The Road to Hell (9 page)

As they started the long walk across the tarmac to the arrivals building, it seemed like a mile away. Thick heat radiated from the sun-baked tar. The fatigue of a 12,000-mile nearly nonstop journey made their knees weak and left them feeling vaguely ill. Tone held the baby tightly as Chris scanned the crowd for a friendly face, someone to reach out and take some luggage and welcome him to Somalia. Each of the other passengers walked toward a Somali face, a warm glance, and a promise of efficient passage. Chris looked around nervously as he led his young family toward the sign that read Arrivals. The faces of the Somali fixers all looked familiar. He
looked into their eyes hoping that one of them was there to meet him. There was no one.

Some years earlier, someone had described the Mogadishu airport to Cassidy as being like carnivale in Rio, except there's nothing to drink and there's no parade, just mass chaos. He remembered that now as the crowds and confusion thickened around him and sweat began to run down his forehead and into his eyes.

Inside the terminal the Cassidys struggled to produce passports. The baby stirred in his mother's arms. Cassidy kept looking for help but there was none.

“
Subax wanaagsan
,” he said, remembering a bit of Somali. Good morning. The official was unimpressed. Another family of foreigners coming; and this one is alone.

Vultures instinctively know how to work airports. Customs officials pounce like moonies or Hare Krishnas, delighted to find these people so close to the edge of despair and so ready to obey orders.

Tone held the baby while Chris wrestled with the luggage. Then a voice called out: “Chris.” Cassidy looked up and saw a Somali he recognized from his days at USAID. The man waved and smiled, but Chris couldn't remember his name. Ali or Abdi or something. It didn't matter. The man was still working for USAID, fixing things at the airport. The Cassidys were rescued.

C
assidy was already disappointed in his new employer. He was no cowboy Peace Corps volunteer any more. He'd done that. He'd slept in sand crawling with scorpions. This time he had come with his family. His family. The concept was new to him, but he reveled in it. He was a man with his family. One kid now but Chris had plans for more kids, as many as he could have. His wife never expressed an opinion on this. But Cassidy was a man with traditional—some would say regressive—family values. He was the man. He would make the decisions and he would take care of the family as best he could. For now, Save the Children would have to help him. He had uprooted his family because the agency had said they needed someone like him to run an agricultural project for refugees from Ethiopia. They were being resettled on an irrigation project on the coast south of Mogadishu, in Qorioley. Cassidy had gone to Cal Poly and studied production agriculture. He'd gone to the Nobel Institute and the University of Oslo in Norway to study socialist development strategies. He was convinced that Somalia was a socialist state struggling to cope with Western capitalist development
strategies. He'd done every damn thing he could. He was state of the art. He was a professional man with a family, and he expected to be treated like one. And he was prepared to take the project on, grow food, turn the refugees into highly productive farmers. That's what he was hired to do. They'd flown him all the way over here, but it was only luck that had gotten him through the trial of the airport. What other unexpected things awaited him?

A
fter Oslo, Cassidy had returned to Cal Poly to teach and to look at other career options. There was plenty of work in Somalia, and Cassidy could afford to be choosy. The U.S. government had offered him a position in Erigavo, northern Somalia, but there was rebel activity in that area, making it an unsuitable place to raise his young family. Then Save the Children called.

“I was a sucker,” Cassidy says about his decision to work for Save the Children. “Save the Children. What more could a bleeding heart liberal religious person want? I thought that the agency stood for promoting the health development and welfare of children. I bought that one hook, line, and sinker. I didn't realize it was a fucking government contracting business, you know, a bunch of cutthroat back-stabbing, selfish, greedy sons of bitches living off the fat of the establishment on the east coast of the U.S.”

In May 1985, with his pregnant wife in California, he went to Westport, Connecticut, for three days of interviews. “They had an agriculture office and had agriculture people there, but I had just come from the best fucking production agriculture school in the United States. I was an experienced aid worker and an educated person. And it seemed to me that these people had a home gardening mentality with an environmental slant. They were good with the rhetoric but weak on the science.” But he took the job anyway. He was restless teaching in California and longed to be out in the field doing the work.

Cassidy hated every moment of the training, but he remembers little of it, because he just ignored most of what happened. His friend, a former Peace Corps colleague and fellow trainee, JoséOrtiz, admired Cassidy's ability to just transcend everything.

“We felt embarrassed by the training,” Ortiz remembers. “There was some woman, an ex-nun I remember, who hadn't done a lot of adult education, lecturing us in some condescending way about real remedial development stuff.”

She'd say things like, “The Save the Children approach is not to give a
man a fish but to teach him how to fish.” Cassidy and Ortiz felt as if they were back in Catholic school and started rolling their eyes and kicking each other under the table.

The trainees, headed for different parts of the world (Ortiz was going to Sudan), were taught about Save's new and exciting approach to development called participatory development. The idea, as explained to them, was that PD would let the Third World beneficiaries of Western largesse have a say in what they were getting, ensuring that they really want what you're trying to give them.

The whole thing, thought Ortiz, was a scam. “They had us doing exercises on how to develop consensus, but in reality it was subtle manipulation in the name of participatory development. It was like law school or business school. Here's how you shoot down the other guy's argument. That's a game I refused to play. It was really distasteful to me.

“That's what modern business practices are today,” said Ortiz, who now has an M.B.A. “It's no different from total quality management. In the business world you try to get employees to buy your strategic plan and make them think it's theirs.”

