If you're not part of the solution, you ARE the problem

(If foreign aid is such a failure, why do we even bother)

It's hard not to feel guilty for our freedoms and comforts, living in a country of relative wealth, where most people have not only what they want, but what they need. What did we do to deserve this life, and how could it all be anything but mere luck of the draw?

And what can we possibly do with this guilt? Lament over the lives of those who live (survive) in a perpetual state of want, with disease, hunger, war and death? We're so removed from that world that it doesn't even seem as if it IS our world, or our problem. In one sense, it's NOT our problem. We have no responsibility over these people or their plights. But in the other sense, all human suffering is our own suffering, and therefore our responsibility.

John Donne said it best when he wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." That sentiment doesn't ring any less true 400 years later.

But what's one person against so much destructive force? And if someone were to have the determination and compassion to want to help, what, they might ask, would be the point? Will their contribution do ANYTHING? Certainly the media spends far more time preaching how foreign aid is failing, than helping.

So why do anything.

And that's just the problem. In a way the incentive is gone, and the endless cynics (not the same as realists) who think they are helping by "informing" us about the "true" state of aid, are really just making it worse, by filling us with horror stories of corruption, waste and misuse of aid, monetary contributions being gobbled up in administration; about how, no matter how much you give, it's never enough, and poverty (with all its side effects: disease, crime), like a plague, continues unabated despite our measly efforts at combatting it.

Who wants to open their cheque books or fight for seemingly lost causes?

When's the last time we heard any of the positive stories, where non-profits were doing even the tiniest measure of good? Where are the stories of success? Where is the insentive to not only help, but to continue to look for solutions? If the UN can't stop genocide, and the Red Cross can't combat AIDS, and UNICEF can't give children an education, what is the point?

MacLeans' main World article this week is the utlimate case in point, titled So Much For Foreign Aid. Its deck: Africa's new curse is a crippling brain drain. Its chief cause: us.

Fabulous. More reasons why we, the wealthy west, despite all efforts of philanthropic, well-meaning and bleeding-hearted NGOs, are still fucking up. Not even fucking up. Making it WORSE.

The main point of the article was that "we" are stealing what few educated professionals are left in Africa and enticing them back to Europe and North America. Not that these people are abandoning their countries (I can't say I blame them. They have every right to seek out and live a life of safety, freedom, health and happiness, and if their own countries can't provide that for them, why should they suffer?), but that we are, for all intents and purposes, stealing them.

It then goes on - as a convoluted sidetrack - to suggest our foreign aid is not only doing nothing to help, but making it worse, by putting money in the hands of greedy, corrupt governments, and perpetuating wars, poverty and disease.

"The money is frittered away by inefficient bureaucrats or finds its way into the bank accounts of kleptomaniac politicans, while the poor remain as desperate as ever."

The author cites two novels to back up his claims, entitled White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, and The Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working.

"The issues that most perpetuate under-development, according to critics to traditional aid, are often actually made worse by aid," he says, going on to call Africa one of the biggest "sinkholes" of foreign aid.

"Aid money not only supports huge bureaucracies but promotes corruption and complacency. Africans are taught to be beggars... it weakens local economies and defeats 'the spirit of entrepreneurship.'"

Makes me want to emotionally wash my hands clean of Africa altogether. Praise to the author, for being one of millions of people tirelessly pointing out the infinite failures of aid, without proposing any solutions.

He presents these huge problems that are seemingly unfixable:

"The British government's Commission for Africa last year suggested that the number of skilled migrants leaving the continent is pretty close to the number of foreign technical experts being sent in as part of international NGO projects or foreign aid packages... A larger homegrown skills base would be beneficial for all sorts of reasons, including lowering dependency on foreign expertise which, as history tells us, does not come value-free."

So what's the solution? Africa can't fix itself on its own. Someone has to facilitate change. Someone has to educate these people, create skilled workers, create trade. But what about the day-to-day issues? Small things like providing wells for safe drinking water, medicine, health-care clinics, school supplies.

I agree that African countries need to fund their own development, and constant infusions of money is a band-aid solution to a complex set of problems many of us really don't understand. But changing the way the continent functions, raising GDP and promoting economic sustainability and the means for self-government, creating health care and education sytems, will not happen overnight, and certainly cannot happen unassisted. And people need the most basic necessities of life - water, medicine, school books in the meantime. Is cutting this kind of basic aid out altogether any kind of solution?

The caption under the main photograph reads, "MONEY FOR NOTHING. Rich countries have spent some US$2.3 trillion in aid over the past 60 years. What has it accomplished?"

That's a good question. And instead of writing a four-page article about how it has done NOTHING, why not write a two-page article on how it's gone to waste, and WHY, and another two pages on ways this money HAS made a difference, and WHY. Because you can't convince me that over SIXTY YEARS every penny has been spent for nought.

"The international community might also take note that efforts to keep countries stable and civil are more critical to the future of a continent like Africa than simply pouring in money. Burundi's real poverty is not simply material but that it persists in being the kind of place that drives out [skilled professionals]."

The author might have a point, but he offers no solutions of any kind, and no indication that anyone else has solutions in mind or in the works. It's irresponsible, one-sided journalism, that offers no hope, and if anything will discourage people from giving any more than they already do.

What HAS foreign aid accomplished? Where are our success stories, and why are they NOT being told?!

Consider...

"Afro-pessimism or afro-optimism? Although the media conveys an image of a poverty-stricken continent overwhelmed by the torments of war, famine and disease, there is a multitude of positive examples of an Africa that is succeeding and concrete evidence of rapidly developing economies." (from the Peace Journalism magazine, January 2007).

