We Meant Well (15 page)

With the sports trend behind us, the ePRT had a firm grasp of what we wanted our woman and her widows to accomplish. On our recommendation, the US government agreed to gift Salina's new NGO $183,420 worth of farm equipment. US policy was that grants over $100,000 needed to be administered by private firms we contracted (“implementing partners”), as the government did not trust its own employees to manage the money. The private firm took the $183,420, lopped off a 38 percent administrative fee, and bought Salina's NGO six greenhouses and three tractors.

The problems began a few days later when Salina wanted to return the tractors. A local gang had told her if she did not give them the tractors they would kill her. Salina dispatched the tractors to the protection of another thug, a sheik from her own tribe, for safekeeping. It was at this point we learned Salina had never legally formed the NGO that she said she had and to which the US government, through a contractor for a 38 percent fee, had given the goods. So now it was unclear who technically owned the tractors, which were in any case in the hands of the sheik. It was also unclear how many US and Iraqi laws had been violated, but in the meantime it was the ePRT's task to recover the tractors.

Getting the tractors back involved what we called muscular diplomacy. Our implementing partner used some of its 38 percent fee money to hire a group of rough boys to repo the vehicles from the sheik. On try number one, weapons were drawn and our crew had to back off. Try number two went a little better, with no weapons, only a little pushing and shoving. Finally, on try number three, our boys got the tractors and put them into US-paid storage. We wanted to give the tractors to another NGO, but the implementing partner was not sure that was legal. We paid the rent while the partner's expensive lawyers in Washington tried to resolve the issue. We might still be paying.

After the tractor project imploded, our ag adviser wanted something simple to work on. An Iraqi organization arose in Babil that provided beekeeping in a box; just add money and the group would set up some beekeepers. Even though the scheme cost over $1,600 per setup and one could hope to earn only about $200 a year from the harvested honey, we liked these bee projects because they were easy. The organization had worked with other ePRTs and knew our system better than we did. They recommended our ag adviser configure his project as “Beekeeping for Widows.” This would make Embassy approval more likely as “_____ for Widows” scored points on the economic-capacity-building Line of Effort, the help-for-vulnerable-populations Line of Effort (widows), and the help-for-women Line of Effort (widows again, but it counted).

The organization told our adviser that he could get fifteen beekeeping sets for just under $25,000, another plus in that the Embassy could approve such microprojects without having to go through Washington. And so we proceeded to enrich fifteen widows out of the thirty million people who lived in Iraq. A few weeks and a lot of paperwork later, the Embassy approved the money (you just can't miss with widows). It was only at this point that our project touched the ground in Iraq. Prior to this, it had existed primarily within the confines of the Embassy and our imagination.

We had not seen any reason to involve the Iraqis, though we should have, because it turned out widows were not as keen to keep bees as we thought, showing roughly the same enthusiasm as they had for short skirts. Several organizations claimed to have no widows available for us, but under pressure from the Embassy to start the initiative, we finally reached Selma, the go-to person for widows, the godfather of husbandless women. She was one Iraqi woman, but she was also an NGO and had made a lot of money working with the US military and the ePRT, acting as a kind of broker between our need for widows, our money, and said widows. For a small administrative fee, her NGO would locate fifteen suitable candidates without us having to drive around and look for them. Within a few days, copies of the national ID cards of fifteen widows were e-mailed to us (Iraq has few, if any, fax machines, because there are few, if any, landline phones left working).

Happy with our lineup, we found it easy to stare past the dour faces on the ID cards and reimagine our widows happily keeping bees. When we tried to contact them, however, it turned out none of the cell numbers worked. This could have meant they did not exist and Selma was planning to take the money and buzz away, but luckily Selma contacted them for us. Bad news: the widows wanted us to pay for taxis to take them to the training, or they would refuse to keep the bees. Our project was thus again in danger of failure. We had no money allotted in the paperwork to pay for taxi rides and would have to resubmit the whole thing to the Embassy to have it added. The widows dug in their heels (said Selma; we were never able to contact them directly) and refused to accept beekeeping gear free of charge. We did not have any extra widows to give the stuff to. We felt boxed in, knowing the Embassy expected us to make things work and would not let us get out of the deal. An interesting note: To prevent the hive from flying away and relocating, the queen bee is locked in a special cage deep within the wooden box the bees live in. She cannot escape her hive. She is forced to simply stay there whether she wants to or not—not unlike us, or even the widows—and try to make things work.

Chicken Shit

Agriculture was what we really focused on in our rural area. Whether it was sheep, bees, or a milk-collection center, the goal was always to lift up the local economy and provide jobs that gave people an alternative to terrorism. The next front in our farm war would be chicken.

Very few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my reconstruction of Iraq. Like learning that Baghdad produced eight thousand tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into. I would also invite the former President along to visit a chicken-processing plant built with your tax dollars and overseen by my ePRT. We really bought into the chicken idea and spent like drunken sailors on shore leave to prove it. In this case, the price was $2.58 million for the facility.

The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers. When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased twenty-five chickens that morning specifically to kill for us. This was good news, a 100 percent jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.

