#138 Rebels, Militias and Freedom Fighters
submitted by D, edited by SgS
Part of being enigmatic when talking about being an expat aid worker or blogging for the folks back home is casually dropping in names of things, places and people who those with regular jobs and mundane lifestyles have not even remotely heard of.
An especially effective way to do this is to mention a rebel group.
The names of all rebel groups sound ridiculously similar to the uneducated ears of people back home — they are usually some combination of the words ‘popular,’ ‘liberation,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘justice’ and ‘front,’ ‘union,’ ‘force’ or ‘movement’.
So when the EAW drops in mention of rebels, the unenlightened noob’s confusion is cause for either annoyance or feelings of superiority. Things get increasingly difficult to explain to your average novice when there are more than 2 sides (“good” vs “bad”) in the local conflict. It’s better to just go all mysterious and say “it’s complicated” rather than try to explain. If they come back to you with a reference to Monty Python, just walk away. Rebel groups are not to be taken lightly.
Note to EAWs: to avoid such situations as the scenario above, it is advisable to use acronyms. You’ll be on much firmer ground if you refer to JPF, PFJ, LRA, JEM, FUC, FNL etc.
Rebel groups matter to EAWs. And why wouldn’t they.
Rebel presence means that the EAW is doing some hardship living (and getting hardship pay!). Rebels remind the EAW that he is living in a dodgy place. And we all know EAWs like dodgy places.
When colleagues at the “Regional Conference on the Use of RCTs to Define and Shape Sustainable Mainstreaming of Successful Good Practice Related to Local Ownership and Crosscutting Holistic Gender Empowerment for Excluded Adolescent Girls based on Positive Deviance Methodology” think they are being all badass by casually dropping in news about their latest vacation in one dodgy place or another, as someone actually living there, it’s your EAW duty to trump them by reminding them that life in Militiaville is no cake walk, thus putting them in their place.
Every once in a while some rebel faction splinters off and attempts or succeeds in attacking the ‘bad guys’ — usually the people in power. If you’re lucky, that happens just far enough from where you are for it to not really affect you but just close enough for you to feel ownership of the incident and empowered to put up either a breathless or bored tweet or Facebook status about it. It’s best to be the first to break the news by mentioning that your movement is restricted, there is now a curfew, or you’ve had to cancel your trip to ‘the field.’
While you post that status, you can simultaneously rejoice that your field cred is racking up right before your eyes, along with the additional dank perks you’ll begin to accumulate as the place becomes hazardous.
In many cases, it’s rebels who give EAWs their raison d’etre; particularly if the EAW works in mapping and analysis of risks, conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution (if we arrived too late), mediation etc. Rebels make life in ‘the field’ more colorful. They give the EAW that je ne sais quoi that provides the unbeatable arguments for bitching about HQ‘s incapacity to understand anything EAWs go through out there, why an online innovation project simply has little chances in the remote villages in our area of responsibility, and why their two-day monitoring visit is not a priority.
Rebels, militias and freedom fighters — what would the hardcore EAW do without them?
#4 Links Expat Aid Workers Like
We profiled 50 Cent’s visit to Somalia and Kenya in last week’s Links Expat Aid Workers Like, and to our delight, received this heartfelt poem from EAW M&E specialist Elliot Seeger…
An Open Letter to Fiddy from An Aidworker Fan
Dear Fif,
I’ve liked you since you first signed with Eminem
Even copped the vinyl of ‘Many Men’
Not only concerned with getting paid
But dabbling in humanitarian aid
Hip-hop needs to rise above the beef
And focus on emergency relief
Now that your record sales exceed 10 million
Perhaps you and I could feed a billion
I really dig your hood philanthropy
But don’t end up like ‘Three Cups of Tea’
Invest in some solid M&E
Don’t pull a Greg in Afghanistan
Let me design your monitoring plan
We should be together like Em’ and Stan
Give me a job and I’ll follow ya
To famine afflicted Somalia
Don’t lose heart due to the haters
I’ll create them SMART indicators
And you can find me in a Hub
Countin’ lots of stuff
If you need some quick stats
Homie, I can make them up
So if you want compliance, I’m the best
All references available upon request
Meanwhile, This is Africa asks: Celebrities and Charity for Africa: Who’s really profiting?
