THE Colombian historian Germán Arciniegas once remarked that there are two Latin Americas, the visible and the invisible. Visible Latin America is the quarter of the continent's inhabitants that are found in presidential palaces and business skyscrapers, at cocktail parties, in estancias, haciendas and military juntas. The least visible of the visible Latin Americans are the new middle classes of Mexico City, Caracas and Santiago de Chile. They have a home and a car, and hope to buy a university education for their offspring. The most visible of the visible are the two per cent who own half the continent's wealth.
The invisible three quarters of Latin Americans are two thirds illiterate and have just over one chance in two of living beyond forty. They lurk in the wings of history until desperation thrusts them into brief explosive appearances on-stage that are seldom reported abroad. The least invisible of the invisible Latin Americans dare aspire to complete primary schooling for their children. The most invisible --- Andean Indians, Buenos Aires shanty-town dwellers, inhabitants of north-east Brazil's terras secas --- consider themselves lucky when they can live from hand-to-mouth.
Visible Latin America is the gradually broadening elite, invisible Latin America the silent mass. Development means making the invisible visible. So great is the appeal of social revolution today among the government-making elite(1) that even reactionaries hide behind its vocabulary. Although such demagogy has wrought electoral havoc and cowed populations into passive acceptance of coups d'état, there is a clear distinction between words and deeds, promises made and promises kept.
The distinction does not arise from differences in Gross National Product or per capita annual income. i.e. in level of development. It may be made, rather, according to the degree of governments' commitment to economic growth and social justice and the extent of efforts made to translate commitment into results, i.e. according to the quality and pace of development. There are two kinds of governments in Latin America: those who don't appear to be waging war on underdevelopment and those who do.
The first group of nations., e.g. Argentina., Bolivia, Brazil. Paraguay, Columbia and Ecuador --- are not all governed by archconservatives and their rulers are not solely responsible for their relative or absolute immobility. The second group, e.g. Cuba, Chile, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela --- draw inspiration from diverging ideologies and use contradictory approaches but are united in their resolute determination to effect radical progress. The Central American republics tend to straddle the threshold, some leaning towards inaction, others towards action.
Though there is voluntary service throughout Latin America, its kind and impact in any given country varies in close harmony with that country's position vis-à-vis the development threshold. Since some nations' positions are extreme; the situation of voluntary service varies widely from one to the next. At the bottom of the scale is one medieval South American republic where student social service smacking of anything more modern that the most degrading paternalistic charity is a one-way ticket to exile or prison.
At the zenith above the threshold is Cuba where, as Fidel Castro told the Workers' Confederation in August 1966, 'Voluntary work is very important both economically and from the point of view of their own education.' Indeed, he chided, so great has been volunteers' contribution that 'apparently the idea of receiving volunteers has led to the belief that all our problems can be solved with volunteers, with students.'(2)
The underestimation of the limits of voluntary service is a new problem in Latin America. In nearly three decades since the continent's first workcamp was organized by the American Friends Service Committee in Mexico, Latin American service organizers, like their counterparts around the world, have had to struggle to gain recognition of volunteers' sincerity and seriousness, not to mention their competence. Their current success in many parts of the continent is due in large part to the spread of the idea of progress with its natural appeal to youth and stress on mobilizing available skills. Conversely, it is not presumptuous to say that voluntary service has played a small part in facilitating the passage of progress from the realm of quixotic absolutes to the arena of political possibilities. Here and there across the continent over the last quarter of a century future teachers, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, priests and --- why not? --- society ladies have compared their ivory tower explanations of and recipes for social problems with the reality of ignorance and poverty. If nothing else, voluntary service has helped demonstrate the bankruptcy of a university system which breeds young men and women who spin extremist coffee-bar theories in their student days, only to become unthinking vassals of reaction six months after graduation.
Voluntary service is not really new in Latin America.(3) It has evolved over more than a thousand years. Voluntary communal service, a fundamental part of pre-industrial societies, still exists today, although much weakened by the money economy, in rural Latin American Indian communities. In Bolivia it is called yanapacu, in Peru ayni and in Ecuador the institution of mingas is a still vital tradition which authorities are attempting to adapt for development purposes.
