Dispatches

Evening Shadows (Dispatches from Kabul)

2011-06-28T17:55:00.015+03:00

On Saturday afternoon, June 18, a group of young men approached the entrance to the Kabul central police station and proceeded to detonate a bomb attached to one of their vests while the others opened fire at whomever happened to be standing around. Nine people were killed.

When I heard about the attack, I did a mental calculation as to the last time I had passed by the police station, and when I might have passed by again.

It happened midday, about 1:30 p.m. The time when lunch is settling in your stomach. You run out for an errand, maybe, or make a phone call, squint your eyes at some emails you need to return—while somewhere else in the city people are dying.

***

I had come to Kabul two weeks earlier. Caught the mid-morning flight from Dubai. Ascend, up and up, over a skyline thick with high rises, sharp glass and steel that cut into the humid, polluted air like a forest of dead trees.

A few hours later we descend into Kabul. Flew in low, or at least it felt low, skimming the tips of the Hindukush mountains, which surround the city like a massive fortress.

Those mountains—staggering, raw. As imposing as thunder.

The plane bumped and jolted in the wind. Felt like we might be tossed down into those peaks, like we could be swallowed up and disappear.

***

I was in Kabul to support the Health Economics and Financing Directorate (HEFD) of the Ministry of Public Health as they evaluate a conditional cash transfer program that was recently piloted. The scheme gave cash to mothers conditional on them giving birth in facilities and having their children fully immunized with DPT3. The program also provided incentives to the community health workers who are supposed to encourage and help them.

As part of my assignment at HEFD, I conduct key informant interviews with health policy and program experts. They tell me about their projects—We train midwives. We create guidelines. We build capacity.

They whisper about the latest controversies, like the survey that shows a maternal mortality ratio (MMR) much lower than the one calculated in 2006—which showed an MMR of 1,600/100,000, the highest in the world. Some don’t believe the numbers. Others are worried what they will do to funding.

Informants complain about other programs, about being left out of conversations and meetings. Once I gain their trust, they lean in, keen to tell me, the rooky, what their business is really like. Their comments about their Afghan colleagues are full of admiration and distrust:

—They are great at extraction, one says. They’ve seen a lot of people like us come through.

—They’ve learned how to survive, says another.

Everyone is very helpful and misleading.

***

It is Friday, the Holy Day. Early morning and the compound is empty, the sky gray.

The night before, I was awoken at 3 a.m. by a tremor. Kabul is near the meeting of the Indian and south Eurasian plates and there are frequent rumblings. Suddenly awake, alert, I strain my eyes to see the ceiling, the outline of the door. I imagine the walls caving in, crumbling to pieces.

Now on the road, I’m unsure where to go. Look out the window, men and women snaking between cars on their way somewhere. Everything about them is long and elegant: long beards, long drapes of white, taupe, gray, billowy blue chadaries. My own head scarf keeps falling clumsily to my shoulders.

My driver leans heavily against the steering wheel, while the shooter in the front seat, an AK47 draped lazily between his legs, picks at his teeth. We pass by a mosque, a market, crooked back roads that lead to the foothills beyond.

The police station is on our right, the same one I will pass twice a day for the next two weeks, the same one that will be attacked a few days after I leave. I hardly notice it, though. I’m looking in the opposite direction, at a wall peppered with graffiti. Something is scrolled in blue paint in Dari next to images of birds, one after the other—wings open, flying.

I ask the driver what it means, but he doesn’t speak English well and hesitates.

Then: It means we want a better life. It means everybody should have a happy life.

I think: Of course. It means Peace.

***

The pub on the U.S. Embassy compound is called the Duck and Cover.

Meet some friends there one night, two young American guys working on civilian-military relations for General Petraeus. Over beer, I tell them about the incentive program whose evaluation I’ve come to support. They tell me about another incentive program, this one to empower (read: arm) local police forces, also called militias.

Despite the fact that Karzai is a Pashtun, there are many who see him and all the other vestiges of security, as illegitimate, a mere reconfiguration of domestic power structures to serve external interests.

The Afghan National Auxiliary Police and the Afghan Public Protection Program are meant to protect the people who are on the right side of the war. My friends at the U.S. Embassy believe in the program. It’s not perfect, they say, but it’s a good thing to do.

—But I thought we are trying to disarm people?

—Well yeah, one of them says, we arm the locals so they can protect themselves from the enemy.

How can you tell which is which?

***

There is a restaurant called Cedars House near the central business district. My colleagues and I sit outside, in the garden.

There are so many gardens in Kabul. Sprawling, with trim lawns, lined with pink and red roses.

The evening is cool. There is a quiet murmur all around us: the chink of glass, conversation in the moonlight. Our meal is slow and meandering, the conversation drifting like smoke.

My Ministry colleagues tell stories. Their days at university in California, St. Louis, the Netherlands, Liverpool. They talk about cricket on the weekends, homes full of relatives, their crowded lives. They poke fun of each other, tell jokes, talk fluidly about philosophy, poetry, literature.

Shards of their pasts are occasionally exposed. One’s boyhood as a refugee in Pakistan. The dark days of the Taliban when they all grew long beards.

I study them. It’s like trying to keep my eye on a flame. I want to understand their lives, but I’m on the outside, straining to look in.

***

They say some expats can’t leave warzones. They get stuck in the netherworld of expat life—behind walls, lonely but never really alone. Submerged in motion, in alcohol, some of them, in constant work. Wake up one morning and realize the only place they feel comfortable is in places where they are uncomfortable.

A storm passes through one afternoon. I’m standing underneath an overhang at the security office with Beth, a British security specialist. She’s open and friendly—shakes my hand, offers me a cigarette as we watch the rain.

She was in Iraq for a while, passed through Sudan, then Kabul.

—I tried to be normal for a year, she laughs. She moved to South Carolina, started a business. “It didn’t work.”

Later, back at the Duck and Cover, I watch her compatriots at the bar: older men with tanned, deeply lined faces, and tattoos on their arms. One wears a gold crucifix, which hangs down over a t-shirt emblazoned with expletives.

It’s karaoke night, and one of them gathers himself solemnly at the mic. A hush falls over the room while he sings:

Would you know my name… If I saw you in Heaven?

***

There’s a lake just outside the city. Some colleagues and I have lunch—Karayee (lamb with tomatoes and garlic), cucumbers, flatbread and yogurt—while lounging on Afghan rugs. We’re in an open-air bungalow of sorts, on stilts that juts out over a cliff above the lake.

It's a rare midday break from the office, and for a while we are all quiet together, looking out over the water, which changes color in the pale afternoon sunlight, from turquoise to shades of grayish blue.

They are like ship captains, these men: smart, realistic, ambitious, trying to navigate the choppy waters of politics and money and ego that are the stuff of the aid business.

There are something like 62 donors to Afghanistan. Six provide more than 90 percent of external support. Aid flows amount to more than 50 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product: official ODA from OECD members rose from US$87 million in 2000 to US$2.2 billion in 2005. [1]

The United States is by far the largest donor. Since 2001, the U.S. has appropriated US$127 billion for the war, and the U.S. military is currently spending nearly US$100 million per day in the country, a total of around US$36 billion per year.

The question on everyone’s mind is Sustainability. It’s the first thing informants ask when I mention the HEFD program to help save mothers’ lives. How will the Afghans, how will any of us, they ask, make this last?

One afternoon, I meet an American official who sneers at the money being “dumped” into Afghanistan. What about the taxpayers at home, she says? Too much money is never enough!

But the amount of aid that ends up in government coffers is hugely reduced by the fact that an estimated 40 percent of all aid goes back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultancy salaries (like mine, with my health insurance and pension, benefits some of my Afghan colleagues do not receive)—a total of some US$6 billion since 2001.

Later, I ask an Afghan colleague about the American official I met. He smiles thinly and looks out the window of our car.

—She has a lot of power, he says.

I think I see a flash of disgust in his eyes.

***

It’s early evening. A friend and I go up to the roof of the guesthouse where I stay, pull some concrete blocks together and sit down, look out over the city.

Sounds now familiar of the city at dusk: Early evening traffic jam. Some men gathered on the side of the road talking. A stray dog barking down a dirt alleyway. Beyond, the mountains stare back at us, harsh, haunting, somewhat obscured in the shadows of the setting sun.

Then the wind picks up, blowing dust and sand in our eyes. Feels like little needles against my skin.

A few days later, my friend will skype me to tell me about the attack.

I will ask him with a kind of panic if he is okay. How did it happen? Were you afraid?

And what will it take for these things to end?

—I wish I had an answer, he will say.

[1] See: Who Owns the Peace? Aid, Reconstruction and Development in Afghanistan, Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra.

History’s teachable moment for a new generation

2011-05-09T13:47:00.002+03:00

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s life.

The events of recent days have us looking back to that day ten years ago, when we were smacked out of complacency by violence that, for the first time—at least for my generation—was happening, not to someone faraway, but to us.

Then in our early twenties, we responded with fervor—we were prepared to defend our country and our values. We hung flags outside our homes and spoke in slogans dripping with patriotism. We were mesmerized and emboldened by an idea of ourselves as victims.

There was little appetite for questioning. Fury was hurled at those who dared to consider the broader issues raised by the attack. This response was understandable in those early days—and dangerous. It laid the foundation of support for the violent wars we were about to wage.

Years went by. There were invasions and casualties. Men convinced of their moral superiority hunted for other men convinced of the same.

Eventually, our fervor waned. My generation grew up, married, had kids, got jobs and degrees. We became accustomed to vague, protracted wars in distant lands, which became abstractions, mere headlines flickering on our computer screens.

Then, the moment. An assassination, a reckoning.

Once again, there are spontaneous gatherings in the street, flags waving, sirens ringing out—only this time there are no tears. This time it is jubilation that we feel.

And a narrative is formed (correct or not): a gun fight, innocent women used as shields by evil men, the necessity of the kill.

Our decency is confirmed again.

Ten years ago I wrote on these pages a short note to my generation—the generation that would be shaped by this ongoing crisis—that we had a responsibility. In the wake of September 11, we had a responsibility to confront the wrongdoings of our nation—to not only talk about American values, but to fight to make them real. This was our jihad, I said, our struggle.

Ten years have passed.

And though there have moments of national reflection, of change and great hope, we remain, for the most part, bystanders to history.

Meanwhile, the world is changing all around us.

Revolutions are bubbling up to overthrow the slovenly, morally bankrupt stooges—the dictators of the Middle East—drunk on their own power, in bed with Western powers. And what is so extraordinary is that they are succeeding, in some places, not because of the violence of a high-profile terrorist organization, but because of the peaceful and persistent demonstrations of ordinary people.

This should resonate deeply with Americans. We are a country marked by a deep belief in equality and freedom for all. We are a people with a fierce commitment to the idea that all people have the right to live free from oppression, free from fear, free to believe and speak what they want.

But instead of resonating, these revolutions seem rather to lay bare the tragic contradiction of our country—our soaring values and fearful practice.

We believe in peace, but not when war is necessary to maintain it. All people are born free, except for those who live in countries where our interests supersede those inalienable rights. Unsavory dictators should be overthrown, but there are exceptions. Democracy is the best form of government, but only for people who will vote our way. Justice is impartial, but not for everyone. Targeted assassinations and frontier justice are criminal, but not when they are carried out by the nation who suffered the pain of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

My generation has submitted to these plausible lies, which force us to become involved in greater and greater contradictions about who we are.

It need not be this way. What my generation lacks is not belief in freedom and justice for all, but rather, the hope that our efforts can make a difference.

We’ve gotten older, maybe even a little tired, a little cynical (yes, even at thirty). We’ve found ourselves deriving a strange satisfaction from resignation, from the assumption that some things will never change.

But then like a drop of water from a tap you thought had gone dry. Like a door blown slightly ajar by the wind. Like hearing a sound in a disused room, you turn your head.

It's the sound of people cheering, of flags flapping in the wind, of feet stomping on the ground they refuse to leave.

These are not the celebrations of death we have witnessed in this country over the last week. Real hope can’t be found there.

These are the celebrations—and demands—for freedom in capitals all over the Middle East. They are a reminder that it is still possible—for average people to disrupt the quantifiable order of things.

Who would have ever thought?

###

As published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on May 8, 2011. I worked at the Trib from 2004-2005.

The Birds of Appetite

2011-03-25T15:33:00.004+03:00

Where there is a carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. …

This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory … enrich the birds of appetite.

[But here] there is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the “nothing,” the nobody” that was there, suddenly appears.

It was there all the time, but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.**

***

A friend of mine, Enrico Pavignani, is working on a fascinating case series about the health sector in fragile and failed states. Well known for his work on Mozambique, Enrico has been working in health in some of the hardest and poorest countries in the world for some 31 odd years.

An early draft on Somalia notes:

“The lack of capacity is constantly invoked to explain the sorry condition of the healthcare field in Somalia. … Nobody would challenge the view that the aggregate performance of the health service delivery system is dismally poor. But poor performance is not uniformly distributed across the health space. …The proliferation of private healthcare outlets, including many of a certain size and complexity, implies some management capacity. The constant growth of the healthcare field, despite all its shortcomings, suggests initiative and entrepreneurship—and hence capacity.…

Orthodox aiddom has tended to focus on the three administrations of Somalia: the Ministry of Health (MOH) of the Transitional Federal Government, which fulfils the prototype of a virtual, absent and disinterested health authority, playing a fictitious role for external consumption; the Ministry of Health and Labour (MOHL) of Somaliland, eager to be recognised as legitimately ruling over the health services provided within its territory; and the Ministry of Health of Puntland.

The MOHL of Somaliland, although belonging to an administration not recognised by the international community, is submitted to the barrage of capacity-building interventions that have become a trademark of the aid industry. The recognised MOH of the Transitional Federal Government is spared this sort of support. Donor agencies in general harbor a deep mistrust of all three administrations, manifest in the reluctance to even contemplate the use of aid management instruments that apportion some control to indigenous health managers.

Then there are the local health authorities. Given their meager (or non-existent) budgets, most struggle to perform their basic functions. The support they receive from international agencies and vertical programmes is in most cases provided in exchange for the execution of specific tasks. These bargains allow for the survival of the concerned local health authorities, but do nothing to nurture their institutional advance as sector-wide local leading agents—in short they do nothing to build capacity, even though this may be the level where it is most needed, and where that type of support could be most effective….

The pervasive perception of a crushing capacity shortage may have its roots in searching for capacity in the wrong places, and in expecting that it manifests itself with familiar signals, like mastering the English jargon used by the aid industry, formulating elegant funding proposals, handling indicators or submitting solid accounts. The striking point is that many indigenous health initiatives have prospered despite (or maybe because of?) their lack of such capacity markers.”

***

One of the reasons development is hard is that donors, as well as those who implement programs, must make decisions about how to best help a country based on inadequate information.

When we don’t have enough information, or when we are pressed for time (as we always are), and looking for the right information is deemed too costly, we fall back on habits, on what is known, on what has been done already. We go to the usual people and talk about the usual things.

Sometimes, this is enough. But sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, making decisions about aid this way results, as Enrico’s discussion of capacity-building in Somalia suggests, in aid geared towards things as we see them, and not as they really are. And like birds of appetite, we miss things that could improve the impact of aid because they are not our kinds of prey.

We could do things differently.

Enrico suggests that in Somalia, investments in local-level capacity development could provide better returns than focusing on the ministries. More generally, he says that capacity discussions should focus on the incentives that condition the performance of the healthcare system as a whole, rather than on the individual and organizational skills that capacity-building measures are supposed to generate. “Provided with appealing enticements, Somali actors have demonstrated their individual and collective capacity to deliver results."

He also suggests a consideration of the thriving private health sector in Somalia, which remains outside most donor portfolios, despite its recognition as a key player in the healthcare arena.

And what about the host of other donor follies identified in the case study?

As in other disrupted (i.e., war-torn) contexts, donors set very lows bars in terms of the support they provide in Somalia. The donor imperative to disburse often overrules most other considerations. As an example, UNICEF drug kits were for a long time distributed to unsupervised health facilities that had no requirement to report back. Similarly, funding continues to be provided by some donors to under-performing hospitals, whose accounts raise concerns.
Only a few donor officials are allowed to devote their entire attention to Somalia. Most scramble around, handling large and diverse portfolios covering several East African countries. Their quick turnover undermines memory: functioning arrangements are forgotten, lessons learned are ignored, abandoned models are rewrapped as hot novelties, and old mistakes are repeated.
There is a glaring mismatch between health needs and funding allocation and levels. For example, among the diseases targeted by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, tuberculosis ranks high, malaria middle and HIV/AIDS at the bottom of major health concerns in Somalia. The respective funding shares, however, are reversed, with HIV/AIDS getting the largest and tuberculosis the smallest donor allocation.

These follies are hardly unique to Somalia. They are also things that we can do something about.

*The countries in the case series include Afghanistan, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Haiti, Palestine and Somalia. For information, contact: enricopavignani@hotmail.com

**Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton

The Ambiguity of Aid (Zambia Journal)

2011-03-20T00:24:00.012+03:00

Driving through Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, is like a first trip to Las Vegas. Everything is in your face, something to see. Dusty streets, potholes like craters, people hanging off the back of pickup trucks, women wearing babies like backpacks as they hack away at maize, the smell of smoke from burning trash on the side of the road, horns honking, traffic that moves like liquid.

Almost two-thirds of Zambians live below the international poverty line—around 7.5 million people. The average life expectancy is a stunning 46 years. Only 58 percent of the population has access to clean water.

Zambia is a poor country. It is also a cauldron of donor activity. In 2005, the country received $1.7 billion in official development assistance—that’s 17.3 percent of gross national income for a country of 12 million people.

“The question people ask,” says Justin Mubanga, the Director of the Economic Management Department at the Ministry of Finance and National Planning, “is, in the last fifteen years Zambia got so much aid but there was little progress. What caused this?”

Some people say that aid caused this. They say that it has hampered, stifled and retarded Africa’s development. But there are others who say, on the contrary, that aid improves the lives of the poor and makes the sick well.

Gordon

Gordon Brown is standing at his desk in a crisp navy blue blazer and khaki slacks, a phone in one hand, the other tapping his keyboard. Even standing still, he’s humming with energy.

Gordon is the 35-year-old Zambia country representative for Africare, a U.S-based non-governmental organization (NGO). His job is to develop new programs, oversee those that already exist, and form alliances and partnerships.

It’s a long way from Augusta, Georgia, where he grew up. “The first time I walked into a store [in Africa] and nobody knew who I was or cared, I felt like I fit in by not being noticed, you know what I’m saying?”

Africare’s work in Zambia centers on health, food security and agriculture, and emergency response. Their projects, Gordon says, are about meeting peoples’ essential needs. So for example, they are helping to install something called PlayPumps, a merry-go-round of sorts that, when children spin it, pumps clean water into a storage tank that can be accessed by a simple tap on the ground below.

“Market forces alone aren’t enough to solve the problem of poverty in Africa. If we take the Darwinian approach—if you have resources, then you’ll succeed—if we believe that and act on that belief, people will die.”

There are many who think that putting things in such stark terms is just a clever way to drown out the voices of critics.

“[But] it’s okay to be motivated by wanting to do good,” Godron says. “We don’t live in a purely dog eat dog world. We want to believe there’s something greater. We want to be able to respond to need. Not everything we do is about self interest.”

Boyd

Looking at Boyd is like staring into the bottom of a well. His eyes are small and dark, impenetrable. I ask him: What is it like to care for orphans? What is it like to live in a village in the Zambian bush? What is it like to be poor? My words are like arrows shot into the ocean, pointed and tiny against the vast waves.

We pick him up at a small church made of exposed cement blocks where he and other volunteers are being trained in Gender Equity. The words seem sterile and queer in the dust beneath the jacaranda tree, where a little girl stands, hiding in the folds of her mother’s skirt, while some wazungu (white people) try to coax her to speak

Boyd Hamuchemba lives in Shimukuni, a village two hours up the Great North Road from Lusaka. He is a volunteer caregiver with a PEPFAR-funded program called RAPIDS (Reaching HIV/AIDS Affected People with Integrated Development Support). RAPIDS gives him training, a bicycle and a modest medical kit, and Boyd and his wife look after eight orphans, three of whom are his dead brother’s children, and five from the surrounding village. He visits them each week and records each visit in a ledger that is signed by the orphan’s guardian. If they are hungry, he tries to bring them food. If they are sick, he gives them a ride on his bike to the clinic. It was a volunteer caregiver like him who took Boyd to a clinic in February 2008, where he was diagnosed as HIV+.

***

The adult (aged 15-49) HIV prevalence rate in Zambia is 14.3 percent, according to the country’s 2007 Demographic and Health Survey—the seventh highest prevalence rate in the world. Anti-retroviral therapy was introduced in 2004, and 120,000 people now receive treatment in no small part because of the vast sums of money PEPFAR has poured into the country—more than $269.2 million in FY2008 alone. (The entire budget of Zambian Ministry of Health in 2008 was $317.5 million.)

PEPFAR has been criticized for devoting too much money to a single disease and for channeling aid mostly through international NGOs, circumventing the government. One afternoon I asked Dr. Ben Chirwa, Director General of the National HIV/AIDS/STI/TB Council, if Zambia’s battle against the epidemic is too reliant on donor funds.

“AIDS is a global problem,” he said. “It is beyond what any one government can do.”

What about the Washington economist who termed ballooning U.S. funds for AIDS treatment an entitlement that is unsustainable?

Dr. Chirwa just grinned like a pumpkin. “Life is priceless,” he said.

***

Boyd showed me around his compound—the hut where he stores food, his two goats, a checker board carving in the dirt where his children play games. I ask what he would do without RAPIDS.

“I was already a guardian and parent. But the work has become easier. When given a bike, it lightened my work. I felt very good.”

Aid is keeping Boyd alive. It is also helping him help kids in his village who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. He would do it anyway, but the help makes his burden light.

Joy

I meet Joy Hutcheon at her office on the second floor of the British High Commission, on Independence Avenue. Joy is country director for the Department for International Development (DFID), the national aid agency of the United Kingdom.

Joy’s interest in development began early. “I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been interested in the different ways people do things in different parts of the globe.” After a visit to India, she applied for a position with the U.K. civil service, marking the Overseas Development Administration (DFID’s predecessor) as her first choice.

“For any country,” she says, ‘the way it is governed is so fundamental. I had the feeling that [in government] I could change something.”

***

The U.K gives about two-thirds of its aid to Zambia directly to the government, more than any other bilateral donor. The idea is to help build the accountability and capability of the state so it can provide for its citizens. Aid to an NGO that buys HIV/AIDS medicine will save lives today, but working with the government to improve its drug distribution system (one of the things DFID is doing) will help all Zambians access essential medicines over the long term.

Chris Pain, who works for the GTZ, the German development agency, as an advisor to the Ministry of Finance, attributes much of Zambia’s strong economic performance over the past four years to budget support, and the way it is helping to slowly strengthen the civil service. “Budget support opens up the whole budget for discussion, so it’s good for enhanced transparency.”

Justin Mubanga at the Ministry of Finance (MOF), who oversees the economic technical cooperation department (the four people in the MOF who manage donors), says that budget support has brought some predictability to the flow of funds, and the division of labor helps “but they still want an audience. They come indirectly to tinker.”

One of the ways donors “tinker” is through the performance assessment framework. Twice a year, they meet with the government to assess its performance on a number of predetermined indicators. If the indicators are not met, funding can be pulled.

Monitoring the government’s performance is necessary because donors must sell aid to policymakers and their constituencies back home, and assure them that funds are not being wasted.

“You can’t have budget support without being worried about corruption,” says Joy.

DFID is trying to help the government create an environment in which finances are well-managed and where corruption is not tolerated. So for example, DFID is helping the MOF install a single Treasury bank account (as opposed to the 300 or so accounts it currently has), to make is easier to track spending. The result is that corruption is more noticeable, Joy says, but there are also voices prepared to speak out and challenge it.

***

When Joy first arrived in Zambia, before anyone knew who she was, she visited a remote village called Kazuni in Southern Province. She shared a mud hut, walked to the river to get water, burned her fingers cooking nshima, laughed around a crackling fire with the women who were hosting her.

One day, a plane passed overhead. The women asked: what is it like to be way up there, in the sky? She felt clumsy as she tried to describe it: imagine you’re in a bus, sitting next to someone, little windows on the side. Are there are toilets, they asked? Yes, there are toilets. There are trays that fold down, and sometimes televisions. The women stared at Joy in wonder. They would probably never set foot on a plane.

