of from four months to a year or more in some two thousand institutions scattered around Britain.
Thanks in part to the publicity accorded to Community Service Volunteers (who now receive government support) local voluntary service is becoming an increasingly popular pastime among young people in Britain. One dynamic M.P. long involved in voluntary service has affirmed in the Guardian that 'The most exciting development in youth work during the past decade has certainly been the change in emphasis from service for youth to service by youth.'(14) In a 1965 survey, less than a quarter of Councils of Social Service --- local private agency co-ordinating bodies --- reported that they had had no offers of service from young people.(15)
In some cases, special local structures have been created, not always without opposition. An unrepentant Manchester Alderman told an Observer reporter he had 'kicked everyone's backside something shocking' to get Youth and Community Service off the ground. The extension of Task Force voluntary service to eight London boroughs has not been easy either --but in Wandsworth alone 2,500 'grandchildren' now help 800 old people. Alec Dickson likes to stress the reciprocal benefits reaped by citing the case of young resident Indians visiting old people in Southall --- and brushing up their English. 'Each is convinced they're doing it to help the other,' he told the Observer reporter.(16)
As in Britain, an early problem facing large-scale mobilization of United States volunteers for service at home was placement. Launched at the end of 1964 by Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver in the government-sponsored Office of Economic Opportunity to send 'lowly paid., highly motivated people into poor areas,'(17) Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) were soon obliged to halve their unrealistic first year goal of 4,000. Nevertheless a reservoir of would-be volunteers was there (15,247 applications in the first six months), as was the work (in the first four months requests from 218 private and public, urban and rural anti-poverty agencies) and VISTA's staff did a herculean job in matching the two. At the time of writing (February 1967) over 5,000 volunteers are in training or working on VISTA projects in some thirty American states.
The standard service period is one year (including six weeks training) but a summer scheme called VISTA Associates was launched in 1966 when students worked with regular Volunteers in a hundred Appalachian communities. 'After returning to school,' predicted Sargent Shriver, 'many VISTA Associates will continue their service on weekends and during school vacations. It is hoped that many will become full-time VISTA Volunteers after their education is completed.'(18)
Unlike Community Service Volunteers and workcamp sponsors in the wealthy countries, Volunteers in Service to America are successfully tapping an unexpected supply of skills and good will. Nearly one third of the applicants are sixty or over, retired but skilled and eager to serve. George Cottell, at seventy-one, is not therefore an untypical Volunteer in Service to America. Retired after thirty years as business manager of a Massachusetts electrical workers union branch, he enrolled in VISTA in 1965. Following training, he was assigned to a city welfare department and quickly discovered that although opportunities existed for disadvantaged citizens many were not aware they existed or didn't know how to use them. He established himself among those needing help
as a man who knew all the angles, and knew how to use them when it came to finding a job, obtaining welfare services or hospital care, steering people into training opportunities and opening up other avenues of assistance.(19)
'If I were not working now,' he says, 'I'd just be rotting away.'(20)
CSV and VISTA have mounted a full-scale attack on the obstacles facing underprivileged citizens of Britain and America, making popular the notion of non-manual volunteer service of a longer duration than the normal workcamp. Other organizations prefer, for a variety of motives, to concentrate on one group of disadvantaged. Thus, in the United States, many volunteers have worked with racial minorities who are underprivileged precisely because of their race. The American Jewish Society for Service (AJSS) has, for example, made a point of holding its summer workcamps in Indian Reservations. A non-Indian teenager from Cloquet, Minnesota, where AJSS held a 1964 project, wrote to the camp leader. 'Through working on the new community centre I saw that Indians are people, not just a deprived and needy race which deserved a better break. Thank you for this new insight.'(21)
Also working with Indians, and with Eskimos as well, are the fifty-odd long-term volunteers, from both French- and English-speaking backgrounds, at present comprising the government-sponsored but autonomous Company of Young Canadians working inside the country.