Faced with a local need such as digging a well or bringing in the harvest, many Ecuadorian villages hold a meeting and decide to do the necessary job without pay. All benefit from the work directly or indirectly, either because they have answered some common need or because the individual neighbour they have helped will contribute his labour when another villager finds himself in a tight spot. Self-help institutions like the mingas have survived in several Latin American countries, but they are fighting a losing battle. Technological society with its individualized --- one is tempted to say commercialized--- concept of man, has encroached on and tends to replace such outmoded communal practices.
Contemporary Latin American Voluntary service cannot boast a history going back a thousand years but it often operates in villages where mingas and similar traditions are sufficiently alive to enable Indians to comprehend urban volunteers' motivations, accept their intentions and join their work even without a common language. It is far from easy to trace the origins of modern Latin American youth service. Some information is available on the pilot work of external organizations but many even recent local initiatives have gone unrecorded. More than in Afro-Asia where the method spread thanks in large measure to systematic evangelization, workcamping and similar activities have appeared in Latin America as a result of osmosis --- a magazine article, a trip abroad, a chance visit by a foreigner --- and of spontaneous domestic combustion --- an earthquake, a national literacy campaign.
A noteworthy exception to this trend is Edwin Duckles, an American Quaker workcamp evangelist. After directing an early Mexican camp in 1941, he took up residence in Mexico City at the end of the Second World War as the American Friends Service Committee Field Director for Mexico. This was broadened to include El Salvador when an AFSC community development project was launched there in 1952.
Today Ed is primarily concerned with expanding and firmly anchoring voluntary service in Mexico, his second home for more than two decades. Since its creation the American Quaker programme has involved some 3.500 volunteers from thirty-eight countries --- including Eastern and Western Europe and North and most of South America as well as Asia --- in year-round as well as summer service projects. Ed has also aided the Mexican Friends Service Committee to organize international student service projects. Another development springing from his work has been the formation of a Mexican volunteer service organization at Hermosillo, in the northern state of Sonora.
A number of other external organizations were responsible for occasional workcamps in Latin America in the decade following the Second World War. During this period, the germination phase of workcamping in the continent, projects were held in several countries by organizations that were most often based in North America and of Protestant conviction.
During the next six years (1955-61) these organizations intensified their efforts and for their programmes this was a period of gestation. Meanwhile, other bodies initiated workcamping and for their activities: this was the germination phase. Prominent among these were North American agencies similar in outlook to the above groups. Simultaneously (and this was the beginning of a new trend in Latin American service) there was a distinct internationalization of organizations which, as often as not, cosponsored workcamps with national affiliates or branches. Among these were: the World Council of Churches, the World Assembly of Youth, the International Student Conference (then called COSEC), the World Student Christian Federation, the International Builder Companions and the International Union of Students.
At the same time workcamping, which had hitherto been largely confined to Central America and the Caribbean, extended to South America thanks in part, if not entirely, to the interest of Europe-based international agencies. Also in this period a number of national youth and student bodies assumed primary responsibility for workcamp programmes, a tendency accentuated by the Unesco Co-ordinating Committee's First Latin American Workcamp Leader Training Project held in Paraguay in 1960.
Since 1961, as we shall see in the succeeding sections of this chapter, the germination period of voluntary service has ended m many countries. Everywhere, the main trend has been for national or even local organizations to take the initiative for workcamping and other forms of service. In countries below the threshold of development quality and pace, programmes still tend to be highly symbolic, irregular to the point of being erratic, and dependent on outside aid if not external prodding. Here, gestation continues.
Elsewhere, where the threshold is being straddled or has been crossed, voluntary service is in full-flower although Cuba --where Fidel had to caution that all problems cannot be solved by impassioned students --- is still an exception. In some cases nongovernmental service sponsors have integrated their volunteers into government-run development campaigns and programmes.
Elsewhere, governments themselves sponsor service programmes. Whatever its relationship to government action, voluntary service has been able to bloom in nations straddling or above the threshold largely because of the sense of forward thrust radiated by enlightened governments and of the consequent confidence many, if not all, young people place in those governments and their leaders.
Increasingly, the trust is mutual. Governments that sincerely believe in and promote progress are coming to understand (if not always to embrace or condone) student agitation for reform and to view students as development agents as much as trouble makers. Some have even established special youth offices mandated to deal sympathetically with adolescents and young adults. Thanks in some measure to their responsible if shibboleth-shaking behaviour in executing symbolic service projects, youngsters are now being enabled by governments they once castigated and still often disagree with to participate more fully in national development programmes.