“Everyone in Zambia has a village,” Joy said, “and will talk about going to the village. I have heard people I know say things like: this isn’t so bad; it’s like camping. But it’s your life. It’s everything you’ve got and there is no prospect of it changing.”

After three days she returned to Lusaka, over dirt roads, then paved roads, past buildings until she was back in her office, sitting in front of her computer, listening to the hum of the air conditioning.

As she told the story her voice cracked, like a rock breaking the surface of the water. “I really, really have to be sure that what I’m doing matters."

***

Night comes early in Lusaka. In the dark sounds are amplified. The rustle of leaves, dogs barking down an alley, a car engine trying to turn over.

An aid worker from Ireland once told me about a man she met at a health center who was holding his dead daughter in his arms. He needed a ride home; my friend said she could take him. The coffin he had was too small, but he hurried to squeeze the little girl’s body in, worried if he didn’t move fast enough, his ride might leave. The aid worker panicked: she won’t fit in there, let’s find something else. But there wasn’t anything else, so they took a hammer, knocked the end out of the coffin, and drove home with the wooden casket in the back of the pickup truck, the little girl’s legs dangling out the end.

Sometimes it feels like you’re being swallowed up, pulled under by a rip tide. The enormity of need. The limits of what we can do.

Boyd said it was hard to show up at someone’s home, ask them if he could help, and realize that sometimes he couldn’t. I remember him walking across a dirt path to the garden where he grows vegetables for the orphans; Gordon striding across a school yard to see a new water pump; Joy walking down the hall to meet some government officials.

They put one foot in front of the other.
*This is adapted from a piece I wrote in 2009 for the Center for Global Development.

Reintegration

2011-03-15T16:59:00.002+03:00

We used to talk about it in Dar—what it would be like when we went back. Went home. What overload we’ll feel, we said! Shopping malls, anything you want, stuff everywhere, expensive jewelry, perfume, crowded restaurants.

We thought it would be unsettling, unnerving, shocking even. But in so many ways it’s not shocking.

You just go back.

***

Landed at Heathrow at 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday. Zipped through immigration, followed the helpful signs to baggage claim, picked up a trolley for my bags, grabbed a coffee at Costa, and some money at the ATM (there were three to choose from). Used the toilet, then followed the signs to the bus stop, made it just in time for the 5:30 to Oxford.

It was rush hour and the motorway was bustling but moving steadily. Out the window, the hills were soft and green and dotted with sheep. A church steeple shone in the pale yellow sun. Tidy little cars drove down tidy little roads. Ten hours earlier I’d been with Frank, my taxi driver and friend in Dar, driving up the airport road in the sweaty crush of rush hour traffic, guys streaming by the window selling bananas and water.

Of course, I thought. Of course I am back and this is how it is.

I waited for the shock, the smack, but my mind was as flat as the window I was pressed up against.

Set out the next morning, grabbed a coffee and walked down Cornmarket street. Stopped in at Boots and walked down the lotion isle, the shampoo isle, flipped through some magazines. Tried on a sweater at Topshop. Kept walking. Felt listless. It started to rain, so I ducked in to a bookstore, sat down at a table in the café, and looked around at all the people sipping lattes, nibbling on cookies and cakes, talking, and I started to cry.

***

I was happy with less. The struggle we have in the West—with consumption, with the ability, now back again, to gratify any desire, any time, any place, is crushing, crushing in the sense that I sometimes feel so helpless against it.

But there’s another, subtler struggle that keeps burning long after you’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat less and spend less and live, mostly happily, with less.

***

It’s 6pm on a Thursday in Washington, DC, where I’ve settled now some three months out of Africa. My colleague, an old development hand, is packing her bag to go home, putting on a woolen cap to guard against the January chill.

—Terrible out isn't it, I say, while a dark spatter of rain hits the window.

—Yes, she says. I can't wait to get out of here.

She tells me she’s leaving for Bali soon, to wait out the winter. She’s lived overseas for most of her career and misses the field. Life is better over there, she says.

I ask her: why do you think it is better?

I want her to explain it, to explain away the awfulness I’ve felt since I’ve been back, the longing to return.

I hadn’t wanted to leave Africa. I’d realized this gradually during my last few months living on the continent. But things were set, and when I stood on the rooftop in Dar and looked out over the city the night before flying out, I felt a sort of inevitability about it. And a strange sense of loss.

A month later I was back in Washington, walking down K Street on my wait to a meeting, when I noticed my finger: the thin silver band I had bought in Swaziland was gone.

I’d found it at a little shop just outside Mbabane. It was small—two very thin silver bands, one rough, the other polished, fused together. To me, it was perfect. I don’t wear jewelry, but when I saw it, I wanted to seize it, as if I’d finally found some little scrap that fit me. I would look down at it all the time, turn it round and round on my finger.

I ran in my high heels back to the World Bank, to the bathroom where I thought I left it while I was washing my hands, but it wasn’t there. So I ran to the reception and told them I had lost something. I was out of breath, my face was red, and I spoke in the unnatural voice that comes when you are trying to hold back tears.

The woman manning the phones sat up in her chair and asked: Have you gone back to the bathroom and looked for it?

—Yes, I said.

She frowned a little, straightening her navy blue blazer. Have you gone to lost and found?

—Yes. And now there were tears streaming down my face.

She gave her colleague an uncomfortable sideways glance. Sorry, she said. Was it your wedding ring?

—No, I said, choking out the words. But it was precious to me. I can never replace it. I have to get it back.

We searched and searched—the security folks, the people who work in the cafeteria, everyone. But it was gone.

***

I remember sitting around an outdoor fire one night in Lusaka with some expat aid workers. The evening was wearing thin, and while people murmured quietly and stared into their glasses, I watched the fire.

A friend, sitting directly across from me, broke the quiet murmur: Lindsay, he said, what’s your favorite thing about Zambia?

All eyes on me. “The expats,” I said. They laughed quietly.

He pressed on, no really, what is it about this place that made you want to come back?

I said: the space.

***

A friend of mine spent two years in Mauritania. One night in DC, over a dinner of hotdogs and red wine (if you know me then you understand how typical this is), I tell him how hard it is to be back, how unhappy I am, and unhappy I am at myself for feeling unhappy.

—What was it like for you, when you came back, I ask him?

—Everything seemed banal, he said, circumscribed.

I tell him I feel the same way but then point out the irony. I complained all the time when I lived in Dar: “And you? Life here—boring and banal? You lived in a village in rural Mauritania.”

He laughed: “Yeah, I was bored all the time there. But just being there was enough. Just going through the motions was interesting.”

He tells me about being at a party one night and thinking that every conversation was meaningless. “I felt like everyone needed to be shaken out of the routines they were living in. It was hard. And I had a hard time connecting. It was like there were people everywhere, but they were just passing each other.”

It was like what my colleague, now in Bali, eventually told me on that cold January night: “There’s too much stuff here. Over there, we were a part of each other’s lives.”

***

I guess the longing for Africa comes from a combination of these things. I liked having fewer choices; I was happy when I had less stuff.

I liked how involved friends were in each others lives, almost as if we were family. I liked how we saw each other all the time, stayed at each other’s houses, the sense of camaraderie, the way we felt bound together by shared experience, like refugees in a foreign land.

And I liked the sense of freedom, the vastness of the landscape, like staring out across the ocean. I liked getting on planes every other week, hopping between countries as if they were metro stops. And meeting new people who did the same thing, floating out there in space and time.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking back.

But the truth is, being expats in excruciatingly poor countries cannot be the only way to live like that, that is, to live with less stuff, to live together, and to be free. There has to be a way to make that real where ever we are.

The Trouble With Rwanda

2011-03-11T22:23:00.002+03:00

“We are hypnotised by the 1994 genocide, and oblivious to the atrocities of a regime we regard as exemplary. Aid, we say, must be conditional on good governance—but post-genocide government is an exception. … Democracy is a precondition of peace—but not in a post-genocidal state. Justice, truth and reconciliation heal—but not the wounds of exterminatory hatred. The invasion and plunder of eastern Congo are criminal—but not when they’re carried out by genocide survivors.”

This is Stephen W. Smith, a journalist who was Africa editor of Libération and Le Monde who covered Rwanda for nearly two decades, writing in the London Review of Books. His piece is an elegant and unnervingly detailed look at snapshots of events from 1992 to more recent days. It raises many troubling questions about the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RFP), and Paul Kagame himself.

There have always been questions about who was involved in the downing of former President Habyarimana’s jet in 1994, which sparked the genocide, but what about the various tallies and reports of reprisal killings after the RFP took power, which have been documented but largely ignored. Smith’s investigation estimates that more than 100,000 Hutus were murdered during the RFP’s first year in power, but he also cites the work of Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, who estimated that “between 25,000 and 40,000 persons were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report—in fact just briefing notes—was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and its allies, the UNHCR went on the record denying its existence.”

Or how about what happened in 1996, when the Rwandan army dispersed the Hutu camps in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). Of the 300,000 or so who fled deeper into the DRC, nearly two-thirds died over the next six months, according to a field study by Médecins Sans Frontières. Says Smith: “The UNHCR spoke of ‘crimes against humanity’, but, again, there was hardly any response. Twelve years later, in August 2010, a fresh investigation by the UN put the number killed at ‘probably in the several tens of thousands.’”

Or how about the murder in Nairobi in 1998 of Seth Sendashonga, who joined the RPF in 1991, as the only eminent Hutu-turned-rebel who was not a defector from the Habyarimana regime. Sendashonga became Kagame’s minister of the interior, but when Kagame failed to respond to his 700 letters documenting RFP abuses and reprisals, he resigned and went into exile. He was killed when gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles opened fire on his car during rush hour, soon before he was scheduled to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

There have been other murders. Like that of the vice president of Rwanda’s Democratic Green Party, who lobbied against the country’s admission to the Commonwealth, citing the regime’s gross human rights violations, and was found decapitated near Butare last year.

We could also talk about Kagame’s Soviet style popularity in elections, or the regime’s suppression of the media and civil society.

Why do these stories seldom feature, or when they do, disappear like smoke?

***

This is not the part of Rwanda that we—people who work in development—spend our time thinking about. When we think about Rwanda, we think of a shining star in Africa, of the extraordinary leadership and stunning progress since 1994.

This is how The Economist describes it:

“The discarded plastic bottles and bags that pollute almost every other country on the continent are nowhere to be seen… The tarred roads are usually in good shape; speed limits are actually enforced, by smart traffic police who fill out paperwork in exchange for a statutory fine rather than shaking you down for a bribe. Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, rates Rwanda as one of the more honest countries in Africa. The World Bank says it is fastest-improving as a place to do business. Hotels in the capital, Kigali, brim with Westerners attending conferences. Paul Kagame, the president who has overseen all this, is a darling of the aid-giving world. Western governments and prominent religious leaders have hailed him as the sort of man in whom to put their faith—and money.”

Money indeed. Rwanda is a heavily aid-dependent country, having received massive increases in official development assistance (ODA) since 2003. In 2009/10 net official ODA stood at nearly US$1 billion. Neighboring Burundi, which is just as poor, has a similar history of violence among the same ethnic groups, received about half that. Almost 40 percent of this aid is provided in the form of budget support, a vote of confidence in the government—indeed, all of Norway’s aid is provided that way, and the majority of the UK’s aid is.

Rwanda is what we wish other countries could be. A donor darling, growing rapidly, determined. There is a kind of wide-eyed lore about the place. Everywhere you go—from Dakar to Abuja, to Addis, to Dar es Salaam and Lusaka, people say: have you heard about Rwanda?

And leaders from the West line up to be friends. I was in Rwanda in 2009 and remember bumping repeatedly into Tony Blair in the lobby of the Serena hotel, where I was staying. I asked the hotel staff about it. They shrugged—he’s here all the time. He and Kagame are great friends.

***

Smith’s essay is not the first time someone has written about these troubling questions. It is not as if people in power—whether in politics or in the aid business—don’t know a lot of this stuff.

What is stunning, stupefying even, is how all of it is barely a blip on the radar.

The first question is: why?

The next question is: when the development community looks back 15 years from now, what we will think about our collective silence on these issues? Will we say, yes, supporting the regime was the right thing to do during a fragile period of recovery. Or will and see our cravenness to confront these issue as a mere extension of our complicity (through silence and inaction) in violence and injustice in Rwanda before the genocide?

***

“‘Rwanda…is a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame through a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres of the RPF from behind the scenes. The majority Hutu community remains excluded from a meaningful share of political power. State institutions are as effective as they are repressive. The government relies on severe repression to maintain its hold on power … Rwanda is less free today than it was prior to the genocide. … Civil society is less free … The media is less free. The Rwanda government is more repressive than the one that it overthrew.’

This is not the preamble to a new Hutu manifesto but an excerpt from the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ published last year by four senior figures in the Kagame regime who’ve now fled abroad [one survived an attempt on his life when a commando opened fire on him last June in Johannesburg, where he now lives in exile].

The authors of the ‘Rwanda Briefing’ may not be trustworthy advocates of freedom and democracy, or paragons of ethnic inclusiveness, but they describe a system they’re familiar with and a leader they know well. To his many Western admirers they have this to say: ‘President Kagame is a very polarising figure. His policies continue to divide Rwandan society along the lines of ethnicity and to fuel conflict. The likelihood of a recurrence of violent conflict, including even the possibility of genocide, is very high.’”

--From Smith’s essay

*The former secretary general of the RPF Theogene Rudasingwa; his brother Gerald Gahima, one-time prosecutor general and vice-president of the Rwandan Supreme Court; the erstwhile chief of external security services Colonel Patrick Karegeya; and General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the ex-chief of staff of the Rwandan army. Nyamwasa survived an attempt the his life last June; the South African authorities laid the blame with the government in Kigali.

An Old City (Dispatches from Jerusalem)

2011-03-02T01:56:00.003+03:00

We’ll start at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport where my Palestinian taxi driver is pulled over and told to get my things and get out of the car. I’m worried. I tell the young man with the machine gun who pulled us over that my flight leaves soon. I don’t want to be late.

He takes my passport and mobile phone. “This is not JFK,” he says tapping his gun. “I am not your friend.”

The taxi driver and I wait outside in the cold dark for 45 minutes while the young men with their machine guns stroll around us, talking to each other and staring. The taxi driver takes twitchy drags on three cigarettes, and tells me quietly, carefully, with sideways glances, that a few weeks ago his company had sent him to Tel Aviv to fetch someone from the airport, but security had detained him for so long that the customer decided to take another cab and the whole trip had been for nothing.

Once inside the airport, my passport now flagged, I’m stopped four times, my bags thoroughly searched each time. Why did you come here, I’m asked? Who did you visit? What does he do? Did you meet his friends? Where did you eat? Did you take their email addresses? Where do you work and why and for how long? And when I show signs of irritation, they say: maybe if you are nice, we will help you.

Back outside, waiting to get into the airport, I talk to one of the guys detaining us. Where were you born, I ask? Here, he says. How old are you? Twenty eight. I tell him I travel to countries all over the world and nothing like this has ever happened.

—Other countries are not Israel, he says.

***

His name is Sandrouni and he owns the Armenian Ceramic Center, a cheerful shop of brightly painted pottery near the New Gate in the Old City in East Jerusalem. On the morning I stop in, it’s sunny and warm and he has the doors open to the street where some boys are kicking a soccer ball.

Sandrouni has dark hair, small dark eyes and looks like a large unmade bed in a slightly tattered sweater and pants. He offers me a cup of Nescafe and tells me about his business: the split from his brothers years ago after a disagreement, his new shop outside the Armenian Quarter. When I tell him I’m part Armenian, he gives me a discount on the pottery and insists on taking me on a tour of the Armenian quarter of the Old City, specifically the Armenian convent, which is closed to the public and is where the majority of the Armenians in the quarter live.

We see the school, the library, the priests’ quarters. And on our way out, he points down an alleyway to his home.

—That’s my house, he says. My brother lives next door and my other brother lives next door to him.

—But I thought you didn’t speak, I say.

He seems confused: Of course we don’t.

***

The Old City is a labyrinth of winding alleys and staircases and darkly lit passageways. In a residential quarter, lights are strung overhead between two apartments, and thin metal piping frames an ancient wooden door, while electrical wire crawls up the side of walls and over archways.

The bazaar near Damascus Gate is always bustling with tourists and locals crowded around carts of fresh bread and falafel. Old ladies sit on the sidewalk with baskets of herbs while children dart between then, running up the steps, past three Israeli soldiers sitting in the shade with enormous guns on their shoulders.

***

The land is beautiful here, though. Outside the walls of the old city are wave after wave of rocky hills dotted with olive trees and cypruses. The air smells of chamomile and thyme and orange, and the cathedral bells ring out against a skyline dotted with minarets, steeples, domes.

I’m walking up Hebron road in the midafternoon, taking in the tranquility, when I see it suddenly in the distance: the wall. Massive. Towering. Totally out of proportion with everything else, it cuts across those lovely hills like a malicious knife.

And then there are the checkpoints, the watchtowers, the identity cards.

It’s reminiscent of another time, another place.

***

I know people who have come to Jerusalem on spiritual pilgrimages, and having grown up in the church, I waited to see if some revelation would touch me in this holy city. But in my short visit, holiness was not the dominate feeling.

Jerusalem could be a place where, side by side, the three faiths express what they have it in them at their best to be, which is a message of peace and redemption and love. Jerusalem could be an expression of that. But in so many ways it is not. Instead, these communities are like the Sandrouni brothers: side by side but not speaking. Walled off from each other, separated.

The city could be about peace, but mostly it is about guns and intimidation and humiliation.

***

It’s early evening and I’m heading back to my hotel. The sky is a fading pinkish purple, and two old men are sitting on the side of wall, smoking cigarettes and talking quietly. I pause to look across the road, to the Mount of Olives—which is actually just a big white graveyard that overlooks another graveyard on the side of the street where I’m standing.

Then in through the old city, down a stoney street, past a church where the last few tourists are filtering out; they smile as I pass. Then I bump into an old Palestinian man closing up the shop of his I’d visited a few days before—he’d made me lemon juice and we had tried to talk, which was difficult since he had no teeth and knew little English, and I, little Arabic. He says he’s going home so we walk together a while.

Then we part ways and I make my way up a dark, narrow staircase, which leads to the gate where I will exit the city. There’s no one around—it’s quiet as a cathedral. Then I hear footsteps coming up quickly behind me, and I turn a little, keen not to seem nervous. It’s just two kids, though, who brush easily past me.

Keep walking, when the older one looks back at me, and that’s when I notice he has a machine gun over his shoulder. He keeps eyeing me and suddenly the air is filled with menace. These confined spaces, that big black gun. And so when he turns around and isn’t looking I dart down a narrow alleyway, out of sight.

Believing Again In What's Possible

2011-02-11T21:41:00.009+03:00

Moving is too pale a word to describe what it feels like. To see, to be reminded -- that it is possible.

For people -- average people -- to change the way things are...

To disrupt the quantifiable order of things.

.......We get to thinking...hands in our pockets, head down walking along the street, tough, smart....we've seen a lot....and we get to thinking that maybe change isn't possible.

I mean, c'mon, not really. Theoretically, sure. For other people? Maybe. But for us, here. Now?

It's been so long. So many delays. So many false starts.

We've gotten tired, maybe even a little cynical...we've found ourselves deriving a strange satisfaction from the assumption that everyone is corrupt, that things will never change.

***

But then like a drop of water from a tap you thought had gone dry. Like a door blown slightly ajar by the wind. Like hearing a sound in a disused room, you turn your head.

It's the sound of of people cheering, of flags flapping in the wind, of feet stomping on the ground they refuse to leave.

And then it happens. The earth moves a little. Who would have ever thought?

***

I guess I'm like most people--feeling, today, a buoyancy that words can never capture. No more complacency, no more despair, the shadows have been lifted.

Suddenly I believe again: that we can have a lot. That life can be different, things can change.

They say people are embracing on the streets, weeping.

Why did we wait so long? Why do we always wait so long?

"Yesterday I was still a fool, but today I know better."*

***

Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end.

Rilke said the only serious thing is to live the questions.

There is only one serious question.

How do you make dreams last?

***

Tom Friedman, in describing what has been overcome today, said humiliation is the most powerful human emotion. I disagree.

The most powerful human emotion -- or let's not call it an emotion, because emotions can be fragile. The most powerful force that wells up inside us is not humiliation.

It's Hope.

***

Things change for the worse so quickly. They change for the better much more slowly.

But they can.

What Do You Really Believe About Development? (Go Home and See...)

2011-01-16T06:34:00.011+03:00

Mexico City, six months ago….

It’s been one week now: my sister and brother-in-law, and his mom and my mom, and their German Sheppard Lila, and me, in a tiny three-bedroom house in Mexico City waiting for my sister’s baby to be born.

We thought the baby would come earlier, but it’s in the wrong position and the doctor will have to induce labor in a little less than a week.

So we’ve settled into a routine to pass the time. During the day, when my brother-in-law is working, we run errands, clean the house, do laundry, and plan the evening meal. My brother-in-law’s mom has baked several pies. My mom does crossword puzzles. I work. My sister naps. Then it’s dinner time, and we gather around the dining room table and pass the food and talk a little before clearing it all away and going to bed.

Being with my family is like being suspended in time. My work, my friends—my life—feel as far away as the moon. When I think about them it’s as if I’m way out in the water, straining to see land, drifting farther and farther from the shore.

***

Each day is like an episode of Survivor, except instead of running around a tropical island in bathing suits, we're dodging the conversational land mines that accompany overly long family visits:

On the highway, on our way to the mall, my sister goes on about how bad traffic is in Mexico. There are no rules here, she shakes her head. People cut you off and run red lights.

—I know what you mean, I say. In Dar, taxis sometimes drive on the sidewalk (where there is sidewalk) or even on the beach to get around traffic.

—Fine! You win, your life is harder than mine!

Or I’m shopping for clothes with my mom and she asks what size I wear. When I tell her, she says: that’s the same size I wear.

—I’m not you mom, don’t you get that!

BOOM

***

My mom and I are not close. Relations were badly severed when she left my dad when I was 13, but that separation was only a more intense version of how my parents had always lived. Alone together.

Sometimes I look at my mom, her face gray and drawn, trying so hard to get people to like her, and I feel exasperation and pity. Conversations are always strained. If I say anything that is even slightly funny she laughs hysterically. I cringe.

At lunch at the mall, my sister conceives of a way for us three to bond: she vents about a difficult co-worker. Surely this is an innocuous topic, free from the undercurrents laden in so many others.

—She’s so intense, my sister says! So domineering!

She throws the words out like crumbs to pigeons, expecting us to gather round and feast happily together. But instead of joining in, my mom timidly defends her:

—Well, if I had the kind of life she has had, I might be the same way.

When we get up to pay the bill and my mom is facing the cash register with her back to me, I study her. She’s trying her best with Spanish. She looks small and vulnerable.

Sometimes I feel so much love for her that it almost breaks my heart.

California, six months later…

The pier in Ocean Beach, the little hippy enclave on the edge of San Diego where I grew up, is the longest in California. Walk down and back and you will have walked a mile.

On the morning I'm there, it is, like always, dotted with Filipino fisherman, their lines hanging down into the water like Christmas lights strung over a balcony. A pair of gray and white seagulls are crying and flapping their wings as they fight over some escaped fish bait, and three pelicans are skimming the surface of the water, a salty spray on their bellies. Beyond, a fishing trawler is making her way in.

My dad used to take me here when I was a little girl. Those were the days before he lost his job and my mom, before the tide of depression nearly drowned him and he packed his bags and left San Diego as if his life depended on, which it probably did.

I remember squinting my eyes against the salty wind while he pointed to some islands shimmering on the horizon; poking at the sea anemones growing like flowers out of the crevices of the tide pools below the pier; trying not to slip on the cold, mossy rocks.

***

It's early evening at my grandmother's house, where my dad, sister, brother-in-law, and little niece and I have pitched our tents for the Christmas holiday.

My dad is out back smoking a cigar and talking in a monologue, the way he always has. He is doing better now and I'm glad for it—there are few things more frightening to a child than to see their parents unhappy—but still. He barely knows us, I think to myself as I pick at some chips and salsa and watch while my sister changes Isabela's diaper.

The really hard memories go underground. A house full of people, but so little is said. When we do talk, it’s like I'm back at the tide pools: trying to keep my balance. Tiptoeing, like a cat through cactus.