The race in most urgent need of help in North America is the Negroes; both black and white volunteers have worked hard at what has been the most widely publicized exercise in 'domestic service' of this century. Some inter-racial workcamps have been held in the southern USA, but these have been few and far between, barely able to scratch the surface of segregation. Where volunteers have been more useful, and where they have done more than scratch the surface, is in creating the channels for the exercise of Negroes' civil rights --- through voter registration and political and trade union organization --- and in helping them exercise those rights intelligently --- through the famous Freedom Schools.(22)
In Mississippi, before and since the 1954 Supreme Court decision ordered them to integrate, schools have been segregated and very unequal. The quality of teaching in Negro schools is generally poor, premises and equipment are dilapidated. The average Negro completes only six years of poor education. Many, never having got more than a foot in the door to knowledge, relapse into illiteracy. Meeting the white power structure, Negro ignorance breeds superficial servility and deep fear. And fear paralyses: in Holmes County, Mississippi, out of 8,000 voting age Negroes only 41 had dared register by 1964. Education was one bottle-neck, and that spring the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO, a union of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, Congress on Racial Equality and other civil rights groups) planned to open fourteen Freedom Schools in the State. By mid August a substantial segment of COFO's 700 Mississippi volunteers were teaching some 2,500 pupils in 47 Freedom Schools.
That summer, at Philadelphia, Mississippi, one Negro and two white volunteers who had come to visit a burnt-out Freedom School were beaten and shot to death by white segregationists. The triple murder did not frighten the other volunteers. Quite the reverse, two hundred of them decided to stay through the winter, keeping the Freedom Schools open the year round.
Race is one of many factors contributing to the underprivileged status of slum-dwellers in America and other industrialized countries. VISTA and multiple other bodies are attacking urban blight, but it is well to remember that voluntary participation in urban renewal is not recent. With less funds and fanfare than some of the recent programmes, but in much the same spirit, workcampers have broken the trail for later effort over nearly three decades. Furthermore, l'Abbé Pierre's Emmaüs movement and similar bodies depend largely on the services of medium- and long-term volunteers, executing social and manual projects, to bring relief to the makeshift shanty-towns ringing most of the cities of Western Europe.
Another type of service particularly adapted to urban slums is weekend workcamping. Each weekend throughout the school year, students and other young people who can only spare Saturday and Sunday take part in workcamps in many countries of Europe and North America. In a few cases, the volunteers trek to out-of-the-way villages. In Poland, interns, doctors and nurses volunteer under the Union of Rural Youth's White Sunday scheme to teach first aid and family planning in farming communities. In the USSR, the Subotnik and Voskresenik ('Saturdaynik' and 'Sundaynik') movement involves many thousands of young people in one-day urban as well as rural service projects.
However, the vast majority of weekend workcamps take place in large cities and it may be said with little exaggeration that, in the West at least, they have a common ancestor in one man, an American Quaker. As a young man in the Depression, David Richie worked in a co-operative farm of unemployed men producing food for city breadlines, in the days before Roosevelt's New Deal brought relief. 'This was a rather lonely and overwhelming experience for this youngster by himself,' remembers David, 'so I readily joined in the first real summer workcamp in 1934,' which was held following a visit by Pierre Ceresole to American Quakers. 'This and other summer workcamps led to the concern to bring that experience into the wintertime and into the lives of many, many more people, and many who were far from ready to volunteer a whole summer.'(23)
If the objective was quantity, one might ask, weekend workcamping --- with its few hours of work and small numbers of volunteers in each project --- might seem an odd way to go about achieving it. Yet, in the twenty-seven years since David founded it, the Philadelphia weekend workcamp programme (sponsored by the Friends Social Order Committee) has furnished many thousand man-days of work. In the 1965-6 season alone, 1,267 volunteers participated in 81 projects, several being organized on each of 18 weekends. 'Better to light a candle than curse the darkness' is the motto of David's Philadelphia camps.
