The Road to Hell Page 2

  He learns, however, that the populace has adapted itself to sightlessness. When he speaks of “seeing,” they think he is mad. They have no windows in their houses and prefer to work at night, when it is cooler. Quickly the mountaineer learns that the king of the blind is “a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.” In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man can’t see.

  For the following twelve months I struggled to survive. I was the one who learned to raise and slaughter chickens, grow vegetables, plant cassava. I learned how to live on a diet consisting primarily of maize and beans in various forms. I learned how to shower with a bucket of cold water and cut the chiggers out of my feet with a Swiss Army knife. I learned to speak Swahili and spent my mornings with the old men at a local tea shop listening to stories about the past. These old men viewed me as a curiosity. It never occurred to them that I could bring anything of value to the village.

  There were a few people who thought I could, however. A few men in the village had Land Rovers and lived in large stone houses: the local administrative chief, the preacher, the school headmaster. These men had brought me to the village. Later I learned that they had paid someone in the ministry of education some large bribes to get me there. (I was told this when I hiked to a neighboring village that had lost the bribe war.) It was their idea that a white teacher would help attract more students, school fees, and donations to the school. Which I did. (The local pastor was devastated to learn that I was a Jew. He had planned on my active participation in church services and fund-raisers. The headmaster looked at the bright side and confided to me that his biggest fear had been that the Peace Corps would send them a black teacher.) They raised money to build more classrooms. But when the shipments of cement and stone blocks arrived, the headmaster and his buddies carted them away at night and built additions to their own houses and expanded their shops in the market.

  These were the people who benefited most from my presence in the village; they were educated, Westernized, and living lives far removed from most of the people in the village. They knew how to manipulate the system that ran on foreign aid. They knew how to get a piece of every contract or public project in the area. It was disheartening, and I complained about it loudly when I traveled to the town of Meru on the weekends and joined with other expatriates at the Pig and Whistle Hotel or at the Meru Sports Club. Unlike the mountaineer in Wells’s story, I had a support group to remind me where I came from.

  Back in the village, I learned to go with the flow and enjoy myself. I dropped any pretenses that I had anything to offer. I stopped trying to help and began to observe. And I learned some important lessons about economic development. I learned to respect people for what they did. People usually do things for good reasons, even though it might not be immediately apparent to outsiders.

  The relevance of Wells’s story continued to resonate with me. The more time I spent in the village the more aware I became of the connection between the desire to enlighten, to do development work, and the desire to rule. It was difficult to sit back and watch the village leaders taking money from the farmers who worked so hard to pay their children’s school fees. Yet the only thing I could have done would have been to get involved politically, to take power, to lead, ultimately to rule. (Indeed, several teachers at the school wanted me to become headmaster.) Earlier missionaries had delivered enlightenment as the word of God and had paved the way for political and economic domination from Europe. We were delivering enlightenment in the form of Western culture dressed up as education and development. Like the missionaries, we could not know what would follow.

  When my Peace Corps term was up I wanted to stay in Kenya, so I went to Nairobi looking for work. I’d heard that Catholic Relief Services was looking for a Peace Corps volunteer to roam the country starting food-for-work projects. I went to the CRS office and met a smiling man named Jack Matthews. Matthews told me long stories about his work in Korea and India. He then told me that CRS had received a $900,000 grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to start food-for-work projects around the country. Whoever got the job would be given an apartment in Nairobi, a Land Cruiser, and instructions to drive around the country starting projects. Of course I was interested. Kenya is one of the world’s uniquely beautiful places. Few people had the money to spend a year in a four-wheel-drive truck exploring its most remote regions. I asked Matthews what I had to do to get the job.

  He told me that he wanted the Peace Corps director to make the choice. The new director had only been in the country a short while and knew very few of the volunteers. When I walked into her office that afternoon, it was the first time I had ever seen her. She immediately told me that she didn’t feel right choosing from a group of volunteers she didn’t know. So I told her that Matthews wanted to hire me; all she had to do was phone him and say it was okay with her. I had the job that afternoon.

  I moved into a beautiful garden apartment in a nice neighborhood in Nairobi. My first day on the job I drove home in a brand-new Land Cruiser. In the morning I drove to my office to figure out ways to give away bags of rice that were already enroute to Kenya from a port in Texas. Meanwhile, CRS notified the country’s parish priests and government officials that this rice was available. All they had to do to receive it was fill out a one-page application describing their proposed project and specifying the number of “recipients”—the number of the project’s workers who would receive sacks of rice in exchange for their labor. Hundreds of applications were submitted.

  I took some of the USAID money and customized the Land Cruiser, adding extra-large fuel tanks and a really nice stereo system, and then I set off across Kenya to inspect the proposed projects. It was a dream come true. I was getting paid to cross one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. I was so awestruck by my own good luck that sometimes I’d stop in the middle of a huge empty wilderness, or beside a herd of giraffes or elephants, and just yelp with delight.

