An Epiphany.....

A few years a go when I was working in West Africa, a friend of mine, Luca, invited me out to lunch with a few of his friends that had just returned from Bangui, Central African Republic. If you know a little about Africa, you probably know almost nothing about this place. If you know a lot about Africa, you still probably know very little about this place. The Central African Republic is landlocked, has a population of pygmies and is largely a subsistence agricultural nation. As per the CIA World Factbook...

The former French colony of Ubangi-Shari became the Central African Republic upon independence in 1960. After three tumultuous decades of misrule - mostly by military governments - civilian rule was established in 1993 and lasted for one decade. President Ange-Felix PATASSE's civilian government was plagued by unrest, and in March 2003 he was deposed in a military coup led by General Francois BOZIZE, who has since established a transitional government. Though the government has the tacit support of civil society groups and the main parties, a wide field of affiliated and independent candidates will contest the municipal, legislative, and presidential elections scheduled for February 2005. The government still does not fully control the countryside, where pockets of lawlessness persist.

The problem with the country is that there are periodic flare-ups of civil unrest and as I understand it, at least at that time, several years ago, there was an ongoing civil war.

So my friend, Luca, these young and enthusiastic workers for the United Nations and I sat down to lunch. I was very much looking forward to hearing their experiences in the wilds of the Central African Republic [CAR]. So, my questions came fast and furious and they answered them with the enthusiasm and aplomb that I expected.

I learned that they worked for a refugee agency at the UN [as I recall now]. I think that it is UNHCR and their role was too assist the refugees in the civil war there to live more comfortable and healthier lives. And this was way out in the boonies of the CAR. So I asked them about their day-to-day lives out in wilds of the jungle. They laughed. They explained to me that since there was a military curfew and since the site was more than 12 hours away from Bangui, CAR, that they never got to the site....in the whole 6 weeks that they were in CAR.

Hmmmm. I thought about this. So I asked, "What did you do for the 6 weeks that you were there?" They told me that thy spent the 6 weeks in the hotel, bored out of their skulls, watching TV, drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, swimming, sunbathing and just generally doing what 25 year olds do when they are bored and cooped up in such a place. So, these dedicated enthusiastic bunch of people, spent 6 weeks in some hotel, partying on the UN's dime, without doing an iota to help the people in Africa that were in desperate need of assistance, probably starving to death and dying of all kinds of awful jungle diseases. And believe me all of this is not cheap. The half-dozen-or-so UN employees get their 1st class [actually not first class as we know it, 1st class there, but never-the-less, not cheap] hotel accommodation paid for and a daily stipend that could keep any of us fat, happy and liquored up for quite a period of time. And why did the UN sent these kids to do a job if it was obvious that they could never get to the site? Isn't someone that sits around at the UN and asks in these civil-war torn places like CAR, can the aid get to the people? I guess no-one did the calculus or no-one really cared.

Then I had an epiphany. It struck me like a ton of bricks. We don't really assist Africa since they need it, in this case they never received the assistance. We do all of this and hire our young sons and daughters to go on adventures to exotic places and party. We do this for ourselves so we can feel like we are doing something altruistic. We give money to the needy but it is spent on useless boondoggles for our children! So that they can come home one day, they can say that they did something for the oppressed and needy of the world and they can tell all kinds of exotic stories to their friends and family and we can fawn all over them and tell them that we were so worried while they faced the dangers of wild Africa.

I quit my job in West Africa later that year. I will never again work for a multilateral aid institution.