Then, too, stress is laid of giving volunteers a capsule education on urban deprivation. 'We do get many less socially motivated young people in our weekend workcamps [than in our summer projects],' says David, 'and are able to move them much further and more dramatically in their social awareness and commitment.'(24) Seven years after a weekend workcamp one volunteer wrote, 'These are the events that shape the fabric of one's life.' And another, five years later, wrote,
My workcamp experience is part of the reason for my decision to join the Peace Corps in Tanzania. To do my small part to better understanding seems ... so necessary. To make people conscious of this necessity is the greatest gift of workcamps.(25)
Some experienced workcampers look askance at current attempts to adapt voluntary service to the needs of disadvantaged sectors of the population of industrialized countries where pick-and-shovel projects are useless. Yet the need for socially significant manual service is as scant as the number of potential volunteers is abundant. Thus, the reconversion of workcamping has ineluctably led even the traditional workcamp sponsors to organize projects resulting in not a single blister. In August 1964, Internationella Arbetslag held the first joint international recreation camp. for physically handicapped and non-handicapped youth to take place in Sweden. The camp life 'opened up the world'(26) for them, and the following year IAL sent its first handicapped volunteer to a workcamp abroad, in Britain.
One disadvantaged group in which physical labour will be more, not less, widespread and --- strange as it may sound---popular, is maladjusted young people. The earliest experiment involving delinquent youth in work projects designed as rehabilitative, rather than punitive, measures dates back to the 1920s. Alarmed by violence and criminality among roving bands of adolescents left without families by the Revolution and Civil War, the Soviet authorities transported some of them to special camps in the non-European regions of the USSR. There, the young people's first reaction was to destroy everything in sight. But the pedagogues running the experiment refrained from intervening to stem the rampage. With the onset of winter, moreover, the young people were told they would have to fend for themselves. Provided with food and tools, they rebuilt their cabins. Thus they learned through first-hand experience the need for elementary social values.
The Soviet experiment was a forerunner of what has recently come to be seen in many countries as an effective means of rehabilitating maladjusted youth. In the interim, treatment of young offenders has not always got to the core of delinquency in so dynamic a way. In the industrialized countries, the Co-ordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service has suggested that:
Juvenile delinquency is largely a reaction to unprecedented material wealth and the orderly, often boring society that produced it. And delinquents will not be bribed back into the fold by offers to teach them the techniques and graces of that society. On the contrary, what is needed is something exciting, something involving physical challenge, something that can bring delinquents together with other energetic ... young people in a situation where they face together the necessity for some sort of even rudimentary social order.(27)
Put more academically,
The re-education and resocialization of a maladjusted (or delinquent) young person are achieved most completely by introducing him into a healthy social milieu. . . . A workcamp comprises all the necessary ingredients: a social community based on very positive moral values, a job whose usefulness is recognized, group life, social and cultural activities, etc.(28)
It is logical, then, that in recent years increasing use should be made of workcamps to rehabilitate socially maladjusted young people by private and governmental agencies, working as often as not in co-operation with one another. Two emerging approaches and one problem warrant particular mention.
The first approach is that of organizations which deal with delinquents already sentenced by the courts. To accommodate this category --- usually boys referred from correctional institutions --- State-operated workcamps have been opened since 1931 in the state of California, Michigan, New York, Minnesota, Illinois and Washington. All do conservation work, road building, pest-control and similar work, but only some provide vocational and other forms of training.
In Austria, where the government itself organizes no camps, a series of forestry projects for young detainees has been organized since 1960 by the Steiermärkischer Waldschutzverband (SW---Steiermark Conservation Association). Though escape-prone at their institution, none of the boys has left an SW workcamp. 'This improvement,' writes the Association's director, 'is above all due to their consciousness of not being locked up, and to the fact that the Waldschutzverband treated them as if they were normal apprentices or students. . . . They could hardly wait for the next year's camp!'(29)
Camps for convicted delinquents have also been organized in Yugoslavia, where work teams are formed (often under the leadership of one of the young people) within penal institutions, and delinquents have occasionally taken part in the Union of Yugoslav Youth's normal volunteer brigades. In Britain, successive groups of half a dozen boys from an open borstal spent a week each working with Leeds University students on an archaeological dig in 1962.
