Mission Control (part 1)

Boston Magazine, October 2000
By Jay Cheshes

 

In 1970, a group of Danish hippies set out on a mission to save the world. Thirty years later, some of the young acolytes they recruited claim the group has become a cult, amassing riches in the hundreds of millions of dollars under the direction of an elusive and mysterious founder. Now, with recruiting efforts reaching into the United States, ex-members say the mission is no longer to save the world but to conquer it.

 

A low cloud clings to the perfect pastures of the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, a tiny offbeat institution hidden deep in the wooded foothills of the Berkshires outside Williamstown. It's just before lunchtime, and the campus is abuzz with activity. A young woman from New Zealand coaxes an oversized lawn mower along the hillside at the base of the main lodge, which was renovated by an earlier group of students and christened Bella Vista for its impressive mountain views. Inside the brand-new state-of-the-art video editing suite, a freckle-faced 20-year-old from Indiana just back from six months in Angola is putting the finishing touches on a presentation about her experiences in that war-ravaged southern African nation. In the kitchen, a group is whipping up a quick vegetarian lunch of humus, pita bread, and three-bean salad. Other students are glued to computers, Web surfing to learn more about the Third World countries where they'll soon be planting trees, building schools, or digging latrines. They are mostly 18, 19, or 20 years old, and are as wide-eyed and well-intentioned a group as you're likely to find. Some of them are practicing their Spanish or Portuguese, others are on the phone tracking down visas, or huddled together working out the details of fundraising excursions to Burlington, Boston, or Amherst. Although they've shelled out $5,000 each to be here, before they go overseas they are expected to raise far more than that, mostly by soliciting handouts from strangers in college towns or affluent suburbs across New England. They are a tight-knit group, drawn together by hard work and communal living, and are not much younger than the teachers charged with preparing them for the harsh realities of Third World life.

 

Those teachers were students here once too. It was only two or three years ago that many of them first contacted the school after noticing flyers stapled to kiosks or to dormitory walls offering opportunities to "volunteer, live, and learn in southern Africa or Central America. Some of them had traveled together to Nicaragua, where they lived sparely in the mountains among the coffee growers and built a medical clinic for the region's lone doctor. When they returned to Williamstown, exhausted but empowered, they were invited to stay on. They signed over their salaries, their time, and their labor and entered the ranks of an international brotherhood of like-minded souls known as the Teachers Group. In return for their commitment to the group, they get room and board, free travel, and a new family of friends. They live together and work together and in their collective strength believe they'll accomplish great things for the poorest, most destitute of their Third World brethren.

 

But there's a catch. Former members, government investigators and journalists who have studied the Teachers Group in Europe say it's a cult. Beneath the warm exterior lurks a dystopia revolving around skewed ideas about helping the developing world. Among the core leadership, there is a seemingly voracious appetite for money and influence. A social movement founded 30 years ago in a rural farmhouse in the village of Tvind in eastern Denmark, the group has been described as a cult in government reports in Belgium and France and in books and articles by European journalists and longtime members from Scandinavia. Two years ago Steen Thomsen, who had been the headmaster of a Teachers Group school outside London, left after 16 years and published an exhaustive personal account he submitted to the Danish Ministry of Education. "What I for so many years regarded as a peacemaking organization, working for the oppressed and poor," he wrote, "has turned out to be a cult with all of its important characteristics."

 

Despite the financial prowess of the Teachers Group - journalists and government investigators in Europe speculate that the combined value of its holdings is in the hundreds of millions of dollars - its public face has always been that of an impoverished grassroots organization. Even its own members rarely have much knowledge of the true scope of the group, whose most senior devotees direct non-profit humanitarian organizations structured to obscure all signs that they are under common control.

 

At the center is a former high school teacher named Mogens Amdi Petersen, who started the group in 1970 when he led a small band of hippies on a cross-continental odyssey, traveling by bus across Europe and the Middle East and into India. Petersen went underground 20 years ago and, beside one brief encounter with a journalist in the Cayman Islands in the early '90s, has not been spotted by reporters since 1979. From locations in Denmark, Florida, and the Caribbean, he is said to direct a world wide empire that over the years has reportedly included not only schools and development projects, but also office buildings, commercial plantations in Latin America, beachfront property in Miami and the Cayman Islands, a satellite television network, computer and lumber companies in China, a clothing factory in Morocco, a shipping company in Florida and the Caribbean, and used-clothing stores all across Europe.

And Massachusetts is its North American headquarters.

 

A little more than a decade ago, after being hounded in Europe by the press and by government investigators, the Teachers Group, sometimes known as Tvind for the Danish hamlet where it began, decided to expand to the untarnished frontier across the Atlantic. With little fanfare and scant scrutiny, it arrived in this country with a bold plan to swell its ranks, and its coffers, by exploiting the good intentions and public-minded volunteer spirit of many young Americans. From an old 4-H camp near Northampton, it created the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, which, in turn, spawned spinoffs in Michigan and California.

 

Three years ago it started collecting and selling used clothing under the name Planet Aid, a non-profit branch set up near Boston that now has four stores and more than 1,200 familiar bright-yellow collection boxes and last year generated more than $2 million in sales, mostly as unsorted bulk sold to commercial wholesalers.