Then I hear something outside: a subtle inflection in my dad’s voice. My stomach flips upside down. It’s the same inflection in my own voice. Sometimes, I sound just like him.

A friend told me once how unsettling it is, to go home and realize how different you are from your family. But the even more unsettling thing is when you realize how much you are the same.

***

We gather in the living room and say goodbye to my dad, who must be up at 4 a.m. to catch his flight back to Seattle. He hugs my sister, my grandmother, squeezes little Isabela. Then it’s my turn, so I hug him lightly and say it was good to see him.

—I sure do love you, kid, he says, and for a moment I think I see a flash of pain cross his face.

I want to tell him that I love him too, that all of it—all the stuff—is okay. Instead though, I promise to get up in the morning to say goodbye. You shouldn't have to leave alone, I say.

But when I hear him shuffling out with his suitcase the next morning, I stay in my room, hidden beneath the covers.

***

Sometimes I wonder if our business—the development business—is futile. And at no time do I wonder this more than when I am with my family, when I am home. Not because I'm reminded that my family is crazy and will probably never change but because I'm reminded that I'm crazy, and that changing your life—changing stale, self-defeating habits, breaking out of the wreckage of the past, starting over—is really, really hard.

And development? Changing other peoples’ lives? How can we ever expect to make even the smallest dent when it’s all most of us can do to keep our own heads above water?

Mexico City, on the eve of my niece’s birth…

The night is hot and very still. Inside the small, square dining room, a single light bulb hanging above us, the family has gathered to play cards. There’s a dog barking in the alley outside, and like some distant, desolate music, the sound cuts through the heavy air between us.

My sister deals. We hold our cards like fans against our chests and stare back at each other like river boat gamblers. We’re trying not to let each other see what’s behind the little walls we’ve created. We’re trying to guess what each other is hiding. We’re trying to win.

A few rounds go by and I’m losing terribly. My sister leans back, sighs heavily and puts her hand on her belly. She wishes little Isabela (the baby) would turn. Doesn’t she know she can’t get out through the side? Her husband puts his hand on her belly and in an exaggerated southern drawl says: well, she’s not the smartest girl.

And then like a crack in an ice covered pond, like a door blown slightly ajar by the wind, we start to laugh. Just a little at first, but then hugely, generously, rubbing our eyes.

And for a moment, the shadows disappear.

***

See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up -- do you not perceive it?
Isaiah 43:19

If You’re Ever In Juba... (A Patchwork Restaurant Guide for Travelers in Africa, West Africa Edition)

2010-12-20T20:42:00.005+03:00

See the original guide, with recommendations for Bujumbura, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Addis, and of course, Juba, here.

Monrovia

The aid business is booming in Liberia, a country recovering (remarkably well, many say) from fourteen years of civil war. As with any aid boom capital, Monrovia is overrun by expats, and if there’s one thing expats do well, it’s gather for evenings out after long, exhausting days fighting poverty.

The restaurants in this list may be wazungu mainstays (said my spindly old taxi driver one night on our way to Rozi’s, his phone ringing off the hook: “it’s a busy night for white people”), but they’re good. And if you’re ever in Monrovia, be sure to check them out.

Tides: Tides is a newish bar/restaurant on the waterfront in Mamba Point. The entrance is up a badly lit stairwell in what looks like an abandoned building, but do not be deterred: upstairs is a sweeping wooden deck and comfy couches—the perfect place to sip a gin and tonic and watch the sun go down. One tiny caveat: 100-or-so feet down the beach is a slum. You know the scene: low-lying crush of cardboard and tin, piles of trash, kids playing football in the dusk. When the sun goes down, the slum disappears, swallowed up by the dark. The drinks at Tides are good, but with the other (i.e., non expat) reality of Monrovia in your face, they can be a little difficult to swallow.

The Palm: This open, breezy rooftop restaurant is a sharp contrast to the hot mugginess of the dusty streets below. A great place to unwind—good pizza and beer—to the sound of ABBA in the background (what is it about ABBA in Africa?).

Mamba Point Hotel: The Rick’s Café of Monrovia, it’s like a transit lounge, where aid workers mix with business types, hard-to-place security guys, and wealthy locals. The deck overlooks the ocean, and framed by palm trees, it’s like a scene out of a movie: a tropical paradise. With a great selection of Lebanese dishes, pizza, Indian, and sushi, the Mamba Point restaurant is good spot for long, meandering, wine-soaked dinners.

Rozi’s: This cute restaurant in Sinkor serves a variety of dishes best described as Liberian-international fusion (pretty vague, I know). I recommend eating in the garden.

The Lounge at Roberts International Airport: If you are forced to leave Monrovia, I recommend grabbing a Club beer in the airport lounge. Surrounded by plastic-covered tables and chairs and enormous fake sunflowers, it’s an ideal spot to recap your trip and wait out the inevitable storm always passing over the airport. Even better when in the company of secret agent Pavignani if you can manage to nab him.

Dakar

What is one of the best things about USAID missions to the field? Per diems, of course. Per diems are what made it possible for my colleague and I to sample some of Dakar’s fantastic (and fantastically expensive) restaurants.

Let me say that this city is not like other cities on the continent where I’ve worked. Tree-lined avenues, charming apartment buildings with balconies draped in bougainvillea, women in skinny jeans and high heels (a bit too fancy for this hippy, I’ll be honest). Dakar feels like Paris (although I’ve never been to Paris). So go, and enjoy—and if you make it before December 30, you’re in time to catch the World Festival of Black Arts and Cultures. Attendees include none other than that beloved Libyan man of the people, Muammar Gaddafi.

Radisson Blu Hotel, restaurant and seaside lounge: This sleek hotel, halfway between centre ville and the towering Monument to the African Renaissance (which is, incidentally, right across the street from a small, humble graveyard) oozes hip: there is an atrium and infinity pool, and the décor is an urbane mix of whites and grays. Munch poolside (but steer clear of the complimentary olives—they are doused in mustard and orange, a truly disgusting combo) or check out the restaurant next door, which has a fine fish selection and wine list. The lamb is also excellent.

Restaurant La Calebasse in Mamelles: On the top floor above an African Art shop, the Calebasse restaurant is a nice mix of local fare (Yassa fish anyone?) and French-ish food. The terrace is breezy and spacious, and the ambiance wonderful, thanks to the musician who strummed quietly on his kora while we ate. The sound is hypnotic, mysterious, like walking down a narrow path in a market you’ve never been to, like light reflecting in crystal. Good food, wine, music and art. A lovely way to spend an evening out.

La Lagoon 1: A friend who lives in Dakar (a French friend who lives in Dakar) told me upon arrival that this was his favorite restaurant and it’s not hard to see why. Nestled on the beach not far from President Wade’s house, this is a restaurant on stilts that juts out over the water. The fish and wine are great, but be sure to sit outside: indoors it’s an over-the-top nautical theme, with air conditioning blasting.

Chez Loutcha: For some Cape Verdean fare check out this cozy restaurant in Centre Ville. The plates are enormous—enough for two or three people—and the atmosphere, decidedly low-key. SO low key in fact that you may have trouble getting the servers to pay attention to you, and when they finally do, it is reluctantly, eyes glaring. Tough love at Chez Loutcha.

Terrou-Bi Terrace Restaurant: A good treat, but as with all the upmarket beachside hotel restaurants, this place will cost you. The fish was good and the service excellent.

A Home-Cooked Meal at Chez Camara: Better than any restaurant, this dinner at the home of a Ministry of Health colleague was the culinary (and social) highlight of the trip. The Camaras served couscous smothered in gravy, with chicken, carrots, raisins and nuts, a traditional dish to celebrate Tamkharit, the Islamic new year. (Incidentally, this was also the evening of the Senegalese version of Halloween, where children march through their neighborhoods, beating tin drums, in search of goodies or money.)

Sitting on the floor of the Camara's living room, their children, nieces, nephews, sisters, uncles and other unidentified family members playing and talking in the room next door, our host showed us photos from a trip to Illinois, joked with his wife of ten years about who really runs the household, and explained that he does the work he does because of a belief, deep down, that he is responsible for other people, that we are all responsible for each other. I guess that included us, his guests. When we entered the house, he spread his arms wide and said: You are welcome. You are home.

The lights went out about midway through the evening meal and the house went pitch black. It was ok, though—there were voices of family all around.

The Aid Workers

2010-11-17T21:59:00.003+03:00

There was a map of South Sudan on the wall behind his desk. The lines demarcating the boundaries between states were drawn in clear black ink against the smooth ivory paper. Near the bottom, Juba, the capital, was nothing more than a solid black dot.

I had arrived the day before with a few reports about Sudan in my suitcase and a few ideas in my mind of the story I would write. Touch down and lumber across the tarmac in the glare of the midday sun; shuffle through the sweaty crush of immigration; then down a dusty road cut with craters, past slopes of mud huts and charcoal fires, to my pre-fabricated hotel. Internet is out so I can’t confirm interviews. Drop heavily to sleep. Early morning departure, but we’re lost and running late. By the time I arrive at the small compound of the international NGO whose country director I have come to interview, I’m exhausted.

From inside his spare, cement office, sunlight flooding in through the room’s single wood-framed window, I take out my notepad and ask him about the program I’ve been sent to write about it: do you think it will work in South Sudan?

He smiles. “On paper it’s so easy. When you get here, it’s not.”

***

It takes an enormous amount of vanity—to drop into a country for a few weeks and think that you can capture the reality of a place. Because of course you never can.

Aid workers are like soldiers fighting in a war the public back home has forgotten about or doesn’t understand. Distrust of outsiders runs deep, but they want to talk too, to vent, to plead: This is what it's really like.

***

Kim is wearing jeans and tennis shoes and though she is young, she has dark circles under her eyes. Her office is just like everyone else’s in Juba: spare, except for her computer and a gigantic map of Sudan on the wall, marked with red pins where the international NGO she works for has projects.

She tries to explain the basics of their contract with USAID, functionally, how it works. She pulls up spreadsheets and all kinds of official documentation. It becomes a tutorial. Most contracts run about 12-18 months, she says. Barely enough time to get programs up and running, especially because nothing ever gets started until six months after it’s “launched” anyway.

And the donors require NGOs to come up with exit strategies. It’s insane, really: in one of the most underdeveloped countries on Earth, they have to explain how they plan to turn over operations (such as running health clinics) to local authorities once the contract is up.

—We know we won’t be able to and the donors know it too. So, we make it up.

***

He was one of the first aid workers I ever met. A salesman, he ran a USAID-funded HIV/AIDS project in Southern Africa in the heyday of Bush II’s big push.

One night we had dinner with some American aid workers in Lusaka. Gathered around an outdoor fire, drinking and smoking cigarettes, he expounded on the process people from Washington go through when they come to the field for the first time: the initial whiplash of being face to face with extreme poverty; a sort of guilt-laden depression; and then, the moment:

—They look up at me and ask: what can we do? His eyes were glowing like embers as he spoke. “I say: Follow me!”

A salesman and a savior.

***

Time is different here, fluid, flexible. Arrive at Medair’s offices, on the dusty road near the airport, around 5 p.m. Jospeh, a twenty-something from Kenya who in the space of one week has become not only my driver but also my fixer—the man knows how and where to get anything—beeps the horn and we wait in silence for several minutes at the dilapidated metal gate.

I used to ask Joseph to come back in one hour, but the assumption that my interview would start on time and last roughly 45 minutes was all wrong. Sometimes the person I’m supposed to interview doesn’t show, and other times, they ask me to stay for dinner. I remember arriving thirty minutes late to meet the country director of an international NGO, an unforgiveable sin back in Washington, and was dumbstruck when he acted as if I was right on time. It didn’t throw off his schedule, it was just part of the rhythm.

***

The compound where Chuck stays is a fortress. Thick concrete walls, enormous coils of jagged barbed wire, a massive and heavily guarded gate. But inside it’s like summer camp: cottages scattered along winding dirt roads and grassy hillsides.

It’s 3 p.m. on a Thursday. We grab beers and popcorn and sit beneath the shade of a eucalyptus tree. The rustle of the leaves is so pleasant that for a moment I forget it’s pushing 95 degrees out.

Chuck is a straight shooter, a veteran. He knows the problems with aid and isn’t going to make excuses. “Exit strategies are bull shit,” he says. “But changing a system that is so politically entrenched is very difficult. We must be realistic about what we can do.”

Later, I ask him why he came back to the field late in his career after a return to the United States.

He shrugs: I get bored back there.

***

Some where along the way I realized I didn’t feel normal anymore unless I was getting on a plane every other week. Airplanes became my taxi, and I met a lot of people who traveled much more than I did, for longer periods of time, sometimes years.

I remember being at a dinner one night “at home” in Dar es Salaam. Looking around the table, I realized that each of my friends had just come back from another country or were getting ready to leave. There was Laverty, just back from Joburg, stopping in Dar “for a drink” then on to eastern Tanzania. Mark, on his way to Kinshasa. Alix and Jean were in Nairobi, another about to meet his wife in Kampala, another on her way to Kigali. I too was back for 24 hours, about to head to Liberia.

It’s like a drug. The motion, movement. It’s like noise, drowning out other voices. And for some, it acts like the tide does against the cliffs, chipping away at relationships. It can take real exhaustion or depression (or lots of alcohol) to make you feel quiet again, still.

***

I used to think it would lessen with exposure. Eventually, I thought, you'd get numb to the shock of poverty, you'd find a way to live with the fact that you're a millionaire compared to the people you have come to serve, to write about.

One morning in Monrovia, I set out with Wilson, my 40-year-old driver who waited out the Liberian civil war by flitting back and forth from Guinea to Cote d’Ivoire doing odd jobs. His contract with the World Bank was a new gig. Each day I needed him, he had work: $5 a day. (I was wracked with guilt on the weekends when I decided to save the $100 a day and use taxis.) When I left, he'd be out of a job.

As we set out he asked if the NGO down the road needed drivers, and if there was someone there I knew whom he could talk to. In an instant, something in my stomach went hollow and queer. I knew his situation, I knew his daily wage, knew it was decent, and I’d met lots of people worse off. But it isn't right—that existence should be so precarious, that distances between people should be so far.

You never get used to it. That obscene fact—that life isn’t fair—stares you in the face everyday, and it is grating and persistent and devastating.

I told a friend about it later. He asked if I felt guilty. No, I said, not guilt. Anger.

***

Nights in foreign capitals can get lonely. A disappointing meal, not feeling well. Non-descript hotel room, just like all the rest, suitcase on the floor, heap of dirty clothes in the corner, the BBC flickering on the television screen.

Some colleagues in town from Washington, and me, flown in from Tanzania, get to Havana late, looking shabby and tired after a long day’s work. We slump onto the leather couches like puddles, faces blank. After a few beers and a handful of peanuts, we get up to leave, all save one.

“He has a girl here,” a colleague tells me. “Don’t look so surprised. You know the story. Unhappy marriage back home, and it’s so easy out here.”

I meet her one night, out at a club playing pool. She is young and beautiful, in an outfit—black leather boots, a short, backless dress with abrasive metallic detailing—that belies her unassuming manner. She smiles shyly, says she likes my dress. Thanks, I say, I like yours too.

More details emerge as the night wears on: She has a diabetic uncle who our colleague helps to support. She has a day job too, earning money for her family.

"He says they’re alike. He says she’s a survivor."

***

A colleague and I meet for dinner at Afex, a compound for U.S. contractors on the banks of the Nile. Grab some food (it's all you can eat) and sit down beneath the pale pink and purple twilight sky. Below, the silvery blue iridescence of the Nile is glowing in the half light like the inside of a sea shell.

We talk about work—she's been in the country for more than two years and is a wealth of information—but as the night wears on, and we become flushed with humidity and beer, the conversation trails off like smoke.

—Sometimes I wake up and I’m just angry, she says. I find myself being short with people, almost for no reason. There’s no where to go here, no freedom of movement (international staff cannot have their own vehicles; too much of a liability for the agency), and no one stays. Friends leave.

She speaks expansively—about where she grew up, about her family, and, after some prodding, about a boyfriend in the States. The day before I'd accidentally interuppted their call one afternoon, and overheard his voice on the line saying: I love you I love you I love you. She'd laughed and covered the receiver with her hand.

There are so many late night dinners out with friends, colleagues. Every conversation is the same. They say: put yourself in my shoes.

Memory (Dispatches from Liberia)

2010-11-01T18:38:00.009+03:00

It’s 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday at Mamba Point and business is slow. The Lebanese-owned hotel is one of the oldest in Monrovia, perched on a hillside across the street from a beach lined with palm trees, like a scene out of a movie, a tropical paradise.

Except foreigners don’t go there. It’s the locals’ domain, where Liberian boys play soccer, where trash is dumped, where, in some places, people go to defecate. And there is no security along the stretch of sand, so best not to walk there, at least not alone, some say. The hotel has a pool instead, surrounded, like everything else in Monrovia, by thick concrete walls and enormous coils of barbed wire.

Four waiters are sitting on bar stools in the dim half light, talking to the barman. The theme is Irish (who knows why): dark wood paneling, bottles of Jameson along the wall, an Irish flag hanging overhead. There’s a football match on the television; the crowd roars and the waiters look up in unison, eyes fixed on the screen.

In the lounge, a pair of aid workers—a young girl with a pony tail and her older, frumpy colleague—are sitting on the couch with laptop computers glowing in front of them, working. The polished director of an NGO just in from Washington strides into the restaurant where another polished man is waiting to meet him.

Outside, some of the regulars are sitting on the deck in the growing dusk. Three young girls, drunk from an afternoon of white wine and hummus, giggle in the thick night air, faces shiny and tired. A pair of beefy guys with military haircuts pay their bill and eye the girls as they get up to leave. And a fat, bald man with a moustache and his lanky compatriot smoke cigars solemnly, watching the smoke waft through the air in front of them and disappear.

***

Though it’s right next door, Mamba might as well be oceans away from the hustle and flow of the streets. Life in Monrovia has improved dramatically since the civil war came to an end, but it’s still rough. The streets are littered with the charred carcasses of buildings, dark as coal. Ramshackle houses are built atop the jagged black rocks that jut up out of the ground all over the city, like gigantic claws.

The old presidential office speaks of grander days lost: a wide, elegant half-moon driveway, a towering building on the edge of the sea. But it has been empty since a fire broke out inside soon after President Sirleaf took office. Now it stands rusting, derelict, some people say haunted—by evil spirits maybe or simply the past.

***

Fourteen years of civil war tore Liberia apart. It made paupers of an already poor population and traumatized everyone. Per capita GDP declined by 87 percent between 1980 and 2005; in 2009, more than half of the population lived on less than US$1 a day and about 80 percent were unemployed.

And the repercussions of sustained violence, of years of persistent threat, appear as cracks, shockwaves. They come out in bursts, unexpectedly, like a car backfiring: stress, outbursts full of rage, panic, fear.

In the car one morning, on our way to a health clinic, I ask James, a Liberian doctor who lived in Monrovia before, during and now after the war: what was it like to be here in those days?

He shook his head and half smiled, looking down at the floor: “We fought for food,” he said. Then his phone chirped and he took it out of his pocket and typed a message.

I looked out the window, into the spit of morning rain, at the people at the market and all the things they were selling: umbrellas, shoes, soap, brooms, mattresses.

A few minutes down the road, James began again suddenly: “Wars were fought on these streets.” I turned to face him. He was staring out the window too, but not at anything in particular. Just looking out past everything, at some secret thing I couldn’t see. “We fought for food.”

***

Up a dark stairwell, in a row of decaying buildings across from a cliff of rock flecked with shacks that look like they were carved into the face of them, is Tides, a bar on the waterfront. The deck is lined with comfy chairs and expats sipping drinks to the throb of the pop music playing inside.

Just down the beach is a slum. If you grew up on the beach like I did, and are accustomed to beach-front property being the exclusive domain of the rich, the beach slums of Monrovia are jarring. The colleague who met me later, a young Liberian raised in the U.S.—the only one of six siblings to come back to the place he was born—said some 70,000 people live there: 70,000 people in that low-lying crush of tin and cardboard that look as if it’s been smushed flat down against the ground.

There are kids playing soccer there, and a boat is docked in the sand beside several enormous piles of trash. Beyond, a factory, the port, and beyond them, a lightening storm is brewing in the deep purple and gray sky.

They say that President Sirleaf takes her cabinet on tours of the slums. They go to the dirtiest, most squalid places in Monrovia, and she says: Look! We are the government of this.

***

Things have gotten better, though. Under the watch of a legitimate government backed by a UN peace-keeping operation, the country is enjoying a period of steadily improving peace and stability. Power was restored to the capital, massive amounts of debt have been cut, and the economy is recovering, thanks to investments in physical infrastructure, hefty sums of donor aid and a gradual improvement in security.

Everyone has an explanation for Liberia’s relative success. Strong presidential leadership, trust of the donors, the character of the Liberian people.

I ask a friend one evening: How is it possible—for life to be one way for so long and then start being another? “Take the ex-combatants. Some studies show they reintegrate into society really well. How does it happen?”

—That’s easy, he said, smiling mischievously: Magic. “In some countries they have a ritual before war. Soldiers have a spell cast on them and from that point on their bodies are inhabited by the god of war. At the end of fighting, there is a cleansing ritual to cast out the evil spirit.”

It's an appealing story, I say, but I'm unsatisfied.

—So do people just forgive them?

***

There’s a night market for locals who can’t get to the markets open during the day. The streets are slick from rain when I go with Charles, a Liberian with gray hair whom the World Bank has charged with looking after me when I arrive. I’d called him in a panic: my computer is about to die! Where can I get an adaptor?

—Ay be right over, he’d said.

The streets are lit by the yellow glow of the kerosene lamps burning on the side of the road, and the market is packed, bustling, a maze of people.

We pull over and Charles tells me to stay inside. As he gets out, a man limps up to him and they exchange a few words. Then the man comes to my side of the car and tries to talk to me through the glass. He is spindly thin and missing an arm. Charles returns and the man approaches again and they talk for a little longer this time, and I’m confused: it seems they know each other. And before getting back in the car Charles reaches into this pocket and gives the guy a little cash.

Back inside, Charles starts the engine and gives me a wry grin: “They used to be our masters,” he says.

The man had been a fighter during the war. People feared him. Now he’s on the street, begging for money.

“Things change pretty quick,” Charles says.

***

I guess I’m like everybody else: wooed by Liberia’s story of redemption, of coming out of darkness and into the light, as the U.S. ambassador to Liberia recently described it. It’s easy to get sentimental about this kind of story, but I don’t think it’s sentiment that keeps Liberians moving ahead. It is whatever it was in Charles that made him help a man who used to threaten him. It is whatever made James keep going all those years when everyone he knew was hungry and afraid.

Necessity, maybe. You move on because you have to. Or maybe it is anger—an angry refusal to stop believing that tomorrow can be different from today.

Leaving Dar es Salaam

2010-10-29T22:16:00.005+03:00

I spent my last afternoon in Dar hanging out with my good friend, Jean, eating Lays potato chips and talking about our respective plans and worries. Another friend, Steve, an engineer from Ireland, popped by—and we decided the thing to do was to have beers on the roof.

I went up just as the sun was setting, with Steve and Jean five minutes behind me. The sun was a gigantic orange and pink circle on a hazy horizon, blurry, like an object’s reflection in water. It dawned on me, as I watched is sink lower into the ground, how accustomed I’d become to the sun setting over land since I moved to Tanzania: the night before I’d been in Liberia, and sitting on the deck of my hotel I’d become suddenly disoriented when I noticed the sun was setting over the ocean.

I rested my arms against the wall and listened to the noises of Dar es Salaam at dusk. Horns honking on Kamana road down below. People taking the bus home. Boys playing football on the sprawling dirt field outside Biafra secondary school—yells, cheers. Down below in Morocco (which is what the neighborhood is called), a man filled a bucket with water from a tap in his backyard and a woman walked home with her baby asleep on her shoulder. Further east, high rises and cranes where new construction is bubbling up towered over the downtown skyline, and beyond, the sea: that beautiful turquoise Indian ocean, and the tanker ships that forever dot its horizon.

Then the call to prayer rang out from the mosque opposite the apartment building, and it so was beautiful and low and hypnotic it almost broke my heart.

Steve came up, handed me a beer, and we talk quietly. He asked what was my biggest regret about my time in Tanzania. I laughed: nice question, Steve.

