It’s not that I mind so much the experts and the celebrities being experts and celebrities.

I’m not necessarily against books like Half the Sky or causes like the One Campaign in principle. The fact that more people in the developed world know more now than they used to about the issues in the developing world is something that I see as a good thing.

And so I try very hard to have an open mind when I see famous journalists or rock stars or actresses going on about “Africa” this or “refugees” that. These people can and often do self-educate about whatever issue or cause they’re passionate about to the point that they may even become legitimate experts in the subject matter in their own right. …Much as it may at times pain me to admit (although staying clear on the difference between “expert” and “professional” helps). In many cases I totally agree with the issues that the celebrities and famous journalists raise. Who in the world would be outspokenly against research on muscular dystrophy, not care at all about global warming or favor the oppression of Kurdistan?

But too often, at least in modern Western popular culture, awareness raising stops at just that. Ann Curry can tell us all about how bad women have it in different parts of the world, and she may be absolutely right. Bono and Angelina may have a higher hill than almost anyone else from which to shout their messages of awareness-raising on HIV/AIDS or non-refoulement, and they may be perfectly justified in doing so. They are all in their own ways very adept at getting their messages into the public sphere and stirring deep emotional responses within us.

But where they consistently fall short is in telling us what to do about any it. In the absence of some commonly understood means by which the ordinary citizens of [INSERT NAME OF SMALL TOWN IN A DEVELOPED COUNTRY] can be part of the solution, we’re left with causes.

And for the non-aid workers reading (I know there are some), I hate to be the one to break this to you, but supporting a cause is not the same thing as supporting a solution. Having a “COEXIST” bumper sticker on your car or wearing a “Save Darfur” T-shirt or re-watching “Beyond Borders” do not result in people being less prejudiced, the Janjaweed voluntarily disarming, or an end to oppression, respectively.

A couple of months ago during happy hour I saw the words “FREE TIBET!” grafittied on the wall in the men’s room of a grungy/trendy pub near DuPont Circle. And in that moment it struck me that that was probably far more apt than whoever wrote it knew. As often as not, at the end of the day there is no effective difference between buying the “awareness edition” of someone’s CD, boycotting a particular brand of athletic wear, slapping a catchy, liberal bumper sticker on your hybrid Civic or just writing your message on the wall above the urinal.

While the increasing emphasis on awareness-raising on a range of social issues the world over during the past few years is not a bad thing per se, it has all basically been foreplay without follow-through. A generation of Oprah-watching housewives and regular guys alike are left flustered and frustrated, believing that their best options include things like: buy yet another book, buy U2 CDs, start your own NGO or movement, send a bunch of shoes to another country…

I’m not down on anyone for caring. But it has to be said: there remain massive logical gaps between knowledge and passion and action that actually does help.

* * *

Where does this leave us?

Sadly, I have no incisively brilliant end-all sage advice to give. I think that intentionally weaning ourselves and our Third Audience constituents off of development porn is an important first step. We need to treat them like they’re intelligent and stop just assuming that pictures of cute kids with big brown eyes are going to pull at heartstrings and purse strings alike. Part of this will also involve us being able to think past fundraising as the key/only purpose of public communication.

I think that another would be countering some of the “yes, you can make a difference in the world” rhetoric out there with a dose of reality: yes, surely enough, you can make a difference. Blogspot and Paypal and Travelocity make that all possible for pretty much anyone to have their own NGO and change the world, literally. But what kind of difference? It’s not just that aid is increasingly a professional field (it is), but also that it is very possible for the motivated but uninformed to do some real damage out in the field. Maybe we can’t prevent them from going out and making that difference, but hopefully we can at least persuade some.

As unsexy as it is, we have to make the point that for those who want to help internationally, the very best course of action is to donate cash to organizations that are actually doing something. Everyone wants to wear a T-shirt or “speak out” on this or that, or graffiti the bathroom wall. But if you really want to help the earthquake victims or the child soldiers or malnourished mothers, support the work of credible professionals financially. Here again, insh’allah, we can help to educate those supporters about what good, effective interventions look like and which are worth supporting.

Perhaps most importantly, I think that as in industry we’ve undersold the importance of local activism on local issues. In our international work we talk about the critical importance of local knowledge and local participation. But we forget to remind our Third Audience that they are themselves local experts in their own communities. You may not be able to directly affect the prevalence of rape as a weapon of war in DRC, but you can most certainly petition, lobby, talk to city council members, write to congressional representatives, etc. about issues related to making your own community a safer place.

Books like Half the Sky tend to raise awareness about the horrible things that are perpetrated on women in other countries. And they are terrible things. But it’s too easy to read a book like that and the take-away be that it’s the awful “Pakistanis” or “Africans” or whomever that do those things, and to totally forget that awful things happen to people in our own “civilized” countries as well. We’ve said it so many times that we’ve forgotten the essence of “Think globally, act locally.”

