Panagiotis
gcpetrop79
martsolka
Filed under: Uganda
I left Kampala on the 23rd of January. The plan was to spend a three-day weekend with some colleagues and friends in Murchison National Park (FRI-SUN) and Monday head on off to our respective bases. The ‘twist’ was that right after that I’d be staying up north carrying out a field visit to selected sites and reviewing work, meeting with staff, and doing the whole press-the-ham (no hanging here, only pressed) flesh-gripping and other semi-pornographic ways to talk about shmoozin.’
The trip up to Kamdini, where we would all meet (I was coming from Kampala, and the rest from Gulu and Lira) was uneventful and as usual, dusty, hot and long. I was greeted with the same sights as I normally am. Tired faces on road rehabilitation workers, bored traffic police, congested Kampala roads, and then rolling green hills hiding small Ugandan huts and even more farms and schools. The road rehabilitation has for the most part been undertaken by a Serbian firm (known far and wide for their uh, roads’ quality…?) and because it’s still in a state of I guess… sensitivity, every ten feet there is a speed bump. FOR ABOUT FIFTEEN KILOMETERS. TWICE. Fucking hell. So back to the romantic description of the trip: Lots of people sitting around who should be working looking at me, hepatitis-dripping liver-on-a-sticks being sold from dudes who seem like they’re high, and women peddling sesame balls (they’re like testicles made of sesame seeds without honey. What the fuck?) Finally we met up with everyone else, hopped on into a large 4×4 and headed off towards Murchison.
First order of business? Getting lost. Haha, not a big deal for those in the front seat but for those of us in the back in the bench-seats, time (and our asscheeks) were of the essence. I was trying very hard not to have to ‘take charge’ and ‘make sure’ we ‘get there’ but at some point I had to. “It’s 1700, we have 90 minutes of sun and we are fuck-all away from fuck-else. Let’s invest 5 minutes in knowing where we’re going make sure we get there, shower, and drink. OK? Yeah. Thank you. So we get there with bruised asses. Fantastic place. The Jane Goodall Foundation runs this chimpanzee reserve, with chimp walks and nature hikes (granola not included) and you get to sleep in a dormitory and eat good food and/or drink beer. We had a great time, and it was a totally legit thing, getting to see chimps eat, sleep, fuck, fight, swing and run around on the ground. Amazing. And all this at 15-20 meters distance. Very cool. Cool guides too, they knew everything and were very humble and it showed that they liked their work. So kudos. One of our colleagues had his birthday the second day and so began the first of 9 (yes, nine) times we would sing him happy birthday that day. Awesome. And humiliating. PERFECTION.
We left for Red Chili the next day. Red Chili is the ‘backpacker’s place’ next to the game reserve in Murchison and also next to Murchison Falls. This place was somewhat shitty and the staff all had a fucking stick up their ass. But fuck them; I was there for the lions and elephants. We arrive at the place and go to the outside pagoda/veranda/waterhole place and meet with other friends:
USAID dude wearing Ministry shirt and camo pants with a yellow Obama beanie: check
ICRC Belgian dude with a chip on his shoulder and a caustic attitude: check
Spiffily dressed Londoner ‘back to see the fam in Uganda’: check
Jaded Ugandan working for some clinical organization: check
Our motley crew: check
Later:
Country Director of Very Large NGO (this is important): check
The drinking begins. We haven’t even taken our shit out of the car and I have no way to know which tent is ours, where it is, or where the hell the toilets even are. The other Country Director arrives with a friend of his and an assortment of Pakistani Colonels on leave from the MONUC Congo peacekeeping mission.
Drinking starts. I believe 4-5 happy birthdays are sung in Indian, Greek, Acholi, English, Spanish and Swahili. Oh happy day! All of a sudden the country director dude and one of my colleagues launch into heart-warming renditions of: the sound of music, for he’s a jolly good fellow, besame mucho, and other semi-colonial testaments to falsettos. Spec-TACULAR.
Drinking continues. Heavily. Somewhere we have dinner. We move to around the bonfire and there begins my blackout. At some point I have a conversation with everyone that goes like this:
Everyone to George: “George, you’re an obstinate, foul-mouthed prick and everyone hates you.
George to Everyone: “Ahha! But my fellow country director *NAME WITHHELD* here understands the stress and difficulties that come with my job and why I have to be so reckless and spontaneous when I am up here, in order to take out all my frustrations.”