Following this brief historical glance at Latin American Voluntary service, we shall survey in more detail its present situation in nations below and above the threshold.
Recent elections in a large backward province of one Latin American country confronted observers with a puzzling spectacle. No fewer than 67 lists of candidates --- representing schisms of tired major parties, breakaway groups from schisms, factions of breakaway groups and fractions of factions --- vied for each seat, all claiming superior ability to catalyse provincial and national development. After the poll, word-weary electors returned to private affairs while their new deputies patched together a motley coalition. Politics subsided to 'normalcy' as the province's --- and country's --- economy continued its dizzy downward spiral.
To say that voluntary service in pre-threshold nations mirrors this muddle would be unduly harsh. However, there is a more than faint likeness: there tends to be as much smoke as fire. Not necessarily by any fault of their own, many service organizations are unable to tap sources of regular finance, to ensure continuity of project prospection and execution and of volunteer recruitment and administration, to co-ordinate action with other bodies, in short, to make discernible inroads into underdevelopment. Although several bodies may be active and the quality of their individual projects may be high, the total impact of voluntary service in any pre-threshold nation amounts to no more than a few drops of water in a dried-up well.
A case in point is Argentina. Although one or two workcamps were sponsored by North American agencies in the mid fifties and although a certain amount of more traditional social service has been organized over the years, sustained youth workcamping did not begin until the early 1960s. It was launched thanks to a group of idealistic teenagers at the large provincial town of Rosario who had taken part for several years in the activities of the Argentinian United Nations Association selling Unicef Christmas cards, organizing exhibitions on the UN and lecturing in schools, clubs and libraries on the Declaration of Human Rights.
Feeling that the Declaration would never be implemented by words alone, the 'UNO youngsters' --- as they came to be known in Rosario --- set to work to help less privileged citizens. An early project consisted in strengthening the morale of polio patients at a local hospital. The best way to get patients' minds off themselves, thought the volunteers, is to involve them in a service programme benefiting someone else. They taught the paralytics braille so they could transcribe books for the blind.
In 1962 the 'UNO youngsters' constituted themselves as the Movimiento Argentino de Juventud pro Naciones Unidas (MAJNU --- Argentinian Youth Movement for the UN).(4) They sent their leader, a twenty-one-year-old diplomacy student called Guillermo Giacosa to Europe on a Unesco Travel Grant. After surveying the structure and activities of numerous European UN student associations Guillermo became homesick and when the last stage of his study programme fell through he agitated to return to Argentina immediately. Someone suggested he go to a workcamp instead. He had never heard of workcamping but when voluntary service was explained to him, decided to give it a try. It would be a shame, he thought, to leave Europe without participating in as well as observing youth activities.
A fortnight in one of le Tonton's Apprentice Mills perched high in the French Alps came as an agreeable surprise. Young people from all over Europe, many never having heard of the Declaration of Human Rights, toiled side by side in much the same spirit as MAJNU's members did in Argentina. When this camp closed, Guillermo was no longer in a hurry to go home. He wanted to see what contribution workcamping could make in a less developed country. Though he understood neither English nor Greek, he wangled a place in a British United Nations Association community development project at Filiates in northern Greece. Here, among British, Dutch and Greek student volunteers, surprise turned into revelation. Workcamping, he decided, should become one of MAJNU's central activities, and a first project would be organized the following summer.
When Guillermo returned to Rosario it was autumn in Europe, but spring in Argentina. To make good his resolve, he had to hurry: only a few weeks remained before commerce and administration closed down for the hot months. Tousle-haired, intense and lean, his natural animation accentuated by a slight fever contracted in Greece, Guillermo quickly became a familiar figure to business men and government officials.
Some turned him down flat, only to find him back the next day with a new pitch. Others caved in almost immediately, if only to get rid of him. But many sensed that Guillermo's project --- the construction of a polyclinic at San Jenaro Norte, a farm village two hundred miles west of Buenos Aires --- was worthwhile and aided him willingly. In the end he managed to wheedle, hound, scrounge and otherwise obtain a plot of land (from the provincial government), tents and tools (from the army), bricks, mortar and other building materials (from villagers and the local municipal council), tinned goods (from food stores in Buenos Aires and Rosario) and half a cow (from a rancher it hadn't been easy to convince).
