Travel to, in, and around under-developed countries can be part of the adventure if that's how you look at it... and you should look at it that way if you want to get around without going nuts.
* At any hour day or night there are a couple thousand people standing in front of the entrances to the Dhaka airport. They are waiting at the two, maybe three open doors. The doors are guarded by armed men in uniform, and people wait peacefully for a very long time. As I head toward the building I put on my best confused-foreigner face and walk over to one of the soldiers.
"Where's the VIP entrance?" I ask. He says "a thousand" because there is no VIP entrance. I tell him the going rate is five hundred, and the nearest door becomes a VIP entrance. Everyone stands aside for us. After I go through the scanner (which works, by the way), I find my soldier standing near the men's room. I follow him in, take a urinal next to him, and discreetly hand him 500 taka (about $6, as I recall).
Then I head for the registration desk. I survey the line-- which always looks like every passenger on the flight is already there and waiting-- and an airline employee comes to greet me. "You are in business class? Right this way, please."
"No, I am not in business class."
"Right this way, please."
I have moved from my car to the gate in 20 minutes after skipping past literally almost every other passenger in the airport.
* Flying from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, required a couple connections. There was a good chance we'd lose our luggage, I thought, so I was attentive as we checked in. Three guys got together to type in whatever was required to print the tags, and as they did so they talked about how much they should ask me to pay. Fortunately, they were speaking Russian instead of Kyrgyz so I learned the airline was going to charge $150 for excess luggage.
I told them I was worried about losing a bag and appreciated that all of them were working together to help me. I said "valuable to me." They selected one fellow to discuss it with me, and I got in first with the thought that $100 would be fair compensation for them even though problems in Kuala Lumpur or wherever would be beyond their control because all they could do was "put PNH on the tags".
At the plane, the three of them made sure all of our bags were properly tagged and loaded as I hung back at the stairs. I said good bye as to an old friend and, shaking hands, put a fresh Benjamin in his palm.
* Flying in Kazakhstan in the early '90s meant trying not to think about the plane's maintenance history and going through a bit of theater to get a ticket.
There were always a few guys in black leather jackets standing around in the ticket office. You go up to the counter and tell the clerk where you want to go and when. Use a loud voice so the jackets can hear you. The clerk says there are no tickets so you ask about the next day. No tickets, she'd tell you. When you turn around one of the guys would approach you and offer to get you on a plane. You agree on a price and bring cash when he meets you shortly before boarding. He walks you across the tarmac to the plane, and you pay him. This was my routine for a couple years.
One day I got to the plane and the stewardess pointed me to the right, to the rear of the small plane, to the luggage compartment, and into the luggage compartment. OK. I pushed a couple bags aside and sat down. Lots of leg room, soft-sided luggage to recline on, and a crate of apples; I thought this was going to be the most comfortable flight I'd ever had in the former Soviet Union.
Alas, it was not to be. She soon called to me and showed me to one of the hard, small seats. Apparently the pilot had not been cut in on the ticket sale so we had to wait until he counted his passengers and settled into the cockpit.
* A couple years later a flight from Almaty to somewhere was seriously overbooked. The increasingly irate passengers crowded around the ticket counter. Rather than deal with the problem of some paying passengers being left behind, the airline staff decided not to decide and simply boarded the people in the VIP lounge and sent the flight off with 3 or 4 passengers and about 40 empty seats. After this story spread through my little circle, I and every expat I knew routinely paid the $25 to sit in the lounge as some assurance we'd get on the plane.
* Airport arrival halls in Africa might be anything from as modern as anywhere in the world to a table in a dusty patch between the trees.
In Juba, South Sudan, it is a concrete box about the size of two two-car garages. The passengers are herded into one half-- all of the passengers, big plane or small-- and nothing happens until every one of them is in there. At one end of this half is a visa desk where the documents you got at their embassy in Nairobi will be rejected. In the other half your bags are piled up.
In between is a sort of concrete bench. It's about two feet high and two feet wide, and it runs the length of the garage. A few customs officers are standing on the other side. You point to your bags, and they get them, put them on the bench, and open them up. There is no real purpose to this. When they are done you climb over the bench, grab your bags, and head for the door behind the luggage pile.
Other than the door you came in, this is the only door, and there is only one window. As many as 200 people are sweating in an unventilated concrete box, and the 100 degree air outside feels genuinely cool when you break free.
