BEFORE turning to voluntary service programmes that may be said primarily to benefit participants, it is well to stress that all projects provide some satisfaction. Otherwise, volunteers would not return --- some year after year--- to workcamps and social service programmes. Excepting the small number of projects where volunteers pay their own way, the material appeal of service to many young people, although this may be disgruntling to organizers, should not be underestimated. Particularly in Europe, where in the summer and long spring vacations wanderlust infects hundreds of thousands of high school students, a workcamp is often the cheapest stop on a rucksack-cum-hitchhike grand tour.
Workcamping also holds the prospect of adventure. of international contact and --- although younger volunteers might not put it in these words --- of learning and growing. Some organizations make special provision for study activities aimed at deepening volunteers' knowledge of the project location and broadening their general culture. A variant of this formula is the work-and-study camp, in which time is equally divided between physical labour and lectures and discussion on a predetermined topic. Elsewhere, vocational training and similar courses take place in the framework of voluntary service schemes. Yugoslav Youth Union, Polish OHP and Bulgarian Dimitrov drives offer instruction in such subjects as building construction, photography, amateur radio, agronomy, first aid, tractor driving and automobile mechanics as well as history and civics.(1)
Whether or not a given project includes cultural or vocational study, workcamping and other forms of voluntary service have an undeniable educational impact on participants in terms of promoting growth and change of values and attitudes. Yugoslav volunteers on the Brotherhood and Unity Highway once adopted the motto: 'We build the road and the road builds us.'
In 1965 Yale University followed the lead of less tradition-minded American institutions, such as Antioch and Bennington colleges, and set up a programme recognizing the educational value of off-campus service activities. A plan was adopted whereby students could complete their four-year B.A. course in five years by devoting a year to work in the developing countries. In contrast to existing foreign study schemes, this was to be a 'virtual furlough from academic concerns',(2) though still an educational experience.
Exactly what growth and change come about is not quite so clear as the fact that they do take place. Character formation is not a form of education that can be measured like, say, one's knowledge of motor mechanics. Yet a workcamp would seem a priori to be a setting particularly conducive to character formation. Most participants are in their late teens or early twenties, the age of moratorium between childhood rights and adulthood duties when a youngster is consciously or unconsciously eager to test himself as an autonomous being, to experiment with new ideas and behaviour without having to accept lasting adherence to an ideology or ultimate responsibility for his acts.
Such experimentation can most easily take place in a temporary social vacuum where young people are not inhibited by the authoritarian hierarchy of family, school or job. Some need also to be unfettered by the pressures of church, party or traditional youth movement. Others, on the contrary, seek the opportunity to express and test total but temporary commitment to an ideology. All want to try their wings as fledgling adults.
The extent to which this diffuse, intangible process of character formation is encouraged in voluntary youth service projects has intrigued organizers for years. AFSC commissioned a survey of the results of its camps as long ago as 1940. More recently, carefully controlled studies have been carried out in the United States, West Germany and Yugoslavia.(3)
It is best to begin by stating what workcamps do not do. The American and German researchers hypothesized, in accordance with the explicit and implicit goals of the sponsors of the projects they studied, that even a few weeks in a workcamp would promote increased political interest, awareness and competence and, in American camps at least, an evolution towards acceptance of the sponsors' own tenets: politico-economic liberalism and non-violence. These expectations were not fulfilled. Indeed the number of young Germans considering themselves politically interested actually decreased.
Political outlooks did not mature, says the American researcher, H. Riecken, because they were not 'directly and immediately relevant to the situation of action in workcamps, not directly related to the kinds of relationships campers established with each other [and therefore not subject to] regulation by group standards'.(4)
If awareness of and interest in political issues outside the camp did not increase, personal political skills --- interaction of campers as a body politic --- definitely developed. Among the German adolescents, this was manifested by increased self-confidence. 'In school,' a girl aged sixteen told D. Danckwortt's interviewers four months after a camp, 'I used to keep quiet and did not dare say much. I always thought: if you say something you'll only make yourself ridiculous! But now I don't care. Everything is different. I don't know why ... a camp should make so much of a difference. . .'(5) By successfully carrying out a socially useful job of work, the older American campers 'became significantly less anxious about inadequacy in achievant activities, while becoming simultaneously more motivated to achieve.'(6) Expressed in the context of camp life and management, the volunteers' increased feeling of social competence meant that a great measure of self-government could be practised.