In five weeks of January and February 1963 forty young people (including an Italian girl and two young Americans) worked an average of six-and-a-half hours a day digging, then pouring foundations, laying bricks and putting on the roof. To a participant sent from Paris by Unesco's Co-ordinating Committee, it seemed that Guillermo, his baggy gaucho trousers billowing out behind him as he ran, was everywhere at once. In the space of an hour he would consult the local mason in charge of the project, urge on the girl volunteers in an improvised field kitchen and do his own share of cement-mixing.
Such feverish and constructive activity could not pass unnoticed in Argentina, which was going through a trying and pessimistic period. One newspaper published on its editorial page a photo of the campers at work alongside a picture of an antisemitic fascist youth squadron then receiving military training. The juxtaposition needed no comment. At the end of the camp, amid the rejoicing of even those villagers who had originally been suspicious of the youngsters' motives, volunteers and local people inaugurated the 'San Jenaro Norte United Nations Polyclinic'.
After its first camp, MAJNU organized a variety of voluntary service projects which, with its other activities, strained the Movement's spare-time administration to the limit. No sooner had Guillermo left university to lead MAJNU full time than the army conscripted him for military duty. As persuasive a talker as he is a firm pacifist, Guillermo engaged long, sometimes delicate but always courteous negotiations with the military authorities.
Finally, a compromise was reached whereby Guillermo was allowed to fulfil his service requirement as General Secretary of MAJNU on three conditions: that he earn no more than a normal recruit, that he report regularly on his activities and that he assume responsibility for some of the civics classes that are part of Argentinian military training. He gladly acquiesced since he already earned less than a private, suspected he would enjoy explaining MAJNU's aims and activities to military officials, and expected to derive great pleasure from lecturing recruits---under an officer's watchful eye--- not only on Argentinian history and government but other subjects as well, including internationalism and pacifism. As far as the author has been able to determine, Guillermo was Argentina's first successful conscientious objector.
The impulse given to workcamping by MAJNU at and since the San Jenaro Norte camp detonated a chain reaction. Buenos Aires volunteers in that project returned home to found Juventud pro Naciones Unidas (Youth for the UN) which ---supported by private business --- has held several weekend projects in the capital as well as a normal workcamp which built a community centre at La Plata in 1965. A similarly inspired body, Voluntarios pro Naciones Unidas (Volunteers for the UN), organizes social and manual camps in the villas miserias that encircle Buenos ' Aires, like a shabby hem round a pretty frock, as do the Emmaüs Volunteers and the Ateneo Youth Foundation. Meanwhile, Acción Misionera Argentina (AMA---Argentinian Missionary Action) has begun to send teams of about twenty-five volunteers and a priest to work during a month in deprived and isolated villages.
The new social orientation of the Catholic Church expressed in AMA's activities, has played an important and sometimes decisive role in promoting voluntary youth service throughout Latin America. Typical of this new approach is the work of an energetic Jesuit, José Maria Llorens (nicknamed 'the gaucho priest'), with students at the University of Mendoza, the most westerly city in Argentina. 'Padre, build us a chapel,' inhabitants of a Mendoza villa miseria begged him when he initiated student social service. 'First the house of men,' replied the Father, 'afterwards will come the house of God.'(5)
The diversity of Argentinian service programmes and sponsors might be seen by some to be a blessing. As in Europe, service is a method used by groups drawing inspiration from a wealth of ideologies and leaders, and appeals therefore to several sources of volunteers. But this variety is also a curse. Swarming fragmentation leads inevitably to wastage and confusion in spite of the efforts of the Argentinian Committee of the World Assembly of Youth to provide a platform for national co-ordination. In September 1965, the government of Argentina, which has furnished help to youth service, announced its intention to systematize schemes through an 'Integrated Plan for Voluntary Service and Community Promotion', involving both domestic and international programmes. To date, however, this plan has not got off the drawing board. Still merely nominal, Argentinian voluntary service has yet to pass the gestation stage.
In other pre-threshold countries of Latin America workcamping and other forms of participation in development activities by young volunteers tend to be even more skeletal than in Argentina. Generally, they have a double backbone: churches (Protestant as well as Catholic) and universities (teachers and students).