But then I thought: isn’t it obvious? To not appreciate what I had when I had it. To not have been filled with a sense of wonder each day for being in this place.

I’m not sure it’s possible to force yourself to feel excited everyday about living in a foreign capital when it’s all you can do to keep your head above water, battling so many small fires, so many frustrations. But this is wondrous, I told him. It’s something like heaven being here….

***

After a rambling, meandering, wine-soaked dinner with friends, I dropped heavily to sleep that night. Woke up at 5:30 a.m., disoriented. For a few seconds I forgot where I was and where I was going.

Not too different from how it feels at transitional points, when you're in between jobs, in between countries, in between relationships. Just like looking out across the ocean in Dar on a stormy day: there's no line on the horizon.

Unnecessary Facades

2010-09-18T18:21:00.003+03:00

Last week, I was in Uganda to write a story about voucher programs. In development policy circles, vouchers are all the rage. The idea is simple: Vouchers are distributed to patients, either for free or a small fee, entitling them to certain services at accredited facilities (in the case of Uganda, services for pregnant women and for the diagnosis and treatment of STIs). Health care providers are reimbursed for the cost of provision, plus a reasonable profit, after delivery has been verified.

As always, I arrived with a pile of reports in my suitcase. Their uniformity was striking: voucher schemes, they say, Empower Patients to choose where to access health services and Spur Competition among health care providers, who must entice these free-to-choose patients to their facilities.

I’d never been to Uganda before. Got the 10:05 p.m. flight out of Nairobi and landed in Entebbe after eleven. As with all late night arrivals, I felt a tired, jittery vitality, like an insomniac. Peering out the car window, my face pressed up against the glass, I strained to see out into the dark.

***

The next morning, a team assembled in the vacant lobby of a hotel in Mbabara: two program managers; a donor representative; and me, the analyst. We drove all morning to reach the facility, strangers, trapped in a car together for hours. At first we talked about the program, our professional backgrounds, where we come from. After an hour, the conversation waned. Turned on the radio. A preacher was talking about sin and redemption.

We stared out the windows, lost in our own thoughts, watching the fields whip by, banana trees, ant mounds, men pushing bicycles weighed down with charcoal, and others laying gravel where a new road is being built.

Arrived at the health center midday stiff and a drowsy. Shook hands with Martin, the young facility manager, who was dressed in his finest suit and polished loafers. We were wearing “field” clothes—jeans, tennis shoes.

Inside his spare concrete office, Martin said he’s worried about the women who come for antenatal visits but don’t come back for the delivery. Others refuse to be referred to higher-level facilities, even when they have life-threatening complications.

Why would they do this?

They want to be comfortable, he said. They are used to the traditional birth attendants in the village. And with referrals, some are afraid of being cut open and operated on in a strange, foreign place, and who can blame them?

Even when they want to be referred, there is no ambulance, and the rocky dirt road we traveled down for an hour in Landrovers to reach the facility is difficult to traverse. The nearest health clinic is nearly 20 kilometers away.

***

At another medical center, I meet four women sitting in a row on a wooden bench in the shade, each in the final stretches of pregnancy. The facility manager is encouraging: ask them questions, he says. There are four of us standing in the sun in front of them, notepads and pens in our hands. I shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other. How many babies do you have, I ask? From where did you come?

Their voices are as soft as feathers, and they bow their heads as if in prayer as they speak. I have three babies, one says. I have five, says another. I have come from 7 kilometers away. I have come from further. There is no where else to go.

At another facility, another manager takes a delegation of six of us on a tour. This is the reception, he says, the lab, the children’s ward. Then he takes us into the labor ward, guides us around a corner and proudly points to a woman with bare legs in stirrups, who is heaving, moaning, about to have her baby.

When we wonder why patients sometimes do not return to the facility to deliver when they could do so for free; when we think it is illogical to forfeit the opportunity to come to a clean, safe clinic—to sacrifice so much by not returning—maybe the patients are thinking of all they sacrifice when they do.

***

Kenya also has a voucher scheme, and one afternoon I visited some accredited facilities in the Nairobi slum of Korogocho. There were three of them, close to each other. I could walk between them easily.

I asked the facility managers how they would compete with the other facilities to lure patients? They downplayed the idea: we work together, they said, we don’t compete.

But you are making improvements to attract patients, aren’t you?

They said they improve their facilities first, because they are strongly encouraged to do so by the agency managing the program, and second, as a way to ensure they will be left with something when donor funds for the program run out. Facility managers in Uganda say the same thing, and for them, the latter reason is even more pressing, since donor funds for the three-year program are spent, and come next year, their new patients and income may disappear.

***

We give names to what our programs do for patients. Empower. Catalyze. Choice. But assessing their views, their motives, and the effect we have on them, is more difficult than is generally assumed.

Maybe vouchers empower women. Maybe they don’t. Maybe instead they are a simple subsidy for particular services at particular locations. And maybe facilities aren't upgrading infrastructure and hiring new staff out of a sense of competition.

But what is wrong with this? Patients are still coming to facilities, where the safe delivery of their babies can be nearly guaranteed. And facilities are making improvements, which make them more comfortable and responsive to patients. Moreover, these programs serve as models for governments considering health insurance programs for the poor (which both Kenya and Uganda are) but are concerned about the mechanics of accreditation and reimbursement.

Plenty of thoughtful people have questions and concerns about vouchers—about the cost and complexity of administering them versus other mechanisms to increase access; about preventing fraud and monitoring facility quality, among other things. But overall, these programs are a good thing.

Why isn’t the way things really are enough?

If You’re Ever in Juba… (A Patchwork Restaurant Guide for Travelers in Africa)

2010-09-18T13:08:00.004+03:00

Sometimes, let’s face it, expats are annoying. Some of us adopt pseudo accents. We occasionally (and with dramatic flair) blame our bad habits on the countries we live in (you’d drink too if you’d seen what I’ve seen). We act superior when we are home. An innocent trip to the grocery store can get you an ear full on overabundance and consumption.

Lately, I’ve been catching myself doing another such annoying thing, something that even annoys other expats. The conversations go like this:

Friend: Want to grab dinner?

Me: Sure. Where should we go?

Friend: Maybe pizza?

Me: But there’s no good pizza here. Let me tell you where you can get REALLY good pizza. Have you ever been to south Sudan? (At this point my friend has stopped listening because she thinks I’m being just a little show-offy.)

Annoying though it may be, in the spirit of eating well in far flung places, I’ve put together this handy restaurant guide based on the cities I’ve lately traveled to. Let me be clear: I haven’t spent long periods of time in any of these places, except for Tanzania, so you may find lots of phase 1 restaurants (i.e., the places where the wazungu go when they don’t know where the really good places are). If so, apologies. Pease add to it—consider it a public service for expats and travelers everywhere.

Dar es Salaam

There are many things to love about Tanzania. The sun, the sand, the gentle sway of palm trees in the moonlight. Quick jaunts to Zanzibar in tiny toy airplanes piloted by 26-year olds nursing blistering hangovers. Ficken.*

Yes, there is much to love. But the gourmet traveler may find Dar wanting. Nonetheless, here's a random sampling of some of my favorite places to eat:

Zuane—Okay, it’s all relative, right, but for Dar, this is pretty good Italian food. Dine al fresco on the veranda lit with lanterns and pictures of Italian people from the 1940s on the wall. The pasta isn’t the highlight: try the pizza. The Zuane is especially good. Also, this may be the one place in Dar that serves a FREE appetizer (bread with bruschetta).

Sweet Eazy—Also known as the Sweet Sleazy (for a certain, ahem, clientele that frequent the place in the small hours), this rooftop restaurant, with tables beneath a canopy of trees, serves a nice mix of sea food and has a sleek indoor club section with great live music on Thursday nights.

The Patel Brotherhood—Not as scary as it sounds, this Indian restaurant, situated alongside badminton and tennis courts, serves great, cheap Indian food. Most of the members and guests are local Indian families, and there are usually kids running around, and men sitting in far off corners smoking and talking quietly. Some nights, a projector is set up to beam cricket or football. You’ll also hear the call to prayer from a mosque nearby.

Rehobot—This is a great Ethiopian restaurant in the backyard of the woman who used to be the head chef at the other Ethiopian restaurant in Dar, Addis in Dar, but left to start her own business. (Snap!) It’s small (you literally walk through their living room to go to the bathroom), charming and inexpensive. Plus her husband makes great furniture.

Slipway—Now four months ago I would not have recommended Slipway to anyone. It always struck me as a fly-infested tourist trap. BUT, since the restaurant/bar renovation, I’m in love. Wide open tables, comfy couches, right on the water, it’s the best place for a drink to watch the sun go down. The food isn’t great, but watching the fisherman sail their Dhows in for the evening completely makes up for it.

Africafe—I bet some of you thought I was going to say that Epi DÓr was my favorite café in Dar, but you would be wrong! Granted, I spent every other day of my first six months in Tanzania at Epi DÓr—and the croissants are lovely—but they keep raising their prices and aren’t super nice to their staff. Go instead to Africafe up by Seacliff, where they have even better coffee, better music (not that I don’t LOVE Celene Dion and Michael Bolton on a loop) and occasionally, drum roll: free wireless internet. But only occasionally. When they remember to pay their bills. Don’t push your luck, ok?

New Kibo Business—If you’re in the mood for some local fare, try this pub nestled in the working class Kinondoni neighborhood of Morocco. Good mishkaki and beer, especially when there’s power.

*Chickens are often fed fish meal in Tanzania, which causes ficken, the dreaded by all experience of confronting a slightly fishy taste when you bite into your chicken sandwich. The horror.

Nairobi

Osteria del Chianti—Now there are two Osteria’s in Nairobi. You want to go to the one with the gelato shop outside, not the one in Westlands by the mall. This restaurant is the MOST charming, the COZIEST, the BESTEST Italian restaurant in Nairobi, with a smoldering fireplace inside and a warm glow of candles and lanterns outside. Good for long, meandering conversations over wine. Get the pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil. Delicious.

The River Cafe—Off Limuru Road, near Village Market, this place is also LOVELY. Really, really lovely. Tables nestled between gardens, grassy hills and a pond, surrounded by flowers and bougainvillea, the place feels like a bit of Eden in big, hectic Nairobi. Their breakfasts are delicious. Try the eggs benedict or eggs with grilled tomatoes.

Java House—Saying you like Java House in East Africa is a little like saying you like Starbucks in Seattle. Totally UNCOOL. But we’ve got to face facts: the coffee house chain is pretty damn great. First, most outlets offer free wireless internet. This is gold. Second: they serve Mexican food. Now granted, it’s Africa Mexican food, but hell. It’s been a long time. I’ll take what I can get.

Havana Bar—First question: why is there a Havana bar in every African capital (see Juba and Bujumbura below)? But to the point, this Westland not-so-divey dive bar is fun for a drink and people watching. Dimly lit and smoky, with walls painted cherry red, the music is loud, and the drinks are good. And if you get bored, there are a random smattering of bars all within stumbling (I mean walking) distance.

Addis Ababa

Lime Tree Café—Hands down, the best. Macchiatos to die for. Free wireless. Good music. And you can get a pedicure at the spa downstairs.

Top View—Up the hill from the Megenagna Roundabout, the view of Addis from this place is amazing (and the food is delicious to boot). The only place with a better view of the city is on the steps of the Orthodox church on top of Entoto mountain. Take a mini bus from the market, and slowly wind up and up the narrow road, through the foothills densely covered with eucalyptus trees, to the top of Entoto, over 10,000 feet up, in the clouds.

(Anyone have anything to add for Addis?)

Juba

Think fifty years of civil war are going to stop Juba, the capital of the soon-to-be-new-country, South Sudan from making the “patchwork restaurant guide” list? No way! South Sudan may be one of the most under-developed places on Earth, but they do have a few awesome restaurants.

Da Vinci—This mixed fare restaurant is expensive, but located right on the banks of the Nile, it’s worth it. Just down the river is the one bridge in Juba, which trucks traverse to bring goods in from Kampala in the south. At twilight, under the mango trees, when the Nile is silvery and calm, Da Vinci may be one of the most enchanting places in Africa.

Logali House—If you’re in the mood for something vaguely neocolonial, check out the restaurant and bar at Logali House, a charming boutique hotel definitely stands out amidst a sea of tents and containers in Juba. Their veranda is a great place to watch the game and have a glass of wine, but as with everywhere else in Juba, it’ll cost you. A burger runs about $18. The vege lasagna is particularly good and costs about the same.

Afex—This is actually a U.S. compound that started as a tent camp. They still have the tents, along with cottages for USAID contractors (that run about US$5,000-8,000 per month—hello aid dollars hard at work), but there is also a great buffet restaurant that is open to the public. Enjoy the burrito bar and mingle with some friendly neighborhood Blackwater contractors (I mean XE).

Havana—Right next door to Logali, this is where the Cuban-Jubans hang. A group of former Sudanese exiles—doctors, engineers, economists—started the place. They gather to share a bottle of whisky and talk, very often in Spanish, about the days when they were educated in Cuba during the civil war and. Havana has great pizza: try the pumpkin with fontina cheese.

Bujumbura

Rumors of coups and post-election violence hover like smoke over the tiny central African capital, but civil strife aside, Bujumbura is a culinary jewel.

Bora Bora—A Saturday afternoon at Bora Bora and you’ll consider retiring in Burundi. A stylish beach shack /bar/cafe/restaurant on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, you can chill out on wide couches by the pool and listen to mellow reggae tunes. Try the avocados with prawns.

Havana—This nightclub and lounge is sleek and stylish, the place to be seen on the weekends. Also a great spot to grab a beer and watch the game after a long day at the office fighting poverty.

Botanika—With candle light and palm trees swaying in the evening breeze, the quiet murmur of conversation and chink of wine glasses, this restaurant oozes intimacy, and the steak and chocolate mousse are amazing. (Alas, good wine is hard to come by in Bujumbura, but you will make due at this place.)

L’Archipel (and) Kiboko Grill—Both places have great Belgian fish dishes, with tables outside in the garden. Kiboko is set on the grounds of Ubuntu Residence, a charming inn on the lake, which has some of the warmest, friendliest staff in Bujumbura. Say hi to Blandine when you go.

Monrovia

TBD

Groping for Relevance in Journalism*

2010-09-01T20:49:00.005+03:00

It’s no secret that the journalism business—newspapers especially—is in the dumps. Profits are sinking, circulation keeps plummeting, and opinion polls show distrust in the media is growing: in 2009, the Pew Research Center found that only 29 percent of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63 percent say that news stories are often inaccurate. (Read longtime journalist James Fallows chapter Why We Hate the Media, in Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, for thoughts on why).

None of this is new. I remember attending a meeting when I worked at the San Diego Union-Tribune, in which one of the editors said that the simple habit of reading newspapers was “the only thing keeping this industry from a free-fall.” For a kid just starting out in the business (this was in 2003) it was crushing.

According to various studies, the number of newspaper editorial employees, which numbered more than 60,000 in 1992, fell to around 40,000 in 2009 (see CJR piece referenced below). Circulation has been on the decline since the 1940s.

Many blame the Internet, Google especially, for siphoning content, but Fallows disagrees: “If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers.”

“Journalism isn’t necessarily dying,” says a journalist friend at the New Yorker, “[but] the business model that supports it is. I don’t generally advise people to go into it. Most of my colleagues are thinking through their own Plan Bs. It’s a scary time.”

I don’t have the expertise to lay out all the various problems and potential solutions. For that read James Fallows’ June 2010 piece in the Atlantic, How to Save the News and the recent Economist interview with Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and author of What Are Journalists For?

But let’s talk about reporting on Africa. The consensus, based on conversations in the dozen or so countries where I’ve traveled, is that it is woeful. Lazy. Inept. Misleading. Sensational. Cavalier. Dishonest. Out of touch. (There are notable exceptions such as Celia Dugger at the New York Times, The Guardian (UK) and others).

Weak international coverage is also not a new phenomenon (although hard financial times have seen newspapers trimming and/or closing foreign bureaus and an increasing reliance on syndication). This was, after all, what spurred Ted Turner to start CNN—to provide better coverage of non-Western countries.

But the bottom line is, in an increasingly interconnected world, coverage, particularly of Africa, is pitiful.

“I have no idea where I would turn to if I wanted good information on Africa,” says a journalist friend. This is a BIG problem.

But it is a problem that has spawned a sort of new journalism: Africa-hands don’t read mainstream newspapers to get their news about Africa (although we read them for fun and so that we can blog about how bad they are). We read the blogs of other Africa hands, and the kind of specialized reporting that I do for various international agencies and think tanks. In this space, there is a mix of content: some of it is great, a lot of it is mediocre.

Even if the new journalism was amazing, it wouldn't be enough. Trained journalists have a critically important civic role to play, holding those in power to account and providing information and analysis to help average citizens participate in civic life.

“Something is gained when reporting, analysis, and investigation are pursued collaboratively by stable organizations that can facilitate regular reporting by experienced journalists, support them with money, logistics, and legal services, and present their work to a large public,” say Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson in “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Newspapers can, and will, find a way to cope with the challenges. For ideas on how to generate revenue, read Fallows and also Downie and Schudson, who recommend, among other things, that the IRS or Congress authorize independent news organizations that are “substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs to be created as or converted into a nonprofit entity or a low-profit Limited Liability Corporation serving the public interest, regardless of its mix of financial support, including commercial sponsorship and advertising.”

Shutting down print operations, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and many others have done, is probably a good thing for many newspapers (think about the cost of making those enormous rolls of paper, shipping them, the expensive machinery that makes newspapers, delivering them door to door, and doing that everyday). They should also retain their reporting and editorial staff and pay them well—they are newspapers’ most valuable assets.

But maybe the biggest task is to convince people to believe, like we used to, that solid, trustworthy news is worth paying a small fee for. You give a little and get a lot.

But for this to happen, newspapers need to improve their content. In his Atlantic piece, Fallows recounts a conversation he had with the executive who started Google News. As the executive scanned tens of thousands of headlines a day:

“[H]e said that what astonished him was the predictable and pack-like response of most of the world’s news outlets to most stories. … their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things… [which] indicated a faddishness of coverage…and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. ‘I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.’”

Newspapers must be willing to take smart risks. The New York Times has a gigantic global readership. Jeffrey Gettleman, their swashbuckling Nairobi bureau chief, writes about 80 percent of their East/Central Africa coverage. This means that, to the extent people get their news about Africa from the Times, one man is telling and shaping the story. News agencies must stop relying on the usual suspects and tap into the huge pool of hungry young journalists who are willing to put in long hours and work for practically nothing. They should broaden their reporting pool and publish unconventional pieces that are fresh, thoughtful, informative and interesting.

“It just seems to me," says Dean Nelson, a San Diego-based journalist, "that we’re in the same place we were a couple hundred years ago when there were dozens of newspapers in every city, each of them perpetuating the political voices that were supporting them. Journalism in America started out as pamphleteering, and now that everyone is a blogger/journalist, we’re back to where we were. Then, when the penny press came along and figured out a way to publish news more cheaply, things changed dramatically. We’re in that era now, where people are trying to figure out how to inform the public, protect democracy, AND make some money. In the meantime, a lot of journalism will continue to be done badly, with the exception of a few outlets who can stand to lose some money while it gets sorted out.”

*This title is based on Eugene Goodwin/Ron Smith’s Groping for Ethics in Journalism, a must read for any journalism student.

The Believers

2010-08-14T11:30:00.006+03:00

I’m sitting in the back seat of an old blue and white Russian Lada, looking through the drizzle flecked window at some wet goats standing in mud on the side of the road. The morning is gray and smells of petrol and exhaust and I have a headache from a bad night’s sleep.

The day before I’d showed up at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital and asked to speak to its 84-year-old founder, Catherine Hamlin. I didn’t have an appointment, and was ambivalent about whether or not she would see me. I’d been travelling non-stop for three months, living out of a suitcase, eating with strangers. I felt dislocated and lost, weary of ideas, weary of writing.

But the hospital public relations manager, Feven, told me to come back in the morning at 9 o’clock and we could meet.

Now I’m stuck in traffic, and my driver, Fikadu, is creeping along the street like a snail. It’s okay, though. I need the time. Looking out the window—a crumbling church, an open market, masses of Ethiopians darting in and out of traffic—I try to think of questions for Dr. Hamlin. Usually, I have a list prepared for the people I interview. The questions have a logical, linear progression.

But when I think about Dr. Hamlin, my questions feel irrelevant, like abstractions (does aid work?) compared to her concrete reality (yes—these women were sick and now they are healed).

And when I arrive, ten minutes late, my mind, and notebook, are completely blank.

***

Feven tells me to have a seat while she fetches Catherine. I pick up a brochure, flip through it absently, then set it down and look out the open window. The morning air is cool and smells of eucalyptus. Nurses dressed in white walk along a corridor next to the admissions office, which, like the surgery and recovery ward, is nestled on a hillside among trees and flowers.

Then I see Dr. Hamlin, tall and conspicuous in a long white lab coat, walking slowly with a cane, Feven’s hand in hers.

Catherine Hamlin and her husband came to Ethiopia in 1959, after answering an advertisement in the Lancet Medical Journal, seeking an obstetrician and gynecologist to establish a Midwifery School at the Princess Tsehay Hospital in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Fifteen years later, they established the Fistula Hospital, a place where women with horrendous injuries from childbirth*, women who have been abandoned, cast away to the margins, can come and be cared for, and in many cases made well again.

Dr. Hamlin's face is deeply lined and rosy, and as we sit down to talk, she tells me about the hospital, which provides fistula repair surgery to about 2,500 patients each year, and cures over 90 percent of them. They also care for fifty long-term patients, who are not able to be cured, and train local health workers and specialists. All services are provided free of charge.

In the opening pages of her book, The Hospital by the River, Hamlin says that she came to Ethiopia as an answer to the calling of God. Has her faith changed in the fifty years she’s lived in Addis?

—No, she says. There has always been good and evil in the world.

Do you ever get discouraged, I ask? Why did you stay when so many others have left?

—I was excited, she says. I was curing people.

***

One night in Nairobi, a friend and I had dinner with a young woman just arrived in Kenya to do research for her PhD. It was her first time in Africa, and in between bites of teriyaki chicken, she told us about the angst she was feeling, questioning the purpose and utility of development. Is it arrogant to come to a place you know nothing about and study it? Is it just another form of colonialism?

—Colonialism is underrated, my friend, M, interjected with a grin. The young woman laughed uncomfortably and shifted in her chair.

I frowned at M and asked her: What is the most defining thing about your first few weeks here? What do you feel most acutely?

She said: Guilt.

***

—Go easy on the newbie, I told M later in the car. I’ve been here a year, and I’m still pretty sure colonialism is NOT under-rated.

—I know, I know, he smiled, hurtling like a rocket through Westlands roundabout. But you can get lost in the debates forever. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think my job was important.

M works in conflict resolution and has lived in Kenya for three years. His job is to think about and work with groups most consider beyond the pale, outcasts.

—I choose to be here. I signed a contract. I know my work isn’t perfect. But I have to do the best I can with what I have.

***

Back in Addis, I’m sipping a macchiato with Owen Barder, head of aidinfo.org, an initiative promoting aid transparency.

He is, as usual, like loose electricity, overflowing with ideas and optimism. Where does this fierce belief in the power of shared information to change things for the better come from?

—I’m a hacker, he says, leaning over the table conspiratorially. I was shaped by the idea that information should be shared.

He tells me about a meeting he attended in Paris, in which donors who give about half of the world’s aid agreed to publish data more quickly, and in a common, open format, so that it is readily accessible, comparable, and easy to find.

Owen’s ambitions are massive. He wants to fundamentally realign incentives in the aid business, to change it from the inside out. How is a meeting in Paris going to do that?

—This is work, he says, undeterred. It’s slow and incremental. Over time, low key technical and technocratic changes will change the system dynamics, and hence the whole trajectory of the aid system.

***

It is easy, in the development business, to get caught up in words and ideas, to be mesmerized by doubt and uncertainty. But we must move on. People like Owen and Catherine and M believe in the work they are doing, not because they are under any illusions about its limits, but because they get up each morning and do the work. Because they try. Their dreams and hopes are grounded in responsibility.

***

As our interview draws to a close, I tell Dr. Hamlin: I don't want to leave! Your work is amazing!

She smiles: "They keep coming, though, year after year." The Fistula Hopsital gives women their lives back, but it does not solve the underlying problem of poverty and lack of access to basic health services that brings them there in the first place.

