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Critique of Aid, Uncategorized

The Race to the Bottom

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At the risk of diminishing the heroic status of all those who work in humanitarian organizations – of all those who toil hour upon hour in an effort to save every last life possible on this Kurtz-ridden planet – let me confess that on occasion, right in the middle of the work day even, my computer screen begins to show articles about the Philadelphia Eagles football team.  Once in a while, articles about the fascinating life of celebrities also pop up.  My computer tends to do this more often during the football season, but also during the approach to the NFL draft, training camp, and, well, on just about every day I’m in the office and hence tiring myself to the bone to save the world or, on days when that seems too tall an order, reading over the 12th draft of the office annual plan, sorting the pens in my desk drawer by color, etc.

For those who regularly read humanitarian agency reports, you probably understand.  The brain needs a break.  It needs regular refuge from the horror.  I unwind with dose of the Eagles, the greatest team never to win a SuperBowl.  Since about two weeks ago, though, my respite has been effectively cancelled by Amina and her nameless invaders.  Surrounding an article about the contract extension of a promising young running back, peeking from the banner, the blitzkrieg begins.  Starving babies.  Grotesquely contorted, ribcage-clad babies.  The enlarged skulls of the emaciated.  Faces in pain, eyes set right on mine.

This isn’t just disaster porn twanging my heartstrings. This is disaster porn combined with new technology, meaning I can’t just turn the page because some big aid agency, let’s call them HAL, has its hooks into my cookies.  Click to a new story.  There’s Amina. Click again.  Here’s that misery-distended face and the floating caption: “No child should be this hungry.” Click again, and one of these kids rolls up from below my screen, like horror-movie fog seeping under a door, asking for £10 now.

Such is the brave new world of Google.  I must have looked at HAL’s website recently, and they know it, so now they are hitting me up with a retargeting campaign.  Where are the ethical limits on exploiting the privacy of web users?  I don’t know.  All major agencies use this technology to enhance fundraising results.  It’s called prospecting.   And like prospecting, one tries to pick a spot that looks good.

In other words, it makes sense to show your appeals to somebody who has recently read stories about aid, or articles about the places we work, or visited our websites.  Note that the NGO also purchases the target audience and the frequency with which its ads appear.  Once per week?  Every two days?  Fairly often?  Where does one draw the line?  Again, I can’t say exactly where the line should be, but surely it should be drawn before creating the appearance of stalking me, and long before any sane person would prefer to set fire to his cash, stocks and bonds rather than allowing even once cent to end up in HAL’s pocket.

Of course, this isn’t just about new technology.  It’s an old one as well.  There are standards.  There have been papers and conferences and workshops and all manner of effort to ensure that photographs and imagery used by humanitarian agencies is respectful of our beneficiaries.  There’s even a code of conduct that is designed to eliminate the merchandizing of starving babies.

I can hear one potential response:  Mind your own business.  Nobody elected you the moral police of UK’s humanitarian aid community.   Is it good enough to leave this up to the market?  Do we leave it up to the public?  Is stalking and exploitation OK because it has proven results?  The cash flows (even if I doubt HAL ever bothers to calculate the cost of pissing so many people off).

But what about my God given right to self-righteous moralizing?  After all, one might expect humanitarians to be slightly less mercenary than bloodsucking automated telephone sales companies.  [Insert fist thumping].  One might expect them not to exploit children!  [Insert more strident fist thumping]. And this campaign might poison the well of public generosity for all of us.    No wait, it’s worse than that. [Insert preachy voice].  This cynically mawkish and manipulative appeal might spark the end of humanitarian assistance as we know it.

Or, it may also be true that none of us are any better; that we simply cling to our own set of arbitrary distinctions that allow us to feel that we’re different.

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On the Limits of Doing Good

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OFFERED:  Used dog ball and toys

I found that gem on my local Hackney Freecycle, a terrific website designed to unite people needing stuff with people getting rid of stuff (see lessons learned on British plastic bags for a glimpse into the exciting world of marital bliss).

Can you imagine the dog whose owner collected on that offer?   Maybe a pug or Chihuahua accessory to an East London vintage girl; or perhaps some adoring chocolate lab at the heels of her strapping student master.  Imagine now its utter shame, entering the gate to Victoria Park, a hand-me-down dog ball for a toy. What latte drinking dog owner could be so cruelly cheap as to save the price of a dog ball?

But that’s only the start.  These are dogs, not people.   Imagine the poor dog’s pulse quickening in fear, its master blithely cocking his arm to toss the ball.  Imagine the fear of that poor dog!  It knows.  It knows from the holes in the used dog ball and it knows from the ball’s scent.  That ball belonged to a rotweiler. Or maybe a raging Doberman-pit bull mix.  That ball belonged to 50 kilos of canine killing power and there now is his owner, about to toss that ball out into the park. Imagine that poor dog scanning the horizon, scanning scanning scanning for the ball’s former owner to cock his head at the first whiff of his long lost toy and the simpering runt of a pooch running after the thing.