*NAME WITHELD* to George: Actually George, I think you’re an asshole. Really. I’m with everyone else. <<silence ensues>>
George: “DAMN IT! Fine! I can live with your vile hatred and venomous words. Another fucking beer!”
That was it. I woke up at 0530 ready to go safariing!!! I was still so drunk it took me about 25 minutes to decide whether my contacts were IN my eyes or not. Eventually I had to dig out my contact lens case, realize they were not, and happily put them in while on the barge taking us across the Nile to the game reserve. I thought that it was fucking cool that I was able to take them off and store them properly in the inebriated ass-forward state I was in the night before. But I digress.
The safari starts. This was cool. Buffalo, hartebeests, waterbuck, dick-dicks (I didn’t name them), elephants, giraffes, all kinds of buzzards and birds, crocodiles, hippos, baaaaaaadass! We drove around for about 7 hours. At one point we stopped at some abandoned 70s resort destroyed by Idi Amin’s homeys, and took some Van Halen pictures… They were awesome. Didn’t see lions though.
What wasn’t cool? The tse-tse flies. Those fuckers are as ugly as cockroaches, as bothersome as mosquitoes, and as disgusting as flies. And they HURT when they bite. The inside of our land cruiser became a cemetery for the flies, and the amount of blood that came out of them when we hit them was something I hope I forget about soon.
The night before, the USAID dude had told off the Pakistanis for being too loud in the night (tents, remember?) and some Polish dude wanted to fight with a British colleague because he had heard a lot of American accents the day before and had a chip on his shoulder because the Americans voted in Obama. FUCK YOU POLISH GUY. AND YOUR UGLY GIRLFRIEND AND BALD-BUT-TRYING-TO-HIDE-IT FRIEND. …we’re Greeks.
We went the second day to the falls where I lost my shitty photography virginity. Meaning I was now able to take a picture the way I wanted to in 25 shots or less. Improvement! But I shall continue to do so.
We also tried our hand on some calisthenics, gymnastics and circus tricks. Thanks to the short guy for making me a believer in myself. I originally didn’t believe we could do what he was proposing. But with a little butt-slapping and elbow-grease (good name for a porno that!) we were able to… elevate ourselves. That’s a play on words, by the way.
Fantastic.
The next day we did a little more game driving and fucked off back to our bases. It was back to work time at Gulu base for me but I did manage to make it out to some friends’ birthday party where I proceeded to drink Too Much Red Label On The Rocks while listening to a marine play “Mr. Jones and Me’ on a guitar. Well. Yes, stranger things have happened but I was not there to witness them. This one I was, and so I report it to you here.
I won’t go into the gory details of the party, which isn’t saying there were any. Get it?
I will say that on the day I left for Lira base, 50 or 60 meters from the Gulu base, a coconut or some nut-like ‘fruit’ fell from a tree and as it was dropping to the ground, the hard-top’s left-hand side mirror slammed into it with the force of the vehicle driving, blasting the mirror OUT of the black mirror cup thingie and… into my face. Thankfully, some Japanese dude at Toyota had made this mirror to withstand those dangerous and frequent African nut-drops and so the mirror merely flew at my face and hit my mouth and/or chin, rather than blowing up in a million pieces and cutting my eyelids and cheeks into a million red, small, chaffy-like tender morsels. Thanks Cthulhu!
Lira was amazing. As soon as I got there it was discovered that one of the people I was on the trip with (we had gone back to our respective caves) had malaria AND a parasite. You see, on the way back, before we split up, everyone had the fine idea to have meat on a stick at some stop. Yours truly, cognizant of the dangers inherent in consuming badly roasted dog liver, chose to abstain from this ridiculous venture. Other whiteys chose to partake, and thus paid for their sins. Indeed. Lots of work there, visits to sick babies in nutrition centers, angry phone calls to other parts of the country, dust, sweat, and lots of plumpy nut. Plumpy NUT. PLUMPY nut. It’s just fun to say; how is your plumpy nut?
The next day it was time to return to Kampala. A shitty day, dusty, and with the roadwork continuing, another bumpy ride, and hours of work waiting at the end of the road. Not something to really look forward to, but still, it was with a happy mood that I was going south. A safari, good pictures, and some good work had been accomplished in 7 days of fieldwork. The next four weeks are almost scary compared to the last 4 weeks in terms of work. But that’s cool.