* Local taxis in these countries are usually reliable. Most are just a man with a car looking to make a few bucks. You just wave them down. It always helps to know how much rides cost, but usually they are fair enough with their pricing (except Turks and Indians). I crossed from DRC to Rwanda on foot often enough that I knew to walk to a petrol station just down the road and I'd find somebody willing to drive me the few hours to the capital for $50.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, traffic is appalling so I chose to ride in a tuk-tuk rather than a car because a tuk-tuk can get through narrow gaps. I knew the fare should be about 17 or 18,000 shillings so I gave him twenty and said thanks. He insisted on giving me change. I'd never seen this anywhere except Japan. The next day it happened again with a different guy.
It was rickshaws in Dhaka. Traffic is awful there, too, but rickshaws are able to weave through pretty well. The trouble is that no driver knows any street names (which are numbers) so you have to give directions. This was the only thing I ever learned to say in Bangla, but for my daily commute, I didn't need to show off my command of the language-- they knew where to go. Every one of the dozens of drivers in the line at the bridge knew where my office and apartment were. That ride would cost a local maybe 20 or 30 taka but I paid 100 because I simply felt bad about paying only 20 cents. One day as we started out and rolled past the rest of the line, one of the other drivers shouted to my guy "you win the lottery today!"
I had a regular rickshaw driver in Phnom Penh, and I never knew if he could speak or hear. He looked to be over 80 years old and under 80 pounds. If there had been even the slightest hint of a hill in that city we never would have made it unless he and I traded seats. In any case, the passenger sits in the front of a Cambodian rickshaw, called a cyclo, and you just wave when you need to turn. I did that for him the first time and only the first time. Every day thereafter, in the morning and in the evening, he would be there waiting for me. In front of the house in the morning, in front of the office at the end of the day, my cyclo guy was there. I learned later that cyclo drivers rent them each day (presumably from some parasitic member of the mayor's family) and that my grateful one-way fare paid his day's rent.
* Customs and passport control can be absolutely anything in under-developed countries. Usually it's not good. The best one can hope for is very slow (though one time on entering Bosnia from Serbia and continuing on into Croatia along the Adriatic coast, there was no border control at all-- each country had buildings and gates at the border, but there were no people at any of the eight border posts-- so we just drove on through.)
Most of the time 'not good' means benign, simply bureaucratic or clumsy, but when it means bad it is capricious and arbitrary. I was refused exit from Kazakhstan in 1995 because, the guard said, my registration was from a different city than where the airport is. Years later I was refused entry into Tajikistan even though I had all the papers because a cousin of a guy I had fired worked at the Foreign Ministry, and he had changed the records in their system.
* Driving in these countries is often on bad roads, as one might expect, though sometimes, in the places I worked there were no roads at all.
In one of my Africa programs we worked in villages. Over five years I rode in 4WD vehicles over the roads you used to see on National Geographic specials: washed out sections, little bridges made of fallen tree trunks, deep ruts carved by months of rain, and animals. In eastern DRC, north of Lake Kivu, we came around a curve and there were 6 or 8 baboons just sitting in the road. Another curve and ten more. I stopped counting at about 40. In Rwanda, on the road near the picturesque tea plantations, I saw at least a couple monkeys every time.
Turkmenistan is a big sandy desert with five cities around the edges. You could fly in modern planes for ridiculously low prices (it was like $25 or something), but I always avoid flying when I can so I told my local manager that we should drive across. The prospect of a 7 or 8 hour drive didn't appeal to him at all, but he humored me because he already wondered about my soundness of mind. (I had written a letter to the president of the country to ask where he bought his ties-- very nice, unique Turkmen design-- which got him a visit from the police to ask if his foreigner was serious and got me a free tie.) So we drove. We saw the centuries old fortress city of Merv (which neither he nor the driver knew existed) and an elegant, dramatic, and very old cemetery. And we saw the road most of the time; it was covered by sand dunes in many places-- and the sand was usually a smoother ride anyway-- but as long we kept the road in sight we knew we were on course.