It’s time to reconnect ourselves and Third Audience with what that means.

My New  Year’s Resolution this year is to take the time to patiently explain humanitarian aid work to non-insiders…

* * *

Stepping off soab-box… now.

It’s hard to deny that there’s a rising tide of emotionally-driven conversation spilling over into the general public right now around how we, the NGOs and aid practitioners, represent our work externally. The whole discussion around Kiva (www.kiva.org) is about as good an example as any (although it’s not the only good example out there). The “Executive Summary” here will bring you up to speed on that conversation, in case you missed it before.

What I find most interesting about the Kiva discussion, though, is that most micro-finance technicians (or at least those that I talk to) seem to agree: Kiva is running basically sound, properly planned and implemented micro-credit in the field. Very few are questioning that Kiva credit programs help the poor. Or no one that I’ve come across is choosing the grind that axe. Instead, it would be fair to say that the recent blogosphere fervor around Kiva is almost exclusively focused on the way that they market their product to donors online. The issue boils down to, “is Kiva dishonest? Did they withhold facts from their donors?”

I won’t answer for Kiva. But I will answer for the entire aid industry:

We do not tell the whole truth to the general public about what we do with their money.

We don’t. We just don’t.

And it’s not just one or two of us. It’s not the odd, outlier NGO who does a bit of wordsmithing in it’s “Gift Catalogue” (or whatever it’s called). There’s no point in calling out by name the one or two NGOs who bury the “truth” in fine print or withhold it entirely… because it really is industry-wide. In nearly twenty years in the business, I have yet to see a convincing example of an NGO anywhere that was utterly and totally transparent with it’s constituent donor base about how funds were used.

And while, if you were to ask the fundraising and marketing a PR staff of NGOs around the world about why, exactly, we are not totally transparent, you’d hear a very wide range of explanations for why this is the case. Some of them are very sound explanations, in my opinion. There are some very good reasons why we aren’t and probably can’t implement policies of total transparency, but if you think about it, they all boil down to this:

We don’t really trust them.

Re-read Part 1.5. You can kind of see why we’re (all) a bit reticent about sharing raw descriptions of methodology, strategies based on years of accumulated specialized data, or lessons-learned documents – unfiltered and in a contextual vacuum – with non-aid insiders. The potential, not merely for simple misunderstanding, but for wildly inaccurate conclusions about… aid.

We’re afraid that if we were really transparent – really transparent, but without the chance to explain fully – people would misunderstand stop supporting our work. We’re afraid that if we were straight up with our constituent donor bases about how we do community development and relief programming, and how we use donor dollars – really use them – how we really decide on budget categories, how we make the decisions about “why here and not there?”… that those donations – our lifeblood – would dry up. I trust I don’t really need to explain why this would be a bad thing…

* * *

The hubbub in recent months around Kiva illustrates the power of a “personal connection” as a fundraising tool in aid. It puts us in a challenging position. Person to person (P2P) giving gets closer to being a real, feasible possibility each day. Yet it remains horribly problematic: can you imagine the Facebook commentors highlighted in the previous post in a situation where they were donating directly to a specific other “needy” person in another country? That thought makes me cringe… and yet this is what various respected voices (last link to The Kristof for a while, promise!) on the subject of aid are suggesting.

As I wrote in Part 1, the general public seems to fundamentally misunderstand how the aid world works. We need to step up our game on the public information and education side. We need to do it because the more people who understand what we do and the issues we deal with, the more potential there will be for positive change in the world.

We have to take seriously the changing role of the public – that Third Audience – in our work. We have to recognize that, just like our more traditional donors, our Third Audience has an array of “rights” and perhaps also obligations in their relationships with us, the deliverers of aid.

Maybe we need something like a “donor’s ‘Bill or Rights’” – a code of conduct that outlines our obligations (and also the limits of those obligations) to Third Audience donors: our obligation to eventually come clean with the public about what we do and how we do it, not because we have anything to hide, but because many of those who help foot the bill just don’t know.

We also need to do it because like it or not our Third Audience really are increasingly stakeholders in what we do.

We need to be able to tell them what we do.

And we need to be able to trust them…

Parts 2 and 3 are coming soon.

Here’s is screenshot of the status update and following comments of one of my Facebook friends from earlier this week. This is someone I’ve been acquainted with since high school. I also am acquainted with most of the people commenting. Although I’m not particularly close to any, I would describe them all as well-educated, professional people, realitively aware of the world in which they live. Several of them have lived and/or traveled abroad, either as volunteers of one kind or another or as students.