That democracy is possible in groups of young people is not particularly astonishing. That it enhances the efficiency of unskilled work-teams and is an indispensible precondition for the maintenance of their enthusiasm --- the conclusion of R. Supek, best-known of Yugoslavia's sociologists --- is a more surprising thesis. It has caused heated discussion among that multitude of leaders who feel that modern-day projects sacrifice material results by relaxing discipline imposed from the top.
At the outset of the Yugoslav study, work brigade structure was rigidly patterned after that of partisan regiments. Supek registered at the end of a summer work drive
a considerable drop [his italics] in the positive level obtained by the measure of attitudes (very favourable in the beginning ... ), particularly as regards the individual's tendency to integrate with the group and relations among brigade members.(7)
Supek attributes this deterioration to volunteers' obsession with public recognition and with a work emulation system too oriented towards competition with other brigades. He exclaims that
success and corresponding distinction ... became a question of honour and dishonour! Thus pressures coming from outside led inevitably to internal tensions and to the weakening of brigade cohesion.(8)
Luckily, the initial phase of Supek's study coincided with a thorough overhaul of Yugoslavia's political and economic structure and with the widespread introduction of self-management in government and industry, including the work brigades. Self-management replaced a vertical para-military chain of command with broad horizontal democracy, based on the brigade conference and involving up to half of any given brigade in elective positions of authority. Predictably,
the trends revealed by repeated surveys between 1958 and 1961 [i.e. throughout the period of transition] indicate a clear tendency towards the stabilization of collective life. The data ... show that initial motivation to participate in the drive remains constantly very high.... In the years 1959-1961 external pressures and internal tensions diminished and, consequently, brigade cohesion was less and less exposed to deterioration.(9)
Democracy was not only possible; it was necessary.
Campers are also motivated to further social action in their post-project life. More than half of Danckwortt's adolescents joined, or increased participation in, a youth movement or student government in the school year following their first camp. An equal number decided to return to a voluntary service project the following summer. Eighty per cent of the university students studied by Riecken were influenced in their studies by the workcamp experience. A few changed their major field; others took new courses; many of them felt more stimulated by material presented in courses in fields like social science. A fifth were moved to participate in extra-curricular social service activities and another fifth took greater interest in discussing and studying social problems outside the classroom. Only about 20 per cent stated that workcamping had no effect on their studies, vocational life, organizational affiliation or other interests.
Finally, one of the unique educational contributions of workcamping in the industrialized countries is in the field of international relations. A slippery subject, even harder to study than to define, international understanding is unfortunately only dealt with in Danckwortt's survey, and then only briefly. Its importance is enormous, however, and growing commensurately with increased youthful interest in international contacts. In recent years, international travel has become one of the most popular summer holiday activities of young people in Eastern and Western Europe and North America.
Educators look askance at the commercial overtones of this annual migration. But they take consolation in the vague hope that cross-cultural contact among the young will somehow remove prejudice today and guarantee peace tomorrow. Youth movements, too, have made this facile philosophical leap. The Constitution of one world youth movement lists among the body's aims to 'facilitate and encourage contacts between youth organizations of different countries, bilateral and multilateral contacts and other direct means leading to friendship, understanding and co-operation'.
As many an exchange student who has spent a year at an impersonal or inhospitable foreign university knows, even prolonged 'contacts' are not necessarily a 'direct means leading to friendship', much less to 'understanding and co-operation'. The average summer trip to another country may give a young person's talk a cosmopolitan patina. Imposing the need for absolute judgements, it will probably not have a balanced effect on his thinking. A German social scientist who studied the impact of a commercial travel firm's organized summer tours on their young participants found that preconceived ideas 'are either confirmed or tilt to the opposite --- the higher the positive stereotypes [before], the greater the negative ones [afterwards].'(10) It is, then, false to assume that international travel leads automatically to international understanding.
