PEACE CORPS IN THE 21 ST CENTURY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

94recruitment rhetoric of today focuses on the beauty of other nations and their people.Service is meant to be attractive as well as rewarding. Visually, we see just that in thesephotographs. Life is calling the volunteer toward a great, beautiful adventure. We havelost the narrative thread of the 1960s and 70s where the volunteers’ job was “tough.”Volunteer Blog PhotosComparing the Peace Corps’ photographs with volunteer photographs will showhow volunteers view their own participation in service differently than the organizationdoes. Whereas the organization’s web site emphasizes scenic beauty and exotic hostcountry nationals, volunteer web sites show volunteers working alongside theircounterparts engaging in physical labor. Volunteer web logs are a means by which nonvolunteerscan access images of service, not seen on the official web site. In the nextchapter, volunteer web logs will be more deeply explored, but for the purposes of thischapter, a brief analysis of volunteer photographs provides another perspective on howvolunteers perceive service.Volunteer web sites show them hard at work building houses and communitywater wells, digging latrines, farming, and teaching. One distinct difference between thevolunteer photographs and the organizational photographs is that volunteer photographsgenerally contain captions highlighting the importance of the picture. This helps to frameand make clear the motivation for posting such an image. In the cases of figures 3.27,3.28, and 3.29, the volunteers wrote that they were working on community projects.Amanda in figure 3.27 is working in the community garden she started; Bly in figure 3.28is helping his community build a water station; and Joe is building a water tank in