Check it out:

I do not share this in order to demean or make fun of anyone, or even to make the point that I or “we” (including all of you, gentle readers) are the chosen illuminati, and everyone else but clueless morons.

Rather, I share it as one example of where orinary, respectable citizens are in their thinking and attitubes about “helping the poor.”

These people represent our Third Audience.

We very clearly have our work cut out for us.

I’m reminded of this nearly every time I talk about my work to an aid non-insider:

Despite more Developed World interest in international issues, aid, and philanthropy now than at any time prior, there remains massive, general disparity between what individual citizens who support our work think we do, and what NGOs and aid agencies actually do.

I’ve written before that aid is simple, and while I don’t recant that (at least not just yet), I think it could be said better: aid is based on some very simple, basic concepts. But understanding how the industry works and what that means in terms of what eventually happens specifically to dollars donated by a single individual is complicated and takes time to get a handle on.

It’s not that we think donors are somehow stupid or incapable of “getting it” necessarily (more on this in a future post). But understanding aid, how it works, why it has to be done the way it has to be done takes time and concentration. There is a lot to know – mountains of books and documents to read just as basic context, a great many facts to be in possession of, trends to follow, crosscutting issues to stay abreast of. Whether we call it “study” or not, just staying current as an aid professional for whom this is a full-time job requires an immense amount of more or less constant education… to the point that, depending on one’s actual role, just staying current can be it’s own full-time job.

 Aid is not rocket science. But for as much as the general public really knows about how it all works and what we actually do, it might as well be. Technical MCH assessment results, quarterly financial statements for a large food security program, or even the narrative monitoring report of a visit to a relief zone, to varying degrees, might just as well be NASA ballistics data in the eyes of someone not trained to read it.

And why would we think that it is or even could be any other way? Why would we ever expect random citizens with full-time jobs to have a nuanced understanding of this incredibly complicated machine on the basis of what we tell them? For goodness sake, I have in the past supervised interns with Masters Degrees in international aid or international development. Interns. With Masters Degrees in the subject matter… And then we get frustrated with our fellow citizens for not understanding in the space of maybe a 15-minute conversation what we spend entire careers figuring out.

* * *

I think that as an industry we have basically neglected our “third audience” (the first two being recipients of aid and our institutional donors). We have all fallen down on the side of communicating to our private citizen constituent donors about what we do, and how, and all of the “whys” that invariably follow the “whats” and the “hows.” By default, we seem to be operating on the basis of some very unrealistic expectations about the extent to which the general public in our constituent donor countries can consume and assimilate large quantities of raw information, and grasp concepts and principles in a very short time and with the most cursory of explanations. And we make enormous assumptions – both positive and negative – about how the generally uninformed public will react when and if they do learn the facts about what it is that we actually do.

Of course there are many and varied reasons for and causes of this. Some are internal: in my own personal experience, NGO marketing/communications/fundraising/PR staff typically do not really understand what aid is, what their own employers actually do on the ground in country X, or how the very programs that they promote work in fact. And I’d see this primarily as a failing of NGO program staff who see themselves as too busy to be bothered to explain to their own colleagues what they do, or who roll their eyes and throw up roadblocks when marketing staff want to visit “their” field programs. So, there’s some onus on us, the programs people, the implementers, to be a little more patient and understanding and proactive in talking about aid to our non-programs colleagues.

There’s obviously an external dimension as well. Aid has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, but the way we talk about it externally has not changed nearly as much. The fact that 2010 is upon us and there are still not just people, but whole charity rating websites who use overhead as a key indicator of organizational goodness is a very apt example. Painting with some broad strokes here, I know, but in general we need to move past the “teach a man to fish…” mode of explanation. We need to move past the three-fold pamphlet, the 2-paragraph marketing blurb, the 30-second spot. We need to think beyond fundraising, and take donor and general public education about aid more seriously.

I have real reservations about total and utter transparency. There are limits, in my opinion, to we as aid organizations can be reasonably expected to voluntarily share with the general public about our inner workings, the details of our internal structural and political debates, details of our budgets. But we need to do better.

We need better thinking about to manage the precarious sets of balances between packaging and content, communication for the sake of simply informing the public and communication for the sake of fundraising. For heaven’s sake, in an age where the dead-serious best advice of a respected voice goes against known industry best practice, where a random undergrad can name a “movement” after himself and have a website about helping the poor, or where a few otherwise indigent surfers can become a “development NGO” that will (of course) accept your donations, we need to assert our place as the subject matter experts in the actual delivery of aid. We need to be a little less bashful about calling out those obvious bad ideas, and more savvy about championing the good ones.

More than anything else we need more, new and better ways of telling the public what we do… because right now they don’t know.