What is important is the quality of the exchange as well as the numbers exchanged. Workcamping --- with its shared social goal, simple life and democratic structure --- is one of the few kinds of international experience able to offer young people depth communication in a short period and at low cost. Danckwortt points out that 'our prime educational forces, the home, the school and the church, are unable to cope with the task of creating the preconditions for international understanding,' and ventures to affirm that for young people 'only workcamps are capable of providing an international milieu as a testing ground, so to speak, in advance of future life experience.'(11) Workcamping is no magic formula for producing understanding out of the varied ingredients present in a project. But Danckwortt found it a catalyst that sets churning in most volunteers' minds a chemistry of questions leading, at least, to a temporary breakdown of prejudice.
Least successful, with regard to the stereotypes of German adolescents, was participation in a single camp held in their own country. The more superficial preconceptions were easily eroded by contact with foreigners, but were just as easily restored afterwards by the parents and teachers from which they originated. A seventeen-year-old reported a few months after her first camp, in which two Frenchmen had participated, that
One of them was exactly the way I always imagined a Frenchman to be: easy---going, always a cigarette in his mouth, never taking anything seriously. The other was exactly the opposite: much more controlled, didn't smoke and trying hard to learn German. He worked well, too. Then I said to myself: 'you can't judge a whole people.' But now we discussed a book about France in school and there, again, I was encouraged in my old opinions. That one Frenchman probably was an exception after all.(12)
Repeated participation in international camps in Germany made foreigners seem less unreal and tended to bring about permanent disintegration of prejudices.
Still more successful was participation in camps abroad. There, young Germans found the 'experience of having to tolerate divergent opinions ... quite different from the situation of meeting foreigners in one's own country, where conflict is avoided for the sake of hospitality yet little is given up of one's true convictions.'(13) The majority of German campers surveyed on return from projects in other Western European countries stated that they had changed some opinions about the nation visited while retaining others. Moreover, fully a quarter reported they had thoroughly revised their views. Doubtless, when faced with stress many had concluded a truce, retreating from friction without coming to grips with its cause. Others, however, had been moved to re-evaluate their attitudes.
Given the unique role workcamping can play as an incubator for international understanding, forward-looking organizers have naturally wanted to experiment with it as a vehicle for exchange between countries of differing or opposing ideologies. Before examining these efforts ---perhaps the most exciting and imaginative development in workcamping today in the industrialized countries --- let us look at two other types of service which may be said to benefit primarily (and educationally) the participants --- Job Corps, Neighbourhood Youth Corps and related schemes, and wage-earning projects.
On close inspection, Job Corps schemes seem even farther removed from the idealist stream of voluntary youth service than, say, the Civilian Conservation Corps or other currents at the centre of the economic stream. Whereas these were seen as a means of tiding over often skilled young men out of work in a temporarily faltering economy, the present-day schemes are designed to bite into the hard core of unemployability among youth whose stagnation is deemed incompatible with---and perhaps threatening to --- burgeoning affluence.
The official aim of the US Job Corps is to provide vocational training and experience in a healthy environment. But some observers maintain 'that an unstated, but at least as fundamental purpose is to get the kids off the streets so they don't start trouble.'(14) Numerous headline-catching breaches of this peacekeeping function have plagued the Job Corps. It is unfortunate that these incidents have provided systematic Shriver-baiters with ammunition. But they do cause one to question to what extent the spirit infusing such programmes can be assimilated to voluntary service.
Understandably, members of the Job Corps --- 30,000 working in a hundred centres on 1 December 1966 --- and Neighbourhood Youth Corps join up for other than altruistic reasons. They are not serving their society; they are serving themselves. Thus, when Sargent Shriver asked Job Corpsmen in vocational courses what they wanted, 'the universal answers [were]: more cigarettes, more money, better food.'(15)
In an intensive survey of Trenton (New Jersey) Neighbourhood Corpsmen, 73 per cent of respondents claimed that those leaving the NYC did so because 'they didn't get enough pay.'(16) If contemporary thinking is right, Job Corps, Neighbourhood Youth Corps and similar schemes may some day be considered valid voluntary service --- perhaps even as alternatives to military conscription.(17) But not until they have at least an element of the voluntary and of service.