The ‘what people think I do/what I really do” meme hits EAW-land. (HT @alexevansuk at Global Development)
Valentine’s Day brings us #DevelopmentValentines. Hilariously apt.
A book folks are talking about: Behind the Beautiful Forevers* by Katherine Boo.
@ianbirrell writes about the (kind of tired) topic of journalists and aid accountability. “Aid workers know they are not saints; privately, they admit the shortcomings of their trade. They accept that billions have been wasted on failed ideas and flawed projects, and acknowledge that huge sums still go missing or are misspent. These concerns find increasingly strong echoes across the developing world. A swelling chorus of economists, politicians and pundits argue that western aid policies are patronising, destructive and outdated. They say big donations fuel corruption and undermine the accountability of governments, which come to rely on handouts from abroad rather than the support of taxpayers at home. Countries are made to seem helpless supplicants by endless pictures of children with distended bellies and flies in their eyes, undermining tourism and trade.” Birrell concludes that “ It should be the job of journalists to ask the toughest questions, however uncomfortable, not to hop on planes at the behest of powerful institutions.” What do you think about Birrell’s take? Discuss on AidSource.
And @cynan_sez reminds us that pretty much anyone who actually works in the aid sector and has their wits about them has thought about aid accountability and related issues. He asks what would happen if INGOs “Didn’t arse about so much we delivered the tools and seeds a month after prime planting period and whined about how (all too predictably) the grant disbursement was late or (like it always is) recruitment was harrrd. Didn’t pat ourselves on the back when we finally got around to scaling up for the food crisis as it was plateauing or winding down, but attributing the credit where the marketers felt it was due. Didn’t blame the donors, the rains, the roads – though those can be real problems – but instead managed that risk and structurally addressed our utterly addressable internal halfarsedness.”
And in case you missed it, AidSource goes live! Check out the Teamhouse Kitchen and the Foodies Group this week for some fantastic recipes! And don’t miss the Collective Wisdom group for ideas on how to make your very own free-standing mosquito net.
*corrected title 20/2/2012
#137 Being “cutting edge”
Expat Aid Workers love to believe that they are cutting edge. Above all else, whether they’re busy innovating, doing some awesome/rigorous RCTs, enlightening those around them (via well-placed righteous indignation), or explaining the intricate subtleties of local culture to locals, EAWs make a point of knowing what is going on in the aid world.
Which is why this public service announcement is of such critical importance…
You heard about it right here just a few days ago. And now we’re super pleased to formally announce a brand spanking new website just for you:
AidSource: The Humanitarian Social Network.
AidSource is a collaborative effort between the creators of the site you’re reading now (Shotgun Shack of Shotgun Shack, and J. of Tales From the Hood), and Alanna Shaikh (of Blood & Milk), but with significant and growing ownership and management by the global community of humanitarian aid and development workers – you!
We have been beta-testing AidSource for about the past two months, but as of today, in celebration of our Valentine’s Day gift of love to the aid blogosphere, AidSource is open to the public.
To join, just go here: http://aidsource.ning.com and follow the prompts. It’ll only take you about five minutes to set up a profile and join AidSource.
Once inside you’ll be able to join working groups and discussions about all kinds of things related to international relief and development, see what events are coming up in the aid world (whether it’s a life-saving workshop or an interagency happy hour in your town), blog, or just hang out with others in the aid industry from around the world (and of course much, much more!). There is a special section for students and educators, too, so be sure to check that out.
You’ll find a fair amount of cross-platform functionality present in AidSource. Members who want to can set up their accounts so that once they’re members, they can log in using Google, Yahoo!, Facebook or Twitter credentials. You can also tweet and update your Facebook status from inside AidSource, ‘friend’ other members, upload photographs or documents, and ‘like’ things.
You can also ‘like’ AidSource on Facebook, follow @AidSource1, and read the AidSource blog, AidSpeak.
We think this is not just a very cool idea and site, but also something that (with time) has the potential to drive significant positive change in the aid industry. And just so that you know, AidSource is not affiliated with or in any other way approved or endorsed by any NGO, charity watchdog, UN agency, charitable foundation, corporation, or institutional or private donor. AidSource is a private project – one that we think you’ll like and that we’re sharing absolutely for free.
We hope you’ll take the time to check out AidSource: The Humanitarian Social Network.
