The RCD program’s success can be gauged among Costa Ricans in many ways. Perhaps the most compelling among them is the impression that volunteers leave on their community members. These range from coworkers to students, community leaders to the youngest of children.
There is something to be said about the phenomenon wherein the further one travels from the largest cities, that is, the deeper into rural areas, the greater the affection with which volunteers are remembered.
This affection can be partly attributed to novelty. Unlike regional capitals, rural towns rarely see a U.S. American spend two years alongside them as a committed member of the community.
However, more notably, these rural volunteers often integrate along an exponential curve. Where a semi-urban volunteer might struggle to find connection due to the nature of city life, RCD volunteers become townspeople faster than coffee and picadillos can be readied.
RCD volunteers have always joined communities with abandon. They become entrusted with all of the community’s inquietudes, all of its joys and nearly all of its relationships. True chameleons, they are remembered as being part of the town’s grander cause to overcome hardship. Sometimes the memory of an ebullient volunteer is for a community member the most vivid and positive image of the town’s hope.
Volunteers provide a unique reflective experience for the community. They reproduce the town’s essential character with an exactitude that only an outsider can achieve. As the saying goes, the town members come to know that the community’s character and its fate are two words for the same idea. RCD volunteers have influenced this process positively for decades and the result has been praiseworthy.
It seems that hope often wanes harder in rural towns, burdened as they are with longstanding family discord and antipodal perspectives on community issues. Volunteers are rarely if ever able to overcome such antipathies and they often, in fact, give into them during integration. Such difficulties must be accepted to be overcome and, usually around mid-service, volunteers break free of these fatalistic mentalities, and are famous for bringing other community members out of the darkness with them.
Those children, educators, women and men, become the legacy of Costa Rica’s RCD program. They press on with myriad skills and attitudes imparted through workshops, classes and countless informal (practical and psychological) motivational conversations.
Many staff members and volunteers believe that the Peace Corps should continue, as it has since its inception, dedicating itself more to cultural exchange, friendship, and peace than to skills-transfer or infrastructural initiatives. Accordingly, and with no intention of downplaying the tremendous successes of the latter, the RCD program will be remembered more fondly than any other program in recent history for its intercultural successes, for its peacemaking and its friendships.
It can be said that youth in rural Costa Rican towns develop a sense of respect toward teachers, elders, and mentors that often seems absent in urban areas. Volunteers are simultaneously overwhelmed by and grateful for this incredible quality of rural youth. It has given the generations of volunteers the ability to be mentors to hundreds if not thousands of children and adolescents in a unique way. This closeness with youth is a hallmark of the RCD project, not by force due to its project framework, but due to the nature of working and living with rural peoples.
Notwithstanding, the RCD project’s impact often shines brighter than many others thanks to its infrastructural project successes. This is largely because of its volunteers' ability to influence the people of a community through kind actions and thoughtful behavior. A lasting impression of the best humans that the United States has to offer will remain long after the last RCD volunteer boards her plane home.
