Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (35 page)

“Why don’t you come over to my apartment and I’ll explain it to you,” James offered. He wasn’t a bad person; he wanted to help, but just didn’t know how. So I went.

The elevator opened directly onto his five-bedroom Upper East Side apartment. The three bathrooms were big enough to be confused with day spas. The cost of the artwork that hung on the enormous walls alone would have been enough to feed a rural community in Africa for a decade.

James passed me a sheet of ideas that he had been working on: giving away glasses and solar-powered stoves, building houses for Africans, sending orphans to school. “Simple recipes, simple solutions,” was one of the taglines.

“What are the good ideas here?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Africa’s a really big place. The needs are different everywhere.”

“Well, let’s pick an idea and figure out where they need it.”

I didn’t know what to say. James had the classic misconception of aid, that it was just charity. People had good intentions, but they assumed that Africans were so pathetically poor that they would want anything we threw at them; that we could predict what they needed from afar. James was tacking on a solution before even knowing what the problem was.

I UNDERSTOOD WHERE HE WAS
coming from, though: the West’s idea of Africa has been shaped by years of misleading generalizations and sentimental imagery. All people can picture are those Sally Struthers infomercials, in which Africa is always portrayed as a lack: a place where people are defined by what they don’t have, a hole that needs to be filled. And by us—by our lifestyle, education, and values. What these infomercials never showed was what they did have: community, tradition, resilience, and pride.

“Well, just giving people things isn’t going to really solve their problems. You’ll want to work with an agency that’s already there and knows the issues and the best way to approach it,” I said. “Or you should start very small. Go to a community, do some research to find out what would really make a difference in people’s lives. I bet you they will say jobs, or health care, or even sanitation. It’s not sexy, but before you go distributing
these things, find out if people actually want them, or need them.”

He took a sip of his tea. This isn’t what he wanted to hear. But I continued.

“And the sending-the-orphans-to-school idea will surely tug at heartstrings for the people who eat at your restaurant. But orphanages are the worst place for children! A lot of times children in orphanages aren’t even orphans—their parents send them there because in an orphanage, at least, they know that their child might receive three meals a day, some kind of schooling, and maybe even a bed. So the day after your orphanage is set up the number of ‘orphans’ will increase tenfold. Work with families in the communities to raise their quality of life so that they can care for their children and pay for them to go to school.”

He looked at me like I was a heartless bureaucrat, wondering why I couldn’t just be
nice
to orphans? I think he wanted me to tell him how amazing I thought his ideas were. But all I could think was,
Don’t use some African family as an advertisement for your fancy restaurants
.

“Well, isn’t it better than doing nothing?” he asked instead.

I didn’t know how to explain what had taken me years to learn. Similar to the boxes of DVDs and stuffed animals and platform sandals that arrived after the tsunami, his plan could end up doing more harm than good. Powdered milk, for example, was often
sent to help mothers nurse their babies after a disaster, when it was feared that the traumatization would result in an inability to lactate. But mothers mixed the powder with water, water that was contaminated, water that could end up killing the babies. Even liquid formula could be harmful: nutrition experts advocated for breast-feeding in almost all circumstances and rarely gave formula to nursing mothers because when that supply ran out, the mothers—who were no longer producing milk—would feed children rice or other foods that the infants couldn’t digest. Also, cans of liquid formula need to be kept cool, which can be impossible or at least prohibitively expensive in places that are baking deserts, where there isn’t much in the way of refrigeration.

Aid procedures weren’t developed out of a lack of compassion; in fact, they specifically took into account how easily compassion could lead us and people like James astray. Aid workers aren’t just a bunch of people doing the first nice thing that came into their heads. Sympathy was a shortsighted emotion: it told you to make the pain stop
now
, and so you went with the quick fixes. Because you wanted your pain to stop, too: you didn’t want to be someone who stood by, seemingly idle, while human beings suffered.

But aid workers couldn’t afford to be impulsive. People affected by crisis deserved more than just our working on a whim. They deserved the respect that went with providing services based on best practice and thought-out plans. To outsiders like James who wanted
a quick win, we may have appeared callous, but over the years aid organizations had learned the value of foresight and patience, after seeing so many ostensibly well-intentioned initiatives create perverse incentives. The outcomes in those cases could be truly appalling: I’d heard of an agency working in the Central African Republic that inadvertently increased the HIV rate when they provided microcredit loans to HIV-positive mothers. Suddenly women who had previously tested negative for HIV were getting rescreened, and the results were coming back positive. The man who worked on the program was convinced that these women had contracted the disease deliberately, in order to be eligible for the loans. These were knotty issues, and to address them one needed to possess a high tolerance for nuance and ambiguity. In this case, I didn’t think James had it.

“
LOOK, IF YOU WANT TO
do this yourself, it will take a significant investment. Why don’t you help small businesses that already exist grow their own retail operations, help them reach international clients, help them market their own products? Handing stuff out just competes with local vendors and undermines small businesses. A lot of times the cost of shipping this stuff over, paying for clearing customs, and trucking the goods to communities costs more than if you bought things in the local marketplace. Plus that way you put money into the economy.”

“That’s really complicated, though.”