"But we're working on it," Hamlin says. She and her colleagues recently opened four mini-fistula hospitals throughout Ethiopia where prevention education programs are being delivered to communities and traditional birth attendants are being trained. They have plans for much more.

Outside, in the crisp morning air, Feven chides Catherine gently for being up and about so soon after hip surgery a few months ago. Catherine takes her hand: “There’s work to be done.”

*Obstetric fistula is a severe medical condition in which a fistula (hole) develops between either the rectum and vagina or between the bladder and vagina after severe or failed childbirth. A woman with obstetric fistula will suffer from incontinence and extreme social stigma.

Dilemmas

2010-08-11T09:31:00.010+03:00

One afternoon in Juba, I arrived at the headquarters of an international NGO to find that my interview had just left. I walked back to the car, kicking the dirt in frustration, then noticed, across the road, a sprawling neighborhood of mud huts tucked away behind a bamboo fence—a scene right out of rural Africa, in the middle of the capital of South Sudan.

I asked Joseph, my driver, if we could walk through the neighborhood. He was confused: do you want to interview people, he asked?

“No, I don’t want to bother them,” I said. “I just want to see it.”

He grinned, started the engine, and two minutes later we were at a pub down the road to pick up his friend, William, a soldier with the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) and part time bar-owner. William’s aunt lived in the neighborhood, and when Joseph asked, William offered to give us a tour.

“It’s called Tomling area,” he said as he led us down a narrow mud path, a labyrinth organized neatly along bamboo fences, around the neighbourhood of thatched-roof huts. We passed school children in navy blue uniforms on their way home from school; a woman in a pink and orange kanga hanging clothes on a line to dry; another woman stirring something in a steaming iron pot.

Tomling did not feel depraved, squalid—the words I used to associate with the word slum. But it was not all cheerful either. A middle aged woman lay in the dirt moaning; a man without a leg limped with a cane, barely able to cross the jagged mud road. Occasional bursts of sour air, the smell of human waste, wafted out of some of the structures we passed.

On our way out, I saw a young man in slacks and a polo shirt walking in front of us, out of Tomling, onto the main tarmac road. He had come from a mud hut, but now he’s walking down the street with everyone else.

I watched him: tall, back erect, book in hand, one foot in front of the other. He was not an image or an abstraction. Each footstep he took I imagined him looking back at me. In my mind he was saying: I am someone. I am someone.

***

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Slumdog Tourism, Kennedy Odede discusses the phenomenon of tourists paying to visit Kibera, the largest slum in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. He writes:

"...Many foreigners come to the slums wanting to understand poverty, and they leave with what they believe is a better grasp of our desperately poor conditions. The expectation, among the visitors and tour organizers, is that the experience may lead the tourists to action once they get home.

But it's just as likely that a tour will come to nothing. After all, looking at conditions like those in Kibera is overwhelming, and I imagine many visitors think that merely bearing witness to such poverty is enough.

Nor do visitors really interact with us. Aside from the occasional comment, there is no dialogue estabished, no conversation begun. Slum tourism is a one-way street: They get photos; we lose a piece of our dignity.

Slums will not go away because a few dozen Americans or Europeans spent a morning walking around them."

***

Maybe tourists paying to walk around slums, to spend thirty minutes snapping photos of another person's life, another person's hardship, is distasteful, irreverent, and unhelpful.

There are many thoughtful people, though, who think that, on the whole, it is a good thing, the same way some thoughtful people think student "mission trips" are a good thing, even if they do little to help the poor in developing countries.

"It has to be done completely differently, but they should absolutely be done," a friend of mine said. "And yes, if even 99 percent of the tourists don't feel like doing anything about global poverty, but 1 percent do, I still think that is a net positive."

Maybe. I'm inclined to agree, but then I wonder: if it was me in there, in the slum, and someone with more power and chances and money came to look at me, in my rags and filth, what would I feel? Humiliated. Powerless. I would feel anger at their pity.

Is there a way to do development tourism right?

***

And what if you work in the development business? What if visiting slums is part of your job?

I was in Nairobi a week ago, working on a story on a program that sells highly subsidized vouchers to poor women, who can use them at accredited health facilities to safely deliver their babies, among other things. One morning, I visited three such facilities. They were located in a slum called Korogocho, less well-known than Kibera but nearly as large and just as poor.

After an interview, the clinic manager took me on a tour of the facility. This is the reception, he said, the lab, the delivery room. I nodded, jotted down some notes.

Then he turned a door knob to take me into a room where a nurse was counseling a patient being tested for HIV. No, I said, reaching out my hand to stop him. We don’t need to go in there.

The tours are all the same: exhaustive, intrusive, helpful, uncomfortable, and bewildering.

***

Maybe it’s debatable—whether development professionals like me should be here at all. (I happen to think that we should.) But we are here because, despite the imperfections and inconsistencies of our business, this is the job we have chosen to do. And to do it well—to change the way things are for the better—we have to get as close as we can to reality as it is. Needing to see and understand poverty, even though we are not poor, is a dilemma we have to live with.

(Thanks to M for your fierce sense of getting on with it.)

Eclipse (Dispatches from Burundi)

2010-08-08T19:57:00.005+03:00

Thirty minutes west of downtown Bujumbura, past the flat, empty swamp lands of Gatumba, along a little two-lane road, is the border between Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

When I asked the taxi driver to take me there, he asked why I wanted to go.

—I just want to see it, I said.

He faked a smile and shrugged.

Truth was I wanted to see something other than the Bujumbura the New York Times’ travel section describes as “a freewheeling city of palm trees and colonial-era Art Deco buildings,” an unexpected oasis for expats—great restaurants and nightclubs, charming hotels—smack in the middle of war-torn central Africa.

Burundi is at peace now, but flash back to 1996: for the third time in a decade the government is turned upside down: the president has been overthrown in a military-led coup, even as it is still reeling from the murder of its two previous presidents—one in 1993 and another in 1994. The coup prompts the international community to impose economic sanctions. GDP falls by about 8 percent. The Burundian franc plummets. The government institutes fuel rationing, and all over the countryside, civilians are caught up in a brutal and bloody battle.

Since independence in 1962, ethnic and political conflicts have resulted in five wars in Burundi, left tens of thousands massacred and close to two million displaced or fleeing to neighboring countries.

Burundi has enjoyed several years of relative calm since holding its first successful post-war democratic election in 2005, but at the time of my visit, the international press was describing the country as dangerously close to the brink.

The International Crisis Group, for example, warned that tensions could escalate in the run-up to communal, presidential, then legislative elections, which began in May and continue through September. Opposition parties face harassment and intimidation from police and the ruling party’s youth wing is dangerously volatile, the report said.

Looking out the window of the taxi, I wondered: Where is this Burundi? And if I get away from my hotel, away from the familiar restaurants, offices, and cafes, and just drive, what will I see?

***

There were—technically—two lanes on the road to the border, but my taxi driver drove straight down the middle. There are always streams of bikes and people, loaded down with mattresses, grass, charcoal, but it was more crowded than usual. The further we went, the thicker traffic became.

Then we saw it from the road: what looked like thousands of people were gathered around a huge stage on a grassy field next to Lake Tanganyika, many wearing tee-shirts and baseball caps with the acronym CNDD emblazoned on them in red. (The CNDD—National Council for the Defense of Democracy—is the political party of Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza.)

We parked and got out. It felt like the fourth of July. There were flags everywhere (not the Burundian national flag, but the CNDD flag)—fluttering outside shops, draped across the hoods of pickup trucks, strung down peoples' backs like capes, on tree branches and the sides of buses. Young men were talking into loudspeakers, cars were decorated with balloons, groups of men and women were running in step together singing. The rhythmic stomp of their feet against the dirt was like a drum beat. It was buoyant, electric.

I took off my sunglasses and tried to look inconspicuous, which was ridiculous and impossible, especially with a band of barefoot kids following me, giggling. People gave me sideways glances and whispered as I edged my way toward the stage and watched as a man in a black cowboy hat talked forcefully into a microphone, his voice rising and falling like waves in a storm. He began to chant, his fist in the air—Shirira! Shirira!— and the crowd started chanting too. Their voices carried like a shockwave through the open air, reverberated like an insistent, pulsating eruption.

I looked at my driver. His face was grave and strained.

We turned to leave, and in the car, I asked him about the slogan they were chanting. What does it mean?

—It’s to make people afraid, he said.

I shook my head: I don’t understand.

He scratched his chin, and looked out the window. “Comme allumer,” he said. “It means to light up. To set on fire.”

***

I called a Burundian friend back in town and told her breathlessly: We must meet! You won’t believe what I saw!

She was unmoved: Don’t be fooled by all those people, she said. They are poor, they are given tee-shirts and food. Just because they are there does not mean they support the CNDD.

She told me that “meetings” like the one I’d seen were a dime a dozen in Bujumbura—there was nothing special about the rally I’d happened upon. And this specter of violence I'd read so much about? Unlikely, she told me.

"This is the problem: foreigners come here, and they see things and are told things, but they don't know how to interpret it. Most of what you read in the newspapers is wrong."

The art of reporting is more difficult than is generally assumed.

***
It's twilight and I'm sitting outside my hotel room at Ubuntu, watching a pair of cranes prance across the lawn. The air is filled with the rustle of palm trees, the quiet murmur of conversation and clink of china from nearby tables. Lake Tanganyika is just across the street. Its cool, silvery vastness conveys a tranquility that belies Burundi’s troubled past.

Then I hear it again—the pounding of feet and faint, distant chanting. I turn my head but I can’t quite make out where the sound is coming from.

Beyond the lake, the Congolese mountains, normally a tower of massive gray solidity, are obscured in the clouds, hidden.

(Nkurunziza was re-elected for another five year-term in June, with 91.62 percent of the vote. Observers praised the calm surrounding the election, but the government was heavily criticized for limiting freedom of expression. All six opposition candidates boycotted the vote following complaints of fraud in district elections in May.)

There's No Blood Thicker Than Ink? (Dispatches from Kenya)

2010-08-05T17:29:00.007+03:00

Nairobi is a gritty town. Sure, it’s got the shopping malls, the fancy restaurants—but underneath the veneer, Nairobi is a coarse industrial machine, with money and labor pumping through its veins like crude oil through a pipeline. You feel it on the road—black plumes of exhaust, traffic jam, horns blaring, streams of men and women weaving in and out of traffic, some selling things, others just on their way somewhere. Pass by petrol stations, car lots, and factories—cement, foam, tires. Then by an ocean of slums, waves of brown cardboard and tin, and along their periphery, commerce: blacksmiths, spare parts, sheet metal. There are lorries everywhere. From the back seat of my taxi I watch a man seated atop one, riding there in the back in the early evening haze, his shirt flapping in the wind.

***

In December 2007, Kenya held presidential and parliamentary elections. Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner, but his opponent, Raila Odinga, contested the result. The election commissioner admitted he didn’t know who won.

People began to say that the election had been stolen and riots broke out. First in the Rift Valley, they spread like a shockwave to the streets of Nairobi, ripping, tearing, blasting apart the sense of solidity that the country (and the world) had of itself. Buildings were set on fire, demonstrators were shot.

—We locked ourselves in our house for two days.

—I lived across from Kibera [a slum]. Even in the house we had to wipe our eyes from the tear gas police were using outside.

—If the international community hadn’t come in, this place would have been gone.

—Sometimes I don’t even like to remember.

Over 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. Such things are not easily forgotten.

Which is why Wednesday’s referendum, in which a large majority of Kenyans voted in a new constitution, was monitored so closely. No one wanted what happened in 2008 to happen again.

Reports from international news agencies preceding the referendum suggested that Kenya was on the brink of a descent to violence:

“Kenyans will decide on Wednesday whether to adopt significant changes to their constitution, but the vote may produce violence rather than reform.” —Reuters

There are “heightened fears of political violence ahead of 6 Aug constitutional referendum.” — International Crisis Group

“Once again, many Kenyans fear that the prospects for more violence are increasing as their country heads toward another politically divisive turning
point.”—The New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman

The reports did not match reality. Most Kenyans felt relatively confident (rightly it turns out) that violence was unlikely. So was this just another example of the press painting African countries as more violent and chaotic than they really are? One more example of cowboy reporters making things sound more dangerous (and exciting?) in the cities where they are based? (Yes, Gettleman, that one’s for you.) Maybe that is part of it.

But maybe the speculation was also borne out of the doubts that appear, like cracks on the surface of an ice-covered pond, when our sense of the inevitability of stability is broken.

***

The constitution contains many landmark provisions—a Bill of Rights, land reforms, and limits to presidential powers. No one is sure if it will usher in a new era, one less riddled by corruption, one defined more by equality and opportunity than sickening poverty side by side with ostentatious wealth. It is, after all, just a document, just words. And we rarely live up to our words.

But words are not meaningless either. They express what we hope for, what what we think we have it in ourselves at our best to be. Maybe that's why, all around Nairobi, in newspapers, on billboards and banners, on the radio, scattered like flecks of gold on the beach, are words like Renewal. Healing. Unity. They are words about leaving the past behind, about bringing fighting to an end and having peace.

Making them real will require effort—mundane, unglamorous work. (For a good analysis of the challenges ahead, see John Githongo’s Fear and Loathing in Nairobi.)

But at least for now, there is a sense of possibility.

"Things change for the worse so quickly. They change for the better more slowly—but they can." --Bono

(With thanks to Matilda for taking the time to talk.)

A Storm

2010-04-30T08:29:00.004+03:00

There was nothing unusual about how it began. Mid-morning, and the skies were as bright as a flower—sunny and clear. Outside, peacocks fanned their feathers on the grass and a crow glided through the air, settling on the perch outside my window. My gaze returned to my computer screen; I scanned the morning headlines, and when I looked up a few minutes later, it was raining. The shower was cool and pleasant, and in April in Tanzania, fairly typical.

But instead of subsiding after an hour or so, it grew stronger and harder, and the drops became thicker and denser, until there were sheets of rain, and the sky was as white as snow and seemed to hover right on top of us. A colleague and I stared out the window in wonder until it was so blurry with water that we could no longer see through it.

It continued all afternoon and into the night and though the ferocity of the downpour let up, the rain itself carried on for three days. Paved roads became rivers. Dirt roads became thick with mud, impassable, with craters filled with filthy water.

Traffic jams lasted for hours. The day before the storm hit was a national holiday in Tanzania, and since most people took the day off, the roads were empty—it took about 12 minutes to get home. On the first night of the storm, it took nearly three hours to cover the same distance.

The next day at the office, colleagues compared traffic horror stories and tried to outdo each other with who sat in their cars the longest. Some asked: what will happen in the city next week, when Dar es Salaam hosts the World Economic Forum on Africa? How will the city cope with the extra traffic it will bring, plus the rain? Others shook their heads and said: the question is how this city will sustain itself at all, with more traffic, and more cars and more people every year (Dar es Salaam is one of the ten fastest growing cities in the world).

Meanwhile, we were informed that piped water in the city had been cut off because of damage to the pipes. It was not caused by the storm, but fixing the problem was made more difficult because of it. We went without water for two days at the World Bank, with acrid fumes of urine emanating from the bathrooms.

But at least we had satellite internet. While the storm raged and the taps went dry, much of the rest of the city also experienced disruptions of internet service because of a breakdown of the fiber optic cable that brings high speed internet to East Africa. It was like the whole city was on the blink, malfunctioning, haywire.

***

That was how about 30 percent of Dar es Salaam experienced the storm this week. The other 70 percent also experienced a storm, but differently.

Seventy percent of Dar es Salaam’s four million or so people live in unplanned settlements: no proper roads, no sanitation systems, no link in to water or power systems (less than 15 percent of the country is connected to the grid). This seventy percent didn’t lose power or internet because they didn’t have it to begin with. The roads in front of their homes became mud, and many neighborhoods were flooded. My three-hour commute was bad, but try doing it in a dala dala (i.e., a small Tanzanian bus)—squished, standing between five people, hunched over so your head doesn’t hit the roof, with no AC, just the choice of leaving the window open and letting rain splatter in, or shut, and letting the bus become a humid, foggy mess. For those who walk to work, the walk became harder and dirtier, and for those who sell vegetables, toilet paper and other sundries at little shops on the side of the road, business slowed.

The seventy percent don’t live far away, either—they live right next door. In the canyon between Kimweri road and Wonderwelders (a shop where expats go to buy gifts for friends and family back home) there is such a settlement, a community built along narrow alleyways; a sea of corrugated iron, of kids running barefoot in torn shirts. At night, little flames glow in the dark lit by tiny kerosene lamps.

The settlement is about five minutes down the road from where I and many of my colleagues stay, on Slipway Road, in million-dollar homes with lovely views of the water.

***

Two sets of people in one city, side by side practically, living different lives. One goes to eat and get her nails done and works out at places with generators, so most of the time, she isn’t even aware of how fragile the power supply is in this town. The other spends her nights in the dark. One treats herself to a 15,000 shilling sandwich and coffee at the sleek, urbane Kempinski hotel, and pays 10,000 shillings for the cab ride home. The other spends 1,500 shillings on a lunch of bananas and rice, and 200 for the dala dala home. One wears pretty scarves that she bought in New York. The other cleans them. One rents an apartment on Dar’s peninsula for $1,500 a month, while the other pays a kind of rent to the guy who “runs” the slum where her and her children live, except she doesn’t think of it as a slum.

The rain began to let up, but it was still sprinkling on the ride home from work yesterday. The director general of the Tanzania Meteorological Agency told The Citizen newspaper that the rains “might start to clear tomorrow” or “the situation might persist.”

Hard to tell.

The Future Needs a Big Kiss

2010-04-23T15:28:00.009+03:00

A year before coming to Tanzania, I had dinner one night in Dupont Circle with a friend. Both of us worked in development—him from the program side in southern Africa, and me from the policy side in Washington. Seated at an outdoor cafe, a bottle of red wine between us, we teased each other:

—Still trying to fight poverty by thinking about it in Washington, he asked?
—Still traipsing around Africa pretending you’re Jesus, I shot back?

While discussing development, my friend was as full of optimism and hope as a spring morning, but when the conversation turned personal—when we began to talk about our families—his mood darkened. He stared down into his plate, moving bits of fried calamari around with his fork.

Uncomfortable with the lull, I said brightly: I think I’ve figured out how we can change our lives.

My friend’s eyes lit up like a struck match. He asked:

—Do you think our lives can change?

I stared out at the sidewalk crowded with people on their way home from work, at the L2 bus zipping up Connecticut Avenue.

—Yes, I said, our lives can change. Tomorrow can be different from today.

***

The development business isn’t (ostensibly) about changing our lives. It is about changing other peoples’ lives. The question is to what extent those of us in the business (or anybody for that matter) believe that is possible.

But change how, you might ask? What is “development” anyway? Is it a moral duty, to save peoples’ lives, or help them live longer if we can? Is it increasing the number of choices people have? Is it transitioning entire economies and countries? Or is it simply a business—what aid agencies do?

Owen Barder, in his recent blog post Aid Policy Vs. Development Policy, identifies two types of development. On the one hand is the view that “development assistance should help to accelerate economic and institutional change in developing countries. The idea is that temporary support from the outside can be a catalyst for permanent changes.” This is what Owen calls development as transformation and it can be achieved with help from donors who support migration, trade, climate change, and other policies that help instead of hinder developing countries.

Another objective of development is what Owen calls solidarity. It consists of trying to improve peoples’ lives today (by, say, providing aid for health programs or schools) while we wait for the bigger, more fundamental and mysterious transformation to take place.

“I personally have my doubts,” Owen writes, “that aid makes much difference to the prospects for economic and social transformation. Countries change from within, through long, slow, organic processes, and it is hard to see how money and advice from outside can make much of a difference to that.”

***

My mobile phone says 8:02 a.m., and I wonder if the taxi driver will show. I’m always ready by 7:55, brimming to get out of the house, to get to the office, to have a cup of coffee and open my Gmail and the New York Times.

I grab my bag and walk down the dirt driveway to the road. There, another commute is taking place. Old women and young women, old men and young men, on foot, on bicycles, are on their way somewhere—to guard houses or clean them, to see a friend, or maybe to work at the hotels further down the road. I wish I could walk, like them, I think. I used to walk everywhere in Washington, DC—I’d walk for hours, even in the heat. But here when I walk I feel like a target, I’m always watching my back.

The ride in is quiet—I’m relieved the driver doesn’t want to talk. After seven months, I still know practically no Swahili, which I am both embarrassed about and resigned to. In the silence, I can just stare out of the window at the sea, which we drive by each morning on our way to town. The tide is swept out, so far it seems to recede all the way to the horizon. The tankers parked offshore seem to float just above the water, which is so dazzling, so glittering in the morning sun that it smacks me back into the reality that I’m in East Africa. That I came here because I wanted to come.

At the office a friend, a nutrition specialist, hands me a pamphlet put out by Uwazi, Tanzanian NGO, describing the state of nutrition in Tanzania. Though food fortification is a cheap and (relatively) simple way to save lives, the Tanzanian agencies responsible for moving the process along have spent most of the last decade in meetings and trainings, equivocating and delaying. So, this year, 43,000 more children will die in this country because they are malnourished, it says.

Later in the afternoon I meet a new colleague.

—What work do you do, I ask her?

—Private sector development.

—Oh really, how interesting. What’s happening with that?

—Not much.

And over dinner, a friend tells me that an agriculture program she is involved with, to help poor farmers purchase inputs like seeds, is in a shambles. “It’s just not working like it should. But obviously that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop it.”

***

That evening, I sit down on the couch and turn on the BBC. Headlines flicker across the screen: a funeral; an election; a flood; a truce. Then two advertisements play, one after the other. One is a general pitch for Africa, full of those familiar, sweeping panoramas of the Serengeti—a giraffe, some smiling Maasai, melodic tribal singing. The other is more somber. An NGO is encouraging viewers to donate money to their cause by panning in on a frail African woman lying on a cot beside a cement wall in a bare room. She is being fed by a nurse in all white, and we are told that this woman is sick but that she will get better. Because she has medicine, which costs only a little, she will live.

As I watch I think: oh yes, I remember. That’s how I used to feel about development.

***

No matter what you think development is, one thing is certain: it is hard. When we say change ultimately comes from countries themselves, what we really mean is that change ultimately comes from people themselves, and people are a messy lot, slow to change, a bit shabby sometimes, if well-intentioned.

So what you must believe, if you're going to be a part of the development business, is that your own life, that is, that you, can change. An enterprise, tired from false starts and disappointments, needs some new energy, and hope that we can be stronger and braver and better than we are. That's why a movement like Twaweza, a brand new citizen action initiative in East Africa, has caught fire so quickly: because it embodies this kind of optimism. Maybe its popularity is illustrative of the fact that, despite our collective fatigue, deep down we still believe change is possible. Who would have thought?

Making Excuses

2010-03-17T17:15:00.010+03:00

An American I know who works in southern Africa had girl trouble recently. The trouble wasn’t so much the girl as it was him: he’d pursued her hard, emphatically, then just when she’d started to warm to him, he backed off suddenly, dropped out of sight. The girl was understandably pissed, and in an attempt to explain his careless behavior, he told her this:

"Intense things take hold of you here in Africa when you least expect it or are prepared. You can say 'wow, I'd never do a thing like that' and you do."

***

It’s Saturday night, and everyone’s out, drinking at a local dive. Around 2 a.m. we gather to leave. In the parking lot, a young American girl stumbles in high heels to her car, fumbles for her keys, cheeks flushed from the heat and too many beers. She opens the door, gets behind the wheel and, laughing, says: “Man, I would never do this at home.”

***

Some friends and I are having brunch at a local café when an old expat couple walks in and stops to say hello. When they pass we exchange furtive glances and smile. The couple are friendly but quirky—they seem to have abandoned all the formalities associated with their former life in the West. Like other “lifers” they sometimes seem slightly unhinged, paranoid, and just plain weird. My friends and I joke about it: “That’s what happens when you stay in Africa too long.”

***

In his January 14, op-ed The Underlying Tragedy, New York Times columnist David Brooks, discussing the development failure of Haiti, suggests that the culprit, the thing that keeps some poor countries poor, is culture.

“It is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty,” he says. “Most of the world’s poorest nations [suffer] from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.”

Brooks’ solution is to find, “self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures…surrounding people…with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.”

Could this be true? And is it this culture that drives us, expats, to such strange behavior when we’re here?