Schemes for the mass mobilization of uneducated youth like those now common in Afro-Asia are absent from Latin America, largely owing to the rapid progress of primary education. However, some countries do utilize part-time voluntary service on community self-help programmes. These are usually found in post-threshold countries, but one pre-threshold example is Colombia. There, thanks to aid from FAO's World Food Programme, inhabitants of eleven cities and towns are using their spare time to pave roads, lay pavements, plant trees and set out parks and playgrounds. Each volunteer must work ten hours a week, for which he receives a packet of surplus food.(6)
In countries straddling the threshold of development quality and pace, governments have devised schemes to use young volunteers, sometimes alongside U S Peace Corpsmen and women and often inspired directly or indirectly by the Peace Corps spirit and presence. Thus a hundred Salvadorans are serving in their nation's Brigadas de Educación Fundamental (Fundamental Education Brigades) and roughly four times that number of Guatemalans are taking part in Acción Conjunta (Joint Action) as volunteers in community development. In Costa Rica, about 160 volunteer leaders of the 2,500-strong Movimiento Nacional de Juventudes (National Youth Movement) have received two months' instruction in youth work and returned to their villages to organize evening and weekend activities for rural young people. Seventy Panamanian students are working in the Servicio Nacional de Voluntarios (National Volunteer Service) doing community development in urban and rural areas during their two-month summer holidays.
'Every time I look down on a Peruvian hamlet from a winding Andean road, I ask the same question and receive the same exalting answer,' declared fiery populist politician Fernando Belaúnde Terry in a 1956 speech.
Looking at a humble village with its picturesque bell-tower, I ask my guide 'Who built that church?' And the guide answers: 'El pueblo lo hizo.'(7) And I ask again 'Who built that school?' And again he answers 'El pueblo lo hizo.'
And, following the serpentine road among the peaks, I ask once again 'Who opened this road?' And once again, echoing in my cars like the refrain of a triumphal march, I hear the phrase . . . . . . El pueblo lo hizo. '(8)
Pueblo signifies both 'people' and 'village,' a blend whose real meaning is only just suggested by 'community'. Extensive travel through the backward interior of Peru --- he is the only national political leader to have visited all 144 provinces --- convinced Belaúnde that the country's vast, ignorant, impoverished and unproductive Indian majority was more an asset than a liability. Properly mobilized, el pueblo could work miraculous changes in the potentially rich forest and mountain areas and in their own desolate lives. Elected President in 1963, Belaúnde wasted no time in mounting what he called 'the conquest of Peru by Peruvians'.
Less than three weeks after taking office he set up Cooperación Popular Universitaria (CPU---University Community Cooperation), a nationwide, government-led scheme designed to effect radical and rapid economic and social progress. This was to be a programme by as well as for el pueblo. But the Indians would need stimulation, advice and the force of example, precisely the function fulfilled by government-run or -backed volunteer schemes in post-threshold countries of Latin America. A group of students and recent graduates urged Belaúnde to help them spend their summer as catalytic agents encouraging and guiding villagers to undertake development projects.
From January to March 1964, 542 volunteer student agronomists doctors, veterinarians and teachers fanned out from Lima and other university cities to 120 villages in la selva and la montaña, the forests and mountains most of them had never seen before. Dental students earned their stripes by pulling more than 15,000 teeth; one gave a woman nearly 100 years old her first dental care. In 1965, 1,200 Peruvian students were joined by 50 volunteers from almost every other Latin American country as well as 15 US Peace Corps and 15 European long-term volunteers to work in 200 villages. Their tasks were more varied than the previous year and, for example, volunteers provided legal advice (especially on land disputes). 'These Indians.' wrote a Swedish volunteer to secondary school students of his country who raised funds for CPU school building (see Chapter 5), 'were once forgotten but are no longer forgotten.'(9)
According to one CPU leader, the effect of service on volunteers is strikingly revealed by a comparison between their views as candidates for the work and their changed ideas after spending two months in the villages. Vague and high-flown concepts about the future of their country have been replaced by down-to-earth ideas about how they can use their professional knowledge to contribute to national development.(10)
And the impact is not limited to students as individuals. The Catholic University has launched a workcamp and literacy teaching programme while smaller, already existing private schemes have received fresh impetus and broader recognition, thanks to CPU.
Paradoxically, the charismatic figure of President Belaúnde Terry, which made Cooperación Popular Universitaria possible, has now jeopardized its continuation. Though students of all ideological horizons have served in it, CPU is undeniably linked to Belaúnde's personal popularity and political future. It rose with him and might well fall when he goes. Already, an unholy alliance of his leftist and rightist opponents managed to reduce CPU's budget forcing a cut-back to 400 volunteers for the 1967 programme. In most post-threshold countries, political progressivism has enabled voluntary service to flower. But because it owes its life to a given breeze the plant tends to wither if the wind changes.
