China

My first glimpse on this return trip to China was the grey, oily fog stalking the Beijing airport.  Of course I had remembered the choking smoke that fills China’s cities, but experiencing it again, especially 18 hours removed from the breeze and beaches of Tel Aviv, sent a reminder to my nervous system: Ingest nothing!

I flew from Beijing to Chengdu, a city of about 15 million people in Western China, for my research.  Chengdu was much less crowded than Shanghai or Beijing.  I was a little shocked to walk on main boulevards with only a dozen or so pedestrians in sight.  Like many of China’s cities in summer, Chengdu was so hot and humid that I often stayed inside reading.

My hostel in Chengdu organized a bike tour of the city, which I assure you was an adrenaline-pumping and frightening event.  My biking, while functional, has always been highly imperfect and clumsy because I didn’t learn to ride until one boring Saturday when I was 17.  On this occasion I only crashed twice, into other bikers thankfully.

For the second year in a row I enjoyed my birthday in China.  I’ve never been one for holidays or special occasions, so I was perfectly content to just receive a free mojito and buy a ticket for the Chinese opera.  The opera in Chengdu was . . . very Chinese.  The players wore colorful traditional costumes, sometimes including masks that might recall Mexican wrestlers.  In one scene beautiful Chinese dancers with meter-long feathers in their hair playfully bobbled their heads to make the feathers swing back and forth.  Then they grabbed the feather at its base, curled it downward to their faces and put the ends in their mouths--yes, that actually happened.

In a solo performance, a musician played the famous folk dance Czardas on a traditional Chinese violin.  The fast parts were beyond his ability.  The section played in harmonics was out of tune.  I was more distracted, however, by the green steam shooting in from the sides of the stage and the flashing yellow stage lights that accompanied the music.  I’ve never seen a classical performance with less . . . class.  

Finally, during another dance by the Chengdu supermodels, bubbles descended from the ceiling to the audience’s delight.

I appreciate escapism, as opposed to only respecting art of the quiet and depressing persuasion.  Even so, there is something about as wide as the Pacific Ocean that separates my artistic values and the values of the audience in that Chengdu opera house.  I left my chair thinking the performance had been at least redeeming in how entertainingly bad it was when a Chinese girl who spoke English came to me and said excitedly, “Wasn’t that great?”  I told her I enjoyed it.

After a week in Chengdu, upon completion of my last research interview, I boarded a 40-hour train to Qingdao, a beach city on China’s east coast where I would meet my friend, April, who I worked with last summer.  As I did earlier this summer, I greatly enjoyed my lower berth, reading my books and looking out the window.  Although I crossed perhaps 1500 miles of China, the landscape was disappointingly consistent.  Dark green fields of corn and rice for miles.  The bed was the most comfortable I’ve had in China.  I luckily had a berth in the middle of the carriage; the ends of the carriage each smelled too much like the bathrooms, which deserve every nightmare that train lavatories might inspire to the reader.

In Qingdao I felt a little more at home, perhaps because many of the buildings are still in the German architecture of the early 20th century, when Germans ran the city.  In fact, Qingdao beer, the most identifiable brand of brew in China, was started by German ex-pats, a factoid that shocked my Chinese friends.  The beach was nice.  We climbed on rocks and rowed in the ocean.  I almost entirely avoided the beach sand, in keeping with my mortal fear of having sand all over me for days and weeks.

After two days touring the city, April and I flew to Shanghai, where I attended the Expo.  In a sprawling complex that might be about the size of ASU’s campus, almost two hundred countries have pavilions that are meant to communicate two things: We are pretty cool, and we want China to think we’re pretty cool.  I had heard that lines for the best pavilions could take three to six hours, a time-span that is simply unacceptable in Shanghai’s heat.  My strategy was to enter small pavilions during the day, and perhaps late at night find some of the busier ones.

I managed to get into about 15 pavilions, including Mexico, Cuba, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, New Zealand, Brunei, Spain, Turkey, Nepal, North Korea, Iran, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Israel.  My personal favorites were Spain, Turkey, New Zealand, and Israel.  It was interesting to see how countries branded themselves.  Some, like Oman, were trying to convince tourists that their countries were perfect for investment and vacations.  Others, like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, were simple tourist traps selling cheap souvenirs that were entirely unworthy of their outer facades and the Expo itself.  Turkey and Israel emphasized their historical ties with China.