Food is a lot of what I remember most. In Rumbek, South Sudan, we stayed in a guarded compound with plain food so I would buy a goat for the camp cook from some villagers while on the road. In Ukraine we worked with farmers so in spring I bought a lamb or two. In Bosnia we helped the association of fish farmers so I'd often stop at a trout farm in the Neretva River. The dried mushrooms in US groceries come from the ex-Yugoslavia so fresh morels, porcini, and others were always available. I was served a big plate of grilled quail in Uzbekistan. For lunch at Chernobyl they served mushrooms-- though I'd read somewhere that mushrooms from high radiation areas are to be avoided. On Sundays in Bishkek one local grocery had whole beef tenderloin at about $3 a pound. On a visit to western Kazakhstan, during the early days, I gave a ziploc bag to someone and in exchange she filled my ziploc bag with fresh caviar.
* On that drive through the desert of Turkmenistan I had a bag of cookies with me, but about halfway across we saw a little... hut, I guess you'd call it, with a Coca Cola sign. Nothing but sand in every direction as far as you could see, but there it was. We stopped for lunch.
The hut was made of some tarp, the old Coke sign, and other debris. Inside were a couple small tables and a few stools. What would you like, the waiter asked. Well, what do you have, I asked. "Fish," he replied.
"Naturally," I said. "I'll have the fish, please, and a Coke."
Honest to God it was the best fish I have ever had. Big pieces, like two inch cubes, very lightly breaded and fried perfectly, moist and flavorful. I had a second helping. Years later, at a very fancy place in Delhi, my wife had some expensive turbot that was about the same.
* Bangladesh is a dry country so I'd go to a speakeasy called The Diplomat. Discreet sign with just one overhead light and a policeman standing at the door. Looking foreign, I'd say 'good evening' and he'd open the door.
It's a dive. Perhaps when it opened thirty or forty years ago it was OK, but it hadn't been cleaned since. Smokey to the touch. The food was OK. Only men inside-- not even any hookers, now that I think about it. So one night I took a couple guys there, and it was full. No worries, I told the manager, we'll stand at the bar. Two minutes later he said a table was ready. He'd basically told somebody to give up their table for us. An American who tips.
You can also get a drink at most restaurants there. Just naively order a beer, and the waiter will explain that they have none, and then you tell him not to worry. He'll say "you will take care of it?" and you say of course by which you mean that if anybody raises a stink or a cop shows up (neither of which ever happens), you will say you brought it with you. The waiter brings you a cold can of Hunter, which is the beer brewed by the army of this, I remind you, dry country.
* There was a roadside place in Georgia. It was dark and I couldn't see clearly. The only light came from the embers of the small cast iron grills at each table. It was winter so the windows and doors of the cafe were all closed. I don't read Georgian, but I believe the sign said "The Carbon-monoxide Grill". I took a seat near the door and was happy every time it opened with a cold blast of air. Their only item was meat you grill over your fire.
Meat on a skewer is almost everywhere available and almost always good. In Malawi I asked my local guy where we should go to get some, and he took me to the bus station. The "station" was just a big parking lot around which many grills were blazing away. Over at one end of the lot was where you got pretty good fries. Women brought home-made empanada-like things to the 100 or so customers sitting on empty milk cartons. Beer guys too. The buses were coming and going. In Kigali the place is called "Car Wash" because during the day it's a car wash.
Somewhere in the DRC we pulled off an almost over-grown road onto an almost non-existent road, and I smelled nyama choma, roast meat. "Probably mbuzi," I thought. I like roast goat. Almost half of my local staff was already there. It was my custom to buy lunch.
In Kosovo we were in a small town and a little restaurant smelled right, but the women in our team refused to go in. This place was a real dump, even smokier than most, and the customers were all swarthy Balkan men. The ladies missed out-- in addition to the roast lamb and warm-from-the-oven bread, they served a fresh salad as beautifully presented as in any white tablecloth restaurant anywhere.
M'banza-Kongo, Angola, is a very small town, more of a big village, near nowhere, and my little hotel's restaurant tried hard but had awful food. Two blocks away, however, was a Portuguese restaurant as nice as any restaurant in Manhattan and a patisserie that would look good in Paris. I swear to God. I had to jump over an open sewer to get to them across the street (just like Paris!), but it was more than worth it.