  I was having so much fun running around starting food-for-work projects—water projects, agriculture projects, forestry projects—that I completely overlooked the most obvious problem: I knew nothing about agriculture, forestry, road building, well digging, dam building, or any of the projects I was approving. But nobody seemed to care. Only once did anyone in authority at CRS ever go and look at a project. When I’d return to Nairobi every few weeks, my boss, who let me work completely unsupervised, had only one question: How many more recipients did you sign on? More recipients meant more government grant money, which meant we could buy more vehicles and hire more assistants.

  When I slowed down for a moment to consider what was happening, it became clear: Aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. Groups like CRS are paid by the U.S. government to give away surplus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food CRS gave away, the more money they received from the government to administer the handouts. Since the securing of grant money is the primary goal, aid organizations rarely meet a development project they don’t like.

  All of this came into greater focus one morning at an office meeting. We were discussing a famine situation that was developing in Turkana in northwestern Kenya. I had recently returned from the area, where I’d been looking into doing some food-for-work projects. I wasn’t very optimistic about succeeding in my efforts, since many of the people were too weak to work and it would be difficult to demand that some people dig holes and move rocks while others were getting food for doing nothing. A young woman who worked for CRS at the time and who was my immediate supervisor conceded my point but said we had to find some way to establish a program in the region. “We have to take advantage of this famine to expand our regular program,” she insisted.

  For her, and the organization, famine was a growth opportunity. Whatever the original intentions, aid programs had become an end in themselves. Hungry people were potential clients to be preyed upon in the same way hair replacement companies se
ek out bald people.

  As ignorant as I was about development projects, there was no shortage of donors willing to hand over cash for me to spend for them. Within a few months additional funds were made available for the food-for-work projects. I now had money to buy pipes and cement and apparatus. I came up with an idea: to travel the deserts of northern Kenya drilling wells and setting up windmills to pump water. That, I had learned, was appropriate technology. Appropriate technology was all the rage. It meant anything but high technology, things that didn’t run on electricity or require a lot of maintenance. There was money available for appropriate technology. It made donors* eyes light up. So I secured funds to purchase some windmills from a company in the American Midwest, as well as an electronic device that could be used to locate underground sources of water. I’d read some books about how people can dig deep wells by hand; we’d use food-for-work for that. And for places where they couldn’t be hand dug, I’d use a not-yet-purchased portable drilling rig that I could drag around behind my Land Cruiser. I’d be the Johnny Appleseed of water. Soon the nomads in northern and eastern Kenya would be drinking clean water and taking showers.

  As I was getting excited about the project, a friend suggested that I talk with an American named Andrew Clarke, who lived near Nanyuki to the north of Mount Kenya. Clarke had drilled some wells in his day and knew lots about Kenya’s dry frontier areas. I went to see Clarke on his ranch and told him about my plans. I expected him to be excited. Instead, he told me to sit down.

  He took out a pencil and drew a small circle in the center of a sheet of paper. “This is the desert,” he said, waving his hand across the whole sheet of paper. Then he pointed to the circle: “Here is your well. During the rainy season this well will provide extra water for the nomads. It will allow them to have bigger herds. When the dry season comes, the nomads will begin to migrate toward your well or any permanent source of water. They will arrive with larger herds and begin to denude the land closest to the well. Soon they’ll have to wander farther and farther from the well to find food.”

  He drew a large circle around the first circle. “Cows must eat and drink water every day. As soon as it’s more than a day’s walk from the water to the grass, the cows will die.” He drew a third, larger circle around the other two. “Goats and sheep can go several days without water, but as soon as the food is consumed for a two-day radius from the water, the goats and sheep will die.” He drew a fourth large circle around the other three. “And then there’s the camels. The camels can go days without drinking water, but soon the walk will be too great for them. And when the camels die, the people die.”

  This was not a hypothetical scenario, Clarke explained. It had happened, and was still happening. Aid organizations were coming in and giving water to nomads, the gift of life, and it was killing them.

  Then he asked me if I’d seen the windmill on the road to Moyale. I had. In northern Kenya just below the border with Ethiopia, beside a road, was a windmill tower crumpled like an aluminum can. The windmill apparatus lay on the ground. Clarke told me that some well-intentioned missionaries had ordered a top-of-the-line windmill apparatus from the United States and had hauled it to northern Kenya, where they proceeded to build the tower from local materials, held together with Kenyan-made bolts. Attracted by the water, a community gathered and prospered. After some time, the heavy-duty American apparatus began to weigh upon the flimsy Kenyan structure. The bolts sheared and the tower crumbled in the wind. The community disintegrated, and Clarke had heard that some members had died before they were able to find a place to relocate.