***

The danger is that we’ll say no too quickly. None of us wants to suggest that a country’s culture is somehow responsible for poverty, to imply that something about the culture is wrong, not as good as our own. Moreover, donors, painfully aware of the meager impact of much of our aid and effort, are keen to take the blame for development failures.

But even as our instinct is to take the blame, we are also just as quick to point the finger. Our constant griping about the frustrations of living here, for example, contains implicit criticism of culture.

—I walked into the post office and the woman at the counter just stared at me. I had to practically harass her to get her to help me…why’s it so hard to just do your job?

—I know what you mean. We’ve been trying to schedule a meeting with the Ministry for months—they don’t respond, they delay, they equivocate. It’s like we’re the only ones who care about this project.

—Don’t even get me started. My driver was an hour late today, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Tanzanian incompetence!

—At least you have a driver. With taxis, it's constant negotiation no matter how loyal you are to them. All I am is a dollar sign to these people.

—Yes, but what do you expect? It's just another form of corruption, and corruption is part of the culture.

We shake our heads in resignation, we huff and puff—but press us on the issue and most of us will tell you the same thing: if you need someone to blame for development failures, throw a rock in the air. You’ll hit someone guilty.

***

Brooks wasn’t wrong to point the finger at developing countries. They are as responsible for their own development (and its failures) as donors, and it’s a good thing to puncture a hole in the chorus of donor knee-jerk self-flagellation.

But even if there are things about living in developing countries that expats (rightfully) find troubling, it does not excuse our own mistakes. Donor aid that is unpredictable and inflexible, redundant in some areas and feeble in others, driven more by the political/PR/security/economic interests of rich countries rather than by the needs of poor ones, under-evaluated and sometimes wasteful—and expats who are reckless, who feel above the rules of the countries they live in, who are arrogant and careless—all these things are still our mistakes and we have a responsibility to address them.

Moreover, talk of culture, that amorphous word dripping with generalizations and contradictions, is often a sign of desperation, the thing you blame when you don’t know what else to do, when you’ve given up, when you’ve resigned yourself to ineffectiveness and failure. Culture is an excuse, in other words, for not dealing with the troubling fact that there are many things rich countries could do today to address poverty but are not. (For an idea of some of these things, see a blog post by CGD president Nancy Birdsall that offers ten actionable ideas for global development—practical things rich countries can do now to improve global equity and prosperity.)

***

Everyone who works in development will from time to time have to face the colossal disappointment of ineffectiveness. It's easy to be mesmerized by uncertainty, to sink into resignation and finger pointing, but we must move on. There are many things we—donors and developing countries both—can do now to improve the lives of poor people in poor countries—the question is whether or not we will try.

Interlude

2010-03-17T13:40:00.001+03:00

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to
Don’t try to see through the distances
That’s not for human beings
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened
Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading
Take down a musical instrument
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground

--Rumi

A Safari (Adventure!)

2010-02-18T09:53:00.009+03:00

There’s a scene in Out of Africa where Meryl Streep and Robert Redford are trekking across the Kenyan wilderness, tracking lions, when one of them suddenly bursts out of the bush with a ferocious growl and charges them. Streep instantly lifts her rifle and shoots it dead, then turns to Redford and watches in stunned silence as he comes to her side and gently wipes the blood from her mouth, where she had bit her lip in exhilarating terror.

Our safari was not like that. To start with, we did not carry rifles, nor did we wear khaki (I wore jeans—which are, it turns out, not an ideal clothing choice for safari). But it was an adventure nonetheless.

With my friends Kevin and Jean, I left Dar es Salaam Saturday morning in a spunky Rav4 (the expat car of choice—tougher than a sedan, but not as neocolonial as a Landrover), drove through the outskirts of town and up the Morogoro Road towards Mikumi National Park, a lesser sister to the grand game parks of the north.

Mikumi offered instant gratification: from the highway we saw an assortment of wildlife: elephants and giraffes, baboons and gazelles. We took some photos, went to the lodge, had a hearty dinner of macaroni and cheese, and went to bed, full of food and anticipation of the safari to come.

Early the next morning, freshly showered and optimistic, we set out into the park. With a map that identified points of interest, which helpfully corresponded to numbered markers on the road, we made our way 10 kilometers or so to the “hippo pool,” and saw, as you might have guessed, hippos sleeping in a crater-like pool of water. When we discovered that sleeping hippos don’t do all that much (and also that they smell), we returned to the car and set off down a road that lead 30 kilometers out and before looping back around to the main gate.

The sky was patchy blue and gray, the air was warm. The valley, dotted with acacia trees, swept out for miles, and far out on the horizon, mountains shown like shadows in the haze. With the windows rolled down, we watched with wonder as elephants led their young across the veld, giraffes stretched their necks to the tree tops, gazelles pranced and zebras grazed. Birds as colorful as a kaleidoscope flitted through the air and buffalo covered themselves in mud to fend off the midday heat.

Further along the road began to change. It became jagged and littered with tall, sharp grass, and the plains were swallowed up by high bush that surrounded us on both sides. We stopped seeing animals, and other cars, and the air outside was suddenly thick with horse flies. We stared out the windows, saying little, until Jean finally broke the silence:

—Dudes, this is BORING.

Kevin and I heartily agreed, but before we could find a place to turn around, we lumbered around a bend and were confronted with a steep embankment that led down to a muddy river. (Okay, river might be a bit of an exaggeration; let’s call it a healthy creek.)

Discussion ensued—to cross or not to cross. We decided to cross.

Now, looking back, one might say that there were various Signs that, had we paid attention, might have helped us to avert the fate that I am about to describe. There was the carcass on the side of the road near the hippo pool, the vulture, grim as a hangman, perched on a dead tree that watched us as we drove by, and the ash gray thorn tree that had fallen into the road, blocking our path (which we decied to drive around). Yes, perhaps the less adventurous traveller would have been deterred by these Coincidences—but not us!

We buckled our seatbelts, held our breath and descended into the water and up the steep rocky climb on the other side. Relieved and emboldened by our good decision (we made it!), it took us a second to notice that the “road” on the other side of the river/healthy creek was nothing more than grass and bush. So we turned around and crossed back, but this time, hit the water at too steep an angle, lodging our front tires in the mud.

Kevin stepped into the muddy water and tried to push the car to no avail. I got out, threw a branch across the water, crossed over and offered to push. (Kevin was hugely relieved to benefit from my added strength and resourcefulness.) We got down on our knees, braced against the oven-hot hood, and listened as the engine clicked, whimpered, and died. The battery was dead.

So there we were, three safari adventurers, up to our knees in mud, with a car nose down in a river/healthy creek with nothing but our wits to save us.

***

Our wits AND cell phones. Now you would think that the park paperwork (receipt, map, permit for the car) would have in-case-of-emergency telephone numbers on them, but you would be wrong. There were no telephone numbers. Our Tanzania guidebook had a generic Mikumi number, which we tried, but there were two challenges: first, reception was spotty and two, when, for a fleeting moment we connected, no one answered.

So we called a hotel instead, and got through to a receptionist who said she would send help. As a backup we also texted a friend in Dar, letting him know where we were and asking him to “do something” if he didn’t hear back in an hour and a half, since by then we wagered we would either be rescued or our phones would be dead. (*Handy survival tip: before heading out into the African wilderness make sure your phone is fully charged, and that you have credit.)

Assured that help was on the way, we had only to sit and wait. So we did the things that everyone does when they're stranded in the middle of a Tanzanian game park. We applied sunscreen and mosquito repellent vigorously. We found spots to go to the bathroom that weren’t too embarrassing. We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We told ourselves it could be much worse. We played games, drank water, and reflected on the meaning of life (ok, that last one not so much). We sunk into various stages of delirium.

After two hours, I asked the question that we had been trying to avoid: So guys, what if no one comes?

Silence.

Just as we began contemplating our options (walk back through the park and take our chances with all those cuddly animals we'd passed hours earlier, or stay in the car overnight), a white Landrover turned the corner, and out came two park rangers who valiantly resisted the urge to smack us upside the head for getting ourselves stuck in a river/healthy creek on a road that was clearly impassable.

They jump started the engine, dragged the car out of the water and escorted us to the main gate. It was unclear if the escort was for our own good or for theirs.

***

Based on our safari adventure, I would like to offer my fellow travellers three handy survival tips:

When you encounter a steep embankment with a muddy river at the bottom and a high grassy impassable road on the other side, DO NOT attempt to cross, not even for adventure’s sake.

Try not to take too many photos of your safari breakdown adventure when the park rangers come to rescue you. They find this a tad annoying.

And finally, don’t test Africa. Africa always wins.

Looking for Explanations

2010-02-08T09:22:00.011+03:00

We hit rough weather thirty minutes out from Bujumbura. A jolt and I could suddenly feel the speed at which we were hurtling through the sky—was suddenly aware that there was nothing beneath us but miles of air.

The man sitting next to me, with whom I’d exchanged pleasantries before take off, saw me clutch my seat and gasp. He looked at me, and feeling his gaze I turned, biting my lip.

—Do you believe in God? he asked. His eyes were as still as the ocean floor.

I shot back instantly: Don’t ask me that, please! And then I turned my head towards the window so he wouldn’t see my tears.

***

I had just left the central African nation of Burundi where I spent a week at a global health conference. The theme was performance-based financing (PBF), a new(ish) idea for improving health in poor countries by, in the case of Burundi, awarding bonuses to health facilities that achieve certain results, such as increasing the number of children they immunize. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of paying for inputs such as equipment and medicine and hoping that better health will automatically follow. It hasn’t always done so. Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars (and some great successes), some health woes persist. Burundi’s maternal mortality rate, for example, continues to hover at about 1,100 per 100,000 live births—one of the highest maternal mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are all sorts of ways to explain tragedies like this. PBF says that the reason so many are still sick and dying is that health systems are weak, and health workers underpaid, under-motivated and unaccountable. The answer is incentives: a modest bonus, along with scrutiny of their work, will enable/force health workers to act on the motivation they already have, or inspire motivation if it is lacking.

A small group of young, mostly European men presided over the PBF workshop. They are old friends mostly, who like to talk about their early days in the “trenches” working for Medicins Sans Frontiers in places like Cambodia. There is a lot of camaraderie among them, a lot of shared excitement about their work. None of them would say PBF is full-proof, a silver bullet, but they were confident (almost Certain), that these programs can and will work.

“Evangelists,” is what one observer called them. Just like the man who sat next to me on the plane, they have an answer.

***

Burundi is emerging from a 12-year, ethnic-based civil war. When Hutu president Cyprien Ntaryamira was killed in 1994 alongside the president of Rwanda when the plane they were travelling in was shot down, violence ensued. More than a half million were killed and many more fled to neighboring countries (including Tanzania, where I live). South Africa mediated peace talks and a power-sharing government was set up in 2001. Most of the rebel groups agreed to a ceasefire, and the country has enjoyed several years of relative calm.

But there is a ripple, just below the surface, of uncertainty, a sort of brace for what might happen. You can feel it in the torn up streets, sudden road blocks, the industrial wasteland feel of parts of the city.

Because it is a post-conflict environment, we had to travel with an armed United Nations security detail on our visit to a rural health clinic. The convoy—a small pick up truck packed with bored Burundian men carrying Kalashnikovs, and us following in a Landrover—felt intrusive, menacing on the simple dirt roads. Especially when we passed a procession of mourners carrying a coffin down a steep jungle hill. They pulled close to the edge of the ravine as we passed, including the somber old man who was leading them. He had a small wooden cross in his hand, raised up to the sky.

***

There are other wars too. One broke out just before the conference when one of the attendees, a long-time public health expert, decided not to come, citing, in an email sent to all his colleagues, philosophical objections to PBF. Financial incentives, he said, commercialize health care, induce cheating, and create distrust of and among health workers. And dissent is not welcome—the club of proponents are single-minded, arrogant, and rarely willing to admit the limits of their own theories.

There was a flurry of response. Recriminations, a hardening of views and marshalling of evidence. The cc’d list ballooned, and the Burundian Minister of Health even chimed in.

Then came an email with a decidedly different tone. The writer, a Bujumbura-based donor representative, began his note with the usual formalities, but then he summoned a quote from St. Augustine:

“Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and bravery. The anger at such things and the bravery required for change.”

The author of the email then said that though he did not endorse the charged comments and personal attacks of the PBF dissenter, he admired his bravery, his willingness to speak up, and suggested that such anger could be constructive, if it is channeled toward more useful enterprises.

It was just a small word of calm, a small word of credit to a man who feels besieged, and it reminded me of another quote, this one from Shakespeare’s Richard III:

“O momentary grace of mortal men, which we more hunt for than the grace of God.”

***

Our wars are low-level—fought amidst the banality of power point presentations, cocktail parties, and networking lunches. But the stakes are high. Our lives might not be in danger, but our reputations are—the way we are viewed by our peers, which affects what conferences we get invited to, what panels we are asked to speak on, what journals we can write for. And through this, our professional success will be judged. And we will judge ourselves too: did what I committed to actually do any good? Did my career matter?

One morning I asked one of the “evangelists”: do you think criticism or doubt ever get drowned out at events like this? He was thoughtful: yes, he said, we should talk more about the limits of PBF, but "look, for years there was no progress, and now something is actually working…and I don't think we should let doubt get in the way of at least trying this. If someone has a better idea of what we should do, fine, but until then, we need to do this, we can’t wait."

***

I got to the conference hall early one morning. It was quiet out, cool. Some attendees were seated around a table watching a televised church service that was being projected on the wall. A choir was singing:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, He is risen, He is risen

Some say belief in God is comfort for the suffering, order within the disorder, a port in the pitiless storm. Maybe that is part of what belief is about.

But if that’s all it is about then we are bound to be disappointed. And what I had really wanted to say to the man on the plane was that God, whatever that means, is not responsible for tragedy. Nor does the idea that our lives are guided, that everything is part of a Plan, make me more willing to swallow suffering and grief. Belief like that is bound to be sentimental and fragile.

And new gods like PBF can be fragile too (even war-inspiring). A community tired from years of inadequate solutions to massive problems is in danger of holding on too tightly, moving too quickly, and glossing over details that must be addressed carefully if these programs are going to really succeed.

Everyone knows this. No one needs to be told that caution and careful consideration are needed. Despite the confidence we often project, for most of us, there are moments of serious doubt. But there are moments when we really believe too, when, despite our real differences, a common hope is felt—that even though we may not be able to explain tragedy, there are things we can do to fight it.

That's why most of us got into this business in the first place: Because we want people to live. We want people who are poor not to be poor anymore, or sick. We want life to be more fair than it is.

Predictably Inconsistent

2010-01-12T10:19:00.007+03:00

Returned to Dar. City is quiet. Empty roads, empty cafés. After three weeks away, I’m one of the first of my friends to come back to the city. Expats take long holidays.

I met with a World Bank colleague when I returned. He reminded me that he’s leaving Tanzania in March—his contract is up. He’s thinking of heading to Vienna, or maybe even Kabul of all places, for another gig.

—You’re leaving so soon, I said. We were just getting to know each other!

But it’s like that here. People come and go. Sometimes they move away, sometimes they have extended travel and dip in and out of your life. This is so common that the joke goes there are three questions expats ask each other when they first meet:

Where are you from?
What do you do? (and)
How long will you be here?

Get that last question out of the way early and you can gauge whether or not to invest in a friendship. (This is only partly a joke.)

The expat life is full of inconsistency and unpredictability—which makes it a lot like development aid. Volatility in foreign assistance has always been a problem. Homi Kharas, in Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, estimates that the cost to aid recipients of historic unpredictability of committed aid flows is 15 percent.

And because most developing countries have limited access to international capital markets, they can’t borrow when expected aid fails to arrive. As a result, recipient governments must often adjust spending plans at the last minute when promised aid is not provided or when additional aid is disbursed unexpectedly.

Poor countries rely on aid to supplement domestic resources for essential services such as primary education and immunization. In many sub-Saharan African countries, close to half of all basic health sector funding comes from development assistance. When aid decreases, these services can be disrupted with an immediate negative effect on the poor.

And although more aid, even disbursed on short notice, might seem like a good thing, it's difficult for governments to spend on useful things when they can't predict what next year’s aid will amount to. For example, governments can't hire teachers with a boost in aid this year, when they don't know if they will have money to pay them next year.

In Tanzania, where total aid accounts for about 10 percent of GDP and finances on average 40 percent of outlays by the government, there is a high degree of variance between committed and disbursed levels of aid, according to forthcoming World Bank analysis. This is particularly true for project aid, (the kind favored by the United States) where actual disbursements have been well below expected levels for at least the last two fiscal years.

U.S. official development assistance channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development is discretionary spending, which must be renewed each year, making it particularly volatile. The Brits do better: the U.K.’s Department for International Development often signs three-year agreements with governments and even has some ten-year partnership agreements. (See The Impact of U.S. and U.K. Legislatures on Aid Delivery for an interesting comparison of the two systems.)

But overall, donor aid is unpredictable. Maybe developing country governments should begin their conversations with donors the way expats begin their's:

Hello, donor. Tell me, where are you from, what do you do, and how long will you be here?

A Diplomatic Spat

2010-01-08T08:43:00.006+03:00

It's not the first time frayed nerves have led to bad decisions. Last month, a Canadian diplomat was jailed in Dar es Salaam for spitting in a policeman's face as he directed traffic. The diplomat is known on the peninsula, where he lives with his family, as even keeled, steady, not easily excited. But something made him crack, so much so he even spit in the face of the Tanzanian journalist who came to the police station to cover the story. (See the full story here.)

All of us have our moments. We all, at some point or another, come close to the edge. And every expat has their own way of coping: there's drinking (an old favorite), praying, yoga, weed, "loose loins" (another fav), arts and crafts, and massages. (Alas, my preferred method of coping--shopping--is not so possible in Dar.) Choose your mode of relief, but let this diplomat's experience be a lesson: do not spit. Ever. It's much harder to recover from than a hangover.

Foggy Illuminations (Thoughts on Three Months in Africa)

2010-01-07T09:41:00.005+03:00

1.

I woke up at 4 a.m. to the sound of the call to prayer. The low melodic voice wafted up to God like smoke from burning incense, lonely in the black night.

My sleep had been turbulent, full of dreams. In one, I dove into a pool and descended through the cool watery depths to touch bottom. Then up, and up. But I can’t seem to reach the surface. The harder I push, the further away it seems. I’m running out of breath. Not sure I’m going to make it. Then finally I pierce the surface and wake up with a shock, gasping for breath.

***

I knew it would be hard, moving to Africa. Intellectually, I could anticipate the challenges. But Gabriel Marcel* was right: there are certain thresholds which thought alone can never permit us to cross. An experience is required. After three months in Tanzania, experience taught me that I didn’t have a clue what I was getting myself into when I came here.

Everyday life—work, phone, internet, groceries, exercise, banking—all of it is hilariously challenging. My friends and I began to feel like a band of refugees on some desert island, shipwrecked, thirsty, slowly cracking up.

And then there was the robbery. My finances had taken a hit, along with my sense of security, and my ankle is still healing.

I turned off my alarm, got out of bed, and took my suitcase outside to wait for the taxi to the airport. My neighborhood, normally a carnival of activity, was vacant—and as quiet as a cathedral.

The cab driver made small talk as we drove, but I was impatient, eyes fixed on the road. I looked out the window at the asphalt rushing furiously beneath the car. That’s how I had begun to feel: like I was spinning round and round. I felt pursued, hunted. Something like a drumbeat was behind me, spiraling closer, until I thought I couldn’t handle one more day, one more hour, in this town.

I boarded the plane to Johannesburg like it was the last flight out of Saigon.

***

The first time I came to Africa, I met a woman named Linda. A slender blond in her fifties, Linda lives in Zambia with her husband, who works for an international NGO. One day she took me to the community center she runs in a poor shanty town in Lusaka. She showed me around the school for orphans and the rooms where women make purses out of plastic bags, which she sells in the United States (the profits fund the center).

Linda seemed edgy that day; she walked quickly, with her head down. As we left, she said suddenly: “some of these women are just lazy.” Her words were short and choppy, like bullets flicked through the air. “They don’t appreciate any of this, you know?” The women had fallen behind on the bags they had agreed to make. Linda wouldn’t have enough to send back with me to the States.

When we got in her truck and pulled out, she rolled down her window and snapped at the young man who was supposed to be manning the gate. He waved a hand in apology, but she hissed: “Quit standing there and do your job.”

When I returned to Washington, I told friends about the places I’d seen and people I’d met.

—What about the expats, they asked?

—They are like barnacles, some of them—hard and cynical, but they’re not going anywhere.

I was thinking about Linda.

I didn’t realize that after only three months in Africa (Linda has lived here on and off for thirty years) I’d sometimes feel the same way: frustrated, at the end of my rope, done being polite, politically correct. I didn’t realize that there was much more going on that day than what I could see.

2.

From Johannesburg I drove to Swaziland to spend three weeks on holiday with my good friend, Lou. It was a welcome contrast to Dar. Mountainous and cool, smell of pine and eucalyptus, and smaller, less frenetic. The streets are smooth and wide, there are sidewalks and playgrounds and dedicated bus stops. Homes, even in poor rural areas, are tidy and attractive. And with the bustling South African port city of Durban just a few hours away, there are grocery stores full of nearly everything you could want (including Mexican-style beans!).

Swazi felt like a development haven compared to Tanzania.

—If I had to be poor in Africa, I’d live in Swaziland, I told Lou.

I hadn't heard much about Swaziland in Washington, but Tanzania was consistently hailed as the golden child of Africa, a development darling. When President Kikwete came to town, members of Congress and the cream of the development policy crop would roll out the red carpet, and talk of new programs and new possibilities. There was much patting of backs and self-congratulations. Aid can work, people would say.

Which is why it was such a shock to arrive in Dar and find so much that was still a mess: horrible roads, constant power outages, lack of sanitation and clean water, few public spaces. I loathed Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid (see my unconventional review of it here) but in Dar es Salaam, I found myself asking questions like hers’: rich countries have poured billions of dollars into this country in the last decade, and what has been gained?

I confessed my confusion to a colleague who has worked in Tanzania for decades. He nodded quietly in agreement then said:

—You’re right, but look, if you had been here in the nineties, things were a lot worse. This country has made huge progress.

And in Swaziland, despite good roads and grocery stores, there are other realities. In the capital of Mbabane, Lou took me to a site where he is conducting a survey on male circumcision, one of the interventions to slow the speed of HIV/AIDS. Swazi has the highest adult aged HIV prevalence rate in the world—26.1 percent.

It doesn’t help that the king, one of Africa’s three remaining monarchs, is a polygamist who made waves in 2001 when he married a 17 year old (he has 14 wives). Jobs are hard to come by, even for the educated, and being a woman compounds the problem. I asked the Swazi girlfriend of one of Lou’s colleagues what she wants to do after university. She said: get out of Swaziland.

The juxtaposition of Tanzania and Swaziland was a reminder, again, of my limited vision. I had known intellectually before, but now could really see, that each African country is making some progress, and each is facing gigantic challenges.

Development takes time. And time is not linear.

3.

I’d considered leaving Africa. Spend another three or four months in Tanzania, then go back to Washington or maybe London. Back to tree-lined streets and not being sick all the time, back to order and rules I understand.

But then I was on the road one afternoon, warm sunshine touching my face through the window. I was with friends: the doctor who tends to the sick and poor in Zambia; the aid worker who helps women access safe abortions; the statistician who evaluates donor aid programs. I was glad to be with them, glad to be part of the huge tide of people who come here because they want to help. And suddenly I didn’t mind that it isn’t easy—I didn't mind because it’s real.

And I knew then that I wanted to stay.

*Quoted, A. Gelin, Les Pauvres de Yahve, Paris, 1954, p. 57.

Photos from the Road

2010-01-07T09:11:00.012+03:00

The view from the house, Mbabane, Swaziland

Rural Swaziland

Another of rural Swazi

Durban, South Africa

Drakensberg, South Africa

Drakensberg

Maputo, Mozambique

Maputo

On the road

Night

My travel partner, Lou

A Border Crossing

2010-01-04T13:35:00.006+03:00

We left Maputo at eight o’clock in the morning—plenty of time, we thought, to cross the border into South Africa and get our friends to the airport in Johannesburg by three.