In retrospect I wanted to write a blog that was a little more descriptive but I find myself sometimes having difficulty externalizing my thoughts on things these days. Perhaps I really think too much about the work, and by the time I get around to placing it on paper or the blog it’s just been digested and regurgitated in my head too much. So I hope the above will suffice for now.
Maybe next time I’ll have something more lyrical. Perhaps the pictures will make up for it. Or maybe I’ll decide I just don’t care at all. I’m not sure if this week was good or not. I think it was fun but maybe without any people it would have been better.
Have you ever been on safari? Did you want to comment on that? Well don’t. I have decided that’s the last fucking safari I go on. Safaris suck. Wow look, a fucking warthog. Lame.
I was also going to put pictures on this thing but I can’t even be fucked to make this new mac resize the images. The only computer I know which cuts a picture to 50% size while doubling the file size. Retarded. Jobs, go die. I also hate times new roman. This blog sucks and won’t let me change the fucking thing.
Filed under: Uganda
So there it is. The big day came and went. Obama gave his speech, almost everyone cheered, and every channel in Africa was most certainly tuned into the event, cheering on the first black president of the US. Not too shabby. And, in my view, a nice turn of events with the speech not being too melodramatic or straining to become epochal or ‘epic.’ It was pretty clear what his goals were as well, and it was good to see that they were pretty much in line with… uh, the line that he’s been selling to the US electorate (and the rest of the world) thus far. So we’ll see. Certainly one thing that jumped to my mind, while thinking about all the ‘yes we cans’ and ‘our time is nows’ and all the rest of the circus, was a certain other promise which the Western world has made concerning the amount of expenditure every year on international aid. This was envisioned to reach 0.7% a while back, but still isn’t there in most places. I do hope that Obama and his new administration see an eventual increase in funding for development and emergencies as an integral part of working his new system of renewed international leadership. The US government has a lot of very technically-minded individuals and a lot of very experienced people working in development. With an increase in aid and care taken to make it work and provide some support and traction to poorer countries, I think there could be a huge chance for it to really have an exponential effect on the good name of the US in the world, while at the same time helping those who want to help themselves. Perhaps the tons of money sent over to Iraq to provide 7-ply toilet paper for Halliburton private security guards could now actually be spent fighting cholera, malaria and malnutrition in other parts of the world, where instead of petroleum the only thing you get when you dig are termites.
Looking at the world, taking a step back, as once does (right?), it’s almost comical how pathetic other countries can be sometimes. I won’t name names. But it’s amazing what has happened since Obama won the election. I consider it something close to what happens when you win the lottery. You get lots of aunts and cousins calling you to tell you about their ‘chronic coposis’ syndrome, loser kids and drunk husbands, who would be SO much better if only you could just help them out a little bit. Well, FUCK YOU grandma, kick your son’s ass, lose weight, and stop buying your jack-off husband moonshine, and watch your chronic coposis slowly go away you FUCKING REDNECK (and by FUCKING REDNECK I mean any country hanging off of Obama’s cock and balls, waiting for a handout). All of a sudden, Obama is going to solve everything. There’s about as much of a chance of him ‘helping everyone out’ in 4 years (that’s 1,460 days) as there is of Santa Claus giving every little shit a toy over Christmas. Hmmm… 160 million dollars for the inauguration ceremony. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Wasn’t that how much it was? Something like that anyway.
By the way, I thought thepoem read out was a good one. Nice and contemporary. No daffodils and shorn sheep. Or whatever.