In Cambodia, as you might know, some people eat crickets and spiders-- fried crickets and fire roasted spiders. The body of the preferred spider is almost the size of a golf ball. I was walking through the market one day, and an old guy offered me charred spiders in a stick, and when I declined he assumed I preferred fresh so he turned to let me look into his basket of dozens of live ones. They also do the "100 year old egg". You bury an egg for a long time and eat it when you remember where it is. This is also on my no list, but in a restaurant I ordered some kind of soup and thought it was a slice of mushroom. The white of the egg had turned to a light brown plastic and the yolk had dried and some of it stuck onto the brown white like the underside of a mushroom. Fortunately, Cambodia is a cold beer country and there was a big bottle of Tiger right next to me.
People ... oh, the people. This is where the difference lies. One on one the people I've met are just like people anywhere else; nice guys and jerks, hard working and lazy, honest and not. People are people everywhere. Societies are a different matter.
* Bangladesh has a lot of problems. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, and despite some large foreign investment in a few industries, it has little hope of any real improvement. That said, at the retail level it's exemplary because the people are friendly and helpful. I had a preferred Bangladesh money changer simply because he was always pleasant and welcoming. I got prescriptions filled over there, and the pharmacists would run-- literally run-- to other pharmacies to find what I needed if they didn't have it.
Similarly, in Romania, a former police state, I asked a policeman where I could change money and, as expected, he said "wait here" and went to get some currency for me (he had loads because he spent most of the day taking small bribes and so he needed the more stable dollars). He gave me a perfectly fair rate. And in Ukraine, some thugs in at the train station were my go-to money changers-- open crime in a dysfunctional economy but helpful and pleasant guys. In Uzbekistan our money changer was a nice woman at the bazar. With currency controls, black market rates are always worth it.
* People are always curious about America. It was a bit of a surprise for me to learn that many have a very limited knowledge of the world. Many have lots of misconceptions about the US-- it's an easy life and everyone has a great income on the one hand, and on the other a belief that crime is everywhere and blacks are all criminals (or near-slaves). Mostly, though, they have no idea what it's like to be in a society where everything works.
At a party one evening a woman asked me about a TV show, "Rescue 911" with William Shatner. She wanted to know if it was actual reality. I'd never seen it but told her the stories were real with bits often recreated with actors to make it a better TV show. I'd misunderstood her question. She said "your ambulances are better equipped than our hospitals."
* I encountered virtually none of the resentment some of my countrymen seem to expect. A few friends who haven't traveled much seem to believe anti-American sentiment is a daily thing. In 30 years, it was maybe two or three times, that's all. In fact it's far, far more likely people will defer to the tall, white, American man.
* It's the expatriate development workers who are usually the difficult ones to deal with. Sometimes it's a simple lack of quality or even seriousness.
There are low expectations, I suppose, of Peace Corps volunteers, but the staff can be awful too. There were volunteers when I was there who left the country for two or three months at a time, and the office didn't even know it. After I went to my post-- as the first and for a while only PCV in that city-- and I didn't hear from the office for 91 days. I counted.
In bigger aid projects I found similar failings. I took over a very troubled lending program in Armenia and found that my predecessor was not only incompetent but had approved loans to farms he had invested in.
In Bukavu, DRC, there is one good hotel-- a very nice one, lakeside, owned by two old Belgian queens with a world class orchid garden-- and one day a helicopter landed to drop off the commander of UN forces for lunch. "Somebody thinks he's important," I thought, but I later learned that the town's very rough main street had actually been in good shape until the UN tanks started using it. International development programs get mixed reviews, but the UN is pretty generally hated.
Local staff can also make problems. A multi-country program I led was largely an ethnic reconciliation program; the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and others were bloody wars between tribes. Our country directors were women focused on helping women who'd suffered through it, and as it turned out, they each focused their efforts only on women of their own tribes. (And my truly incompetent and self-serving state-side boss had never suspected a thing. When my team turned the lights on, it was quite the scandal.)
Government is government. It's the same everywhere-- bureaucracy, pointlessness, and incompetence-- different only in style and specifics.
* This scene happened over and over: We needed some kind of imprimatur, for a bank account or a phone line or something. I sat and laid out my request and reasoning. Refusal, as expected, so I explained from another angle. He fully understood but replied "we use documents not logic."
So then I show our papers from the ministries that give papers to organizations like mine, and the local clerks point out that the papers were issued by the Ministry of Something Else, and that this is a different office, you see, so you'll need this other permission first which you get by applying to someone who isn't here right now for a different certificate that you, as a foreigner, can't have.