Yes, I do realize that not just anyone can write a bestselling book and then get invited to promote said book on Oprah.

But you’ll forgive me for being more than a little blasé at the sight another journalist-cum-aid expert giving advice to NGOs about… fundraising.

In this article written for Outside magazine, our old buddy, a familiar name in the aid twitterverse and familiar face on the aid-related speaking engagement circuit, Nicholas Kristof shares a few pearls of what has the look and feel of sage advice for NGOs. Let’s take a look at some of those:

“So for God’s sake, let’s learn how we can connect people to important causes and galvanize a robust public reaction.”

That sounds lovely, but on second read I have absolutely no idea what that means. But it could be a line from a modern remake of Dr. Zhivago: “The cause needs you..”

“Hundreds of thousands of American students and church and temple members joined the Save Darfur movement, protesting, fasting, or otherwise supporting a people halfway around the world who mostly didn’t look like them, who belonged to a different religion, and whom they’d never heard of a few years earlier. For me, it was a reminder that emotional connections are possible even with the most remote suffering.”

Oh, well, hallelujah. Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested and fasted…

Yes, you can make a difference in Dafur (and also release lots of toxins) by simply fasting. Now if we could somehow link hot yoga or cross-country motorcycling to the Iraqi refugee crisis, I’d be all up in that.

(Other bloggers do the rant-about-badvocacy thing far better than I… WrongingRights, AidWatch, Texas in Africa, or Good Intentions… – care to take a crack at Kristof, here?)

“Half the Sky became a New York Times bestseller and went through seven printings before it was three weeks old. Young people particularly seem to want to move from reading about problems to addressing them, so we started a Web site for them, halftheskymovement.org. We’re also developing an online video game and television documentary to bring new people to the cause.”

In case you missed it, here’s the key message:

- Step 1: Buy my book

- Step 2: Donate to my movement online

Call me a naysayer… but a video game? Seriously?

“Many of you readers travel to developing countries, and you’re the ideal marketers for humanitarian causes. But if you’re trekking in the Himalayas, come back not with stories of impoverished villages but rather ones about a particular 12-year-old girl who, if she received just $10 a month, could stay in school. Come back with photos of her—or, better, video that you put on a blog or Web site. Make people feel lucky that they have the opportunity to assist her, so that they’ll find helping her every bit as refreshing as, say, drinking a Pepsi.”

Yes, by all means, plaster the face of some poor child up on your blog. Better still, give her name and location, so that any random person with internet access can track her down… for whatever purpose.

As well, please do just create the impression that people can help her directly. There simply aren’t enough start-up charities these days. What we really need are more amateurs mucking about in the field of humanitarian aid.

And forget Pepsi. Make it as refreshing as drinking a “Fat Tire” and I’m in…

Don’t even get me started…

I’d written a rambling, strident, rant post in response to the recent run on AidWatch which – I’ll be vulnerable – I found more annoying than normal. @Bill_Easterly, way to push my buttons, bro. (e.g.,  here, here, and here.)

“How the world”, I demanded, “can someone who’s never actually managed an aid or development project claim to be any kind of ‘expert’??? I’ve actually been working in aid – not just pontificating on about it from an ivory tower (or World Bank cubicle) – for years, now…” It went on like this for a page or two.

And then, just before clicking “publish”, I managed to get myself into a twitter conversation with a few people whose correspondence I’ve come to particularly appreciate about the differences between an “expert” and a “professional.” (HT @ithorpe @NaheedMustafa @Michael_Keizer @saundra_s)

As my pupils un-dilated and I again became capable of considering viewpoints alternate to my own, it sank in: Bill Easterly may be an aid/development expert.

But I am a professional.

* * *

I partially paid for my existence during graduate school by playing in a rock band that enjoyed what I think I can honestly describe as “moderate local success.” No talent scouts from BMI or Sony Records ever approached us, but we managed to have paying gigs most every weekend. It was mostly just good male-bonding fun, with gas money thrown in as a bonus.

But there was always someone – maybe an old acquaintance, or maybe a close friend, or a random total stranger – wandering backstage between sets to offer little wisdom pearls of advice: “Duuuude, you need to, like, turn the bass all the way up…” Or, “That bridge you guys played two songs ago, just totally didn’t work… it would be cooler if you made it more, you know, like Nirvana…” Or, “Wow.. you guys really sound a lot like Supertramp, except without any keyboards…” (Supertramp? Really? You’re cuttin’ me deep, man… might as well say we sound like Chicago…)

And whether we ever said it to anyone’s face or not, in the van on the way home we’d invariably gripe about how “everyone’s an expert.” Everyone who doesn’t play guitar knows exactly how guitar should be played.

* * *

Apart from the occasional post about Egypt v. Algeria football matches, I do not follow sports at all.