Special note to Bakoyianni, the Foreign Minister of Greece:
Please shut THE FUCK up. No one respects you. Just get back to work. The capital and goodwill you inherited from your husband’s brains being made into fine red mist years ago by someone’s gun are GONE. Stop asking the US to solve your little regional problems. Actually I’m wrong, you’re so obtuse you aren’t even asking for solutions. You’re asking for fucking ‘attention’ like someone’s ignored little redheaded stepchild. There’s a WAR ON IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN so no one really cares about your special little problem with FYROM. Greece spent millions and MILLIONS to get on the security council and pissed it all away playing with itself while embarrassing itself trying to send industrial waste to Sudan, a country it was also aiding in Darfur (only while it was on the SC of course) and fucking at the same time because some jackass in the UN thought the… (wait for it, wait for it!) GREEK delegation there could actually be in charge of the illegal arms embargo on Sudan! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA blow me. Now Greece will be spending a few months anally raping Eastern Europe as the presidency of the OSCE. Hmmm let’s see… Could the FYROM question be something to deal with there? We always get special presents when Greece heads an institution as well, as, I guess ‘growing up’ gifts. For the last presidency of the EU? Why, the US invasion of Aye-Rak! Thanks Dubyah, and go fuck yourself. For the OSCE? Hi Greece, welcome aboard the big boys. Now please solve the Russian gas problem. We should have just canned all the teargas from Athens in December, and sent that in liquid form over to Kiev, where the Ukrainians are busy playing with Europe like a child with an anthill and a magnifying glass. I hope your dad comes spanks you, Europe. Oh wait, dad happens to be… Greece… the presidency of the OSCE. NICE. Which reminds me, are we ever going to have a new EU foreign policy person? This Solana guy has been busy either being irrelevant or ineffective for 15 fucking years. Nice democratic processes Brussels, thanks. I want my MEP taxes back assholes.
Special note to BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7840712.stm
If you read the above article, you will see that Paul Henley states that the Turkish army invaded Cyprus to protect its citizens. What citizens? Cyprus, for the 123359539th time was NOT split between Turkey and Greece like a sandbox, but was its own country. Even though Ankara and Athens wanted to believe it was a sandbox, it’s obvious that very few times were the Cypriots asked how they felt. There were ethnic Turks and ethnic Greeks (as pure as anyone can be in this part of the world… say it with me: We’re all Phoenician-Caucasian hybrids with some Egyptian thrown in) but how many citizens can there have been from Turkey? Should Egypt have invaded as well? I don’t get it. If someone has any light, then let me know. As I understand it, there are a hell of a lot more Turkish citizens since then since there have been a lot of immigrants to the Turkish northern Cyprus. So that’s strange. Mr. Paul Henley, stop the crack.
And now, for your reading pleasure: The most hilarious site I have ever seen:
www.fuckthesouth.com Obviously this is a very, very upset person. Dated, but NOT forgotten!
Filed under: Uganda
The first time I have ever heard a weapon being discharged in my vicinity was at my University in Bradford in the year 2001, shortly after 9/11, where a person whom I would later come to identify as someone working freelance as a ‘private military contractor’ taught our graduating class of young development-minded individuals some basics about personal security while on mission.
The second time came not long after that, in the military when I myself got to train with a variety of assault rifles and pistols under, of course, controlled and standardized safety rules. I admit that it was exciting, informative and special, because of its unique nature.
The third time was somewhat more banal. A shooting range outside Vienna, Austria, where my family and I went for a nice brisk day out in the autumn sunlight to watch people doing skeet shooting.
After that the instances became more uncontrolled and substantially more brutal: an armed attack by Janjaweed militia on the El Fasher market, about 150 meters from where I was watching a movie with Val Kilmer… a rebel wedding in points northwest of North Darfur, and a few other unmentionable times of working in Darfur.
I can understand the difference in sound between a weapon and a firecracker, or a firework, rock quarry or artillery. (I heard artillery in Rhodes, near an artillery training field while in the military.)
Last week, armed men shot at police in the downtown neighborhood of Exarhia, in Athens, seriously wound a 21 year old police officer. Three or four weeks before that, a 41 year old police officer shot and killed a 15 year old child from an affluent part of Athens who happened to be slumming in Exarhia. I guess it gave the boy a feeling of exhilaration to hang out with his boys in parts of town that would make his momma freak out if she knew he was there. It got me thinking that in 2009 we have finally reached a point where working in warzones across the world, from conflict zones to places where one can be kidnapped by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, or be collateral damaged into oblivion by someone’s IED is now not so bad anymore… since one could basically be clipped by some jackass going full-auto down an Athenian residential street. That’s what? 20-25 rounds just ripping into balconies, cars, bushes, benches and who knows? Shop windows, stomachs, baby carriages and taxis. Or my face. It’s a sad and scary thing to think about.