* Documents need an official stamp, they told me in our office, so I made a simple design like the ones I'd seen. "The KGB did not approve your stamp," our director told me. (It wasn't called the KGB anymore but everyone still did.) I found this decision mildly amusing because they were the ones who had said I had to have one. I assumed they didn't want a foreigner to have a little rubber stamp after all, but I was wrong. They had rejected it because my design was round (like every stamp I'd seen) and round is reserved for government officials. So I redid my stamp as an octagon.
* US embassies are no better. The American staff is in almost every case lazy. I wish I could make a better, fuller description, but 'lazy' is simply accurate. In 30 years I have never once seen an embassy employee put forth much effort on anything. The only thing that gets them even remotely animated is making a power point in which they try to justify their funding. I can count on one hand the number of people that struck me as capable. The rest are cousins of the people at the DMV but with an undeserved sense of nobility of purpose and pseudo-sophistication.
In some countries there is an "American Club" associated with the embassy. It is an oasis of suburbia, like the club house and pool at a big condo complex. Visiting, one gets a very 'I wonder what the poor people are doing today' vibe-- a colonial feeling for people who say that hate colonialism. Embassy staff go there, they say, to relax, but it's mostly a place to avoid handling life in a strange and challenging place where nobody speaks English. Typically these clubs have some of the worst food in the country.
"Host country national" is government talk for the embassy's local employees. In my experience, most HCNs are well intentioned and bright. They'd like to see US resources help their country, but every single one I've worked with was in over his head. They're smart enough but thoroughly unqualified. Hired years ago mostly because they spoke English well, they have learned how to "work" by watching embassy people.
* USAID is usually in the embassy building but often times it seems as though the staff thinks of itself as somehow apart from the US government. It's like they feel they have a higher purpose, beyond politics, beyond borders even.
In fact, it is nothing more than a large government contracting office. They don't actually do "development". Indeed, there is shocking ignorance of what makes good development work. All they know about the activities they fund is what people like me tell them (and my HQ bosses want me to make it all sound good even when it's not). Theirs are daily efforts to justify the funding and ask for more.
Here's my worst story: The important one from Washington came to see things. He was important enough that my stateside boss came over to walk around with him. On the first night I'd arranged a dinner with our local partners. He got drunk. The next night he had dinner with our government counterparts. He got drunk. I wasn't out with him the next night, but he got drunk. The next morning he couldn't leave his hotel and canceled the meeting with my (his) team. As we drove him to the airport he dictated a complete revision of every aspect of the program (simply voiding by fiat our contract and a range of procurement regulations), and my boss just nodded along. She said to me "we'll get our integrity back next year." I walked.
Development projects do help the people we reach.
* The first quarterly reports I wrote became a topic in a training HQ had arranged for us. A former USAID guy led the training and said that my reports were complete, readable, accurate, and nothing at all like what the embassy wanted to see. He said they wanted to read that the activities they were paying for were effecting significant, long term improvements in the country.
My reply, which I kept to myself at the time but have repeated many times since, was that if all it took to fix the problems in the XXX sector was to send me out there with a few million dollars, then somebody would've fixed it a long time ago. Foreign aid cannot change the recipient country, and everybody knows it. Officially, USAID thinks otherwise.
* Societies are different from one another because of what people do, and what people do is governed society's rules. The rules and norms of society and how they are enforced determine a society's outcomes-- is it prosperous or poor, pluralist or restrictive, free or oppressive?
'Economic institutions' is the name we give to the formal legal rules (laws and regulations) and the informal social norms (customs and tradition) that govern individual behavior in a society and how these 'rules of the game' are enforced.
Douglas North, a Nobel economist, wrote that these "institutions form the incentive structure of a society and so they are the underlying determinant of economic performance. Time, as it relates to economic and societal change, is the dimension in which people's learning shapes the way institutions evolve. That is, the beliefs held by individuals, groups, and societies determine their choices, and these beliefs are a consequence of learning through time-- not just the span of an individual's life or of a generation but the learning that is cumulative and passed on intergenerationally by the culture of a society."
Intergenerationally is a long time.
What I did was lead programs in under-developed countries, programs intended to improve organizations and systems in key sectors and industries, increase incomes among the very poor, or address health & nutrition issues.