Among projects benefiting primarily volunteers, wage-earning camps present a particular problem. While in America volunteers are usually expected to pay their way on workcamps, board and lodging is provided to European campers by the community where they work or the organization sponsoring their project. Exceptionally, wage-earning camps are held, principally in British and French agriculture, to offer needy students an opportunity to make ends meet during the summer and fill the seasonal labour demand. The atmosphere is as jovially international in these camps as in normal work projects, but the spirit of voluntary social service is most often absent. Although some organizations sponsor both types of project, a clear distinction must be drawn between wage-earning schemes and voluntary service workcamps.
In the autumn of 1960, the author was astonished to open a copy of the popular American weekly Saturday Evening Post and find himself looking at a half-page photo of a Ukranian workcamp he had participated in that summer. An accompanying article --- that week's lead --- by the authors of The Ugly American implied that the camp was designed to lure young Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to the Soviet Union and subvert their innocent minds. The photo caption neglected to indicate that the volunteers pictured included young non- and anti-Communist Westerners. And the authors and editors did not bother to find out (or were not saying) that among the participants were a Dutch Quaker, a Swiss pastor and assorted English, French and American civilists and other young people hardly in sympathy with Soviet policies; that discussion topics (presented by those believing in their point of view) included 'Multi-party Parliamentary Democracy' and 'Christian Pacifism'; that although little agreement was reached on these and other themes the sincerity of those expressing all points of view was evident and resulted in the formation of many friendships; or that the camp was one of a series co-sponsored by SCI, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the Committee of Soviet Youth Organizations and was painstakingly organized as a place of meeting, exchange and co-operation for young people of different persuasions.
In short, the Saturday Evening Post was as guilty of sloppily ill-informed journalism and facile cold-war prejudice as the Soviet press organs that vilify the U S Peace Corps as an instrument of neo-colonialist infiltration. It is just this sort of petrified thinking that organizers have tried to chip away by holding camps for participants from countries of different ideologies, most often NATO and Warsaw Pact member-states.
East-West understanding has made some headway but it would be unrealistic to expect a few weeks in a necessarily artificial setting of East-West co-operation to work the wonders that years of diplomacy have barely made to seem possible. Yet while the statesmen tread water and their governments perfect and stockpile the means of joint suicide, it is ever more urgent to open as many doors of exchange as possible. Contact does not automatically lead to understanding, but it can transform black and white abstractions into shaded grey reality.
Indeed. the aim of East-West workcamping is not to make communists capitalists or capitalists communists, but to show both that neither has a monopoly of Truth and Right. Therefore organizers and volunteers realize that it is impossible to achieve an entente by ignoring the very real divergences between East and West. 'By mutual understanding,' wrote an American participant in the Ukranian camp misrepresented by the Saturday Evening Post,
I do not mean a process which encourages young people to make tabula rasa of the thrust and parry. incidents and responsibilities of the last twenty years of world history in order to approach one another in an 'open-minded' way. On the contrary, it is only when young people meet one another in an atmosphere of frankness and sincerity ... that the complex process of understanding may begin.(18)
The occasional abrasion of frank intercourse is counterbalanced in workcamping perhaps more than in other forms of East-West youth exchange by the uniting influence of a shared goal: doing the job in hand.
And sometimes one can hope to achieve more. A Czech girl volunteer discovered during a 1966 SCI-IVS camp that one of the reasons why poverty still exists in England has nothing to do with class warfare. 'I have never seen so much misery and dirt as in England.' she wrote,
the houses we were painting, papering, cleaning and varnishing. With one exception, I cleaned the flats of people who were no doubt poor but mostly and in the first place only because they were lazy. Among the thousands of possibilities they could find in British society, they freely and voluntarily chose laziness and consequently misery and dirt. In my country we have no such poor people. Not because we have no people who prefer to be lazy, but because there is a special law of work and everybody who can must work.
She also came to appreciate that not all Western youngsters are money-mad or subject to a more or less high degree of ennui or nihilism.
