Selling…soft power

Your Eyewitness welcomes the latest contingent of Peace Corps volunteers – smiling, enthusiastic, and eager to serve!! They’ve been coming since 1966 – bearing lesson plans instead of manifestos, footballs instead of firearms, and mosquito repellent instead of military hardware!! Few Guyanese would question their sincerity, but history’s got a looong memory!!
The Peace Corps was JFK’s great humanitarian innovation, launched in 1961 with lofty ideals of service, friendship, and mutual understanding!! Yet it emerged during the Cold War, when Washington viewed newly independent nations as either future allies or future problems!! We became one of those problems!! Declassified documents show the Yanks devoted considerable resources to preventing Jagan’s leftist Government from consolidating power. Burnham’s PNC was the beneficiary – using methods that were anything but soft!!
Yet once the political battle ended – entering independence under a different Government – another challenge popped up! How does a superpower persuade ordinary Guyanese that it’s their friend after having intervened so aggressively in their politics?? Enter the Peace Corps!! If the CIA had been the iron fist, the Peace Corps became the velvet glove!! Instead of covert operatives, we got idealistic university graduates willing to live in villages, teach Mathematics, organise youth clubs, and learn enough Creole to be laughed at affectionately by their hosts! It was a PR triumph!!
The US grasped something empires have known for centuries: power alone breeds resentment, but influence requires affection!! While soldiers can intimidate, volunteers can inspire, and while Governments may distrust Washington, it’s much harder to distrust young Americans helping kids read, planting a community garden, or cycling through the village with a backpack full of books!!
That’s the genius of soft power – volunteers become the faces folks remember, and the geopolitics fades into the background. Now, that’s not to question the motives of the volunteers – most join ‘cause they genuinely want to help, and many formed lifelong friendships in Guyana. Thousands return home with a deeper appreciation of this country than they had when they arrived!
Their contributions were real – just as was their strategic value! Every smiling volunteer quietly challenged the caricature of the “ugly American” – the loud, overbearing foreigner more interested in lecturing than listening. Every successful community project demonstrated that America could build schools, as well as alliances and friendships, as well as military partnerships. In diplomacy, perception matters as much as policy, and that’s why the Peace Corps remains one of America’s most successful foreign-policy investments!! It costs comparatively little – yet generates reservoirs of goodwill!!
For Guyana, the appropriate response should be neither cynicism nor naïveté. We should welcome the volunteers, appreciate their work, and learn from them – just as they should learn from us.
Viva Peace Corps!!

…change
Well, it’s good to see some folks appreciating that rules shouldn’t be carved in stone – but written with the understanding that they can be changed depending on changed circumstances!! Your Eyewitness is referring to the Carter Center praising AG Nandlall for announcing right after the last elections that the constitutional stipulations regarding the “Carter Center formula” composition of the GECOM Commissioners oughta be amended to reflect the new configuration of the Opposition parties!
And that’s where the maturity of the PPP Government isn’t given enough recognition. Because for the donkey years the PNC were the Opposition, their nominees argue that they transport the three Opposition seats!! One from outside – Trotman – was accepted to signal the inclusion of smaller Opposition parties!! But with WIN displacing PNC as the major Opposition party – voluntary accommodation was dumped in a hissy fit!!
So the answer ain’t blowin’ in the wind – it’s right there in the Constitution!! The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Constitutional Reform has gotta take action, pronto!!

…fish
The media is awash with reports of folks refusing to buy freshly caught fish and shrimp – a staple of Guyanese cuisine! – because they fear the denizens of the ocean must be gorging themselves on the bodies of the missing MV Barima passengers.
Even Gillbacka!!