I’m now leaving China and finishing my circumnavigation in twelve hours.  Since these ten weeks have been an extension of my year of study abroad, I am very excited to finally go home, spend time with family and friends, and not go anywhere for a long time.  My research has been educational and the interviews I’ve collected are enough to make the thesis I have envisioned, assuming I follow all this up with continued diligence.  Ten weeks have brought me to seven countries and one occupied territory.  Most of these are places that the general public has little desire to see, but I’ve enjoyed them a lot.  I assume in the future I’ll look back on this period nostalgically, but for the last few weeks and at this moment, I’m only looking ahead to Tempe, school, friends, and home.

Are You a Terrorist, Sir?

I had been off my flight from Tbilisi to Tel Aviv, Israel for less than a minute when three security officers took me aside.  Why did you come to Israel, sir? a young woman asked.  Tourism I lied.  My lying wasn’t just a stupid miscalculation.  A week before coming to Israel I had learned that, because I had a Syrian stamp in my passport, I would have to go through additional security in the Tel Aviv airport.  According to some backpackers with personal experience, I’d have to strip entirely--I suppose to make sure I wasn’t hiding a tattoo of the Palestinian flag near my loins--and someone would yell at me in Arabic to see how I reacted.  When I arrived in Israel I had already decided not to say that I was doing research about World Bank projects in the Palestinian territories.  I thought this would avoid an industrial-sized can of worms, and it’s not like they could prove I wasn’t there for tourism.  Right?

Why did you decide to come to Israel in particular?

I always wanted to see Israel.  My mom came here and loved it.

How long are you staying?

Two weeks.

Where are you going?

Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

You mean you’re here for two weeks and you’re only going to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? Here a pattern began in which she restated my answers in question form as though to make me sound ridiculous. 

Yes.

Where are you staying in Jerusalem?

I don’t know yet.

You don’t know where you’re staying?

No.  I’ll arrange it later.

When are you going there?

I don’t know yet.  I have two weeks.

Why were you in Georgia?

Tourism.

You were in Georgia for tourism?

Yes.

How long were you there?

Two weeks.

Do you have an itinerary?

Yes.

Can I see it?

Yes.

She saw that I had flights from Phoenix to Macedonia to Africa to Georgia and then to Israel.  She began shaking her head and her eyes got wide.  

When did you leave for this trip?

May 31.  

From where?

Istanbul, Turkey.  

She threw up her hands and spoke to one of the other guards in Hebrew.  I knew that May 31 was the date when nine Turkish citizens were murdered aboard the Gaza aid flotilla, but it was also truthfully when I left Turkey to start my circumnavigation.  I could have just said Phoenix, Arizona.  My itinerary didn’t say Turkey, only my passport would.  But to be honest I was kind of enjoying my interrogation, and some second-hand Turkish nationalism made me want to engage them on this front, but only so far.  For example, I didn’t reveal to them that I had actually interviewed the director of IHH, the NGO that sent the Gaza aid flotilla in the first place.

Why were you in Turkey?

I was studying abroad at Bogazici University in Istanbul.

She returned to my itinerary.  Where did you go in Africa?

Bangui, Central African Republic.

Where? I am by now very used to people not knowing CAR.

It’s a poor country in Central Africa.

Why did you go there?

Tourism.  

I really began having fun at this point.  Clearly my itinerary was full of places that most people don’t visit for two weeks, but as long as I stuck to my story the guard just became more bewildered while I enjoyed my game more and more.

Why did you go to Macedonia?

I reeeally wanted to see Macedonia.

Do you have guide books for any of these places?

No.  I mean I don’t have room for a bunch of guide books in my backpack.

Then her eyes got really wide, looking at my 18lbs red backpack.  That’s your only backpack?

Yes.

So you’re traveling for ten weeks to all these different countries and you only brought a little backpack?  Her hands, head, and eyes now rolled in circles simultaneously, which I gathered meant that she thought I was lying. 

Yes.

You’re traveling all over the world to all these different climatic zones . . .

Well, actually they’re all hot, I interrupted.  You can search my bag if you like.

No that’s fine.  Who’s paying for all this?

The Circumnavigators Club Foundation in New York City.

So they’re paying you to go all around the world to these different countries just for tourism?