I am not a stranger to gunfire. Though I am thankful the only time a weapon was fired at me it was firing blanks, and in a controlled environment. And I don’t write this as an ode to guns. I write this because I am, in my own mind, justifiably fed up with a bunch of assholes running around trying to play at cops and robbers in Greece. Our population of simpletons can’t find the big blue recycling bins on our street. What the hell makes us think we can find our way out of this slowly ticking time-bomb in which 25 years of neglect by politicians, watchdogs, opposition parties and ‘the Church’ have culminated.
Filed under: Uganda
In humanitarian and developmental aid, there is a big, big problem which is very strongly embedded in the way things are done. It’s the institutionalized for of kickbacks that western donors use to ensure that while their funding envelopes remain fat (perfect for reeling in the ‘central Athens’ crews and bandana-wearing Polytechnic faux-Che-dildos) they can swing the money over the dark continent of Africa (let’s say) like a yo-yo, and when those wretched, tired, malnourished arms rise up to use it as a mechanism to pull themselves up, the yo-yo snaps back into the hands of a western intermediary.
The European Union, the United States, Germany, Italy and many other countries and donors were guilty of this. Their institutionalized guidelines specified rules of origin for where you could buy your equipment, where your staff had to come from, etc. etc. At one time, in a very good book I just read, it says that Italian Cooperation Aid (some of the largest shitheads ever) was up to 95% “yo-yo’ed.” Don’t believe me? Go check out your local Italian NGO. Find any Liberians working there? No? Something easier then: any Dutch people? Canadians? No? Full of bad accents right? Only able to talk about cooking right? Yup. Italians. Not their fault, man! They’re just doing their thing. But they are working for NGOs from Italy, which are very much pressured into hiring Italians by the badly tanned dude himself, Berlusconi, here standing in for that ever-shaky institution we like in Europe to call The Italian Government. I know this because I have been told by people running Italian NGOs that the government keeps tabs (More on this later…). The EU, the US, and other large donors have recently all revised their procurement and staffing guidelines to allow agencies to procure and buy items from any place (within reason) on the planet, if it means that quality and price can be balanced right. A Chevy Blazer is not the vehicle you want in the middle of Africa, if you want to hand it over to a grateful but poor local health directorate. They will run it for 6 months, and when they need spare parts, realize that the closest Chevrolet spare parts dealer is in Des Moines. So fuck that. Maybe Tata, or Toyota, or even some Iranian vehicle is more affordable and a smarter choice. So yes, donors are making headway.
Donors are also realizing that national policies and diplomatic goals driving funding are a bad thing. It’s usually easy to notice, easy to bemoan and slander, and very easy to use in slappin’ them back, especially when you’re from the West. (Poorer countries get to sit in silence if they want to see any aid come in, no matter where or how it’s getting there…) So they are stopping this as well, making sure aid is fair, balanced and accurate… Hmmm
So it seems that all donors are for the most part cleaning up their act. All? No- not all, because just like Asterix’s village, there’s a barbaric, pedestrian, throw-back system still in place for those too bored, immature or savvy enough to be able and play in real development. It even has a name that translates well into English, because it was made a time when its founders wanted to be ‘forward… thinking.’ And so they gave a name to their pain: “Hellenic Aid: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece.”
Go ahead. Say it. Roll it out around your tongue; try it on for size. A tad small, right? Yup. The agency in the Greek MFA responsible for its cooperation activities in humanitarian and developmental aid. Greek codename: ΥΔΑΣ, Υπηρεσία Διεθνούς Αναπτυξιακής Συνεργασίας. Dig it. I worked with them for about two and a half years. At first, I had to run one of their MDM-implemented ‘humanitarian’ projects in the most god-forsaken, complex disaster of the time: Northwest North Darfur. Then I had to run the mission in Darfur with an underfunded, under-supported shitty envelope. Then the real fun began. I had to do the same for ‘humanitarian’ missions in Georgia, Ethiopia and Syria. All this as a desk officer.