This was the buzzword of the month. Experienced aid hands know that development concepts are generated at universities, accepted as profound by policy types in Washington, and then declared as gospel. In order to raise new money to do the same types of projects you've always done, you have to be sure to include the appropriate current jargon in your project proposal and in subsequent progress reports. And you have to be conversant with the jargon so you can use it when the academics who coined the terminology are sent by USAID on junkets to inspect your project. When you use their jargon, it makes the academics happy and they write you a nice evaluation and you can get more money.

While participatory development never really caught on, by the late 1980s, the development industry had found a new mantra it could use: sustainable development.

I
n a brief statement before the House Appropriations Committee in April 1994, Carolyn Long, vice president of InterAction (a consortium of NGOs), used the term
sustainable development
sixteen times. Not one representative asked her what she was talking about or requested that she define the term. Was it supposed to contrast with the “unsustainable” development that member organizations had been spending taxpayer money on for years?

In part, yes. Sustainable development emerged as a reaction to criticism
that most development projects for the last thirty years fell apart the moment the foreign money was pulled out. So project proposals started referring to
sustainable
development. (In fact, the term is redundant; if it's not sustainable, it's not development.) What this novel approach meant, in essence, was that the designers of development projects would try to cook up projects that wouldn't fail.

Although nothing actually changed in the field, in the day-to-day operation of development projects, everyone now spoke about sustainable development. Every proposal to get money from the UN or U.S. government employed the term or even contained an entire section devoted to it. In Somalia, even the lower level employees on projects knew that sustainable development was somehow a good thing. If you used the term, it sounded as if you knew what you were talking about.

The beauty of the term “sustainable development” was that it could be manipulated for any purpose.

At the 1992 Rio conference on the environment, sustainable development was about ecology. Vice President Al Gore defined sustainable development as “economic progress without environmental destruction,” adding: “That's what sustainable development is all about.” (In the Third World, by contrast, there's been no economic progress and plenty of environmental destruction.)

But by the 1994 Cairo conference on population, it meant birth control. Leading up to that meeting, Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and secretary general of the Cairo conference, announced: “If we had paid more attention to empowering women thirty years ago, we might not have to battle so hard for sustainable development today.” Her organization had just released a document declaring that fertility control was the key to sustainable development.

“This year, we must also do more to support democratic renewal and human rights and sustainable development all around the world,” President Clinton said in his 1994 State of the Union Address. He didn't elaborate. Addressing Parliament in November 1993, Queen Elizabeth II said, “My government will maintain a substantial aid program to promote sustainable development and good government.” She also chose not to elaborate.

In June 1993, Al Gore announced the formation of the President's Council on Sustainable Development. The council, he said, “can focus attention on issues of common interest. It can serve as a forum for raising ideas and plans. It can help resolve issues that arise as nations proceed in
their sustainable development agendas. It can monitor progress. It can help shift the multilateral financial institutions and bilateral assistance efforts toward a sustainable development agenda. It can help revitalize the UN system to ensure that sustainable development is a central theme in each organization. Indeed, this commission, through its focus on sustainable development, can enhance UN efforts to maintain peace, stability, and prosperity in this post-Cold War world.”

And it wasn't just heads of state who took up the sustainable development battle cry:

A paper industry journal noted, “Pragmatic environmentalists have also shown that industry, including paper, will be the major force for sustainable development in which the world's economic and environmental ambitions can best be met.”

The 1991 annual report of the U.S. Army stated, “The Army possesses valuable knowledge about nation assistance, including expertise relating to health care, infrastructure rehabilitation, management and environmentally sustainable development.”

The International Fertilizer Association at its 1993 conference pledged, “IFA will continue to communicate the importance of mineral fertilizers for a sustainable development of world agriculture.”

This terminology emerged in the years after I entered the Peace Corps during the Carter administration, when the buzz was all about “meeting basic human needs.” We were sent into villages at the grass-roots level. We were expected to live like the people in the villages; we were discouraged from buying vehicles for ourselves. When I went into the bush it was the late 1970s. I emerged in the 1980s, and the world had changed. The new wave of volunteers arrived as I was leaving. They had different music and punk haircuts. And the buzz was “women in development.” A new group of women were given four-wheel-drive vehicles, and the woman who was the new Peace Corps director seemed to have little use for men or for any of those old development ideas. With this new development theory came a new rhetoric. “Teach a man and you teach an individual,” people would say. “Teach a woman and you teach a family.” The aphorism came in several versions depending upon the development project in question.

Cassidy, too, had been through “meeting basic human needs” and “women in development.” In school he'd begun hearing about “sustainable development” and now this nun was pushing “participatory development.” How does this help us do our jobs? Cassidy and Ortiz were asking. Tell us what all this means when you're standing in an African village knee-deep
in cow shit trying to talk some local trucker into transporting your fertilizer, while at the same time someone is trying to steal your project funds.

O
rtiz was insulted and decided not to cooperate. He raised objections in class and resisted joining the role-playing games.

“Ortiz, goddamn it, why don't you agree with us so we can all get the fuck out of here?” Cassidy would mutter.

Chris figured that he'd do what he wanted when he arrived in Somalia anyway, and he just wanted the training to end. Ortiz figured, “This is bullshit. We're professionals with advanced degrees being hired to do technical work overseas and we have to listen to all these little pieties like we're joining a church.” Ortiz later recalled that he found the training “cultish and repugnant.”

The worst thing about the training was that no one in Westport really knew anything about the actual projects. Both Ortiz and Cassidy wanted to know what they would encounter. Cassidy had been assigned to run a multimillion-dollar irrigation project. He wanted technical details, information on soil, availability of fuel, level of training of the participants, budgetary information, that sort of thing.