Now, where do I go with this?  How about the topic of fear?  We humanitarians struggle to convey what is often the most damaging element of life caught in crisis, the years of waiting for violence to leap out from behind the curtain of poverty and desolation.  It’s relatively easy to convey starvation, disease or actual violence , but for the most part, protracted, pervasive fear remains invisible to medical data and escapes capture in a photo.  Recall that time somebody appeared behind you on a dark street?  Now elongate that momentary distress over years.  Or maybe it’s the life of a Palestinian child who wets himself every time an olive branch bangs against the zinc roof of his home.

 That was a diversion, a case of indulging my solemn side. 

I’ve seen lots of oddball stuff on offer at Hackney Freecycle – pavement slabs, broken darkroom equipment, 17 assorted felt cuttings – but that used dog ball takes the proverbial cake.  It struck me as an icon for the limits of do-gooderism.  It’s a story of how the feeling of goodness surpasses actually having done some good.

My wife and I have been experiencing the sense of being good as a result of our giving.  It took me by surprise, as I’d been getting more and more miffed as time constraints killed off my plans to sell much of it.  So up onto the Freecycle website went the items we couldn’t carry over to the Salvation Army.  Often, the phone rings almost immediately, so eager are people.   

These are people with stories:  Joe, binding a stack of heavy duty moving boxes for his garden (??) and then carrying on the train to Dagenham; Enrico, starting a new business, sputtering off with a heap of ring-binders; or the fantastic Veronica, heading to the bus stop with our 180 cm tall book shelf (translation for the metric-impaired from showing-off American:  approx. six feet), the first piece of furniture for her new apartment.   A bookshelf on a London bus!  I wonder if the driver dared challenge her determination.   These are people who are grateful and seemingly thrilled with the idea of getting something useful for free. 

And there stood my wife and I, like proud parents, our furniture going out into the world, each piece a helping hand in the untold thousands of fresh starts happening right here in our little corner.  We basked in the glow of the giver, modern day Johnny Appleseeds.  Somewhere, a former dog ball owner is doing the same.

Next blog:  Part II on this topic, because that sense of doing good is what pays my rent.

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My Job as a Bagman

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So what do you do when the honeymoon is over?  Move house. 

We’ve been in the throes of moving for the better part of two weeks.   I’ve got a fair amount of stuff and she’s got a fair amount of stuff, a term which in her case includes such sundries as the packaging for everything she owns, every shopping bag that has entered the premises, and two thousand record albums (including some truly great 70s era funk, soul and reggae).  Comparing our stuff is in this manner is unfair  – my life’s sundries are sitting in a buddy’s attic in New Jersey and, mostly, in my folks’ spare room.  Lawyers call that an “admission against interest”:  having Mom sort my stuff from time to time ranks pretty high on the Loser chart for somebody over the age of 30, let alone 50. It’s part of the humanitarian identity.

Anyway, moving involves throwing stuff out.  Not a little stuff.  Lots of stuff.  So I’ve now earned a PhD in the demise of the British Empire, as exemplified in their ability to produce a decent garbage bag.  I’ve been buying the “heavy duty” models; real garden and trash bags.  Green and black rolls.   These bags should be manly, designed to satisfy the deepest of macho DIY urges.  These bags should be the plastic equivalent of a crowbar or a paint stripping machine. 

Well, thus far, and I think I’ve been through the full assortment of bags on the market, the Brits seem to have a problem with the concept of “heavy duty”.  As far as I can judge, they mean bags suitable for heavy duty cotton balls, or maybe heavy duty pieces of Styrofoam.  Half of the makes are as see-through as the Sudanese government’s official reason for not granting a travel permit.  Shove in trash with edges, say a cardboard box or a rolled piece of carpet, and the bags split like pea pods in the summer sun.  Worse than that, they seem to split along pre-existing fault lines, splits straighter and quicker than the tear lines between two bags.

In my book, you shouldn’t have veto power at the UN Security Council if you can’t make a garbage bag that works.  And you certainly shouldn’t be flying war planes over the Falkland Islands, or menacing Syria’s dictators, or discussing the invasion of Iran.

I’m not one of those Americans who chant “USA, USA!” when an American helicopter flies over a ballpark, or thinks that American crap is any less crap than un-American crap.  But have you ever used an American garbage bag?  Maybe you’ve seen an ad for them.  A guy with pipes for arms fills one with tree branches, shards of broken window pane, maybe a little tornado-torn aluminum roofing, and then adds a box of rusty 3 inch nails.  Then they drive a Hummer over the thing, or shoot it with a concealed weapon.  Then throw in a full Encyclopedia Britannica to press the sharp bits into the plastic.  The thing won’t rip.   Not even holes.  You could carry tropical fish in it.  Or suffocate an enemy combatant being held indefinitely without trial.

That’s really all I wanted to say.  I know, this blog is supposed to be about humanitarian issues.  Apologies, my brain has been on leave for eight weeks.  So, to pull a rabbit out of a hat, here’s the moral of the story.  The presence of NGOs  in DRC or Haiti or Somalia may look like humanitarian aid, it may come in the same color and wrapping as humanitarian aid, and it may even have the same ”heavy duty” label as humanitarian aid… But that don’t make it humanitarian aid.

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Welcome

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Please excuse our appearances.  We’re still in development and I am mostly computer illiterate.  Hopefully, some great stuff to come, including photos of me with bad haircuts from the field.  So visit again.