The second approach focuses on socially maladjusted young people who are potential though not yet convicted delinquents. It is fraught with many ticklish problems.
Are we prepared to let a workcamp's output drop to almost nil, even if socially maladjusted participants profit from taking part in it? How can we make effective enough contact with maladjusted youth to induce them to come to a workcamp? Should workcampers be informed as to which members are the maladjusted ones?
A British expert put these key questions to CoCo's 1960 World Conference, stressing how difficult it is to define such terms as 'socially maladjusted' before an offence has been committed. 'In attempting to help socially maladjusted young people,' he warned, 'we must ask ourselves to what extent we ourselves are socially adjusted, realizing that "socially adjusted" is a relative term.'(30)
For offenders convicted and detained, workcamps are doubtless more attractive than being cooped up in an institution and they tend to be on their good behaviour at the work-site. For boys on the threshold of delinquency, workcamping --- which explicitly aims to divert their flirtation with antisocial, even criminal behaviour --- may seem less attractive. Nevertheless, New York State has made provision for camps for pre-delinquents and, in 1961, le Tonton discovered how inextricably intertwined social and antisocial attitudes can be in the same group of mauvais garçons.
After much persuasion, fifteen boys from a tough quarter of Paris accepted to come to the Apprentices' Mill. 'The first eight days went very well,' reported le Tonton. 'The fellows worked to rebuild the mill's sluice which for fifty years or more had been overrun with silt and brambles.' But trouble ensued and the blousons noirs finally had to be sent home. 'Then, without saying a word, some of the better ones returned on their own to finish the job.' It was only a 'half-defeat'.(31)
Some organizations --- this is the problem --- have, opened a Pandora's box by attempting to include both normal and maladjusted campers in the same projects. At times contact has been tenuous indeed. Near Geneva, a series of SCI and World Council of Churches' camps held in the late 1950s helped the sixteen to twenty-year-old inmates of a Centre d'Accueil redecorate the old farm-house they were to live in. The work project was a success, although some of the boys tended to slack off while the outside volunteers laboured mightily to finish on schedule. In fact, camper-delinquent exchange, a major aim of the camps, was fragile at best. 'To what extent this camp really influenced their life is hard to tell,' wrote a volunteer after a 1958 ecumenical project at the Centre. 'I myself found it a large disadvantage that the campers had insufficient orientation as to the nature of the boys' problems and what could be done to help them.'(32)
A more successful camp organized in Britain in 1962 by a Midlands university proved that borstal boys can find a common language with students more or less their own age. There were, said one student camper,
no lessons, no preaching, no subtle means of 'getting at' or 'reforming' the borstal boys. The aim was to live, play and work together and the campers found a real companionship which no barriers, real or imaginary, of class or crime, could destroy.(33)
Workcampers seeking to help maladjusted young people cannot reasonably expect to achieve more than this without special training. And, after all, 'real companionship' is a good beginning.
A final example illustrating the variety of youth services in the industrialized countries whose primary benefit does not accrue to the volunteers, is a rather particular type of wage-earning project. Working in factories, construction gangs or special bob-a-job campaigns, young people have turned over sometimes fantastic earnings to a variety of causes, as often as not enabling volunteers in the developing countries to get ahead with their programmes.
In 1965 $400,000 were raised in a single day by Operation Dagsverke (OD-Operation A Day's Work) under which 150,000 Swedish teenagers ran errands, held entertainment events and did odd jobs (two dusted the King's Library). Run with all the efficiency --- and some of the hucksterism --- of a modern public relations campaign, but entirely by secondary school students,
OD contributed its proceeds to the Peruvian Co-operación Popular programme described in Chapter 8.
Only a little less spectacular was the construction of a spacious school on a Virgin Land sovkhoz by Soviet students. 16,000 of them worked on construction gangs during 1964, earning enough money to buy the material for the school, which was built the following summer by a team from a Moscow technical academy and decorated by 87 volunteers from the Odessa Building Institute.