The drive started out nice enough. After a weekend spent lazing at the beach and bumming around the streets of the old Portuguese colonial capital, the five of us settled into our seats in the car and sat in congenial silence, listening to music. There was Adam, a lanky blond geologist and native Zambian; Emma, an aid worker from Ireland with a singsong accent and fire red hair; Jack, a Dutch doctor who runs some clinics in Lusaka; Lou, an American statistician working in Swaziland; and me.

About an hour into our drive, we came round a bend and slammed to a halt. Cars, buses, and trucks, for as far as we could see, were stopped in the road. We waited a moment for it to pick up, but it didn’t, so Emma, Jack and I walked down the highway in search of an explanation.

It was cool out. Drops of rain spat down onto the green stretches of hills dotted with bush. The men manning the road block told us that, though it was just ten kilometers away, it would be hours before we got to the border. It was jammed with people returning from holiday and traveling for work into South Africa. The border crossing itself would take even longer.

After several conversations (please, sir, we have flights to catch!) and trips back and forth to the car (plus 100 rand), the men let us cut ahead, past the long line of cars, into empty highway.

We hit deadlock again not long after. While we debated whether to walk to the border or stick together in the car, Lou called Felix, a guy who had (for a small fee) helped us sort through temporary car insurance and immigration when we crossed into Mozambique. About thirty minutes later, Felix was at our car with a plan for getting us through the stop in traffic, he just needed some cash, which we gave him. He returned thirty minutes later with instructions for moving ahead. It worked. He caught up with us down the road (where traffic was sluggish again), gathered our passports and walked with Jack and Adam to the border post to take care of our paperwork.

Lou, Emma and I crept on down the highway, inch by inch, snacking on dried fruit and biscuits, reading books that were lying around the car, and watching passers-by. Outside, floods of people had abandoned their vehicles, wagering that it would be faster to make the journey by foot. Men with briefcases. Women with babies. Hipsters with sunglasses. Families. Friends. All trudging along the wet asphalt and muddy hillsides. It felt a little like a block party: strangers greeted each other, guys sold drinks and nuts, and the smell of rain mixed with the smell of smoke as women cooked food by the side of the road.

Jack and Adam returned with our passports, which had been processed and stamped in a back room at immigration, we paid Felix (again) and were on our way.

With our completed paperwork in hand, energy and humor came back to the car. We bounced down the road, relieved smiles and laughs, and were nearly to the crossing when we saw the exodus.

Next to the highway, on a gentle sweep of rain-spattered hillside, thousands of people (that’s right, thousands) stood in a line ten deep. This was the line for immigration for those who couldn't pay their way through. They looked like refugees, an ocean of them, possessions in hand, a frozen current.

We drove quickly by, turning our heads to watch them recede into the distance, our mouths open wide in amazement. Thank goodness, Emma said, that we’re not in that.

***

Down the road, nearly to the crossing, we hit deadlock again. To our left was a coned off empty lane, which we considered cutting into, but hesitated. Back in Maputo, Jack had accidentally made a wrong turn down a one-way street, and we were pulled over immediately. It took nearly twenty minutes to negotiate the bribe down and convince the police to let us go.

Eventually, we pulled up next to a border security agent, told him our paperwork was complete, and he waved us into the fast lane. Happily, surprisingly, we sailed through the border and crossed into South Africa. Deep exhale: we had made it.

But not quite. A young border guard on the South Africa side flagged us down with a stern wag of his finger. Clad in a dark navy blue uniform, he told us to turn around and go to the back of the line. “You are not finished,” he said.

Sick silence from Adam and I; cursing from Emma—fuckers!; and Lou, boiling at the steering wheel while Jack, masking his disgust, tried to sweet talk, and then reason with, the young man.

It got us no where. The more we protested, the more he hardened against us. And when we tried defiantly to pull over instead of turning around, he raised his voice: Turn around.

So we did. After hours and countless bribes, we drove to the back of the line, and waited.

The guard’s insistence wasn’t entirely spurious. We had actually missed “passport control,” which consisted of a fat, sluggish woman stopping each car to look absently at passports and take some money. We had just scraped together the cash and were approaching her when, for some reason, she turned around and walked away. And once again, we drove across the border and into South Africa, bewildered and deflated.

***

The whole affair took three hours and cost about 1,300 rand. We’d interacted with about 10 separate individuals and had paid nearly all of them.

***

I never used to think much about corruption, back when I worked at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, DC. Conversations in liberal policy and advocacy circles were dominated by efforts to make programs more “country owned.” The donors need to get out of the way and “let the countries lead.” CGD’s HIV/AIDS Monitor, for example, tirelessly recommends that PEPFAR, the massive U.S. AIDS program, stop relying so heavily on international NGOs and parallel systems to implement its programs, and instead, channel aid through country systems, in order to build capacity and prevent duplication.

When I asked Jack and Emma about aid modalities over dinner one evening, they laughed and recalled a corruption scandal that rocked the Zambian Ministry of Health back in May 2009. Two European donors, who channel health aid directly to the ministry, temporarily suspended the flow of funds in response. “The Americans must have been laughing,” Jack said. “They do it right: they control their aid as much as possible.”

Keep aid away from the system, he implied, because the system—from the high ups in government to the guy on the street selling bananas—is corrupt to the bone.

***

Why on earth don’t they do something about this, I asked as we left the border? I already knew the answer. Countless people were profiting, and not just a few dodgy immigration officials, but everyone. And they had all the time in the world. We could either wait and pay or not pay and wait even longer.

And what if we, a group of expats, were upset at having to pay bribes, at the total nonexistence of rules and order? What if the Africans were upset at having to spend all day at the border because there was no good system for processing them? Who would any of us complain to about any of it?

***

Everyone is corrupt. (Or at least it feels that way sometimes.) And not in the Swiss-bank-account-and-Paris-shopping-spree-kind-of-way. Corruption is more subtle than that, and more insidious. It’s about conversations with officials that circle round and round and go no where; minor bribes for everything; constant skimming off the top; workers who don’t work very hard, who seem unconcerned with either quality or efficiency; civil servants who demand massive per diems, first class flights, and Landrovers; and aid officials who give it to them over and over again.

Not that it’s entirely about money. The guard who forced us to turn around didn’t gain any money (that we know of) from the incident, but he did gain something: it was a fight, and he had won. Corruption is also about power. A young guy from the African sticks puts on a uniform, and suddenly he can force four Western aid workers and one white Zambian—five people whose privileges in life far exceed his own—to go to the back of the line. I imagine it was satisfying, to see us reeling, powerless, to watch us lose.

Want Racial Unity? Go Shopping.

2009-12-17T18:05:00.004+03:00

I was in Johannesburg yesterday with some friends, shopping for a computer to replace the one that got stolen back in October. It was the Day of Reconciliation, a national holiday borne out of two rival holidays, one for Afrikaners and another for Zulus. As this New York Times piece Holiday of White Conquest Persists in South Africa describes, "Afrikaners, the descendants of white settlers, celebrated the Day of the Vow, a covenant said to be made between their ancestors and God in 1838 that led to the slaughter of 3,000 Zulus. Blacks commemorated the same day on the calendar, marking the start of armed struggle against the apartheid regime by the African National Congress in 1961."

The holiday was renamed in 1994 and is now meant to be "a time for all races to come together in the spirit of national unity."

Want to know where they come together? The same place we do in the ol' U.S. of A: the shopping mall.

A Funeral

2009-12-14T11:28:00.017+03:00

At first I was annoyed. “Is there no one in charge of regulating the roads in this country?” A friend and I had just pulled up to the apartment building where I live only to discover that half the road had been obstructed by our neighbors, who had put up a tarp, held by thick wooden sticks, and gathered twenty or so plastic chairs underneath it, in the middle of the road. There were men sitting there in the shade and others milling around.

I live in Namanga, a mostly Tanzanian neighborhood just down from the mostly expat peninsula. Looking out from my balcony, the neighborhood is an ocean of corrugated tin roofs, palm trees, dirt roads, and small cement dwellings.

My apartment building

The view from the balcony

Though people sit by the side of the road all day long all the time in Dar, like this pair of guys who hang out with the guard outside my gate:

...something struck me as odd about this makeshift gathering: the men weren’t eating or drinking or playing cards, or even talking much. They were just sitting there. When I came home to the same scene the next day, I began to worry: is this permanent? How can they just decide to block the road? And why are they just sitting there?

As happens with so many things (!) I hadn’t understood all or even most of the story. It turns out they weren’t just sitting. They were there for a funeral. A woman had died in the house behind the store front, and scores of men and women had gathered around to mourn her. I don’t know her name and I’m not sure why she died. Her death could have been natural or brought on by any of the many diseases and afflictions that kill people in this country. What I do know is that she was 48 years old. That may seem young, but it is only a little bit younger than the average age people are expected to die here (55 years old).

You see signs of it everywhere—sickness, death, mortality. A taxi driver with elephantitis; a man who lifts his pant leg to reveal an open, mucous-covered wound; a woman so thin she looks like a skeleton; wood workers who peddle in coffee tables and caskets; and very public funeral processions.

There are so many sicknesses, just like home, except here, the tragedy is how much of it could be prevented, but is not. Like stunting. People who look too young and too short for their age, who never received the vitamins and minerals they needed as children and so are permanently and irreversibly damaged, physically and cognitively. And malaria, that deadly—and preventable and treatable—fever that is the leading cause of death for children in Tanzania. And then there’s diarrhea, borne from dirty water, dirty hands, dirty fruits and vegetables, which only takes a couple of days to kill you, but is easily treatable with cheap oral rehydration salts and antibiotics.

***

My roommate who saw the ceremony described it as modest. A priest in a white robe said a prayer. Heads were bowed. A hymn was sung out in the open air. Flowers were gently placed on a wooden casket.

And then they sat. Not just for a half an hour, but for days. For days they were just there. Present. Maybe they couldn’t do anything. Maybe the small donation of money they gave the family (which is custom) isn’t enough to cover the financial loss that the death of a working adult brings. Maybe their assembly won’t stop others who are sick from dying. But they were there, with them. The family was not alone.

***

I felt sheepish afterwards. The road is obstructed! What a thing to complain about in the face of a woman who has died. But then, the truth is, I’m not very good at dealing with inconvenience. And I'm guessing that this makes me a little bit like you. We are, none of us, but especially Americans, very good at dealing with things that interrupt the quantifiable order of our lives.

And nothing is as disruptive as death. Maybe that's why we keep it so hidden. When, after all, was the last time you saw a graveyard in a U.S. city? It’s probably been a while because they are located in far-out, hidden places, so we don't have to be reminded of the unpleasantness and uglines of loss, sickness, and grief.

But in Tanzania, it's out in the open. Which makes it all the more interesting—how easy it is to miss things (like I did). Even when they are right in front of your eyes.

The now empty store front where the funeral was held

A Toast to Tanzania!

2009-12-11T08:55:00.003+03:00

Happy (belated) Tanzanian Independence Day. Last Wednesday December 9, marked the 48th anniversary of Tanzania's (relatively peaceful) independence from the British.

The day after the celebration (in which President Jakaya Kikwete pardoned several thousand prisoners during a stadium-filled tribute with music, dancing and commemorations), Tanzania celebrated (a little less enthusiastically) International Anti-Corruption Day, which they have renamed National Integrity Day.

Here's a toast to the two Is.

Lines and Shadows

2009-12-09T15:43:00.008+03:00

Sometimes I forget why I’m here. I’m so tired, so skeptical (but I’ve only been here two months). I don’t think about poverty that much, except as an abstraction, an issue to be discussed, a paper to write. It’s my job.

Why did I come? Why—originally?

Because there are very poor people in the world and we must help them. Because they are sick, many of them, and very often dying—and all because of a stupid accident: the accident of where you happen to be born. It’s not fair. Nothing can explain it. It must be made right.

***

When I was a little girl growing up in San Diego, at the southern tip of California, I would go sometimes with my dad across the Mexican border into Tijuana, where he helped build homes with a local NGO. We’d drive south down the I-5 in his blue pickup truck, an old clunker that was perpetually breaking down. Past downtown San Diego with its yacht-lined bay and glittering high rises, through the banal stretches around Chula Vista—strip malls, billboards, fast food restaurants—towards San Ysidro and the discount stores, used car lots, and signs advertising cheap Mexican car insurance.

Once we crossed the border, we’d turn east, towards the dusty, crackling foothills, blown by brush, slithering with rattle snakes and scorpions. Kids chewing on fried tortillas ran around dirt roads dotted with cardboard dwellings, and Mexican men in cowboy boots talked quietly with my dad about where to build the houses, and how many, and how soon.

The fence was only a few miles north. Thick concrete slabs that towered over the men, women and children who—desperate, adventurous, brave—lined up each afternoon to steal across into the no man’s land beyond the border.

Back in the 1970s, under pressure to “do something” about a spate of gruesome muggings and murders in those mesas and canyons, the San Diego Police Department established the Border Crime Task Force, a squad of rough and tumble police officers who disguised themselves as immigrants, and then in the black of night confronted the bandits who preyed on them. In his book about that (failed) experiment, Joseph Wambaugh describes the incongruity of the “twin” cities: “In one city, inhabitants still suffer from diseases considered exotic in the other: cholera, polio, typhus, tuberculosis, rickets. In the other city, separated by the former mostly by an imaginary line, lies some of the richest real estate in the richest half of the richest state in the richest country on the face of the earth.”

I remember looking out the window of my dad’s truck as we drove. Whip of telephone poles, gray seven-lane highway, cars snaking into narrow lanes to filter through the border. Federales in aviators would wave us through, and then, the assault: the yellow glare of sun, little kids darting in and out traffic to sell chiclets and glittery paintings of the last supper, the smell of sewage, and trash like a waterfall covering the hillsides.

You know how it is. You never understand what you’re seeing until later. All I was aware of then was a dim sense of bewilderment: but we are so close to home?

***

We were poor too, all things considered. Most of my parents’ friends were professors and academics, but my mom worked in a grocery store, and my dad, a perpetually out-of-work writer, floundered from job to job. He drove limousines for a hotel, sold art for a while, and did carpentry. Things got bad when they divorced. My mom’s income, though meager, had been stable; my dad had the bad luck of losing her and his job at the same time. We were renting a modest home in an upper middle class neighborhood in Point Loma. We tried to keep our struggle to get by hidden, but people from church bought us groceries a few times.

I remember not having toilet paper one night, and my dad yelling in despair: what do you want me to do? (So I went and bought some with money I had.) I remember coming home and furniture would be gone, sold. And I remember the insecurity I felt, that the ground beneath my feet was unstable. That there was no safety anywhere, and that if I didn’t take care of us we would be lost.

***

But there was a fire inside, too—an electrical current. One evening, eating a microwavable dinner and watching the evening news, images of children starving in Ethiopia flashed across the television screen. They were little kids, bony and bloated. It consumed me. I felt, with a kind of panic almost, that we must do something. With a mix of self-righteousness and fever, I would lecture my parents about responsibility and justice. My poor parents! They put up with me, even encouraged me. But then, maybe they were encouraged—by my fierce belief that things can be better, that our lives can change.

***

I’m not sure where the fervor went—that swelling of the heart, adrenaline rush, invincibility. It’s like I was walking along with a close friend, only to turn around one day and discover she wasn’t there anymore. Where did she go? When did I lose her?

It’s not that I don’t believe anymore—I do. But injustice and equity are less straightforward now than they were then. Once you start trying to get a hold of these big, complicated words, once you try to lasso them in and force them into something real, something tangible, it’s almost as if you stop feeling it as acutely. Maybe those feelings were possible because there was so much I didn’t know?

I Don't Believe In Riches (But You Should See Where I Live)

2009-12-03T12:18:00.003+03:00

A friend of mine in Dar, a fellow expat, fell in love recently. I mean with a house. A beach house. If you met him you would agree that he really should live in a beach house. A cross between an Italian gangster and a southern California surfer, he’s like your groovy uncle David—always a little unshaven, a little shaggy, in board shorts and slightly unbuttoned shirts that show off his tan. In between sips of bubblegum pink Hibiscus iced tea, he described the Moroccan-style villa he’ll begin renting in January: high white walls, archways, gardens. Nestled among palm trees on a secluded stretch of beach in the south of Dar, the house sounds like it might have been airlifted from Marrakech.

My friend came to Dar to work in malaria. He’s part of a team trying to get life-saving medicine to poor people who need them. He told me he felt something deep inside when he saw the house for the first time. "Listen,” he said, “I'm not religious, but I feel blessed."

***

Maybe that sounds ridiculous—working in a poor country; living in a villa on the beach. Seriously? But his story is not that different from any of ours.

People from the West may endure frustrations (well-documented on this blog) when they come to countries like Tanzania to work, but most of the time, we are well taken care of by the institutions we work for. Compensation packages can be generous: hardship pay, per diems, massive housing allowances, shipments from home, the cost of education for your children (if you have children), cars, business class flights and other perks.

Not everyone receives packages like this, but many do. And even those who don’t, like me, still live behind walls. Protected from the outside. Weekends in the sun, the sand. Enclosed in our cars, distracted with our Ipods, busy on our blackberrys. Yoga after work, dinners out, Christmas shopping, a gym membership, the occasional pedicure, a massage….

The question is: is it wrong to live this way?

***

At a Thanksgiving potluck, I happened to sit next to a young man named Leo. Clad in a sporty green tee-shirt and sneakers, he reminded me of guys back home in DC. In the dim half light, while we listened to a leathery old Tanzanian guy strum some chords on a guitar, Leo told me that he originally worked as an electrician in Dar, but began volunteering with small European and American NGOs, and eventually, they hired him. Now he works with the volunteers they send over, helping them help Tanzania.

—What's the biggest thing people like me, who come here to help, do wrong, I asked?

Leo stretched his arms out and chuckled. —Well, he said, people get angry.

—What do you mean? I asked.

—They get impatient. If you come here, you have to live here.

***

But sorting out how to live here isn’t easy.

It was the end of the day and my roommate and I were sitting opposite each other at the dining room table, the ceiling fan blowing round above us, talking about life in Dar.

She confessed suddenly: I feel bad.

I asked: about what?

—About the poverty, she said. I don’t know why, but I just don’t feel it.

***

We’d make good Catholics, every one of us, all the guilt we feel, trying to sort out what it means to live here, while living differently from the poor. Serious consideration for the things we have and the way we live can be a good thing—it means we’re aware of and grappling with the dilemmas and inequities in our lives.

But on the other hand, say we “live simply”—does that automatically afford us greater understanding of the poor in Tanzania? Does that make us more authentic, more in touch? No. Not in itself. Sometimes, all it does is make us think we have the authority to judge the commitments of other expats who have nicer houses and bigger cars.

The other problem with hair-splitting attention to what is the best, the most tasteful, the realest way to live, is that sometimes, underneath the concern is a pesky little idea, a feeling lurking in the corner of our minds, that says: We are not like Them.

My mom worked in a grocery store all my life and my dad earned money as a carpenter. If you're a doctor or a lawyer, does it take some special understanding, some sort of "coming down" to “where they’re at” to understand people like them? And are the people further up the economic ladder really all that different?

If the lady I buy tomatoes from at the dhuka outside my house were suddenly to become rich, would she spend time biting her nails trying to get "close" to the poor? Does she see herself the way we see her?

Maybe my friend with the beach house is right: we should work hard, be humble about what we know, and be thankful for and enjoy, without shame, what we have.

Thanksgiving Celebration

2009-12-02T13:42:00.008+03:00

The gang

Michael and Irish Steve (the lone Irishman at our gathering, God bless him)

Would you believe that these guys have serious jobs?

And here we are again

Stronger Than Karma (A Thanksgiving Post)

2009-11-27T10:35:00.033+03:00

It would seem obvious—to be thankful. Especially here, in Africa, where we are reminded everyday that we won the lottery ticket of birth in a rich country that affords better prospects in health, wealth, and opportunity.

Yes, sometimes we are thankful.

But sometimes, we're just struggling to live here. In the furnace heat, horns honking and crush of the street. Haggling for fares, caked in dust and dirt, trying not to snap when the internet and electricity go out. Fighting stomach ache, a fever. When food is no comfort, and you’re itchy from mosquito bites. When the ATMs are broken, your clothes smell like mildew, and you can't remember that Swahili phrase you practiced yesterday. Feels like the engine won't start. Feels like banging your head against the ground.

Overload. Exhaustion.

***

Even at 7am, it felt claustrophobic, alone in my apartment. I needed to be around other people, to fight off the loneliness that had been following me around Dar like a stray dog. But the cafe was mostly empty when I arrived, and I sat down in a huff, frustrated that my ankle still hurt, frustrated at the money I was about to spend, frustrated with everyone.

When the waitress, Deborah, took my order, I was curt: coffee please. After she brought it, she stood against the wall in the shade. While I wrote in my notebook, she said shyly: excuse me, are you the one who was robbed?

I looked up. Yes, I said, it was me.

She said: I'm sorry, pole, so sorry. And gently: I hope you will be all right.

I stammered a little, embarrassed, and said: I'm fine. She brought me some cold water to drive back the heat of the morning.

***

I needed a break from the cafe where I'd been staring at my computer, so I walked outside into the sunlight towards the sea. Tangled in thoughts—regrets about the past, worries about the future—I didn't realize I was frowning at the people I passed. Then a hotel guard, a tall, thin Maasai I’d talked with once, called out to me from across the street, smiled, and waved a greeting. I thought: he remembers me? I smiled and waved back.

***

I was lost one morning, and carrying a heavy bag on my shoulder. I didn't want to ask for directions, so I kept on nervously. After a while I knew I'd never make it on my own so I cleared my throat: sama hani, I said to the man walking ahead of me. He stopped and pointed the way.

—I will walk with you? he asked.

—No, it's okay.

But we kept walking, nearly side by side. Eventually, he cajoled me into conversation. Where are you from, what do you do? On emptier, quiet stretches of road, I wondered if I should be walking with a stranger. Perhaps he will rob me, I thought.

But he safely dropped me where I needed to go, and left me with a "no problem" and a wave.

***

Sometimes, even in the sweltering symphony of an East African city like Dar es Salaam, it’s not the clamor and din around us that keeps us from seeing. Sometimes, like everyone, we're buried under the weight of our own lives.

But then, a catch at the back of your throat. A flash, like light in water. The kindness of strangers. The kindness of friends. Utterly undeserved.

And then I see it again—what Dostoyevsky said. That life is paradise. And "we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep."*

*(The Brothers Karamazov)

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

2009-11-25T12:46:00.007+03:00

It was hard to tell if her cheeks were flushed from the heat or anger. Over a beer on a rooftop dive off Kimweri Road, Jen, an American from North Carolina who has worked in the poverty reduction business in Dar es Salaam for two years, derided the sins of development aid—hopelessly arrogant, self-interested and patronizing. Not to mention ineffective. “Do you know how much money we’ve poured into this country?” she fumed. “Show me an example of where it actually reaches the end user.”

Around us, Tanzanian men and women sat on blue and red plastic chairs, some watching television, others talking quietly. They had greeted us warmly (and with amusement—we were the only wazungu around), offering us chairs in the shade, but Jen had protested. Little beads of sweat dotted her forehead, and her face glowed in the sunlight. “It’s worse in Washington,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll work in development when I go home. I don’t know if I can be a part of that.”

The irony, of course, is that she already IS a part of it. We all are. We work in various capacities in poor countries because we want to help—because we feel we need to help—but we are also our own fiercest, most merciless critics. Half in love with our own disgust for the community we are a part of, we derive a strange satisfaction from the assumption that while our particular projects are decent, not too bad, well-intentioned, all around us lie the wreckage of development failures.

—The bilterals are so pitiful it's funny. All politics, you know. Neocolonialism at its worst.

—It's the NGOs that really scare me. Some of these people--what qualifications do they have to be here except big hearts? Such a bunch of clueless do-gooders.

—I hate to say it, but the World Bank is the worst offender. A bumbling bureaucracy, totally incompetent. I mean the work you do for them is great, but really, as a whole, it's terrible.

It’s a mystery—how individuals can be so smart and well-intentioned, but put them together in a collective, make them into an institution, and they become arrogant, lazy, short-sighted villains.

The criticism is warranted. Donor assistance is often unpredictable and inflexible; redundant in some areas and feeble in others; driven more by the political/PR/security/economic interests of rich countries rather than by the needs of poor ones; under-evaluated and sometimes wasteful.

We all know this. But our bumper sticker criticisms are useless. They trivialize the complex, and are born out of a gnawing doubt, a nervous cynicism, a ragged despair that secretly wonders: maybe we cannot fix this.