My greatest discovery was the enthusiasm with which Western students did the work.... It is possible that it was only coincidence, but they worked so perfectly, so steadily and so patiently that it exceeded all bounds.(19)
Wrote a Soviet volunteer in a Swedish camp:
We could see for ourselves what a developed capitalist country that had been unscarred by war was like. There seemed to be no slums ... and very few unemployed ... (20)
Characteristically, it was the civilist faith that, in the still chilly early thaw, first used workcamps to dislodge the icebergs blocking the flow of ideas and people between East and West. 'By faith,' wrote a chronicler of Quaker East-West projects, giving a definition applicable to the approach of both organizations, 'we mean the refusal to accept a situation as hopeless and the insistence in seeking growing points in it.'(21) This faith took intrepid civilists to Poland in 1955 for the first East-West voluntary service project to be held since the cold war had halted international participation in the mass Eastern European work drives of the late 1940s. It was co-sponsored by SCI and WFDY.
The camp, which turned a Warsaw bomb-site into a playground, enabled exchange organizers to square off and define their terms for future East-West projects, to learn what to hope for and what not to expect. 'The Warsaw camp did not achieve a conciliation of ideas between the two groups,' a British volunteer observed, 'but it was able to make some progress towards such a conciliation and to show us clearly what are the principal obstacles to its achievement.'(22)
The second and third camps took place in Poland and France in 1956, and the fourth in the USSR in 1958. In 1959 East German Quakers confounded smug expectations of cold war analysts everywhere by sponsoring a workcamp at Dresden including participants from West Germany and Britain as well as representatives of East German churches and the official Free German Youth movement.
By 1960, the cautious, experimental phase of East-West workcamping drew to a close. Neither miraculous transformation nor disastrous catastrophe visited the pioneer camps, and the Co-ordinating Committee's 12th World Conference, held in Yugoslavia, put a firm foot in the door of exchange. Then in the early 1960s, came a period of lateral expansion as, one by one, more countries took up the method.
The establishment of East-West workcamping has been a collective effort. Through mutual concession and persistent trust, youth organizers in East and West alike have overcome the lethargy of their respective bureaucracies and methodological differences, not to mention their own personal suspicions. Like Columbus's sailors, those negotiating the first exchanges ventured into uncharted seas with a sense of giddy drama. Yet gradually, and without disavowing their ideological affinities, the handful of pioneer organizers multiplied, bonds of friendship replaced earlier, solely business-like relations. The earth turned out not to be flat after all.
Although no individual can be singled out as instrumental in initiating East-West workcamp exchange, a Polish artisan of their development may be picked at random as typical of this untypical group. Mieczyslaw (Mitek) Klos became active in voluntary work in 1947, during the early days of Service to Poland. When in 1960 members of WFDY created an International Bureau for Tourism and Exchange of Youth (IBTEY), recalls Mitek, 'my experience fitted me to take the post' of director.(23)
Thanks to his realism and fine sense of diplomacy, Mitek was able to arouse the interest of IBTEY's Eastern members in workcamping while dispelling fears of Western organizers as to Easterners' ulterior motives. Many IBTEY members joined the Co-ordinating Committee --- Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary following Poland and the Soviet Union.(24)
Although no longer directly involved in administering exchanges, Mitek has, if anything, become more interested in voluntary service. He recently completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Warsaw proposing increased provision of Polish long-term volunteers to serve, without political strings, in developing countries.
