The Road to Hell (29 page)

Michaud also wrote a letter to InterAction, the NGO consortium complaining that the ad violated the “minimum standards for fundraising solicitations.”

Soon after the first Save the Children ads appeared, the photographer Kevin Carter was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph. Save's executives felt exonerated. They called a staff meeting to gloat. “They just thought that was so sharp of them that they picked out this Pulitzer Prize-winning photo,” Franz recalls.

One of the executives stood up and said, “Just goes to show ya, you just have to go ahead even when you have criticism.” They also announced that there had been a 10 percent increase in phone calls to Save's 800 number since the ad had run. “Nobody talked about the fact that a 10 percent increase in calls didn't mean they were all positive calls. And nobody ever showed me figures that those calls equaled money,” Franz said. (Four months after he won the Pulitzer, photographer Kevin Carter committed suicide. Save continues to use his photograph in its ads.)

The impression still lingers that “your” child is receiving your gifts. Shelby Miller pointed this out in her report: “There continues to be some lack of understanding among sponsored children and their families that the funds raised through sponsorship are pooled for community programs. This has been confounded by the following facts: that there have been no
activities in some communities, that some sponsors send checks and gifts directly to the child, and that the information given to both sponsors and sponsored children's families is not entirely clear. The sponsor is still ‘sold' the concept on the basis of an individual child.”

In 1992, as the staff uprising against president James Bausch went into full swing, the
Washington Post
began an investigation of Save the Children, sparked in part by leaks about Bausch's salary, but Bausch and board chairman Dana Ackerly resigned before the article was published. The story was killed as the new chairman, Najeeb Halaby, former director of the FAA and president of PanAm, ascended to the chairmanship.

The possibility of a negative article sent the organization into a panic, leading many Save staff members to conclude that the organization devotes more energy to repairing its image in the press than it does addressing the concerns that have been raised. One of those most bewildered by the organization's strategy was former board member Michael Dorris. On July 22, as the organization was expecting the Post article to appear, he wrote to board chairman Dana Ackerly, “We should take responsibility for ‘news' about Save the Children, especially if it is potentially damaging, thereby defusing any impression of our being reluctantly ‘exposed'…. If we've made mistakes, let us admit them and go forward.” Dorris was also miffed because he had been asked by Save the Children to talk with the
Post
reporter, writer to writer, to see about getting the story killed.

Three days later, Dorris wrote to the board, protesting the confidential severance package that had been approved for James Bausch. They$225,000 settlement had been approved because Save wanted to avoid the publicity of a potential lawsuit from Bausch, who had grounds to sue for breach of contract. “Having recently seen first-hand the situation in Zimbabwe,” Dorris wrote, “I cannot in good faith agree that it's better to avoid embarrassment or the threats of litigation than to pay for the digging of 9000 new wells in a country on the verge of fatal thirst.” He said that Save “must be scrupulously honest and forthcoming with financial information; to that end, I urge that a full disclosure of any settlement terms be made public.”

Dorris's advice was not taken, and on August 13 he resigned from the board, citing “the non-acknowledgment of past errors of judgment, to a general wariness toward legitimate outside, objective scrutiny of our operation.” Dorris also wrote that he was disturbed by “the fact that my mailings from Westport have contained far more information about procedures (i.e., who one may or may not talk to) than the content of our programs.”

After ignoring Dorris's advice, Save the Children called James Lukaszewski, a corporate public relations commando hired by companies expecting bad publicity over chemical spills, hazardous-substance exposure, faulty and dangerous products, or nasty labor problems. Lukaszewski, whose high-priced consulting firm is based in White Plains, New York, met with Save the Children executives on September 2, 1992, to discuss the
Washington Post
investigation. Among the materials Lukaszewski was given were the three letters from Dorris.

It was through this maelstrom that Charles MacCormack ascended to Save's presidency in 1992 with the clear intention of making changes. His visits to Christian Children's Fund and other organizations were meant to chart a program for the future, and to learn from the “best practices” of other organizations.

CCF, MacCormack noted in his March 15, 1993, memo to the files, was a much more efficient organization than Save. “They have very lean headquarters staffing. Their entire fundraising staff, producing over $100 million in private funding, is seven. This compares with 36 fundraising and public relations employees at Save the Children (58 if one counts the sponsor servers and sponsor fulfillment employees).”
*

MacCormack concluded: “It seems clear that our own sponsorship strategy is flawed from beginning to end. We have to make sure that sponsored children, families and communities have a real stake in the success of our program. As a quid pro quo, we have to make sure that these groups take on much more of the responsibility for administering the sponsorship program at the field level. As a result of this, we can reduce our field office staffing. Finally, we must invest in the systems and the customer service people to make sure that our sponsors know that we are meeting their needs.”

MacCormack's conclusion is probably the only one the administrator of a sponsorship agency could reach. Given a choice of how to spend limited resources, the needs of the sponsors must come before the needs of the children. The survival of the organization depends on it. Fewer staff will work in the field. More staff will be in Westport to keep the sponsors happy. Save will become a much more efficient fund-raising machine. But one, as Shelby Miller said, built on the backs of children.