#136 The Sachs-Easterly Debate
submitted by Matt G who tweets at @mgutten
Every great endeavor has its great rivalries. Yankees vs. Red Sox. Barcelona vs. Real Madrid. Wile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner. In the world of EAWs, though, we have the Great Debate of the New York Development Economists: Jeff Sachs vs. William Easterly.
Go to any EAW cocktail party and you can consider yourself lucky if you don’t end up hearing someone drone on about the chapter they just read from The White Man’s Burden while everyone around gives knowing nods. If you find yourself in this situation, be aware that you could get stuck in a back-and-forth game of aid worker intellectual one-upmanship. The best way to extricate yourself is to make a reference to how The Elusive Quest for Growth was really a better book, refer jokingly to Bono in Africa, and then back away slowly to get another drink.
If you aren’t familiar with the debate, you’re in luck, because you can just use the handy flow chart provided below to figure out which side you should be on.
Here are a few shortcuts to get you started: Do you consider U2 to be one of the top INGOs in the world? Try Sachs. Do you enjoy pointing out the lack of scientific rigor in some small overworked local program’s M&E plan? Might want to give Easterly a read. Do you hope to one day cavort around Africa with Angelina Jolie sprinkling anti-poverty dust on all the children? Sachs is your guy. Do you really, really like beards? It’s Easterly all day.
(click the image for improved reading)
#3 Links Expat Aid Workers Like
A few links that caught our eye this week….
Rapper 50 Cent visits Somalia, (and of course, Kibera) (via @moved2monrovia). “The rapper/actor/entrepreneur has set a goal of delivering a billion meals through the UN World Food Programme. The money for this plan is to come from sales of his new energy drink, called Street King.” Looks like it will be a good way to up sales for ‘Street King,’ but we want to know: what’s the plan to break into the BoP market? And how will piracy be avoided?
50 Cent in Somalia
Via @chrisalbon we have the photo of the week:
And another via @keshetbachan:
Scatter plot of use of the word sustainable and it’s derivations has been floating around for a bit but worth sharing for those who missed it.( HT @robwaugh83)
@paulclammer alerts us to Kabul Disco, a graphic novel by Nicholas Wild, who “captures the pretentious, privileged, vaguely Eurotrash existence of the professional expat do-gooder with a suitably wicked eye. All the tropes are there; the protected lifestyles, the local “utility men”, the SUVs, the suspiciously connected American and, of course, the expat party scene.”
Buzzfeed instructs us on “how to write a passive aggressive note” (HT @SaraDougherty)… Seriously, click through to check it. Though of course, we are well aware that real EAWs don’t need instruction on passive-aggressiveness. (Where’s the guest post on that one, folks?!)
And finally, AidSource…. We have limited invites to the beta – hit us up if you want to be an ‘early adopter’. I’m voting the fab discussion in the NGOs and Gender (Pretty on Paper) group as this week’s top AidSource content. (follow @aidsource1 for more)
ToonsEAWL: Reaching Out
#135 Spiffy Project Names
submitted by Matt Greenall who also tweets: @mngreenall and blogs: epidreamiology.
Spiffy Names for Spiffy Projects! (Photo from SHOPS twitter page...)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an aid project in possession of good funding must be in want of a name. The bigger the contract being bid for, the more multi-pronged and complex it is likely to be, and the harder it is to get across what it is trying to achieve. Sure, Community outreach and village rehabilitation and millennium sustainability gender project including HIV/AIDS intervention covers all the bases, but it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it?
And so it is that at a critical juncture in any given tendering process someone, usually from the head office of one of the minor bid consortium partners, will copy everyone in an email with a heading like “Project name???”, explaining that something like Compass would be ideal, because a compass points us in the right direction, because our holistic project will “encompass” all of the communities needs and the technical specialities of all of the consortium partners, and best of all, because it stands for “COmmunities Mobilising for Progress in AIDS ServiceS” (sort of). Oh, and wouldn’t “Compassion” be a perfect name for the annual report?