But I wonder if maybe there’s some analogy in the sports world, too. Seems to me that there are plenty of 10-year-old boys who can recite the stats of every player on every team in the NBA. Or overweight old guys who seem bent on sharing their strident opinions about who is or is not going to with the SuperBowl this year, and all of the reasons why (I always seem to get stuck sitting next to these guys on long flights). And I know there are equivalents in other countries for a range of other sports. The extent to which whole swaths of Asia and Africa simply shut down during the World Cup is part of the evidence.

And as in my (one time) world of music, I imagine that in the world of professional sports there is the same “everyone’s an expert” dynamic. You can know a lot – maybe even everything – about football: all the teams, all the players, strategies, plays, the rules of the game, the ethics and morality of it all… You can be an “expert”, but that doesn’t mean you’re able to throw a ball through a hoop or kick one into a goal.

* * *

No reasonable person would deny that any community of practice needs critics, experts. Those non-practicioners who can look in from the outside, whose job it is to see big pictures and/or elements of the whole in the abstract. Those who see things that we’ll invariably miss because we’re too close physically, emotionally to it all.

Admittedly, the stakes are far, far higher in aid than they are in professional sports or the local music scene. What we do makes the difference between life and death for tens of thousands, daily (on some days). And so perhaps those of us inside the aid industry need those not-directly-involved experts more than we think we do. It’s painful at times, not to mention annoying, but we need to engage with those ideas honestly and with open minds.

However, I do think that those critical, analytical, external voices need to be tempered and balanced with the voices those of whose job it is to actually, you know, do stuff. Those of us in the thick of it, whether on the front line of service delivery, on the cutting edge of some crosscutting debate, or struggling to balance “innovation” with “process” deep in the organizational bowels of an INGO or UN agency.

A lot of what the aid critics have to say in the blogosphere and in books you can buy on Amazon.com sounds lovely. But much of it is just plain not applicable. At least not in it’s current form. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that @Bill_Easterly is absolutely right about RE v. “data mining.” Anyone working for an INGO give a flying rip? Does it change one iota what the vast majority of aid professionals will do tomorrow? The fact that I’m even asking gives you a hint as to my personal opinion…

Whether you agree or disagree with me about “data mining”, we, the professionals, need to be more active, credible participants in the conversation with the expert critics.

* * *

There’s already fantasy football… fantasy Aid, anyone?

Oh, and if the experts are somehow analogous to 10-year-old sports fans with notebooks full of stats and data on every team and player… I wonder what aid worker posters @Bill_Easterly has on his office wall…? ( All written in good humor and with nothin’ but love for you, Professor )

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a strong supporter of President Barak Obama. And, if I’m honest, I can’t totally turn off the American idealist/optimist buried deep inside me. But on December 1 – barely out of American Thanksgiving and into the straightaway towards Christmas (supposed to be all about “Peace on Earth and Goodwill Towards Men” [and I seriously hope women, too]) – I found it somehow sadly ironic that the Leader of the Free World announced what amounts to an escalation of war in Afghanistan.

Despite some more-strident-sounding-than-I-really-meant-it Twitter discussion the other day, I’m not categorically opposed to any/all military intervention in Afghanistan. But my very great fear is that no one has a clear (I mean really clear) picture of what “success” looks like in Afghanistan. Maybe the rhetoric coming from the podium sounds great, but it’s far too broad and general to translate into tangible states of being in the field.

 And it seems that “what in the world can we do about Afghanistan” is actually a really great metaphor for about where I feel we are with Aid, writ large.

I asked this question once before, and I’ll now ask it again: where is this all going? In specific, tangible terms what are the household and community level conditions which will signal that we have successfully worked ourselves out of our jobs there? What does a “developed” Afghanistan look like? Or a “developed” any place else, for that matter.

How do we know when enough has been done?

When every mud-brick house has a satellite dish bolted to the corrugated metal roof? (Not the cheap ones that only pull in Iranian mullahs and dance videos, but the nice ones that get Free World programming, like, from Turkey and Dubai.)

When every Afghan kid over the age of 10 plays Wii “Rock Band”? (The proxy indicator would be how many know all the words to “Eye of The Tiger” or “Man in the Box”)

Or more seriously…

Is there a magik number of doctors and nurses per population, a number kilometers of paved road, a number of consecutive elections that meet our standards, or cars compared with donkeys? Is it a literacy rate we’re after? A particular infant or maternal mortality rate? We want to see the age of female sexual debut go up? A percentage of the population within a kilometer of clean water? What?

Speaking not just about Afghanistan, but about, well, everywhere…

* * *

I actually had a very similar conversation about eleven years ago (back in my “text bitch” days). It wasn’t a country or region-specific conversation, but more focused on how to articulate the achievement of “goals” as written into USAID proposals. Things like, “Improve the quality of life for poor, rural farmers in __________.” How do we get at that quality of life?