MacCormack's memo about Christian Children's Fund reflected the fear that Save the Children was in danger of being left behind in the fastchanging world of development charities, where organizations were becoming more professional, businesslike, and streamlined: “Paul McCleary, the CEO of Christian Children's Fund, envisages that, in the next century, there will be a handful of major worldwide relief and development organizations. These organizations will be looked to by government and international organizations because of their professionalism and their worldwide outreach. He considers CARE, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision to have already reached their critical mass. He intends that Christian Children's Fund will be in this key group.”

The pressure is on NGOs to build bigger bureaucracies and improve the proportions on their pie charts, but not necessarily to do better relief and development work; the people working for Save the Children and other organizations in the field feel it. Like Chris Cassidy, they go to the farthest reaches of the globe believing that the organization exists to serve them in their work. They often learn that the opposite is true: They are in the field to fuel the fund-raising machine, to send back the images and information that become the public image of the charity. Their presence in certain places is required to keep the machine working. And oftentimes it appears not to matter that their work is pointless or counterproductive or that their lives are in danger.

*
In fact, Bausch's salary was comparable to that paid to the heads of many NGOs. Bausch honestly, and perhaps foolishly, reported the total value of his salary and benefits package, while many charitable organizations keep actual salaries low for public-relations purposes, and compensate their top staff with cars, housing allowances, and bonuses that don't show up on public documents.

†
Bausch is now the head of the National Charities Information Bureau, which monitors the fund-raising practices and expenditures of U.S. charities. He recuses himself when questions arise about Save the Childrens

*
One of the reasons CCF is so efficient is that they don't put a lot of effort into designing development projects. They are, in effect, purely a fund-raising operation that takes a fixed cut for their own overhead. CCF has had its own ethics problems and been the subject of several critical investigations.

CREATING DEPENDENCY

—Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, 1957

[I]f you are really looking for a way for people to lean on you and to be dependent upon you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.

I
n early March of 1991, just over a month after Siyaad Barre and the remains of his army fled Mogadishu, some 700 Somalis of the Daarood clan crammed into a 60-foot wooden dhow in Kismaayo and set out on a 250-mile journey toward what they thought was safety in Kenya. Some of the refugees had paid as much as $500, an entire life's savings, to board the broken-down boat. Among them were low-level government officials and professionals with their families, men not near enough to power to have stolen large amounts of money, yet too close to escape the vengeance of the surging armies of the revolution. There was one passenger on board who didn't fit this description, Yusuf Abdi Shirdon.

Shirdon had been involved in Somalia's refugee program at the highest levels. Without much effort, he could have taken the food-aid route to riches and a smooth escape from Somalia. By March, most of his former
colleagues, and many of his subordinates, were living in luxury hotels in Nairobi and staking out tables at the city's best restaurants. But Shirdon never took any money. As a result, he was forced to scramble for space on a crowded boat headed for disaster off the Kenyan coast. When the dhow hit a sandbar and began to sink near the town of Malindi, the refugees panicked.

A report by Jane Perlez of the
New York Times
described what happened: “Antonio Carbone, a diving instructor at a beachfront hotel [in Malindi] who was the first to reach the dhow, described a scene of bedlam as people … screamed for help in the darkness. He said he feared his small outboard boat would be overcome with refugees jumping onto it if he got too close. Instead, he threw a rope, rescuing 8 and then 28 people on two trips. He screamed at people, urging them to try to swim 60 yards to a sandbar, from which they could walk to shore.”

Nearly 200 people died in the panic, mostly women and children, who were drowned as men flailed past them toward the shore. People who knew Shirdon guessed that he would have stayed to help as many of the women and children as possible. Shirdon was one of the few men among the dead buried in a mass grave in Kenya.

Between 1993 and 1995,I traveled between Kenya and Somalia looking for people who could tell me something about the abuses of aid in Somalia during the 1980s. Shirdon was the person with whom I most would have wanted to speak. He knew everything about the refugee programs and, most important, he wasn't afraid to talk about it, even when Barre and his secret police ruled Somalia. I looked for other people who had worked with refugees in the hope that with the Barre era over, the people involved in his government would be willing to speak honestly about what they had seen and done.

Early in the process, and quite by chance, I met up with Mohamed Abdi Tarrah, former head of the National Refugee Commission. Tarrah frequented one Nairobi café where former government officials of the Daarood clan met every afternoon for tea and pastry and to exchange news about the anarchy in Somalia. They nodded knowingly at each other as reports about battles among the factions of the rival Hawiye clan arrived every day. The continuing chaos gave them a sense of superiority and buoyed them as they fantasized aloud about returning to power—and most did believe that they would someday rule again in Mogadishu. For that reason, I suspect, they were reluctant to come clean.

The first time I entered the café I recognized Tarrah from several meetings we'd had when I was with USAID a dozen years earlier. He hadn't
changed much; he was gray, bearded, and bald on top and carried himself with slow, confident, and regal air. But now it was all an act. Tarrah was a defeated man. He'd once been rich—among the richest men in Somalia— but he'd also invested most of his aid loot in Mogadishu real estate, villas to rent back to the aid agencies and NGOs. His holdings were in the hands of the
mooryoan
, Aydiid's fighters, who weren't inclined to have any sympathy for him. We chatted amicably until I told him what it was I really wanted to talk about. He paused and suddenly told me he was late for an appointment. We arranged another meeting at the café for the following day. He never showed up. Whenever I was in downtown Nairobi at that time of day, I'd stop by his hangout. If he wasn't there, I'd talk to his friends, and when he was there, he was always rushing away for something or other while inviting me to stop by tomorrow.