When thinking about this blog, I wanted to just bullet-point their fuckups. And admittedly, in the relationship, there were fuckups on my side, from day one I am sure. And I hope one day someone will grab me by the ball sack, bring me to task and point to a sheet of paper saying “Here numb nuts, see that? That’s where you fucked up. Here, here, here, uh- not here, but also here. Oh, and here asshole.” But until then, it’s my turn first; so here goes:
First of all, Hellenic Aid (which I guess fittingly has the word ‘Hell’ in its name) is not run by development experts. Or, if they are there, they are so few and far between that they are lost in the mists of cheaply-bought cigarillo smoke, a rare but increasingly ‘trendy’ tick that our Greek diplomatic corps seems to revel in. The department is run by normal diplomats from the corps, who are assigned to it as their ‘Home Assignment’ after difficult postings like Santiago, Chile, or even worse ones like Vienna, Austria. Unless of course they have a couple of fishing buddies in the parliament, when they just go between Hellenic Aid and other Athens-based departments. That’s for another time. Where was I? Yes. Diplomats. They know… diplomacy… they know… negotiations… they know (AD NAUSEUM) the Cyprus problem. They also know good trattorias in Milan, and have a hell of a way with the written word. They are intelligent, fluid people who have shown this by being promoted through the ranks of the most elitist Greek civil service there is. And I have good friends who are now working their way through it, and would never take away anything from them or the diplomatic academy. And good luck and god bless and may the bedbugs bite. BUT. Do they know OCHA’s actual role in a common pool funding mechanism in relation to cluster-supporting multilateral donor? Do they know the proper focal point in an AU-led military observer base to negotiate checkpoints? Can they seriously say that they as well-versed in the nuances of NGO overhead sharing between HQ and capital level on budget sheets as they are at how to address the deputy cultural attaché of Bulgaria on a dinner function’s invitation? Finally, do they give a shit, when someone like me is trying to explain the above to them regarding a project? The answer is, of course, no. I don’t know diplomacy. I don’t know its intricacies. Reading the IHT is not ‘knowing’ diplomacy. But working in Hellenic Aid apparently is also not ‘knowing’ development. So please whoever staffs this department. Either train the diplomatic corps in one of the great issues of our time: DEVELOPMENT; or get some external consultants to do this for you.
Another issue with Hellenic Aid, which, it must be said, has at times, support and relations with huge European donor mechanisms like ECHO, the EC’s emergency relief support donor, is that Hellenic Aid has an overly facile way to differentiate between emergencies and development (fair enough, those are, basically, the two types of aid) and makes no time for complex emergencies, sustained emergencies, recovery and other forms of ‘post-‘ aid. This is a huge issue and has to deal with funding thresholds as well, and I don’t want to go into it too deep. I respect Greece’s decision to not provide millions of EURO annually for complex emergencies. For example, one year’s programming for a 70-bed field clinic in South Sudan’s Kalma refugee camp which you may have heard of cost Medecins du Monde 1.6 million EURO. The mission was well-run by dedicated humanitarians and provided medical support to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. Darfur was, is and will be considered an emergency, even after all these years, for the types of services needed for the people there. Hellenic Aid continues to this day to provide one hundred thousand EURO as its cap for ‘emergency projects.’ The day of dumping food out the back of a plane has come and left, for most emergencies, I am afraid. And more the same when in order to charter that Antonov, it just cost you 40,000 of those EURO. Yes, I know sometimes the plane is a Greek air force plane but what’s the operating cost for that?
Most donors run projects in places where they can follow up projects either through a dedicated development individual in the country’s embassy, or through an actual office set up regionally or in the country (if the emergency or development needs warrant) called something like “Technical Assistant.” This person helps with the design, implementation, funding and advocacy for your project, and is (usually) deeply committed to seeing it bear fruit, as it is usually their recommendation on your proposal that got you your money for the work. The Greek government runs its projects through the Ambassador (or in rare instances an unfortunate diplomat delegated with the busy Ambassador’s responsibility) in the country. If there is no embassy or consulate, then the closest country. Pray that you have no Greek diplomatic representation. These people do not understand why this program is running, beyond how this program’s existence will affect their relationship with the host country. Sad really, when they expect blowjobs for a 75,000 EURO project to (hmmm for example) buy ambulances (from Greece, of course), and donate them to a Greek Orthodox-run orphanage. Meanwhile, the British ambassador is dumping 3 million EURO into a remote-area communications or water treatment project. I am