The first step in Iraqi chicken killing was remarkably old. The plant had a small window, actually the single window in the whole place, that faced toward a parking lot and, way beyond that, Mecca. A sad, skinny man pulled a chicken out of a wire cage, showed it the parking lot, and then cut off its head. The man continued to grab, point, and cut twenty-five times. Soon twenty-five heads accumulated at his feet. The sharply bright red blood began to pool on the floor, floating the heads. It was enough to turn you vegan on the spot, swearing never to eat anything substantive enough to cast a shadow. The slasher did not appear to like or dislike his work. He looked bored. I kept expecting him to pull a carny sideshow grin or wave a chicken head at us, but he killed the chickens and then walked out. This appeared to be the extent of his job.

Once the executioner was done, the few other workers present started up the chicken-processing machinery, a long traveling belt with hooks to transport the chickens to and through the various processing stations, like the ultimate adventure ride. But instead of passing Cinderella's castle and Tomorrowland, the tramway stopped at the boiler, the defeatherer, and the leg saw. First, it paused in front of an employee who took a dead chicken and hung it by its feet on a hook, launching it on its journey to the next station, where it was sprayed with pressurized steam. This loosened the feathers before the belt transported the carcasses to spinning brushes, like a car wash, that knocked the feathers off. Fluff and chicken water flew everywhere. One employee stood nearby picking up the birds knocked by the brushes to the floor. The man was showered with water and had feathers stuck to his beard. The tramway then guided the chickens up and over to the foot-cutting station, which generated a lot of bone dust, making breathing in the area unpleasant. The feet continued on the tramway sans torso, ultimately to be plucked off and thrown away by another man who got out of bed knowing that was what he would do with his day. The carcass itself fell into a large stainless steel tub, where someone with a long knife gutted it, slid the entrails down a drain hole, and pushed the body over to the final station, where a worker wrapped it in plastic. The process overall sounded like something from Satan's kitchen, grinding, squeaking, and squealing in a helluva racket.

According to our press release, the key to the project was “market research which indicated Iraqis would be willing to pay a premium for fresh, halal-certified chicken, a market distinct from the cheaper imported frozen chicken found on Iraqi store shelves.” The only problem was that no one actually did any market research. In 2010, most Iraqis ate frozen chicken imported from Brazil. Those crafty Brazilians at least labeled the chicken as halal, and you could buy a kilo of the stuff for about 2,200 dinars ($1.88). Because Iraq did not grow whatever chickens ate, feed had to be imported, raising the price of local chicken. A live bird in the market went for about 3,000 dinars, while chicken from our plant, where we had to pay for the feed plus the workers and who knew what else, cost over 4,000 dinars, more than the already expensive live variety and almost double the price of cheap frozen imports. With the fresh-chicken niche market satisfied by the live birds you killed yourself at home and our processed chicken too expensive, our poultry plant stayed idle; it could not afford to process any chicken. There was no unfulfilled market for the fresh halal birds we processed. Nobody seemed to have checked into this before we laid out our $2.58 million.

The US Department of Agriculture representative from Baghdad visiting the plant with us said the solution was to spend more money: $20,000 to pay a contractor to get license plates for the four Hyundai trucks outside in the parking lot facing Mecca. Our initial grant did not include licensing the vehicles we bought. The trucks, he hoped, would someday transport chicken to somewhere there might be an actual market. Another Embassy colleague repeated the line that the plant was designed to create jobs in an area of chronic unemployment, which was good news for the chicken slasher but otherwise not much help. If employment was indeed the goal, why have an automated plant with the tramway of chicken death? Instead, fifty guys doing all the work by hand seemed like a better idea. A chubby third Embassy person who came to the plant for the day, huffing and puffing in body armor, said the goal was to put more protein into the food chain, which might have been an argument for a tofu factory or a White Castle.

How many PRT staff members does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to hire a contractor who fails to complete the job and two to write the press release in the dark. We measured the impact of our projects by their effect on us, not by their effect on the Iraqis.
Output
was the word missing from the vocabulary of developing Iraq. Everything was measured only by what we put in—dollars spent, hours committed, people engaged, bees pressed on widows, press releases written. One team leader noted, “Numbers are at times more explicative than words. Being successful in Iraq often was consequent to the number of times ePRT members could have a hands-on approach to their work. Team Leader alone has been on 170 missions since January.” The poultry plant had a “business plan,” but it did not mention where or how the chickens would be marketed, assuming blindly that if the plant produced chickens people would buy them—a poultry
Field of Dreams
. Without a focus on a measurable goal beyond a ribbon cutting, details such as how to sell cold-storage goods in an area without refrigeration fell through the cracks. We had failed to “form the base of a pyramid that creates the possibility of a top,” the point of successful development work.
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The plant's business plan also talked about “an aggressive advertising campaign” using TV and radio, with the modern mechanized chicken processing, not the products per se, as the focus. This was a terrific idea in a country where most people shopped at open-air roadside markets, bargaining for the day's foodstuffs. With a per capita income of only $2,000, Iraq was hardly a place where TV ads would be the way to sell luxury chicken priced at double the competition. In a college business class, this plan would get a C− (it was nicely typed). Once someone told the professor that $2.58 million had already been spent on it, the grade might drop to a D.

I located a report on the poultry industry from June 2008 by the
Inma
Agribusiness Program, part of the United States Agency for International Development (and so named for the Arabic word for “growth”). The report's conclusion, available before we built our plant, was that several factors made investment in the Iraqi fresh-poultry industry a high-risk operation.

1. Lack of a functional cold chain in order to sell fresh chicken meat rather than live chickens;