Yes.

Did they send you here?

No. I chose all the places I wanted to go.  They’re just paying for it.

Do you have any documentation from them?

I showed them the business cards the foundation supplied me with, but I didn’t mention the letter of invitation the foundation had provided.  I thought about whether the letter mentioned my research.  I couldn’t remember. They’d just have to find it and I’d deal with it if they did.

Exasperated, she left me with one of the other guards for the next ten minutes.  I got tired of standing and sat on the floor with my legs crossed.  I started whistling unconsciously, but I decided to keep it going as a sort of arrogant and unnecessary measure of civil disobedience.  Then a higher-up came and rushed me through passport control toward a special security screening area.  We went through a grey door in the baggage claim.  The entry was hardly noticeable, lacking any marking except a coaster-sized “Do not enter” symbol.  I expected that here is where I would derobe. I walked in and saw two female guards in the room--for the first and I presume only time in my life I had to wonder: Which of these two women will force me to take my clothes off and which one will be yelling insults at me in a language I don't understand?

They began to empty my backpack and put individual items through an x-ray machine.  I thought about the things I had that might be suspicious.  My laptop bag had more than $300 in USD and Euros--my reserve for if my wallet got stolen and I was in an emergency.  That might not look good, but it could be explained.  I also had my tape recorder--not an everyday piece of equipment for a tourist, maybe something a bothersome journalist would have.  Certainly the interviews on the tape player would support that conclusion.  

Impossibly, they missed both of these things.  They took my laptop out of its bag without noticing the cash inside it.  And I had placed my tape player, by chance, in a small pocket in my backpack, the only one the guard hadn’t opened.

After twenty minutes in this windowless cave, I was told Ok.  You can pack up and go.  Enjoy your stay in Israel.  As I thanked my handlers and victoriously replaced all my things, the irony occurred to me. They never noticed the stamp from Syria.  They were so pre-occupied with my suspicious around the world travel that they had rushed me through passport control and missed the clearest sign that I was a security threat.  Somehow by pulling me aside they had removed me from the standard procedure in which I probably would have gone through hours of interviews, not to mention the great revelation.  

So that’s my story of coming to the Holy Land.  I guess it started with a blessing.  Two weeks later I left Israel through the same airport, and I went through more interrogations.  For legal reasons I won’t write exactly what happened, but I’ll say that I won round two as well.

My Holy Blog-Post

Arriving in Israel has given me a chance to be a true tourist for the first time in my circumnavigation.  I arrived on a Wednesday night with my first research-related meeting set for the following Monday.  In those four days I have tried to see the best sites of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Tel Aviv’s western side is a beautiful Mediterranean beach that I jealously walked along.  I refuse to make any piece of clothing sandy for the next month, and I could surely have only spent ten or twenty minutes in the warm waves before ultraviolet rays would get the best of me.  Instead I walked half the length of the city’s beachfront in the shadows of tall hotels and beautiful people.

Tel Aviv’s central streets were a strange mix.  Some buildings looked standard Middle Eastern--brown and square with an abundance of satellite dishes.  But the very same streets had overpasses, small parks, or shops that reminded me of New York City--they either looked in decay or had a nostalgic appeal, depending on my mood.  And then there were condominiums and skyscrapers that I imagine are the most modern buildings between the Persian Gulf and Western Europe.  This all made for a confusing collage of under-developed, developed sixty years ago, and hyper-modern.

After some museums I made for Jerusalem on Friday afternoon, just before the start of Shabbat.  With the sundown of Shabbat I went to the Western Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.  From a secular tourists’ point of view, the Western Wall is pretty underwhelming, although perhaps its plainness and modesty is well-suited to Judaism.  For all you hear about Islam being limiting for women, the Western Wall can only be approached by men.  There’s a mini-wall about 30 meters away where the second sex can pray.

The most interesting part of the Western Wall were the thousands of tiny prayers squeezed into its crevices.  I understand that Jews consider this the best line of communication with God.  I was so tempted to sneak away a handful of prayers to read.  After all, if you made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and now had your best chance to get a word in with God, what would you say?  My respect for others’ tradition and very small fear of a hypothetical God outweighed my curiosity.