One thing is for sure: we cannot improve aid by trying to change these core dilemmas. Like churches and democratic governments, there are lots of persistent shortcomings and corruptions, but that doesn’t mean the whole system is worthless.

How can we take these realities and produce better development outcomes—people who are healthier, who can provide for themselves and their families, who have more and better choices about how they live their lives? Here are a few suggestions:

Tell the truth

All of us should be more transparent about what we’re doing—what we spend, and what we spend it on (including compensation and perks for our own employees). As Owen Barder notes in a recent blog post: “Under current arrangements, donors publish details of their aid up to 23 months after it has been spent. Donors need to publish detailed information about their current and planned future activities so that governments, donors and the private sector can identify the gaps where additional resources would have most effect.”

We should also be more candid about our failures. Programs that don’t work ought to be written up and discussed just as much as success stories, and the people implementing programs on the ground shouldn’t have to worry that their funding will dry up if they actually show the donors just how hard to implement and messy and riddled with problems many of these programs are. (The World Bank, to its credit, will soon publish a story on such a failure written by yours truly. Stay tuned.)

Cross the ocean

There are oceans—literally and figuratively—separating development professionals working in the field from those working in policy circles in Western capitals. We need ways to facilitate regular and candid communication between the two.

Commit

No one really knows how economic development “happens,” but most are pretty sure it takes time. You can debate the motives behind and modalities of aid flows from rich to poor countries until you’re blue in the face—they are not going to stop any time soon. This is long-term redistribution at work, and the sooner we can make this reality a part of the foundation upon which our programs are built, the better. The United States is especially guilty of thinking about aid in terms of ultra-short time horizons.

***

Our sins are many—but in spite of them, aid can and does improve lives, and it can be made better. But not by simply wishing that things—that we—were different.

*For specific “what to do on Monday morning” suggestions, see Owen Barder's Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid, published by the Center for Global Development.

Birthday Celebrations

2009-11-19T14:21:00.013+03:00

Serena, Winnie, Me, Cristina, and Bruno

Michael, J & K

Cristina

Irish Steve

J&K

Michael and friends

A Revelation in Washington — A Yawn in Tanzania

2009-11-17T10:45:00.006+03:00

CGD research fellow David Roodman (my former colleague) made waves recently with a blog post about Kiva.org, the famed and beloved non-profit organization that promotes itself as a link between individual lenders in rich countries and individual borrowers in poor ones. The reality, David noted, is more complex. Perhaps you want to donate $100 to the farmer and mother of four in Malawi whose photograph colors the Kiva.org homepage. You click on her photo, donate, and voila—the link is made. Not quite. As David explains, by the time the photo is posted, that farmer has probably already received (and even repaid) a loan from the same institution.

This revelation caused a stir—the New York Times wrote an article about it, David's blog received more than 10,000 hits, and there was a flood of Twitter postings.

What's all the fuss about? Steve Rosenzweig, another former CGDer who has worked for the past five months for a Kiva.org partner in Dar es Salaam says: "I really enjoyed reading David's blog, Kiva's response, and the Times article, but the whole thing is kind of funny because what he wrote about is something I could have told you after one week here. There, it makes big news."

Kiva has been refunding MFIs for already disbursed loans for the last two years, but clearly most users and supporters didn’t realize this.

But why do loans need to be “refunded”? Why not fund them directly? "Well," says Steve, “to wait for the loan to be fully funded on the Kiva website would delay the usual procedures for disbursing loans. When clients apply for a loan, they expect to receive it within two weeks, and they often depend on it to buy supplies… If they had to wait for the funding to come through from Kiva (which would require making the transfer, not just getting it fully funded on the site), it would cause a delay."

Even as the revelation caused a stir in the countries where Kiva lenders live, the debate doesn't seem to have reached the Kiva-funded MFIs themselves, where business continues on as usual. Says Steve: "It’s amazing. There is such a disconnect between the two worlds."

Who Needs Whom?

2009-11-02T10:09:00.080+03:00

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and I'm sitting in the World Bank mission room, trying to edit a report. But I’m drowsy and full of lunch, so I put down my pen and just sit. I watch out the window as some men load a truck in the afternoon sun…listen absently to some quiet chatter nearby….take a sip of tea that has gone cold at my desk. And I begin to think about my first month in Dar es Salaam, and some of the people I've met....

The Money Man

Johhny Lee is sitting alone on the rooftop of the Zanzibar Coffee House hotel, looking down at the computer in his lap, sunglasses on. Mid-twenties. American. My friends engage him in conversation: hey man, how's it going? He tells us he's on leave from a post with a U.S.-based consulting firm in Afghanistan. Our eyes widen and we lean in, like we’re gathering around a campfire. Wow, how exciting, we say. How cool.

He tells us about remote villages and tribal elders, about bombings and near misses, about cultural gaffes.

My friends say they'd like to go to Afghanistan, too. Like speculators in the wild west, they have ideas for programs and businesses. Johnny Lee is encouraging: there's lots of opportunity there, he says. And danger. It’s awesome.

We ask him to tell us about his job: what exactly do you do?

He tells us: I go from village to village with a duffle bag full of cash and hand out money to village leaders, as payment for their work/cooperation. They need the money, and we need them, he says, smilingly widely. And then he packs up his things and sets out to catch a flight back to Kabul.

The Criminal

He calls himself Captain Hajj. Rumor has it he just got out of prison. Hard to say how old he is. Clad in torn shorts and a beanie, he roams the beaches of Paje and casually introduces himself to unsuspecting tourists. You want to kite surf, to dive, to buy some pretty things for the family back home? Looking for a restaurant, a bar? Looking for drugs? Whatever you need, the Captain can get it.

Michael and Boris, it turns out, needed to go fishing. Michael is an American from Rhode Island just arrived in Dar where he is working logistics on a malaria program and Boris, an Australian, is in Dar on holiday. For a small fee (US$10 each), Captain Hajj helpfully arranges an early morning boat to take them out past the barrier reef where they can spend a few leisurely hours fishing (with real live Zanzibar fishermen!) and enjoying the view.

I'm in my room sleeping when it starts raining, so hard it sounds like bullets blasting through the roof of my bungalow. Pounding rain, unrelenting, drenches the beach.

Later they tell us how the deep purple storm clouds had approached quickly and with menace, and when the wind picked up and the sky broke open, tossing the small rickety vessel in the waves like a child's toy, they were afraid. But not as much as the Captain, who cowered in the corner of the boat, waiting for it to end.

The next morning we see him on the beach, approaching a man and woman strolling through the shallows. He looks as sweet and innocent as a poisonous flower.

The Local

Winnie Jonathan seems shy at first, tentative. A native of Dar es Salaam, she clicks and clacks in high heels up to the long, narrow table where we--a group of expats, one of whom is her co-worker--are eating dinner. All of us like her instantly and engage her emphatically. We are grateful to (finally!) hang out with a Tanzanian.

After dinner we go to the Sweet Easy for drinks and dancing, and that’s where I discover that Winnie is not shy at all. She leads me with command to the bar and orders us gin and tonic. She gabs about an ex-boyfriend, and about her work as an administrative assistant at an international NGO. We laugh and dance in the crush of the sweaty club.

At 3 a.m. we pack up to leave. An hour-long saga begins when I realize I'm locked out of my apartment. While we sort out another place to stay, she takes me to a 24-hour pizza joint in Oyster Bay. It's a dimly lit hole in the wall--the kind of place no foreigner would ever stop in the middle of the night (or even during the day). But the pizza is cheap, and even better: it tastes good. I thank her profusely, for her help and for the pizza.

The streets are emtpy when we finally make our way out again; the headlights of her Rav4 are thick yellow tunnels in the dark. She tells me about growing up in Dar, about friends who have left, and about feeling lonely in the city that his her home. She is grateful for our company, and wants to hang out again. Me too, I say.

A (Brief) Encounter With Malaria

2009-10-31T13:49:00.015+03:00

Yesterday, I thought I had malaria. Fever, headache, diarrhea, extreme fatigue. Like most people I know in Dar es Salaam, I quit taking malaria prophylaxis almost as soon as I arrived—I didn't want to hassle with it and malaria prevalence is low in the city, at about 4 percent.

A friend ran out to the local pharmacy and got me some Coartem and oral rehydration salts. It was surreal—this is the stuff I had read and wrote about in Washington, and here I was having to use it. (Side note: the “orange”-flavored ORT tastes like death.)

But I still didn’t know if I actually had malaria. I wondered: should I just start taking Coartem, and treat myself presumptively, as some friends had done? It was tempting—going to the clinic would take too much time and cost too much money. Plus, I'd been there twice recently for my ankle and didn't want to start feeling like a "regular."

But I wanted to know for sure, so I decided to go to another, better stocked pharmacy nestled in a shopping mall in an expat enclave by the bay and pick up a rapid diagnostic test, or RDT. These handy little things, I knew from having read about them back in Washington, were easy and relatively cheap and could tell me in minutes whether or not I had malaria. Voila.

The South African-manufactured RDTs cost about 25,000 shillings (or about $19) for five tests. (Like the Coartem, which cost 16,000 shillings for a full adult dose, it is prohibitively expensive for most Tanzanians.) I went home and assembled the pieces on the kitchen table: lancet, pipette, alcohol swab, and the test device/strip. Then I realized: the buffer was missing. So I called the taxi driver back and went back to the pharmacy, where they apologized and gave me some buffer.

Round two. I assembled the parts, and my friend sat down to help me administer the test. He pricked my finger, but hardly any blood came out—the lancet was dull. We took another lancet and pricked another finger. More blood this time. He took the tiny plastic pipette and tried, as the directions instructed, to suck up enough blood to drip into the test device. But the pipette wasn't sucking anything—it merely moved the blood around on my fingertip. We kept trying for about ten minutes and gave up.

Now the chances that I have malaria are low. More likely it is some nasty parasite. But the lesson is: getting things like RDTs on the shelves is one thing. Getting them to work (even under the best of circumstances) is another.

*Tanzania has made huge strides in malaria control (see Paul Smithson's Down But not Out: The Impact of Malaria Control in Tanzania), but it is still the leading cause of illness in the country. Next year, the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria will launch in Tanzania, which will subsidize the cost of effective malaria drugs such as Coartem, making them affordable for average Tanzanians.

Zanzibar

2009-10-30T16:15:00.005+03:00

Some friends and I took the Thursday afternoon ferry to Zanzibar, that iconic spice island off the coast of Dar es Salaam. It dropped us at Stone Town, where we spent the evening winding through narrow alley ways and dark corners. The city is a sweep of minarets, latticed walls, the call to prayer, candles flickering in the dark, the crescent moon, fishing boats moored off the beach, the sharp white curve of the dhow sails, like arrows in the glittering blue water.

From Stone Town we headed east, to the small beach town of Paje, where we did the usual things—laid in the sun, took long walks, went kite surfing, read books drowsily in the shade. And then we collected ourselves for an evening out.

Now, economic development, if it’s working, can bring great things like jobs, roads, and schools, but it can also brings not-so-great things, such as drunken tourists at beach bars. Let me say up front that my friends and I were of course NOT those kinds of tourists—sunburnt and dehydrated, smelling of mosquito repellent, drinking Pina Coladas. Of course not.

After dinner and dancing, the guys decided to shoot some pool. Their opponents: Maasai warriors. No really. (The Maasai lost.)

A Robbery

2009-10-20T21:00:00.003+03:00

There’s a moment, when you’re being robbed, when you still have hold of what is yours, and then, in a blurry flash, it slips out of your grasp, and you watch as the all the things that enable you to function, work, communicate, are taken further and further away until they are gone.

I had just left Epi d’Or cafe, an expat watering hole as cool and lovely as a garden, where I’d met a friend for lunch. She’d offered me a lift home, but I said no thanks. I’d walk. I packed up my bag—it held my computer, wallet, phone, a digital recorder and some papers and notebooks—paid the bill and set out.

Ten minutes into my walk and I was wishing I’d taken the ride—my bag felt like an anchor on my shoulder, and I’d forgotten to apply sunscreen. The road was quiet, and with each step I heard the crunch and crackle of dirt, rock and broken glass beneath my flip flops. I passed a man standing idly beside some concrete blocks. Crows squawked and scavenged among a pile of trash. Beneath the shade of a tree, a woman lifted her baby on her back.

Then a car is beside me, so close that the passenger door brushes against my skirt. A violent jerk and I’m on the ground. I look up. A man with sunglasses is staring back at me, expressionless. Then I get it: he has my bag in his hand. He is trying to steal my things. I clutch the strap fiercely. The car accelerates, dragging me along the road until I let go and watch them speed away.

***

Coughing, choking…dripping snot and tears…blood on my hands and face. Passerbys gather around awkwardly. Pole, they say. Pole sana. Poor girl. We are sorry for you. I feel seasick…my head is full of water…like everything is dissolving.

My first thought is: I have nothing. What am I going to do?

***

You must go to the police, someone tells me. I’d just finished canceling my credit cards and visiting the doctor, and all I wanted to do was sleep. But she was right. I had information: a witness took down the license plate number and make and model.

So a friend drove me to the Oyster Bay police station, across the road from the U.S. Embassy—the one they built after the original was bombed in 1998. It is a fortified compound of Soviet-style gray buildings (USAID is housed there too), with carefully mowed lawns, security guards and electrified wiring along the perimeter. Across Old Bagamoyo Road, the police station is crumbling and shabby, with a small dirt parking lot and scores of people milling about while boys play football on a field opposite the entrance.

I limped up to the outdoor counter where a uniformed man was writing in a ledger. He gave me a sideways glance and grinned while I told him what happened. I didn’t understand why he was smiling.

He called another officer over to write the incident report. “What did you lose?” the young man asked. He regarded my friend and I with mild annoyance.

“A computer,” I said.

C-o-m-p-u-t-e-r he wrote.

In between each question, he would pause to scratch his chin or flip through the newspaper. Someone would yell to him and he would wave hello and have a chat. I felt helpless, about to explode.

“The computer is how much?” he asked.

“One thousand five hundred U.S. dollars.”

O-n-e t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d f-i-v-e- h-u-n-d-r-e-d he wrote.

We went through each stolen item—the whole thing took about an hour—and he took a scrap of newspaper and carefully added up the total.

“One thousand eight hundred,” he said. His eyes were vacant.

Yes, I said, yes: I lost almost two thousand dollars, have a sprained ankle and some cuts and you don’t even give a damn.

***

Every year there are wildfires in California, where I grew up. One year they burned some expensive homes in the swanky neighborhoods in the hills around Los Angeles. No one was hurt but several homes were destroyed. Friends and I joked about it—those poor rich people, we would say. Geez, one of their mansions burned down. What a pity.

Of course we weren’t happy it had happened, but it was hard to feel sorry for them when they had so much, including, we assumed, insurance. We laughed because we thought: it’s an awful thing but they will be fine.

***

Everyone I talk to has an explanation.

—Crime is getting worse here, I tell you, a Tanzanian woman says. Worse, by the week. Be careful. Don’t walk outside. Try not to carry any bags.

—Well, these are poor people you know, someone else says, and poor people are sometimes driven to do this sort of thing.

—Poor? But they had a car! says another.

—Right, don’t be fooled. This is a business. There are networks; it’s organized. Kids in the compounds, some grow up and go into crime, others don’t. Who knows why?

—It is because there are no jobs in Dar es Salaam that young men turn to crime, says another. The donors should quit with their capacity building nonsense and build roads so there will be investment. If there are jobs this kind of thing will not happen!

—But the donors tried infrastructure and it didn’t work. Money was lost, things were not maintained. The problem is corruption. And the police? They are just as corrupt as everyone else.

—But the police are paid nothing, what do you expect? They probably don’t even make $2,000 in a year—what you lost in one day.

—You should feel lucky, it could have been worse. At least the police wrote up a report—you’re in Dar, so that’s not bad. And you weren’t hurt badly. It could have been so much worse….

There are a hundred ways to wonder at circumstance.

***

The morning after the robbery, I walk down a dirt road towards a taxi stand. I’m carrying only a notebook with a little cash in it, which I keep clutched in my hands beneath a scarf. My arms are crossed as I walk, like a locked gate.

There are, as usual, people hanging around on the side of the road, chatting with street side vendors, walking along on their way somewhere, or just sitting, letting the morning pass. To me, it all looks like danger. But these people didn’t steal from you, I remind myself. They are not going to steal from you. I keep walking.

Then I hear footsteps behind me and I turn in a panic to see three men walking towards me quickly—at least it seemed quickly. I feel terrible, guilty, as I cross to the other side of the street and watch them as they pass. Tears well up in my eyes—and I feel angry. And afraid.

Behavior Change

2009-10-14T12:18:00.002+03:00

Night comes early in Dar. The sky is midnight blue in the moonlight, and from where I was sitting, on a rooftop Ethiopian restaurtant off Migombani Street, I could see cluster of palm trees sway gently in the cool night air.

I was having dinner with my new friend, Cristina Broker. Cristina is a 28-year-old Boston native who arrived in Dar five months ago to work for Population Services International (PSI). In between bites of beef tibs, she told me about a social marketing campaign she and her colleagues are creating to help promote condom use and discourage concurrent sexual partners—one of the things helping to spread HIV in many African countries, including Tanzania. The campaign will spread messages, via radio, television and in print, that will encourage Tanzanians to engage in less risky sexual behavior by reminding them that it is in their personal, social and economic interest to do so.

It was the first time Cristina and I had had a chance to really talk one on one since meeting, so we covered the usual range of topics: work, where we are from, where we studied, what we miss about home, how long we plan on staying, and: Guys. I told her about a relationship I'm trying to wean myself off of and she told me about a similar situation in her own life. There was a lot of laughing and shaking our heads. We know what is best for us. We understand what it costs to keep on down the same road. But changing your behavior—even when you know it is in your interest—is hard.

Sunday Headlines

2009-10-12T10:03:00.011+03:00

Discrepancies

2009-10-05T23:20:00.004+03:00

I strolled up to the taxi stand in front of the Seacliff Hotel armed with the knowledge that a ride from the tip of the peninsula to the center of town should cost no more than 8,000 shillings. In a nearby café a South African named Denise, who has lived in Dar with her businessman husband for nearly a decade, gave me the scoop on taxis, tipping and good restaurants.

Up until this point, every time I’d get in a cab it was like the lottery: I tried to play but I knew I was going to lose. My first day alone I spent US$50 in taxi fare – for one day. A good sense of the exchange rate can help, but as with many African capitals, Dar is expensive, and you need insider information. And confidence.

It was about 1 p.m. and the afternoon sun was beating down on us like a spotlight, radiating heat. I approached in my flip flops and sunglasses; five drivers leaned against a wall and stared back at me.

“You need a taxi?” One of them came forward.

I squinted against the sun and nodded.

“Fifteen thousand,” he said.

“Seven,” I said. We stared at each other like river boat gamblers.

He took a deep drag on his cigarette and shook his head: “Mnazi Moja is far, seven kilometers. Ten.”

“No, eight.”

He laughed. “No, no. No less than ten. That’s the rate, no less.”

Now normally I would have said: "Okay great thanks, let’s go, and sorry for being such a pain." But I was emboldened with the knowledge of what this ride should cost, so I persisted: “Eight.”

One of the other men who had been sitting, listening in the shadows, suddenly spoke up: "What’s one or two thousand shillings to you?”

***

At dinner some friends were talking about the obsession some expats have with not living in the "expat bubble" (i.e., trying to avoid $3,000/month apartments and full-time drivers and expense accounts). The reason it’s important to them, my friends said, is partly because they want to experience whatever is the most authentic Tanzania, and they are pretty sure the expat bubble is not it. But it is also important -- to try to live with a little less rather than a little more -- because most Tanzanians they meet are astronomically poorer than they are. And the discrepancy is uncomfortable.

***

Eventually the driver agreed to 8,000 tsh. When we got in the car the gas tank was empty, so we stopped for petrol: 5,000 tsh. It barely moved the petrol indicator.

On the way we ran into some traffic on Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road. I had a bag in my lap with a computer, wallet and camera inside. Our windows were rolled down because of the heat, but when he noticed me clutch my bag as some men walked close by selling things, Michael, the driver, whose name I now knew, rolled up the windows and told me not to worry -- he turned on the air conditioning.

I asked him, with a sort of panic almost, to turn it off.

On the Indian Ocean

2009-10-02T16:37:00.009+03:00

The Indian Ocean looks a lot like the Pacific, except there are patches of bright teal and aquamarine cutting through the deep gray blue. It’s windy out, and there are white caps dotting the surface of the water, and way out, near the horizon, some tankers are passing by or parked…I can’t tell which.

I took a cab from Mbezi Beach in the north of Dar to the Seacliff Hotel way out at the tip of a peninsula where expats and tourists hang out. The ride over was an assault of sound and smell – traffic jams, horns honking, the smell of exhaust, of smoke from burning trash on the side of the road, and bodies, sweat. Inside the hotel, it’s quiet and cool and lazy. Some men on break from a conference smoke a cigarette and talk quietly. A gardener takes a break from trimming a hedge.

When people ask, I’ve been telling them that I work for the World Bank (which I do, on a short-term contract). Now in Bob Zoellick's dreams, the average response probably goes something like this: ah, yes, the World Bank! You work to alleviate poverty around the globe!

But in my one day's worth of experience, the response has been more like: Oh, nice, they have lots of money. One guy, Job, a young Dar native, said exactly that, and another fellow who works at the Seacliff, launched into a very detailed description of a safari scheme he's been dreaming up and asked if I could help him find financing. Maybe I should just tell people I’m a writer.

Waiting at Heathrow

2009-10-01T20:35:00.005+03:00

Heathrow is one of those weird places where everything and nothing is happening all at the same time. The buzz, clatter, motion, sound--people waiting in line for sandwiches, the BBC blaring across a gigantic screen, voices on cell phones, ladies at the duty free counter, families with strollers, four story high walls of windows, and outside, planes ascending into the gray spatter of rain.

I'd hoped to do some shopping while I waited (nine hours) for my flight, but unless you can afford Fendi and Aramani, forget it. The only thing I bought were two cappuccinos, some internet time, and a salad. Then I found a place to set down all my stuff, and I did what everybody does: I waited. While the din of Heathrow swirled around me like a tornado, I watched passerbys, stared off into space, and enjoyed that jittery delight of being on my way somewhere.

Distances to Cross

2009-09-29T18:59:00.004+03:00

And I pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself
I too much discuss
Too much explain

--T.S. Eliot

I guess I’m probably just like you. When someone tells me they’re writing a blog from Africa, part of me can’t wait to read it and part of me is, well, cringing.

I’m happy because I want to hear about their experiences, and, being a writer, I think words are a good way to communicate—a good way of keeping track of your life. More broadly, I think going to new places and seeing new things is a good thing to do.

But part of me cringes. This is partly because of anticipated guilt—I always begin with good intentions to read the blogs of friends and colleagues, but I always fall behind (if you are a friend or colleague who writes a blog, don’t worry—obviously I read YOURS).

Another reason I cringe has to do with something a colleague asked me recently. I had just returned from Zambia, where I’d spent a few weeks writing a piece on foreign aid, and she asked: “What makes you think you have the right to speak for them?”

By “them” maybe she meant Zambians, or maybe she meant poor Zambians, or maybe she was talking about the expat community. Who knows. I took her point, though. She was glad that I’d gone but the whole enterprise made her uncomfortable too, and I think it made her uncomfortable for the same reason lots of us in the global development business get uncomfortable from time to time: because our business is about telling other peoples’ stories, advocating for people we have never met, trying to make sense of places we are not from.

We understand the dilemmas. We know the potential for over-reaching, for forgetting the limits of what we can know, measure, quantify, explain. We worry, sometimes, that our own experiences and preconceptions—our own stories—get in the way of objectivity.

But each of our stories, is actually part of the story. And rather than Explain, I think what we try to do, each in our own way, is to describe, with as much honesty as we can muster, what we see in front of our eyes. We sort through the debris, we try to find meaning in the ambiguous heart of things.

Tonight I will board a plane bound for Dar es Salaam, where I will be based for the next six months to a year, writing stories about the people I meet—what they do, where they’re from, how they got to where they are, what they think about their work, what makes them laugh, what are their secret fears. And I’ll write about my own story too. Now this will probably get in the way of objectivity, but this blog isn’t going to try to answer any big questions about development or poverty or Africa. It will just be an attempt to tell stories. Like E.B. White said: Don't write a story about Man, write about a man."