I won’t pretend to have all the answers. I won’t even pretend a few good ones. What we came up with over the course of a few month’s worth of conversations, mostly in a Starbucks in Silver Spring, MD, were these two things:

- More options for people. Back then we saw our jobs in aid as primarily about somehow “facilitating” options for people that they previously hadn’t had. The option to seek health care from a professional (or not). The option to go to school beyond the sixth grade (or not). The option to vote for one’s own leaders (or not)… Making sure that additional options are there materially is only half of the challenge. Going to the trouble ensuring those options and then being strong enough to let people choose not to choose them is the really hard part for aid workers and nation builders alike.

- Plump, happy babies. We saw this the ultimate measurable impact (you can count plump, happy babies). You can do all health sector capacity-building you want, build roads, do agriculture extension, improve yields… but if the babies aren’t plump, something isn’t working. Similarly, you can do civil society programs, support good governance, empower women, improve access to markets with consumer good from (say) China, address resource gaps… but if the babies aren’t happy, it means families and communities aren’t happy, and that means something isn’t working.

Far from perfect? Of course. Perhaps flawed to the point of not being useful at all.

But to this day, I can’t quit the habit of specifically looking to see if babies are plump and happy whenever I go on a community visit.

* * *

I sincerely and fervently hope that I’m wrong, but I have a tough time making the connection between an additional 30,000 combat troops in Afghanistan, more plump, happy babies in any kind of foreseeable future.

That said, I cannot envision even in my own head what “success” looks like there. Forget military success, I mean development, humanitarian success.

Of course, I know the technical standards. If we can get infant mortality down to approximately the same rate as, say, Sri Lanka, or the food security up to approximately the same level as, say, Nicaragua, or good governance and the political process to more or less the same standard as – oh – Macedonia, maybe that will be enough. I know how those things look on paper.

But I can’t picture it in Afghanistan.

Not that I don’t think it’s possible. But I just can’t picture it.

I want more plump, happy babies. But that’s a long-term dream. Not just for Afghanistan, but everywhere.

For now I’ll stick to wishing for peace on earth.

By now anyone who’s been paying any attention at all to miscellaneous wars in the Middle East or Central Asia, the tortured Civ/Mil conversation, or the aid world twittersphere has come across the controversy spawned by this article, published in The Nation, written by one Jeremy Scahill.

For those who have been offline for a while or who have been busy with their actual jobs, the main issue relates to this statement by Scahill (entire paragraph shown for context, problematic part emphasized):

According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have “conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up,” he said, adding, “They have a sizable force in Pakistan–not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way–but to support a legitimate contract that’s classified for JSOC.” Blackwater’s Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT “was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it.” Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. “Nobody even gives them a second thought.”

If it’s true that Blackwater personnel are really working undercover, posing as aid workers, that is extremely troubling on a number of levels. From the admittedly biased and probably self-serving perspective of an aid worker, this is terrible. It makes us all more suspect than we already are, more likely to be targeted by belligerent insurgent groups than we already are, and more likely to be refused visas/travel permits, shadowed by national internal security organizations, and generally hassled than we already are. And not just in Pakistan, but pretty much globally.

Oh yeah, and it’s illegal.

Actually, forgive me, but I long ago stopped assuming that groups (like Blackwater) under shielded contracts from US government entities (like the DOD) would act in a legal manner necessarily. Call me cynical, but in fact during the GW Bush years I came into the habit of assuming the opposite. So, whether or not Blackwater has or once did or now continues to act illegally is really beside the point for me, at least in the context of this post. And of only marginally greater interest is the question of whether or not they really do or did have operatives posing as aid workers.

Thanks to Jeremy Scahill’s insistence on including those two troublesome sentences, it now doesn’t really matter now whether Blackwater operatives in fact posed as aid workers or not.

* * *

I would actually like to request the help of my friends and readers who are journalists or reporters. I’ll admit up front that I’m fighting the urge to be a hostile audience. My experience as an aid worker over the past 15+ years has been consistently (though, to be fair, not exclusively) negative when it comes to journalists reporting on aid. I’ll spare you detailed examples, but I do have several. In my experience, it seems that very often the nuanced nature of aid work is frequently (and sometimes I suspect intentionally) misunderstood in favor of a story that is more sensational in the short-term. This article by Scahill in The Nation and the controversy now surrounding it (for example, see here), make me ask “why?”

My plea to journalists who happen across this post: help me understand your world.