The number of volunteers taking part annually in East-West workcamping has not yet risen above a few thousand, yet it would be impossible to give even a summary run-down of the projects that have taken place. One series will, therefore, have to suffice to illustrate what has been achieved, the Tripartite Work-and-Study Projects, known unglamorously as the 'Tripe-Wasps'. In each of three summers (1962-4) a work-and-study camp including one team from the USSR, UK and USA was organized, first in Britain, then in the Soviet Union and finally in America. Mornings were devoted to physical labour, afternoons to carefully prepared discussion. The AFSC, British Friends Service Council and Committee of Soviet Youth Organizations co-sponsored the services, each supplying ten volunteers to each camp. Several volunteers attended all three camps.(25)
The Tripartite Work-and-Study Projects wrought no radical re-orientation in the minds of volunteers. But that they could take place at all came as a surprise to some officials of the three sponsoring bodies. 'The attitude of co-operation which does not hide differences and does not fear imperfections,' concluded an American volunteer,
is one of the important experiences in the understanding that has developed.... Understanding, after all, is not something that is acquired and preserved, but an active, restless thought process. Sometimes it is more perfect than others, but always it aims to strengthen the constructive relationships between men.(26)
Holding East-West workcamps has the advantage of placing participants squarely in the arena of the conflict they are attempting to allay. Russians find out that Republicans are not fire-spitting madmen and Americans see for themselves that kolkhozniki (collective farmers) are not down-trodden slaves. On the other hand. one group is always in 'enemy' territory and both may become preoccupied with their disputes out of all proportion to the cold war's importance.
Of late, workcamps in developing countries have been the site of East-West encounters where cold-war quarrels have paled before the problems of underdevelopment to which capitalism and communism as practised in industrialized settings are thought by many to be irrelevant. Uneconomical in most of the Third World, broadly international short-term workcamps in North Africa are near enough to East and West Europe to bring travel costs for youths of different ideological orientations within tolerable range.
Since 1962, the United Arab Republic's Supreme Youth Council has organized an annual international summer workcamp at Wadi el Natrun, a spot in the desert half-way between Cairo and Alexandria where young men from around the world have toiled to dig irrigation ditches and plant and water tree seedlings. In 1964, for instance, young people from twenty-five nations of Europe, Africa, America and Asia took part in the International Friendship Brigade. A Yugoslav volunteer found '4,000 kilometres away from their homes. East and West Germans are agitating for unification by singing old ballads together.'(27)
In his 1961 Inaugural Address, President Kennedy invited East and West to 'begin anew', to 'explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us', to 'push back the jungles of suspicion' and establish 'a beachhead of co-operation'. Today, more than any other form of educational youth exchange, East-West workcamping has a firm toehold on that beachhead. So much so that --- a bit prematurely perhaps --- many organizers no longer deem the very term 'East-West', with its overtones of political cleavage, applicable to the present situation.
While the Soviet Union has averaged just over one East-West camp a year, and the United States rather less than one, Poland and Czechoslovakia are holding between ten and twenty annually and elsewhere --- in Britain, France and Sweden, for instance --- Eastern participants in a plethora of normal projects not especially conceived for East-West contact are as commonplace as, say, Americans or Spaniards. In 1966 one hundred Czechoslovak volunteers took part in SCI-IVS's British camps. At the end of the season, SCI's European Secretary could conclude that there is now 'ground for hoping that international rust has at last more or less got the better of the iron curtain' .(28)
What of the future? The continued escalation of the Vietnam war makes prediction hazardous. Its effect has already been felt, in terms of a slowdown in the rate at which existing programmes are expanded and new channels are opened. Yet much needs to be done if the painstakingly gathered momentum is not to be lost altogether. And much can be done to propel East-West voluntary service beyond the symbolic stage. Large national programmes like the Soviet Virgin Land brigades, Community Service Volunteers in Britain, Poland's OHP and Volunteers in Service to America would be ideal frameworks for a full-scale youthful incursion into the jungles of suspicion. Proposals in this direction will be elaborated in the book's final chapter.
Initiating programmes with countries not yet involved in schemes of volunteer exchange between nations of different ideologies depends almost entirely on political considerations. For instance, it seems highly unlikely that North Korea or Mainland China will participate in such programmes for years to come. A Westerner who proposed at this stage to sound out these countries' youth organizations on the possibilities of joint workcamping would be treated as unrealistic, foolhardy, or worse.
Yet these were just the terms used even by friends of the civilists to depict efforts preceding the first East-West camp a decade ago. Why accept the present situation as hopeless? Why not seek the growing points in it? For growing points there are. Already, a new dimension of inter-ideological workcamping has opened up. In 1965, volunteers from Peking, North Korea and Cuba joined Westerners --- including an American --- in Egypt's Wadi el Natrun International Friendship Brigade.