Being critical of systems that fail the people they aim to help is, in a way, one step to prompting change. But one step that isn't followed by another goes nowhere. The next step should and must be towards solutions. Because without the incentive to continue looking for more and better ways to help, who will be left with the energy, drive, passion or desire to do ANYTHING?

To truly understand the incredibly complex problem that plagues so many African countries, we need to see how we're not just compounding the situation, but improving it. Without both sides of the picture, we will be uninformed, and our perspective and understanding one-sided and skewed.

And so, for those simple success stories that will make you want to do MORE (not less) to help:

* Red Cross - Family in Sierra Leone expresses gratitude to Canada for bed-net - www.redcross.ca

* Engineers Without Borders - Poverty is not about weakness. For the 800 million people who go hungry each day and the one billion who lack access to clean water, poverty is an absence of opportunity - www.ewb.ca/en/whoweare/index.html

* Water for Life - www.pumpaid.org/

* Council on Foreign Relations - www.cfr.org/index.html

* The Aga Khan Foundation Canada - www.akfc.ca/

("Be the change you want to see in the world")

Thoughts on Nagasaki

It's crazy to me how we as humans bomb the shit out of each other, and then build memorials to remember it and honour the victims. And it's weird how we flock to these memorials and pay fees to enter museums. Why is it that we visit them? Is it out of a sense of obligation to remember the victims? To pay respect to them for their sacrifice? For most of them they were ismply at the wrong place at the wrong time. I think this fills people with a degree of guilt, and perhaps on some level we feel it's our duty to witness their suffering.

I don't know.

Humanity's gruesomenss fascinates and horrifies me. It fascinates me because it seems so unbelievable. Like the idea that dinosaurs once roamed THIS earth... or that babies grow INSIDE us... or that the Universe is infinite, yet possibly EXPANDING. These things boggle me. I can sit and think about those three things and boggle and boggle until the cows come home and never be any less blown away. Contemplating these insane wars has the same effect on me. I look at pictures of Nagasaki after the explosion, and it is nothing more than a steaming rubbish pile. A city reduced to smouldering ashes. And then I imagine what it would be like if that were Vancouver or Toronto. If someone obliterated everything I knew and loved. It's like something out of Terminator, a scene so chilling and apocalyptic that it could only come out of a sci-fi horror movie. And yet it happened. Here. Not during the dark ages. Not in Roman times. We think Gladiator fights and the Crusades were barbaric. When it comes down to it, not much as changed other than the setting.

A single person murders five, and he is a sociopath and deemed unfit to be a part of society. But a nation does the same to another, and it is part of life. It is war. The victims are collateral damage. Can we shrug it off simply because it's always been so, because that's the nature of our world? Mankind's ability to inflict such pain on ITSELF is beyond my comprehension.

It's horrendous to say, but after a while, all the pictures and stories in all these museums start to blur together. From a distance, they are indistinguishable from each other. Washington's Holocaust Museum, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City. I go to these places and marvel and mourn. I force myself to read books like Shake Hands With the Devil because I'm afraid of turning a blind eye to these atrocities. I don't want these people to be forgotten. There will always be things of which I am ignorant, but I never want to be ignorant about these events.

Unlike the museum in Hiroshima, Nagasaki's didn't gloss over the fact that the bombs were dropped without warning. I am not discounting all the horrible things the Japanese did during the war, but the fact of the matter is the Americans were the victors and therefore "in the right" (and vice versa) simply because they had the upper hand: they had a secret weapon. And it's always easy to justify an evil deed after the fact. We live in an ends justify the means world. I mean, isn't that the nature of capitalism? Capitalism is, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex concept, another form of war. But I digress (as I so often do...)

It's scary to think that we have the power to unleash such destruction, that scientists devote their lives not to finding ways to make the world better and safer, but to developing a science that facilitates destruction; that governments actually fund their research and development, and then fund the efforts to prevent other governments from doing the same. And then they fund the wars to sniff these other people out. Instead of expending energy to obliterate nuclear warfare, our top nations are spending money to IMPROVE it. Can't EVERYONE see that this is utter madness?

There was a Truman quote up on a wall wherin he stated that Nagasaki (and undoubtedly Hiroshima) was bombed "in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans." Why were their lives worth more?

On display were several clocks and watches that had been collected from the wreckage of what were once buildings. All stopped at 11:02. It was chilling, and it made me think of how many lives time stood still for at that moment. Forever. 40, 000 souls suspended in one second. I know it's a small number compared to, say, the death toll in the Nazi concentration camps, but each of those numbers was a person. And their only crim was that they were Japanese. They were on the wrong side.

Outside of the museum there was a beautiful park, throughout which were scattered peace statues donated to the City of Nagasaki by various countries from around the world. Tons of mothers cradling babies and doves and that sort of thing. I was pretty surprised to come across (the ugliest one of all) a statue donated by the United States (literally seconds after uttering to Aneke, "Imagine there was one from the States here!"). The nerve! What, was it a consolation prize? Sorry we slaughtered all these people while they were going about their morning activities. Here's a little reminder that peace is the way to go, let's be friends (not like you have a choice), and for next time, don't be so freaking evil.

Then I got to thinking - while digging the beauty of the park and museum - of all the effort that was put towards the museum and garden and park. All this energy and money put towards peace... after the fact. Too late.

It was a Japanese doctor (who died from leukemia after - and as a result of - the bombing) who said, "The person who prays for peace must not hide even an needle, for a person who possesses weapons is not qualified to pray for peace."


Sadly, this is appropriate considering the state of the world right now.

All this hypocricy makes my head spin.