Another post-threshold nation where student voluntary service derives more or less direct support and financing from the government's politics is Mexico. No change of government is on the horizon since Mexico's ruling party, PRI, is both revolutionary and institutionalized. One can safely assume that the Brigadas Cívicas de Servicio Social (Social Service Civic Brigades) founded in 1958, will continue for some time to come.
In Chile, President Frei's progressive Christian Democratic policies have given voluntary service a powerful shove forward, but were not responsible for its creation. Voluntary service among Chilean students bloomed, rather, thanks to an immense discussion of university reform and an earthquake. In the early 1950s, student leaders began a vigorous campaign to draw public attention to the divorce between institutions of higher learning and the nation as a whole. Chile needs and is all the more sensitive to the work, influence and leadership of professionals since it is in a state of flux and development.(11) But --- claimed the students --- Chilean universities bred graduates who were only partly capable of fulfilling their social as well as professional mission.
Low-cost housing experts, for example, were technically well equipped but often socially deficient in that they seldom had any contact with the people for whom they would be building. True, social service in urban villas callampas (mushroom towns)(12) was an old Chilean university tradition. But the handfuls of students involved over the years had made little impact and, in any case, those who volunteered were probably already destined for social service professions. In the 1960 academic year, the reformists cast about for an approach enabling them to put across their ideas forcefully to a large student audience.
In November 1960, as the summer vacation drew near, a series of earth- and sea-quakes destroyed much of the southern part of the country. Crops were lost and hundreds of villages as well as the city of Concepción severely damaged. The catastrophe galvanized the entire nation into action. Students took part in a nationwide 'Solidarity Chain' collecting food-stuffs, clothing and money.
With funds they themselves had raised, and working through the reformist-created university departments of social extension, some 500 graduates took part in work camps in devastated areas during January and February 1961. The Student Union of Santiago's Catholic University alone sent out 300 volunteers; some worked in one town to build thirty houses in eight weeks. Later, in April-May, the International Student Conference and newly formed Unión de Federaciones Universitarias de Chile (UFUCH---Chilean National Union of Students) held an international camp at Concepción where volunteers from Africa, Asia and Europe as well as the Americas, built a social welfare centre. A similar reconstruction programme was organized a year later but in 1963 UFUCH members turned to projects more closely linked to rural community development, working in some thirty-five nucleos scattered over Chile's central zone.
A typical rural 'nucleus' was composed of five male students living with peasant families and five female students, accommodated in the local National Association of Peasant Organizations' centre. All had been carefully selected from candidate volunteers and received rudimentary training on evenings and weekends preceding the summer holidays. During the day, the boys worked in the fields side by side with the villagers, demonstrating not only their concern for rural improvement but also their willingness to contribute voluntarily to village income --- a sure way of gaining the men's confidence. Agricultural improvements usually bear their fruits only after a year or so, however, and although befriending the boys, the farmers were not quick to embrace innovations. And, like country people everywhere, they had a healthy scepticism that kept the more ardent students on their toes.
The girl volunteers spent their days visiting housewives, determining their needs and suggesting solutions to important problems. Experience showed the women more open to, and even eager for, discussion and suggestion than their menfolk. The successful treatment of a sick child with medicines that are simple but unknown in large sectors of rural Chile was a concrete example of improvement women could talk about. Once they realized that the girls were not 'do-gooders' but enjoyed sharing gossip and expected to learn as much as they could teach, the women were easily won over.
Evenings and Sundays were devoted to community activities that varied from manual labour projects to lectures and discussion groups. One of the most urgent popularization themes was to draw attention to already existing legal provisions for social welfare and land reform with which many country people were not familiar.
The population's reaction? 'Our departure was very emotional,' said one of 1,800 1965 volunteers after a stint in an Arauco Indian island settlement. 'The women wouldn't come down to the beach and very few men accompanied us as far as the boats. They waved their handkerchiefs from their houses, and the last to say good-bye --- rustic men hardened by life---were crying.'(13) So impressed was President Frei by the students' success that he ordered the creation of a National Office of Voluntary Service within his Presidential Office on Youth Affairs.
Consistent with its policy of stressing private contribution to social as well as economic development, the Venezuelan Government has not created a special youth volunteer programme. Instead, government efforts have attempted to bring about an atmosphere favourable to --- and enlist support for --- privately sponsored volunteers. They have also channelled at least one already existing but underemployed pool of governmental man-power, the armed forces, into a crucial development task --- literacy.