not saying the ambulance wasn’t needed. I am saying don’t expect blowjobs for it. Get it? These people expect full reporting, on time, on schedule, and perfectly written in Greek. (This assumes all people working in an NGO are Greek. An asinine, facile and childish assumption best dealt with on Teletubbies and not this blog..) They are too scared to visit serious projects (Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia) and don’t give a shit about support these projects because they did not call for them, did not help draft their methodological strategy logical framework for working, and have no vested interest at all in ‘those dusty Bedouins over there…’ One thing I will say on this because it’s amazing and shows the depth of understanding of context, politics, security and NGOs. When asking a Hellenic Aid official who shall of course remain nameless (the name and shame game would only work in Greek and only if I gave a shit who wins the next elections I guess…) why they didn’t have more ‘emergency’ projects in Afghanistan, I was told it was because they couldn’t verify quality or timeliness since there was no diplomatic representation in Kabul. Fair enough. I asked why a fresh-faced, just-out-of-the-diplomatic-academy-and-into-Islamabad coffee-gopher from the nearest embassy (Pakistan), or even one of the Central-Asia-Stans wasn’t sent there, supported by an EU embassy in Kabul, to oversee projects once a quarter or once a semester. The answer was that it is too dangerous, but that the Lt. Col. In charge of the Greek military engineer reconstruction unit in Kabul could do it. I picked my jaw off the floor and asked her, what she thought the fate of the humanitarian worker would be, who has his rural health center construction overseen by someone in a NATO uniform in March, a few weeks after? Did she think they’d be beheaded, shot, stabbed or have a wall dropped on them Taliban style? Maybe I exaggerate but that was the end of that discussion. You cannot argue calculus with a turtle. And you’d feel stupid to even try. That day I suuuure learned my lesson.
I don’t expect any of the above issues to be solved immediately or ever, being part of a department of the Greek civil service which works in an area where mediocrity means failure. Success in aid-work is so uncommon and difficult, it is as rare as a will-o-wisp. But I do expect some heads to pop out of asses regarding the last issue: the entanglement of special interests and the god. damn. church.
Special Interests: Sudan. 2006. Hellenic Aid awards 1.5 million EURO in ‘development’ to a Patra-based fisheries company to ‘develop’ fishing in the Red Sea of the Sudanese port-city of Port Sudan. Is that the burning Sudanese issue? Or is the absolute failure of the Southern Sudan autonomous government to care for its people the developing issues of the day? No no, must be the fish. Meanwhile, the MFA touts 1.5 million in assistance to Sudan for development. But the money went to a Greek private fishing company, which brought Greek fishing boats and all the works. Maybe we even ate some of that mm-mm-GOOD catch in Athens after they brought it back. The Ambassador in Khartoum had trouble looking me in the eye when I was asking for 90,000 EURO to provide health for 100,000 Darfurians at extreme danger to my staff, myself and my assets. Nice.
In other, ‘strategic’ places like (and here I WILL name and shame) Jordan, Georgia, Syria, the Greek government sends money to places like Orthodox-church schools, which then have the funds siphoned into bullshit issues and see fights ensue over priests about which piece of equipment is better, or which sick children ‘deserve’ the aid more, your school or mine. The Greek diplomatic service, like the Sphinx sits silent, alone, and very, very trained, not daring to intervene in fights held by fat, old, ridiculous men in dusty, badly misruled places. Meanwhile, the children and refugees go unaided. Ridiculous, personality-led Greek ‘humanitarian’ agencies (I don’t call these NGOs as there is something suspiciously ‘G’ about them!) appropriate millions of EURO annually for minimal projects, in unnecessary contexts, completely out of sync with the coordinate international donor approach to the area. Small African children are dressed in the traditional ‘Evzone’ dress, paraded in front of a newly-built (but wholly unsustainable) health center, and their picture taken, in order to eventually grace the pages of a shameful, misbegotten and wholly disreputable annual ‘report’ by Hellenic Aid.
Aid should be led by need. Funding should be based on funding availability and project requirements. Projects should be run by specialists, overseen by specialists, and funded by funding specialists. Security and safety for people, goods and beneficiaries should be ensured and enshrined in funding guidelines. Greek NGOs should fight for these rights and privileges. Instead, their staff costs are questioned, security costs not given, and foreign specialists brought in to do the job right bring about Hellenic Aid’s wrath because yet ANOTHER ‘Evropaikes Spoudes’ Cyprus/Turkey specialist wasn’t hired to run a project in Papua New Guinea…
I’m glad I am where I am today. But so far it’s been the show of ‘what not do to.’ I’m looking forward to seeing what the hell you’re supposed to do sometime soon. And when I do, I expect things will be a whole lot clearer.
Fff… I need a beer.