* Foreign aid works like this. In Washington they decide how much taxpayer money should go to which country. This is mostly but not entirely a political decision. US relations with recipient countries as they are or as we wish them to be play into the decision along with any number of other considerations and influences. These other influences can be as significant as continued massive US funding of efforts to curtail HIV worldwide and as simple as aid to Armenia year after year because when Senator Bob Dole was a wounded soldier in WWII his nurse was Armenian.
Meanwhile, in the embassies they decide on development priorities in general categories such as economic development, health, education, democracy & governance. Only God knows how these decisions are made.
When the budget is known and the development priorities set, the contracting office issues a request for proposals. This is a long document that basically asks something like "if we give you $20 million to work on the agriculture sector over here for four years, what would you do?" Organizations in the US which specialize in this respond with their plans. These Washington based organizations are often called "beltway bandits" because over 2/3 of the money will be spent in the US.
A very important part of the proposal is information about who will do the work. Projects succeed or fail almost entirely due to their leadership, and USAID wants to approve the person for this critical position. The vetted individual almost never accepts the job. The whole process takes months, and by then the guy has already found a new job somewhere else. So the company goes to the pile of CVs they've gathered and starts calling around to see who's available and willing to go wherever it is.
I was in Bishkek when I got a phone call. The guy said "Good news, Jon, we got the award in Cambodia." As far as I could recall I hadn't applied for a job in Cambodia and had never heard of this company. These are things I would've remembered. Anyway, he asked me if I could get on a plane by the weekend. He was serious; this is how it's done sometimes. I had my family with me so it was a full two weeks before we flew.
* Starting a project is not for everyone. It is basically me and (maybe) a couple other HQ people flying in, looking for an office, hiring staff, and all that. It's a busy and potentially chaotic period. When I went to western Ukraine, I was alone and knew no one. To pay for things the company wired some money, and I walked out of the bank with $20,000 in cash and simply got started. To that point, my only contact with my new HQ had been a couple phone calls and several emails. (A good reputation is important in job hunting.)
* While all of this is happening, my family and I have arrived in the new country. We need a place to live, a school, furniture, dishes and spoons, and a reliable guy with a rickshaw. It can be an interesting life or a nightmare-- it all depends on your attitude. It was always very important to me to be with my family and, thank God, they enjoyed our nomadic life.
We had been in Uzbekistan for two years, and my contract was up for renewal. There are nice Korean restaurants in Tashkent and a good golf course so I wanted to stay, but it's a big decision so I asked what they wanted. "It's been two years, time to move!" So I took a job in Armenia.
* The projects themselves rely on local staff. These are the people who actually do the work. It's no trouble to find qualified people; our projects offer good wages, excellent working conditions, and reliable employment for several years. Applicants are multi-lingual, educated, and experienced; they can find jobs easily, though maybe not as nice, but they usually want to do something to improve their countries so they've chosen development work.
The challenge is to motivate them to apply themselves and do the job well. This is often difficult; very often these are not people accustomed to putting in extra effort. There can also be glaring gaps in their education and knowledge. I always included support for professional development in the budgets and workplans, and I was continuously disappointed at how few people took advantage.
Too often their output is not impressive, and we have to devote more resources than should be necessary to get something done. Very often the people I look to hire have worked on a similar project earlier, and this can be good-- contacts, core knowledge-- but it can be bad when they believe they can simply skate along-- "the foreigners come and go, we always remain". The few good ones you manage to find are pure gold.
* While the projects run for a few years, we get our participants only for a few months before we enroll new ones. Every project needs to generate numbers-- we measure everything-- and no number means more than the number of warm bodies we put in front of our trainers and experts.
This is reasonable enough, I guess, because this stuff costs a lot of money, but while funders spend time and money trying to measure how well something works and specify what type of intervention works best, usually the info gathered is only used to justify funding. Evaluations are only very rarely the learning tool they are intended to be.
To be sure, there is always a good deal of attention given to the content and quality of the training (and counseling, guidance, 'technical assistance', and all the other labels we put on our activities), but not once have I seen a decision maker acknowledge the single most critical factor in determining success.