As a non-journalist lay-person, this looks like something somewhere between idle hear-say and outright fabrication. Further, including the two sentences on Blackwater-posing-as-aid-workers, to my reading, does little to enhance the overall story. Those two sentences could be deleted and the sensational quality of the story would not change. Why were they necessary? Help me understand what I’m missing…

As an aid worker, it reads as plain irresponsible. To me the likely effects of this story on the safety of aid workers, as I said above, not just in Pakistan or the region, is so blatantly obvious that my mind goes immediately towards a malevolent intent. Only the most clueless news writer would fail to see that associating assassins with aid workers in such a volatile and politicized context would almost certainly result in aid workers being targeted. And by “targeted” I specifically mean, AK47s pointed specifically at them, triggers squeezed…

Maybe Mr. Scahill wants aid workers to be targeted? Maybe he wants humanitarian space to shrink even further? I don’t know much about the world that he inhabits. But in mine, these are very real possibilities and serious concerns. Plenty have questioned accountability in aid: is there accountability in journalism? Some just ask that aid benefit the poor (HT @bill_easterly). Who is supposed to benefit from journalism like this? I ask the above as questions, because one part of my brain wants to believe that no journalist would be so calloused or out of touch with reality, and because I shrink from judging someone I’ve never met.

But seriously: what the hell was he thinking?

Someone help me out here…

(For those born outside the USA and/or after about 1980, the title to this post is from the lyrics of a Doobie Brothers song entitled “Black water.” Actually, I could use a doobie right about now…)

It seems like months ago, now, but in reality it’s only been three or four days since I was wading through flooded evacuation centers and muddy neighborhoods just outside Manila, listening to the stories of Typhoon Ketsana victims.

I’m not exactly new at this. I’ve been around a bit.

But no matter how many relief operations I participate in, no matter how many disaster zones I visit, no matter how many haggard survivors tell me their stories, I always find that my eyes are opened in ways I did not anticipate when I finally make it out of the cubicle. While on the surface each response may feel “same same” with the previous one, when I escape the head office or the country office or even the project office and actually get out and talk to those affected (you know, actual people) my understanding expands more and farther and in ways I could never have foreseen. I might cut and paste text from a proposal for India into one for the Philippines. We might hand out the same NFIs or “shelter kits” for every emergency response. But every response is still unique, if not at an operational level, then at least at the level of the individual human beings being served.

When you sit in a cubicle or office churning out proposals, compiling data, doing media interviews, and explaining the basics of disaster response to fundraising staff, and generally directing email traffic, it gets easy for a response to become about sound-bites. It becomes a one-page summary of bulleted talking points, the bare facts of numbers and places. In the heat of a big, high-visibility disaster where I’m in an on-point role, I am as guilty as anyone of focusing on the cold facts and evaluating options numerically and letting it all (temporarily) be about those tasks which need doing. Human references get boiled down to scripted statements that seem either too bland or too over-the-top, but never right on the mark. We lose sight of people’s faces (and although it’s not the main point of the post, this all adds up to perhaps one of the very best reasons ever why HQ people and field people need to spend meaningful amounts of time in each other’s worlds).

And so, just a few days ago, I was spending time in the world of Marikina City, the “Shoe Capital” of the Philippines. I was in a neighborhood where backed up lagoon water had risen to well over three meters (comparable to The Tsunamis), and as it receded left mountains of trash, clogged sewers, and ruined shoe-making equipment and supplies. The people here most made their livings handmaking high quality shoes for sale in Manila’s boutiques and export throughout the region.

My employer’s Philippines team had done an absolutely crack job of responding with a wave of basic food and NFIs up front, followed by very extensive cash-for-work for cleanup in that municipality. By the time I walked through that small, peri-urban neighborhood, it looked almost back to normal. The streets were relatively clean and I could hear the sounds of shoes being made again through open workshop doors. The neighborhood “Captain” pointed out the still visible high-water line, about a third of the way up the second storey. The people living there clearly had challenges ahead of them, but they seemed very pleased with what had been done up to that point.

That’s when I met Joey.

He wheeled himself out to “our” little entourage with some effort. It was clear that Joey suffered from Cerebral Palsy or something similar. He was contorted and unable to speak. But it quickly became evident that Joey was fully capable intellectually. He’d learned to communicate by using a combination of fingers and toes to “type” text messages on a cell-phone that he kept on a lanyard around his neck. Joey was 26 years old.

Through our translator I learned that Joey was fluent in English and also a chess player of some fame, locally. Which was impressive enough. But what really struck me, standing there among a crowd of onlookers, watching Joey using his toes to text on a grimy Nokia, was how at home and – well – happy he seemed. I’ve been before in communities where people with disabilities like Joey’s were pestered and taunted by neighborhood children. I’ve also seen situations where people with disabilities of all kinds have been lumped together into “special” dank, grungy, unfunded institutions, sequestered away out of sight of a mainstream preoccupied the appearances of things. Maybe the mere fact of my presence there that day was a temporary deterrent, and everyone was on good behavior. But I did not detect even a hint of animosity or disdain or disregard for Joey among the growing crowd. If anything, they acted pleased to show him off to us.