 

The Teachers Group has big plans for the United States, plans being put into motion through a complex network of foundations, holding companies, and non-profit organizations. It is preparing to recruit more students and more teachers, and open new schools. As Planet Aid, it hopes to gain the name recognition, if not the scope, of such used-clothing concerns as Goodwill or the Salvation Army. In parts of Europe, where Teachers Group affiliates have more than 100 stores and thousands of bins, it has already reached that status - although in the last few years its operations have been largely shut down in Great Britain and France because of tax law violations. If all goes well, sometime in the next five years its American arm will operate thousands more of those clothing collection bins in shopping centers and on street corners, and as many as 25 used-clothing stores, including one already planned for Harvard Square. Flyers advertising its overseas programs will blanket the walls on every college campus, and it will be flush with cash raised from tuition, the sale of used clothing, and generous grants solicited from a new corporate office on Wall Street.

 

All of this capitalist flash belies the orgins of the teachers group in the counterculture of the late 1960s. In the beginning, the young Scandinavians who founded the group were driven by a genuine desire to combat injustice, inequality, and the suffering of the poor. But as in so many other revolutionary movements, things quickly changed. The good works began with schools in northern Europe that, once they became money making enterprises, paid the way for expansion into southern Africa, where the fight against apartheid became a focus. In many circles the conventional wisdom was that strengthening South Africa's neighbors, known as the frontline states, was one of the best ways to help topple the apartheid regime. The Teachers Group put its energies behind the rebel leader Robert Mugabe, who was fighting a brutal war for independence against the white government of Rhodesia. It supplied food and clothing to the war refugees pouring into neighboring Mozambique, and informed Mugabe that, following victory, it would help him build a new country. Mugabe has now been president of Zimbabwe for 20 years, and for all that time the Teachers Group has been his friend. It has built schools, clinics, and Teachers Group teacher-training colleges, and has recruited veterans of the war into the Teachers Group. In return, it has reaped considerable influence in Zimbabwe, where two years ago it inaugurated a new multimillion-dollar headquarters at a ceremony attended by Mugabe and other government officials. The Teachers Group also has a significant presence in Angola and Mozambique.

 

In these countries, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Teachers Group's nonprofits appear to be legitimate humanitarian organizations. While there have been benefits to this work, however, there have also been many problems - so many, in fact, that some critics in the development community wonder if the group is doing far more harm than good. Rather than working with locals in Mozambique and Guinea Bissau to develop their own plots of land, for example, the Teachers Group owns enormous cashew plantations that employ hundreds of local farmers as part of a program that teaches them commercial agriculture techniques. Critics say the plantations pay the same comparatively low wages as any other commercial enterprise, and funnel the profits back into the Teachers Group.

 

Working on the principle that if you believe in something, you can accomplish it, the school in Massachusetts sends young untrained volunteers to work on complex projects such as implement ing health education programs or training experienced farmers in new growing techniques, often providing little or no guidance. "I met a couple of 18-year-old girls who were trying to teach 40- and 50-year-old farmers how to farm," says an aid worker who ran into Teachers Group volunteers in Zimbabwe. "They had no background for this work, not to mention the language barrier." In Mozambique, one former volunteer says he was instructed to plant a whole grove of fruit trees, even though it wasn't the right season. "We planted thousands of seeds," he recalls. "I heard that a few weeks after it was all done, everything died." Another aid worker, also based in Mozambique, says Teachers Group volunteers built a school in his area two years ago without government authorization.

 

Since that time, the building has remained empty. "It's like these people are from another planet," he says. "I don't understand what they are really doing." Zahara Heckscher, whose upcoming book on international volunteer programs warns people away from Teachers Group programs in a section about the Institute for International Cooperation and Development, cites the school's cult affiliation and many examples of mismanaged development projects. While conducting her research, Heckscher traveled to Zimbabwe, where she interviewed confused young Americans who seemed to have no idea what they were supposed to be doing. "When I arrived, I was in culture shock city," one woman told her. "There was no one here telling me what to do. The two people I am here with were completely unsupportive."

 

Ten years ago Cara Siano, Laura Chomentowski, and Stanley Gildersleeve paid out $7,700 to join a volunteer travel program in Central America, and soon found themselves hitchhiking through Mexico, living on $2 a day for food, with virtually no budget for lodging. The Teachers Group runs all its schools under a strict philosophy of self-reliance, which is why the trips are often poorly planned and students get so little guidance from the largely untrained staff. Overseas programs run by the Teachers Group are like a cross between the Peace Corps and the television show Survivor. The group contends that adversity builds character, and that the best way to understand the poor is to not only live among them, but to live just like them. Problem is, many students have never even been overseas, let alone to a Third World country overrun by war, starvation, and disease. A letter one group leader sent back to the school in Williamstown gives a good idea of just how bad things can get. "We have hit some hard times here in Angola," the teacher wrote. "Most of us have had malaria now, some worse than others.

[Naomi] is scared and wants to go home. [Hillary] has been severely depressed and homesick for over a month now. She has just had malaria for the second time."

 

Over the years there have been many reports like this, from schools in Europe and the United States. Students have gotten malaria, typhus, and worms in their intestines. They've been robbed, assaulted, even shot at.

 

Despite all these trials, many still say the ordeal was worthwhile. Even Siano, whose group filed a lengthy complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, says she had "a great experience despite the problems."

 

Mikael Norling, the director of the school at the time that complaint was filed, wrote a letter to the attorney general, dismissing the students' allegations that the school had lured them in with false advertising, then put their lives at risk. "They had been explained very clearly what the program was all about," Norling says today. "It's not kindergarten. These are adults who come to us on a volas never taken action against the school.

 

Part 2