* The critical factor is time. It is not the content of the training, but the participant's sustained interaction with the project that brings the result. Think about it: if we spend huge amounts of money to bring a certain result, we had damned well better see some kind of measurable, positive outcome whatever it is we're doing. But this data won't tell us why we got the outcome.
Of course, we already know why. Everybody knows why because everybody "develops" in their lives. There is no secret, nothing to be uncovered by repeated surveys. These programs are simply lengthy, well executed efforts to guide individual development toward certain preferred outcomes.
* It is said that people don't change but this just isn't true. Each of us changes a few times throughout our lives as our views shift in the course of experience and life-changing events. It's called 'transformative learning', and this transformation can arise out of a single traumatic event or over a few months of sustained exposure to information and experiences which bring new perspectives-- a serious illness, going off to college, becoming a parent, or the old joke about a conservative being a liberal who was mugged by reality.
Adults have a body of experience-- associations, concepts, values, feelings, conditioned responses-- which defines our world. Development work is an effort to effect a change in this frame of reference among people in societies in which unproductive associations, concepts, values, et al, are prevalent.
Several studies have found that an ordered and structured transformative learning program can guide and speed the uptake of more productive behavior as the learner makes decisions in a different way after shifting his or her view of society and their place in it.
This sort of change is what development work is intended to achieve, though most development workers don't know it and might even object if they did. (There's a fair amount of kumbaya feeling toward these charming brown people among expat dev workers. "No society is better, they're just different" is a line I've heard a lot, and it's total crap.)
* In the development business we call this "life skills". We are not telling them to make different decisions. We are not trying to tell them to do anything at all. We are asking them to think about what they do and think about it from some different perspectives-- for example, the village woman who fetches water every morning should recognize that hers is not simply the woman's role, but rather it is productive and valuable labor just like the valuable and productive labor of anyone else.
We also show them new ways of doing things-- such as a small plot of land planted with a crop unusual in their area. Over 3 or 4 months they experience the process involved in getting a result so they can judge for themselves whether to try it or not. It is a combination of teaching, discussion, demonstration, and experiential learning.
Whether they plant the new crop or not is secondary to the adoption of a new way of looking at it all. But whether they plant it or not is what we measure and is what the funder rewards.
* To help people make this sort of transformation, your first step is to find people who want to. Usually, projects do this with some kind of incentive. We almost never pay people to come, but there must be some kind of short-term value for them because participation can require a lot of their time. (Often these projects focus on women, and this makes the question of time especially critical. Women still have to do all the things they have always done for their families in addition to attending our activities. In the business we call this "time poverty" and we try not to add to it too much.)
Anyway, you do workshops of 15-20 people in which a peer leads discussions about realistic situations and optional reactions and responses. The meetings run an hour or so, once a week for several months. It was always gratifying to see attendance hold up over time; with very few drop-outs, I reasoned, we must be doing something useful.
Indeed, I am convinced that this sort of development activity is the most effective. In one project I helped design, I inserted a life skills program that ultimately reached over 700,000 families. Add in my other programs, and the number is certainly over a million.
* US tax payers paid for most of this.
Surveys often show very little support for "foreign aid" among voters and I certainly agree that a lot of money is wasted or misdirected (did my earlier comments about government hint at this?), but the truth is that foreign aid is less than 1% of federal spending. That's still a very large amount of money-- and a lot of waste-- but it's worth it. That HIV program I mentioned has saved over 25 million lives in its 21 years. (I was part of that for a year or two.)
And, in truth, Americans support foreign aid. Private giving for overseas charity is actually bigger than the amount spent via the government, and together this amounts to far more than aid than from any other country (even as a percent of GDP despite what UN reports tell you). Helping people who need it is a core American value.
It's the wasteful part and the sending it to the wrong country part that people object to. A couple decades ago a senator objected to foreign aid. When he called it "the rat-hole of foreign aid", he was referring to many of the recipient countries and their not always pro-American governments. The political decisions about who gets how much weren't going his way.
Though I made a career in foreign aid, I can't completely disagree with him. It's a lot of money being distributed by government officials with often conflicting motivations in a complicated, multi-faceted global environment to organizations of well-intentioned people with their own often conflicting motivations working in places where things don't often work very well on a good day.
Given this, one can be forgiven for thinking it's a blessing we get anything at all done. OK, maybe it's not that bad. In fact, it's been a good career and a good way of life.
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