A striking example of private initiative that has come to life in this propitious climate is the Instituto Venezolano de Acción Comunitaria (Venezulan Institute of Community Action), a Christian-inspired but lay-operated community development agency, founded in 1962.(14) Apart from teaching those drafted to read and write, Venezuela's armed forces have helped accelerate the country's literacy campaign by offering educated soldiers the opportunity to volunteer as literacy teachers. Thus, in the 1962-3 school year, members of four regiments posted in Caracas were trained to teach and taught reading, writing and arithmetic to classes of from five to twenty pupils in five of the capital's ranchos (shanty-towns). Simultaneously, an effort is being made to transform National Guardsmen stationed in the countryside into 'cultural militia-men'. About 7 per cent of each National Guard Unit teaches literacy and allied subjects, including civics, geography and even natural science. Between 1963 and 1966 11,315 Guardsmen enabled some 30,000 men and women --- in the words of the Government's Literacy Director -'to join, With joy and pride, the great family of Venezuelans with equality of rights and opportunity'.(15)
Cuba is doubtless the country in Latin America where volunteers have been most numerous. The wave of exultant popular enthusiasm that followed the island's liberation from dictatorship lifted the hopes and generosity of young people to a peak seldom attained in a world of demagogy and doubt. From the start, the new government made clear its intention to increase and distribute knowledge and wealth, and most young people with skills to share had no second thoughts about volunteering their energies for the immense task of effecting national socio-economic revolution.
1961 was declared the Year of Education and Fidel called on all educated Cubans to take part in a national campaign destined to eradicate illiteracy for once and all. One twentieth of the population, 271,000 volunteers --- 100,000 high-school and university students, 15,000 workers, 35,000 teachers and professors and 121,000 citizens at large --- succeeded in reducing the illiteracy rate from 23.6 per cent to an insignificant 3.9 per cent.(16)
The question asked by many impartial observers of this and succeeding spontaneous mass efforts is 'How long can they last?' The revolutionary explosion that disrupted Cuban society and released such quantities of voluntary popular energy cannot continue for ever, they reason. Ineluctably, and probably sooner than later, the dust will settle. Cuba will return to 'normalcy', Cubans --- like human beings the world over --- will return to basically egocentric preoccupations and, as elsewhere, voluntary service will be the pastime of a militant but tiny minority. A fever pitch of social activity cannot be maintained indefinitely, it is true, but the above analysis does not give sufficient weight to two factors.
The first is the extent of upheaval wrought by Fidel. The revolution will in time become institutionalized, and it is precisely through institutionalization that radically changed ways of thinking will be implanted as permanent features of Cubans' mental landscape. In a decade it may no longer be possible to mobilize a. quarter of a million volunteers to eliminate a given social ill at a single stroke. But it will also be unthinkable for a student to spend four years at university without participating, at one time or another, in a social service project. Voluntary service is not a way of life but it can be a vital part of a way of life.
The second factor to be taken into account is the reaction of the island's youth to adversity. It is thanks to, more than in spite of, the country's continuing economic difficulties, which are hardly all of its own making, that voluntary service has become a hardy perennial. When hurricane Alma struck in 1966, over two months before the usual tropical storm season, the island was caught unprepared and damage was correspondingly great. The government called for 100,000 urban volunteers to clear debris and help rebuild, and from Havana alone tens of thousands of employees, teachers and students poured out over the countryside.
'What we did was natural for Cubans of today,' wrote one young Habañera on returning from an all-female reconstruction brigade. 'And now,' she commented, demonstrating that young 'Cubans of today' who take part in voluntary service are not ascetic fanatics, 'we're once again seeing to our homes, work, studies and revolutionary activities as well as caring for our nails and hairdos, choosing rouge that suits us, shopping for clothes and shoes...' And these personal preoccupations tarnish in no way the 'deep and intimate joy of knowing we've been useful'.(17)
'Did we have difficulties?' asked one student when questioned about primitive living conditions on a farm where he helped build a giant chicken-coop.
Can revolutionaries call difficulties the natural inconviences encountered when we leave city homes to set up shop in the countryside? We all simply took in our belts a notch or two and found satisfaction and enjoyment in bringing our grain of sand to the great task of converting adversity into victory.(18)