But the problem is, there are a finite number of words in colonial languages that have that sort of versatility. What happens when all the words like “Engage”, “Results”, and “Empower” have already been acronymified by other international NGOs, and when the suffix “–star” has already been done to death? Expat Aid Workers, with their ample field experience and knowledge of words in other languages have the answer: why not call your project something exotic and authentic-sounding? Something that will allow the marketing people back home to begin every newsletter with the sentence “XXX, which means Together, we are strong! in the local language…”? This way the pool of candidate project names becomes limitless, and what better way to be grassroots and to show commitment to local ownership?
Of course, the holy grail is a word that not only means something in a local language, but that can also be used as an acronym made up of some wonkish words that suggest to the donor that you know what you are doing: something which combines grassroots authenticity with bullshit bingo and which everyone can get behind. Come to think of it, why not go the extra mile and arrange a participatory multi-stakeholder logo workshop? That’s right, a PMSL workshop: no aid project should be without one.
#2 Links Expat Aid Workers Like
And it’s Friday! Time for Number 2 in our experiment: Links Expat Aid Workers Like (a.k.a. LEAWL)
@bill_easterly and the NYU Crew (with some help from @wrongingrights) host The ‘Exploiting Africa’ Academy Awards. And the winner is….?
And speaking of contests. It’s time to vote in the 2nd annual Aid Bloggers Best Awards (ABBA).
Canoeing the entire Congo river… AND LIVING TO TELL THE TALE ”I was alone in the middle of deepest, darkest Congo. Worse still, I was being chased by eight angry tribesmen in two dugout canoes – and they were gaining on me….” Thanks Guardian. We were feeling nostalgic for early-20th-century-style English Explorer stories.
Famed Kabul hangout L’Atmo becomes a French TV series set in 2005. (HT @scott_gilmore)
“Toronto Org Puts Women’s Underpants on Haiti’s Aid Agenda”. Glad the folks in Toronto have shed some light on what Haiti’s aid agenda should be. Some well-deserved comment from @asamburton.
Canadian-Somalian rapper K’naan tells US Republican Candidate “Stop using my song.” (HT @jlundine)
(Does that mean Romney is worse than Coke and FIFA??)
Dave Algoso takes on the Global Journal’s Top 100. And the Global Journal editor shows us how not to respond to criticism. And Dave pretty much wins the war. (BTW: congrats all you readers whose INGOs made the Top 100 list. Your marketing team is probably milking the hell out of it.)
Talesfromthhood gets serious on the new blog AidSpeak, taking us Beyond Aid.
WhyDev offers some advice to development workers re: how to explain to normal people what exactly your job entails.
So you want to go to LSE? (HT @ReesEdward) Pretty depressing.
So let’s end on a high note: Gangster African Wildlife!!!! (HT @texasinafrica)
ToonsEAWL: Being ‘between jobs’
#134 Driving a Beater
Submitted by Kolberg
There’s only one thing that real Expat Aid Workers like more than a cushy, air-conditioned Land Cruiser washed by their security guard every morning – and that’s an old, beat up sedan, probably a Toyota Corolla, bought at a second-hand dealer, or off of a local guy, who, despite the $4,000 price tag, probably got a 100% markup anyway.
Much like going native, or participating in symbolic local traditions, driving an old car proves that you’re just so much more in touch with the community of the country you’re patronizing. To top it off, it provides a huge amount of field cred, showing that there’s no need for you to drive an extravagant vehicle just because you’re paid around 500 times the average local salary.
Photo: Jennyballen.wordpress.com
In countries where security is an issue, driving a beater is an extra plus on the field cred account.
Some NGO’s, especially the large international ones, will require you to drive armored cars, or at least ones that meet certain standards of size, capability etc. (and this will 99% of the time be a Land Cruiser). EAW’s who defy these requirements are badass. Nuff said.
There’s a different category of EAW likely to drive an old crappy car than the one described above. And that’s the guy who doesn’t have the pay grade/seniority to have a chauffeur-driven Land Cruiser at his disposal at all times, and thus is responsible for his own transportation. He will drive his 1983 pale green Corolla with pride, frowning at all the gas-guzzling 4×4′s and their owners, because who needs a large SUV to get from office to the expat coffee shop, really??
However, more often than not, his point of view will pivot the day he gets an offer for that comfy desk job that comes with perks such as a nice McMansion and – yes, a chauffeured Land Cruiser with an A/C cold enough to make a polar bear sneeze.
Until then – drive on (if your car isn’t in the shop, that is).
