rants

A Request for Useful Information

By Alanna Shaikh | | 15 Comments |

empty jar

Some time ago, in a time and place I’m not going to specify, a middle-aged woman brought me a human uterus in a jar. She was a pathologist, and she’d stolen it from her place of work. It was a healthy uterus, she said, with a healthy fetus inside, that had been removed by a gynecologist under pressure from the government to keep birth rates down.

Needless to say, my project could do nothing to help her. We didn’t even know where to begin. We weren’t a human rights project, or even a reproductive health project. We didn’t have the contacts with the government to make them stop this kind of behavior. I thanked her for her honesty and passion, and gave her the contact information for Human Rights Watch.

Until today, that was the worst story anyone had ever trusted me with. I’d heard worse things in the media, of course. But that was the worst story some had asked me to help with.

What really got to me was that it wasn’t her uterus she was carrying around. (And, it turned out, she took it everywhere, for fear the government would steal it and she’d lose her evidence.) It belonged to a stranger. But this pathologist saw a systemic wrong, and she wanted to change that.

I don’t think anything has changed in that country. I think she is still carrying that uterus in her purse.

That woman is my hero. She’s more than a little bit nuts at this point. She sleeps with a human organ under her bed. She’s Don Quixote with a scalpel and a supply of formaldehyde. But she’s not complacent.

And that’s why I’d like to slap both Bill Easterly and Jeff Sachs upside the head. There are human lives at stake here. There are people suffering and dying and risking their lives to help others. And nothing the big guys are saying right now is useful to me.

I want to know how to do my work better. I want to know whether it’s useful to have the EU pull its funding from the country whose name I won’t mention or if it’s more effective to keep pushing small changes and hope they add up. I want to know if supporting democratic institutions actually leads to democracy.

The high level debates about theory and the middle-aged guys mud-wrestling about African aid do nothing for me. You are very, very smart. You know more about aid than just about anybody. Please, give me something useful.

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photo credit: caro’s lines
Chosen because the jar is somehow sad.

How to ride in a white SUV

By Alanna Shaikh | | 9 Comments |

1. Look sheepish, like you would never been in this huge vehicle if you weren’t forced into it by overprotective security officers.

2. Look ill. Maintain a greenish-grey visage that makes it clear that if you weren’t so terribly ill, you’d be on a local bus at this very moment.

3. Ride with someone older than you, and develop a facial expression that indicates you are just the gormless flunky riding involuntarily in the VIP car.

4. Fill your vehicle with boxes and bags, to make it clear that the SUV is hauling important equipment and you’re just along for the ride.

5. Wear your damn seatbelt. If you’re going to cruise around in a symbol of oblivious neo-imperialism you owe it to world to be safe.

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(photo credit: hoyasmeg)

Humanitarian neutrality isn’t dead because it never existed

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

Humanitarian neutrality is dead. The sooner we stop mauling its rotting corpse, the better off we’ll all be. In fact, I don’t believe humanitarian neutrality ever existed. It’s not a corpse at all; it’s a figment of our imagination that we’re finally abandoned. The provision of humanitarian aid changes the dynamics of a conflict situation. It is therefore inherently not neutral, and it was naive to ever believe it could be.

Mary Anderson started talking about do no harm in 1994, and recognized that aid has an impact on the conflict, and is therefore never neutral. It was naive of us to ever pretend it was. Here’s what she had to say: “All aid programmes involve the transfer of resources (food, shelter, water, health care, training, etc.) into a resource-scarce environment. Where people are in conflict, these resources represent power and wealth and they become an element of the conflict.”

The targeting of NGO workers in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia is appalling, and brutally dangerous. But what protected Medecins Sans Frontieres and the International Rescue Committee in Afghanistan in the 90s was not some airy-fairy belief in neutrality. It was the Taliban’s belief that the NGOs were not keeping the Taliban from achieving its goals. Combatants in Afghanistan no longer believe that, or are not organized enough to enforce rules. Mourning the end of neutrality is a dangerous sidetrack that keeps the real issue from being addressed.

All of that being said, I think that a particular NGO or project can nonetheless be known as honest and fair and therefore have a humanitarian space to operate in. But that’s not based on an abstract concept of neutrality or humanitarian space. It’s based on earning the trust and respect of local populations, and on convincing all sides of the conflict that your provision of aid will not turn the tables against them. That’s not an easy game to play, but it’s the only one we have. And, despite histrionics to the contrary, it’s the only game we’ve ever had.

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(photo credit: DVIDSHUB)

Chosen for pretty obvious reasons.