The next day I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, marking where Christ is believed to have been crucified.  The church is quite beautiful, though it certainly could be much more glorious if it were not pettily divided between various denominations who have territorial disputes over specific stones and light bulbs.  I was most fascinated by the chapel dedicated to Christ’s actual crucifixion.  It was guarded by a Greek Orthodox priest who banged a staff and yelled at people not to take pictures (I took one of course, less afraid of Christianity’s God I guess).  I don’t know if it’s some kind of honor to guard Christ’s place of death, but if so this seems like an ill reward.

Finally, this morning I visited the Dome of the Rock, which houses the Foundation Stone, from which the world was made and where Adam was created, Joseph dreamt, and Abraham readied Isaac for sacrifice.  As a non-Muslim I’m not able to go inside the Dome of the Rock.  This seems unfair since--as I understand it--Judaism and Christianity also regard this stone as the foundation of life, but to some extent I respect it.  It seems more legitimate than the Christian priest banging his staff on the ground.  If they want one of their holiest sites to remain pure, it’s probably better that I don’t go in there and take pictures with which to increase my social capital.

For someone who regards these monuments for their history, rather than spirituality, I’ve found many of Israel’s memorials to be nearly or as impressive as its religious heritage.  In the Tel Aviv Diaspora Museum hangs the Memorial Column, dedicated to all the Jews who have been persecuted in history.  Situated in a tall, dark, and voluminous room, the Memorial Column is a hanging beam with small lights that actually radiate heat.  Surrounding it are layers of iron bars like jail cells.  Its symbolism is simple, dignified, and extraordinarily beautiful.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem is just as effective in this regard.  Unfortunately I could not take pictures (Google images will have to suffice).  In one room designed like Professor Xavier’s special chamber in X-Men (sorry, but it’s a fair comparison) one is surrounded by a two story silo of bookshelves full of the names of Holocaust victims.

Easily the most haunting and well designed monument was the Children’s Memorial.  In almost total darkness, one walks into a room of dark mirrors, like obsidian or an extremely polished black marble.  In the center are candles that reflect off of these surfaces.  The effect is really like one is floating in space, amidst a galaxy where every spot of light represents a small human soul.  The loss of children was the museum’s most tragic theme.  I read a speech by the Jewish leader of one of the ghettos, in which he tells thousands that they must hand over their children under ten years old to the Nazis because they are too young to work.  He explains himself metaphorically to the horrified crowd, saying they must cut some limbs to preserve their bodies.  Moments like that make you pale.

Finally, there was an exhibition of art created by Jews experiencing the Holocaust, in which two pieces really struck me.  One was by Carol Deustch.  When his daughter was two years old he made her an illustrated version of the Torah, with 99 of his own drawings, some of which were on display.  He died in a concentration camp, but his daughter survived.  That book, which the Nazis seem to have regarded as worthless, was the only thing she had from her father.

There were also some paintings by Bruno Schulz, who had been commissioned to paint the walls of a Nazi officer‘s villa.  Schulz painted fairy tale characters, like princesses and Snow White, but he did not give the characters “Aryan” appearances.  Instead he gave the characters the faces of his family members, including his father.  It was a show of resistance and a way of preserving his family.  Schulz was eventually killed indiscriminately by a Nazi officer.

With each art piece there was incredible suspense while I read about the artist.  First I’d learn their backgrounds, educations, influences, their struggle in the Holocaust, and finally, whether they were murdered or they survived.  Obviously the former was much more common.

The greatest lesson I took from the Holocaust Museum was that the Holocaust was not inevitable.  There were countries that refused or resisted deporting their Jews to Germany, like Bulgaria and Denmark.  There were people who hid Jews, protected them, and helped them escape.  There were even German officers who did not follow orders.  The Holocaust is not just the result of an evil regime with a fundamentalist ideology, but equally the result of inaction, cowardice, apathy, and--most disturbingly--people’s susceptibility to groupthink hatred and inhumanity.  Comparable situations have arisen since, in Cambodia and now Congo, and the apathy continues to run through my government, my people, and me.

Throughout these memorials were quotes from Jewish leaders and the Torah about the sanctity of human life.  Without overly politicizing the immense tragedy of the Holocaust, there’s an obvious and shameful hypocrisy at work here.  After all Israel has executed the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, in which civilian deaths outnumbered Israel’s total losses by about 60:1.  This doesn’t make Jews or Israel exceptionally evil.  But it suggests to me that every society will tolerate the murder of innocents, even the most intelligent, successful, resilient, cultured, and those most personally acquainted with evil.