That was exactly the point. Helping people required pinpointing what needed to change, and actually changing it, and both often raised difficult logistical, ethical, and economic issues. James’s handout mission wasn’t going to address these issues and could very possibly interfere with the work of people who were. He may have had a catchy tagline for his project, but aid is more complicated than that. It takes time and it takes an investment. You couldn’t just come up with a good title—you had to actually write the book. Sitting at his granite kitchen counter, I could tell he wasn’t getting it.

“If you want to do something,” I said, “I really think you should find an organization that is good, is working there already, and donate to them. If you want me to help you find some, I can do that.”

“Thanks. I’ll let you know,” he said, as he walked me to the elevator. I never heard from him again.

James’s very human impulse—to help others in need—is centuries old. It became an actual industry in the mid-nineteenth century when a Genevan businessman witnessed the death and dying of forty thousand soldiers in the Battle of Solferino. He returned to Geneva and founded the International Committee for the Red Cross with the mission to provide relief to all those in need, regardless of which side they were
on. But only in the last few decades has aid become an actual profession. The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 is considered a watershed moment for the industry, where it was publicly called out for its chaotic, ad hoc, and poorly coordinated response to the massive refugee crisis that followed. The industry reacted to this extreme criticism by acknowledging its weaknesses and underwent significant reforms, including developing rules and regulations to govern themselves. By the late 1990s, wars were being covered by twenty-four-hour news cycles bringing the world horrific and real-time images of state failures and civil war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. People were moved and through the early 2000s, the size of the humanitarian community increased significantly in terms of its budget, reach, and modes of providing assistance.

Today, the aid world is a highly professionalized industry consisting of large, networked International NGOs, UN agencies, local NGOs, think tanks, consortia, and academic institutions. There are at least eighty different global master’s-level programs focusing on humanitarian and development studies, and hundreds of professional training programs. The aid community resented amateurs, “voluntourists” like James. But when they scorned people like James they were also reassuring themselves, justifying their place in the profession and that what they did
was
a profession. Whenever a dilettante screwed up or revealed his ignorance, it was once again confirmed that experience and master’s degrees were the only ways to be legitimate.
But as self-serving and smug as the critics could be, they were also usually right.

Yet it was easy to point at the flaws within the aid community; certainly I had made many mistakes, and I saw my colleagues and the institutions we worked for make them, too. No one had the perfect answer, the magic bullet. Doing good aid required a time commitment—not a week, not a month, but years. It meant focusing your efforts rather than trying to solve everything at once, and tackling what you could do well. It also meant fessing up to mistakes, learning from them, and sharing them with donors or the general public. Too often we hid behind shiny reports that glossed over the complexities of certain situations and the trouble we might have navigating them.

“No one wants to hear the truth about aid,” a friend who had just come back from assessing an education program in Niger told me that winter. Over several cups of coffee in her Brooklyn apartment, she detailed the problems she’d encountered during the trip. “The donor government spent fifty million dollars of taxpayer money on this education program. You think they want to hear that it went badly?” she asked. Negative press and scathing headlines would follow if it turned out that money had been invested in projects that were poorly administered or proved otherwise ineffective. “The agency spent the money, so they want to be able to report that they spent it well. The office in the country that actually implemented the program, well, they don’t want to look bad, either, so they will
present it as going well, too.” It was one big merry-go-round of denial.

Now that I worked in New York, I saw her point. At headquarters, we relied on reports from the field for much of our information. We trusted the agency staff out there to tell us how it was going, but they were incentivized to report success and cover up or excuse problems. Numbers could be massaged, made to suggest a positive outcome: X amount of money was spent on Y number of buckets, which were distributed, or Z number of teachers, who were trained, these reports would tell us, and everyone would be happy. But rarely did people follow up on the Ys and Zs. What if the buckets had holes in them? Or what if the teacher training program didn’t make a difference in literacy rates of schoolchildren? In the private sector, a bad investment shows up in the numbers: if you lose money, you know, and somebody’s held accountable. But in the aid world, it was hard to see, let alone measure, impact. Our time lines were often too abbreviated to be sure if an investment was bad or good. After the emergency stage came to an end, humanitarians passed the reins to development professionals like my friends in Sierra Leone who would be there longer.

“Who, at the end of the day, is really interested in whether the project went well or not?” my friend asked as she took another gulp of her coffee and looked up with raised eyebrows from her large mug.

“The people who we’re there to help,” I said.

“Yes. Of course, they are. But we don’t really work
like that, do we? I mean, we work
for
them, but at the same time we don’t. Organizations can fire people, and donors can stop giving, but what can the people we help do, if we mess up?”

It was true. Accountability to beneficiaries, to the people actually affected by disasters, didn’t fit into the equation anywhere. As long as donors paid for services, they would have the final say about whether or not the program continued. Although humanitarian actors preached “community participation,” and “ensuring affected voices are heard,” at the end of the day it came down to pleasing donors who kept aid agencies in business. The people receiving the services almost never got a say in what was offered in their communities during an emergency response. “We come with hammers and so we look for nails,” a colleague once admitted. “It doesn’t matter if what we’re seeing are screws, we’re going to find those nails so we can get to work as we know how.”

This isn’t to say that there weren’t very passionate or committed people on the ground. And it’s also not to say that people were actively misusing funds, or spending them with deliberate carelessness or indifference. Although a strong movement to improve quality and accountability was growing and gaining traction within the humanitarian world, there was no getting around the fact that the system was set up so the end user wasn’t in a position to select what he received or to evaluate its benefit.