In his 2007 documentary of the American health care industry, SiCKO, Michael Moore said something that really came back to me in that moment. I can’t remember the quote exactly verbatim, but it was approximately: “You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats it’s weakest members.”

Of course I’m in absolutely no position to judge anyone, anywhere. But if I were pressed to make an assessment of that community based on their treatment of Joey – treatment that was certainly costly in the context of that difficult time when every able body was needed to clean up and rebuild and restart the shoe-making business – I’d say they passed with flying colors.

And although I can’t precisely pin down all of the reasons why, I found that moment unexpectedly moving.

* * *

In parts of Southeast Asia – perhaps also the Philippines, I’m not exactly sure – there is a way of thinking about people with disabilities like Joey. It’s called “soft wisdom.” In some ways the concept of “soft wisdom” might be inappropriate in a western, politically correct sense. It tends, for example, to lump together those with Cerebral Palsy (like Joey) into the same category as those with, say, Down’s Syndrome. But in other ways I think that “soft wisdom” is a nearly perfect descriptor. I love the fact that it communicates a difference in ability and capability without an implicit value judgment.

Slammed back, in the space of only a few hours, into the head office grind of proposals and reports, strategies, meetings, and numerical analysis, I already fight the urge to too easily forget that emergency responses are, at the end of the day, about people. I can’t help but think back to Joey, talking to me by texting with his toes.

I’m still working out how “soft wisdom” applies here, but I’m convinced that somehow it does.

There’s this classic line in the movie Crash, where the black guy is in bed with the Latin-American woman, and he calls her “Mexican.” She gets all wide-eyed and uptight ‘cause she’s Honduran, not Mexican, and, you know, there’s a lot of difference, and only the most culturally out-of-the-loop and insensitive person could ever mistake one for the other. And his response is something like how, regardless of all that cultural diversity in Latin America, isn’t it interesting that they all still park their cars on the front lawn???.

* * *

In case there’s anyone reading who doesn’t know this already, Guyana is the only English-speaking country on the continent of South America. Further, if I could be indulged to lump a bit, culturally Guyana seems quite distinct. It’s clearly Caribbean. It might share borders with Venezuela and Brazil, but has more in common culturally with little Trinidad, just off the seawall.

Now, if you know any Guyanese person, it’s important that you don’t think of them as “Latino.” ‘Cause they’re not.

But what kills me is that my wife actually kind of looks Latina.

And that’s not just me talking – it has actually been repeatedly confirmed by others.

When we lived for a few years in a northern suburb of Washington D.C., we’d sometimes rendezvous for lunch at a little southern Indian restaurant that was smack in the middle of a Nicaraguan neighborhood (or was it Guatemalan???). As she’d walk the length of the strip mall from the parking lot to the door of “Udupi Palace”, nearly every (Latino) male within earshot would have to say something:

“ehhhh babeeeeeee!”

“(suck teeth loudly…) ehhh mamita!”

“que pasa muchacha?”

Or maybe they’d just whistle loudly.

She’d be good and miffed as she sat down to her dhal and biryani… Not miffed that she’d been hollered and whistled at, though. Miffed because they’d just assumed she was Latina, and – hellooooo – she was from Guyana, and, like, there’s a difference!

And for the last eleven years, the “hey, aren’t you Latina?” theme has been one of our in-jokes as a couple:

On a business trip to Bolivia I showed a picture of my wife to a group of local colleagues who asked where she was from. I answered that she was from Guyana (you know, between Suriname and Venezuela…). They nodded approvingly. “Ah, good for you! You married a Latina…”

The guys selling purses in Istanbul’s “Grand Bazaar”: “Como esta, muchacha..?”

The aging German man at the security screening line in Frankfurt Main: “Hola…”

My favorite, though, was when the two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door and she answered. Our son then a baby and still relatively white was balanced on her hip. Their first question: “Oh, is the lady of the house at home?” (Let’s just say, the Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t win any converts in our home that day.)

* * *

By now I think I’ve made all of the classic white-man blunders regarding Guyanese culture. I know that it’s “peas and rice”, not “rice and peas.” I know the Demerara is the only real rum on the planet. I can recognize “guinepps” in the market. And I have learned to never refer to Guyanese as “Latinos.”

But still, some times I just can’t help it. I need to see the eyes flash and hear the voice rise. And I just borrow from the lyrics of “Los Lonely Boys”:

“Oye! Mamacita!”