Tag Archives: Perceptions

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Let Them Eat Hippo

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“Do the local people eat hippo?  Hippo, lechwes [a kind of antelope] and the other game?” 

I was on safari with my octogenarian parents.  After all those years working in Africa, my first real safari.  We were in the Okavango Delta, which (without the two octogenarians) I would recommend visiting to any humanitarian who wants to see African wildlife other than mangy goats and one-eared dogs.  Of course, I’d also have to recommend robbing a bank first.

One of the safari guides was explaining traditional food to us over the evening meal.  That’s when Ron asked the question.  Ron was clearly an intelligent guy.  New York banker working for a venture capitalist group, articulate and engaged, owner of the newest top Nikon SLR.  In short, somebody who would place in the upper percentiles of just about any set of social indicators.  He probably laughed at Jon Stewart and would be above average (for one of us Americans) on the scale of being politically informed.  I’m sure he considered himself a responsible voter.  Oh, and he was Keanu Reeves handsome to boot, so I disliked him intensely.

Look again at that question.  Let me rephrase it:  Did the people who lived in the middle of this game-rich delta eat game?  Or rephrased again:  Were all the people practitioners of vegetarianism?   If not, does one of these densely forested islands hide the local equivalent of my local Ginger Pig butcher shop selling butterflied leg of lamb and ground pork loin burgers?  Is there a supermarket nearby?  Because if these weren’t the questions he was implying, what is it he thought traditional people ate in a place like the Okavango Delta?

Smart as he was, Ron seemed wholly unacquainted with the basic rules of human existence.  How could traditional ways have included the people here not eating the game that surrounded them? 

Now back to the aid world.  We know that our donor base, even those who keep well-informed, tends to think of people in Africa and aid workers as, respectively, more impassively victimized aid and more heroically productive than reality.  But we also believe, and must to a certain extent require, that the public has some generalized understanding of the way it is.   For our newletters and “protection” reports and situation updates to have any meaning, readers must be able to hang them onto some sort of foundation.  Otherwise, it would be like me attending a graduate school lecture on molecular biology.  The difference, of course, is that I would quickly recognize my confusion, whereas I’m concerned that our public is unwittingly getting it dead wrong.

Well, the Rons of this world are our donors.  They are our constituency.  It’s OK that they don’t get it 100 percent.  But what if it’s more like 10 percent?  Forget about meaningful engagement in the public debate on foreign politics, military incursions into unfriendly countries or the (current in the UK) discussion on aid budgets.  Forget about the idea that the people who give us money actually support – as in agree with – our work.  It all adds up to an Antoinettesque “Let them eat cake” level of comprehension.

Critique of Aid

The Old Bait & Switch

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From the GiveWell Blog, check out this interesting post on the way in which aid agencies are feeding off of the Japan emergency to stock their coffers.  There’s more elsewhere.

The bigger  issue, though, isn’t whether Japan needs the money or not. The bigger issue is integrity.  Mercenary fundraising by NGOs marks our descent into the sort of fine print tactics one expects from a used car company. NGOs have abandoned ethical standards and constructed a legally defensible escape clause, usually well hidden compared to the appeal itself, basically saying that any unused funds for Japan will be used elsewhere.  In the world of supermarkets and department stores, this is the bait & switch tactic.  Advertize a huge sale on an item, get people into the store, then switch.  “We’re sorry, that item has sold out, but you might be interested in…”

We should ask NGOs:  Right now, what percentage of the collected funds do you reasonably expect ever to go to Japan? Is it even 50%?  In the end, the genuine outpouring of empathy for Japan will pay for office furniture in quite some other locations.  One might have expected more from the self-proclaimed moral leaders of the world.

Our Western Identity

There but for the grace of god…

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Lots of headlines now on day seven about the “unfolding” situation in Japan.  Even casual (read: armchair) observation leaves me with the impression that this thing has pretty well unfolded already.  Just look at how this three-pronged crisis — humanitarian, nuclear, economic – has overrun its initial headlines.  It is only a handful of days ago that the main story was the lack of destruction and devastation; a disaster averted by Japanese know-how and organization.  Sharp contrasts were drawn or implied in comparison to the helpless likes of Haiti and Bangladesh.  Praise was heaped on everything from architectural codes and standards to the emergency response capacity.  

To be very clear, such praise was and is well-deserved.  The response capacity of the Japanese authorities, combined with their preparedness for earthquakes, undoubtedly averted an incalculably worse catastrophe.  And yet the Japanese people find themselves just as undoubtedly right smack in the middle of … a catastrophe.  Was that early optimism a case of simple error?  Of not getting the story right?  A case of the situation becoming worse as the days progress (e.g., the nuclear issue)?  

Or is there something else at play here?  Were we too quick to look at Japan and see – Thank Goodness! – our developed world’s mastery of Mother Nature?  Have we become mesmerized by that shield of technology?  Is it really a comfort blankie, protecting our psyche from the likes of Moby Dick pounding the vessel of our orderly world?  Chaos expunged from our lives.  And even where we saw the developed world’s failure in New Orleans a few years ago, we also knew that New Orleans was practically Third World anyway, closer to its Creole cousin Port-au-Prince than to Tokyo, Berlin or the truly civilized worlds in which we live.

Did those rose-tinted glasses project onto Japan our own illusion of security, of being protected by our sophistication, our gadgetry and our smug modernity?  Because if this sort of destruction and suffering can happen to the people of Japan, it can happen to all of us. Last Friday, we saw what we wanted to see.