The Low-Down: Part 3 of 5

In Tbilisi, Georgia I researched the European Commission’s grants to NGOs under the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR).  I was familiar with this funding instrument since I had also researched the EIDHR in Turkey.  As elsewhere, several interesting insights emerged regarding donor dependency and civil society sustainability.

I interviewed four NGO administrators implementing European Commission-funded projects.  This included the Justice and Liberty Association, which was conducting a project to monitor and prevent torture in the Georgian military; the Georgian Young Lawyer’s Association (GYLA), an enormous organization that does a lot of pro bono human rights advocacy; and the South Caucuses Network of Human Rights Defenders, which is establishing a network to keep human rights defenders safe from persecution.  I also interviewed two EU officials, the projects coordinator for the EIDHR and an expert on human rights and civil society.

Between Georgian NGOs and their donors there seemed to be a more dense social network than in other countries I’ve visited. For example, the executive director of GYLA explained that in the donor institutions, “There is a lot of people who are my friends, because they used to work here.  We keep contact all the time.  We consider ourselves as partners.”  Speaking about Georgian NGOs, the official from the Network of Human Rights Defenders described the civil society community as a “closed circle.  We’re maybe 100 people and we all know each other.”

These relationships seemed to be important for project implementation as well.  The GYLA executive director and the Network of Human Rights Defenders both talked about the EU’s dense bureaucracy, in which personal relationships can make the difference: “There are people working within the European Union.  You have to find the right person and it may take ages.  If you are with the wrong person, you are stuck.”

Regarding whether these projects are grassroots movements of top-down interventions, these NGOs seemed to be working more for the EU than for their local constituents.  The Justice and Liberty Association‘s project funding, which includes office supplies, printers, and a car, is for an idea that came from within the organization rather than demand of the general public, and the EU has funded the NGO extensively because of the importance of torture for the EC.

When I asked the director of the Justice and Liberty Association how he knew that Georgians--rather than only he and the EC--cared about this project and wanted it to be part of their development, he explained that generally in Georgia: “The trust to NGOs is big from society because we are trying to protect human rights, support democracy in Georgia, and people in Georgia love democracy . . . We have good experience, education, and people trust us.”  While his perception of Georgian society may be true, it leaves a very broad mandate to seek any project that the organization feels is good for democracy on the basis that Georgians want democracy.  The director did not offer any evidence or data about public support for his organization or this particular project.

GYLA was a little stronger in this regard.  Their executive director explained that, “We do conduct sometimes surveys.  Every year we conduct various surveys, we purchase this service from a specific company.  We ask about legal aid, what is needed.”  This response was a little vague, but it represented the greatest effort I could see by anyone in Georgian civil society or the European Commission to find out what is needed from the general public, rather than assuming that their own priorities are necessary and popular.

Importantly, on this topic I am criticizing the European Commission by my criteria, not theirs.  The EC’s method may in my view be undemocratic, since they do not seem to ask for or heavily value how Georgians might like EU funds to be spent in their country.  To them human rights is a foundation of democracy, and a basic requirement for getting into the EU, which of course Georgian people do want.

Moving to my primary research interest, sustainability of the civil society sector was neither a priority for NGOs nor the European Commission.  That is to say, in my view sustainability for NGOs would mean that they are financially self-sufficient, through some balanced combination of their own commercial activities, private donations from their society, and last of all funding from foreign donors.  But Georgian NGOs entirely depend on grants from foreign donors, and they are resigned to the fact that private society will not support them.  The director of the Justice and Liberty Association felt that private companies could not support NGOs because it would bring investigations from the government.  The executive director of GYLA, an enormous organization with multiple offices and hundreds of staff, explained that “We are donor driven, grant-driven, as a majority if not all NGOs in Georgia are because local philanthropy is not developed in this country.  We have a membership fee, but it’s symbolic.  2% of budget comes from dues.”