  “You can put a water system in a community,” he warned me, “but then you’ll have to be there all the time as a policeman. You’ll have to make rules: People can drink from the wells but animals can’t. You won’t really be able to explain to the people why their cattle can’t drink from the water. For them, their herds are everything. A man’s wealth and status is dependent on the size of his herd. So he won’t understand why you’re standing between his cattle and the water. Is that really what you want to do? The water will make you responsible for the community. And that’s not why you came here.”

  Clarke had successfully soured my plans, but more important, he taught me to ask questions about so-called development projects. I still could have gone and drilled wells across the countryside. No one would have stopped me. I could even have gotten substantial grant money to do it. There was no one watchdogging the development business. There was no central authority curbing the ambitions of young people like myself. With my English degree and suburban upbringing and white skin, I could walk into an African village and throw money and bags of food around. I could do anything I pleased. I had, admittedly, enjoyed the feeling of power. Suddenly it scared me.

  If my project created a disaster, no one outside of the village would ever hold me accountable. The missionaries who erected that windmill near Moyale, and other aid workers who bring destruction to communities, are probably still running around doing their “development” work in remote villages from where news of their failures will never emerge.

  Kenya was a wonderful place to work and it attracted thousands of aid workers. The place was crawling with them. Aid organizations competed with each other for grant money and projects. Kenya’s politicians loved it. They could give aid projects as gifts to their supporters. They weren’t about to start asking tough questions or demanding long-term environmental impact statements. No one questioned the idea of aid. It was as if the good intentions alone were sufficient to redeem even the most horrific of aid-generated disasters.

  This book is about aid and charity—aid and charity as an industry, as religion, as a self-serving system that sacrifices its own practitioners and intended beneficiaries in order that it may survive and grow. Much of this book is centered in Somalia, but it draws on my experiences with aid organizations over nineteen years around Africa: in places such as Kenya, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Like most people in the United States and Western Europe, I’ve heard the pleas of aid organizations and boasts of their accomplishments in the Third World, but the Africa I know today is in much worse shape than it was when I first arrived. The futures of Africa’s children are less hopeful than ever before. The countries that received the most aid—Somalia, Liberia, and Zaire—have slid into virtual anarchy. Another large recipient, Kenya, inflicts unspeakable abuses of human rights on their own citizens while aid pays the bills.

  In Africa, the people who are supposed to benefit from aid see what is happening. They hear foreigners talking about development, but they know development was a colonial policy. Development was a policy of subjugation. When colonials came ashore, they didn’t say, “We’re here to steal your land and take your resources and employ your people to clean our toilets and guard our big houses.” They said, “We’re here to help you.” And then they went and took their land and resources and hired their people to clean their toilets. And now here come the aid workers, who move into the big colonial houses and ride in high cars above the squalor, all the while insisting they’ve come to help.

  As in colonial times, the foreigners employ an elite cadre of locals to carry out their work. The elites are rewarded for their relationships with the foreigners. They enjoy higher pay than most. They have access to foreign goods, education and visas to foreign countries. And, just as in colonial times, the foreigners use this elite as their link to the rest of the population. They are regarded as the voice of the people and employed to speak on their behalf. In reality, however, the elite, with their vested interests in the system, tell the foreigners exactly what they want to hear: The system is good; the system works.

  Thus affirmed, the aid establishment moves forward, as the colonial one did, ignorant of the widening rift between them and the supposed recipients of their beneficence.

  In 1981, I left Kenya to take a job with USAID in Somalia. I knew little of what was going on in Somalia except that perhaps a million and
a half refugees had entered the country fleeing the Ogaden war in Ethiopia. The world was mobilizing to help. I thought it was a good opportunity to try something new and get a fresh start in a different country. Alert to the corrupt and politicized aid business in Kenya, I felt ready to deal with the situation in Somalia.

  I had learned to view development aid with skepticism, a skill I had hoped to put to good use to help ensure that aid projects, at worst, didn’t hurt people. But Somalia added a whole new dimension to my view of the aid business. My experience there made me see that aid could be worse than incompetent and inadvertently destructive. It could be positively evil.

  LAND CRUISERS

  —Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

  Charity creates a multitude of sins.

  The town of Baidoa in southwestern Somalia, it seems, will forever be called “the city formerly known as the City of Death.” Did workers attached the City of Death label during the famine of 1992. Before that, Baidoa wasn’t really known as anything. It was a dusty little market town in the center of Somalia’s agricultural region where nomads would exchange camels and milk for grains, cooking oil, cloth, and other items. In early 1991, after the government of dictator Mohamed Siyaad Barre was overthrown, Baidoa became a battleground, an arena of spectacular brutality. The dictator’s retreating armies fled through the region, looting and killing as they passed, wrecking everything they couldn’t carry off. They made a special point of pillaging farmers’ traditional underground food stores in an effort to halt the advance of the pursuing forces of the United Somali Congress, who nonetheless managed to find more to loot and destroy. Before it was over, the armies would pass through the region four times, achieving monumental levels of destruction.