I joined the Peace Corps in 1969 and began working at the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1977. I was caught up in the whirlwind of the era’s great liberation movements, an uplifting idealism that inspired so many.
The Peace Corps and U.S.A.I.D. were established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, and both agencies were to share with the wider world a portion of our national wealth to inspire and support new nations arising from colonialism and struggling to address domestic issues of poverty. My participation in these agencies gave me a life of meaning, significance and value.
I fear that with the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to U.S.A.I.D. and other foreign aid programs, the next generation of young, idealistic Americans will miss out on the chance to participate in this generous, life-changing type of service. Worse, more people around the world will remain trapped in cycles of poverty and insecurity.
The thousand townspeople of a Muslim village in southern Burkina Faso welcomed me despite my foreignness and inability to offer much help with what they needed most desperately: adequate harvests and access to clean water. My limitations forced me to embrace humility, to listen and to find common ground among us.
I offered what I could; I helped to build a few wells and a one-room primary school building. For the townspeople, these wells and this school represented not something I had accomplished but rather something the United States had done for them. They saw it as being in continuity with the American wheat President Kennedy had sent in response to a drought some years earlier. “Kennedy wheat,” they called it. Now the Peace Corps was present to them, assisting them, in a limited way, through me.
During my three years in that village I began to sense that, if I just had an institutional home and a little more money, I could contribute so much more. So after earning a master’s degree in economic development planning from Cornell University, I began working for U.S.A.I.D. It was quite exciting at first; I worked with lots of former Peace Corps volunteers, now with professional degrees, all with a youthful energy and commitment characteristic of the 1970s.
In 1979, U.S.A.I.D. sent me to Indonesia, one of its largest programs in the world at the time. The Indonesian government was investing heavily in infrastructure, funded by domestic oil production and foreign sales of natural resources and strategic minerals. To assist the country’s many poor people living in rural areas, the Indonesian government established a joint Indonesian-U.S.A.I.D. project, which I managed on the American side, to channel resources to farmers, fishers, sheepherders, and mothers and children, all among the poorest of the poor. Such assistance, along with opportunities for advanced education, agricultural development and maternal and child health, fulfilled our congressional mandate under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
It was exhilarating. “Peace Corps for adults,” I called it. I was not a churchgoer, but the moral vision was clear: We Americans, in our affluence, must reach out to those in need with generosity, human beings to human beings.
But in time the all-too-human dimensions of the political world in which U.S.A.I.D. operated began to sully my idealism. Congress imposed its earmarks for certain constituents’ priorities; the political apparatus funneled the largest share of aid to countries of strategic importance to the U.S., and the bits left over went to the poorer, needier countries. But I remained because, despite all else, we were living out our mandate, and I was living out my values.
Having returned to the agency’s Washington headquarters in 1984, I chaired the U.S.A.I.D. team that channeled humanitarian assistance to Lebanon, then in the midst of civil war, and backstopped U.S.A.I.D. programs in Oman, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. But the thrill of walking through the diplomatic entrance with its impressive lineup of flags from recognized countries was wearing thin. I finally realized that I had given what I could.
Encountering—and being baffled by—the Catholic Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in D.C. led me unexpectedly to meet for over a year with the Rev. John Gigrich on the cathedral staff. I felt attracted by something I could not name, and gradually I discovered Jesus looking for me at the Mass, in Scripture, in personal prayer and finally in a conversion moment alone in the cathedral.
Father John confirmed me at the age of 41, six weeks before U.S.A.I.D. sent me to Yemen, where I worked until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. This was the year of Yemen’s descent into internal misery, made worse by the external violence visited upon it. It was also a year of great personal change; I was beginning to hear Jesus’ call to priestly ministry in the Catholic Church. I became a Jesuit novice at 44, was ordained a Jesuit priest at 53, and went on to be a high school president, pastor and now senior priest.
Is my life now the same or different from my earlier life? It is surprisingly similar if I acknowledge God as the author of my life and destiny: “I know the great plans I have for you” (Jer 29:11). “I have come that you might have fuller and more abundant lives and share my complete joy” (Jn 10, 15). My life’s implicit grounding in a desire to respond to human needs became an explicit grounding in God’s call that we hear in Isaiah 61:1—“bind up the brokenhearted, heal the sick, proclaim freedom for captives, release prisoners from darkness”—and was made visible in Jesus’ ministry.
As I contemplate the imminent demise of U.S.A.I.D., I am not sorrowful for myself or my colleagues. We contributed our utmost, even to the point of shedding blood. The name of one of my colleagues is etched in a marble tablet on the east wall of the State Department’s diplomatic entrance. She had been a Peace Corps volunteer in India and was killed in 1989 when her helicopter carrying food aid crashed in Ethiopia.
But if the work of U.S.A.I.D. comes to an end, then I will be sorrowful over our country’s lost opportunity to provide generous outreach. I will be sorrowful for those in need who will lose critical assistance. I will be sorrowful that we are losing the many men and women in each host country who staffed U.S.A.I.D. offices.
The world’s needs persist, and the people of the countries we have served look to the United States—the wealthiest country in human history—for a compassionate and generous response, for companionship and help in times of need. But if our government does not recognize the moral imperative to give of our affluence, these needs will remain unmet.
Folding U.S.A.I.D. into the State Department does not offer a real solution; the two agencies are too different in character and mission. This bureaucratic sleight of hand can only diminish U.S.A.I.D.’s mission and hasten its demise.
We must ask for whom this is being done—and why. The claim that Americans must serve our own people first seems more rhetorical than real when libertarian values and threats to the safety net undercut a sense of the common good at home. If “Making America Great” means ensuring that America remains the world’s single most affluent nation at the expense of the rest of the planet, then we have lost our country’s sense of mission and betrayed Jesus’ call to build his kingdom.