The project coordinator for the Network of Human Rights Defenders also emotively explained how Georgian civil society became donor dependent:

“They came in with quite a large amount of money, but they did not come in with an explanation of what is an NGO, how an NGO should be run, what are NGO ethics.  They did not start a public discourse about that.  They just gave money to people who were poor, who were struggling to survive.  We did not have electricity, water, food, and you see that if you open an NGO and start doing some work you can get money.  That brought negative consequences, and we have to get rid of that legacy.  Civil society has to step up which is a painful process.”

I asked the EIDHR projects coordinator in Georgia why the EC did not lobby the government to be more supportive to NGOs or fund projects to encourage Georgian private companies to donate more money.  First, she rejected the premise that the government is hostile toward NGOs, saying,

“Whatever the EU does with the government is obviously a negotiation of priorities.  Government is already somehow indirectly involved in identifying priorities for NGOs.  Government is not against NGOs.  I would not take the argument that the government would investigate private companies if they donate to NGOs.”

Then she explained that NGOs complain that they cannot raise money or conduct their own commercial activities, but seem to make little effort to test that belief.  GYLA’s admittedly “symbolic” 2% membership dues certainly confirmed this for me.  An organization or lawyers struggling to be financially (and therefore ideologically) independent could provide more than this if there was not such an abundance of grants from foreign donors available to them.

The same EU official said that she could not “recall anyone putting this issue strongly on an agenda in public debate.”  It seems that NGOs have not asked for the EC’s help in securing more support from government or local donors, even though they lightly lament that civil society is dependent on foreign grants.

What was most interesting was how the two EU officials conceived of sustainability in the Georgian civil society sector.  Much like the grants specialist for the US Embassy Democracy Commission Small Grants Program in Moldova, the EIDHR projects coordinator felt that grants and civil society sustainability did not really go together.  She said the strength of Georgian civil society,

“is certainly a goal, but we cannot provide it through our funding.  The European Commission funds actions, which means we do not pay for any organization--we pay for action.  We do not ourselves provide any support to help NGOs become self-sustainable.  Even though the European Union would like to see NGOs be more sustainable.  We fund actions.  We would, but we try to have as many actions funded as possible.”

It’s clear that the EU does not see the sustainability of Georgian civil society as its goal, but rather the completion of projects that align with the EU’s values and can be implemented by local NGOs.  Likewise, the human rights specialist in the EU Delegation to Georgia explained that the EU encourages sustainability of the NGOs they fund by giving them experience in applying for and executing grant projects.  By that logic, Georgian NGOs implementing projects for the European Commission and other foreign donors is the ideal stage for Georgian civil society.

I personally find the EC’s view of this to be refreshingly honest, but unfortunate.  I presume that Georgia’s society would most benefit from NGOs that are primarily funded by the Georgian public and represent the wants and needs of the Georgian public.  The ideal scenario is that if Georgians wanted to address some issue in their society they’d be entirely free and able to do it themselves and mold their society in a way that best serves their interests.  The EC seems to view things the other way around--as long as Georgian NGOs can get money from us, we can help them become a strong society.

What’s most strange is that the dangers of this donor dependency are entirely understood by the local NGOs.  In 2003, Georgia experienced its Rose Revolution, in which a new democratic, pro-Western regime came to power.  Every NGO administrator I talked to described how civil society was crippled after this because donors concentrated their efforts on supporting the new government.  Civil society was sent years backward in development as a result.  And yet, the consensus among the NGO administrators was: this is why we need donors to consistently give us money no matter what they think is happening in the country.  I of course am an outsider, but to me the logical reaction would be to tell the donors: help us become self-sufficient, so that the next time you decide to leave we can survive.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Georgia (the country)

Walking around Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi, I felt the same surprise as I did when I first saw Budapest, Chisinau, and Bangui: this is more developed than I imagined.  Tbilisi isn’t Tokyo or Singapore, but there are wide boulevards, metro lines, Nike and Adidas stores, and the buildings light up in interesting colors at night.

Tbilisi is bisected by a river that runs a greenish brown.  It’s not the prettiest, but two of the bridges that cross it tell a lot about this city.  One is the Metekhi Bridge, built near a church from the 13th century.  According to one story I was told, an earlier incarnation of this bridge was the site where a Muslim conqueror demanded Tbilisi’s Christians convert and desecrate the crucifix by stepping over it.  According to the legend, no one converted and tens of thousands were thrown into the river.

Nearby is a very new bridge mostly made of metal and glass.  Its topped by a white symmetrical wave with a matrix-like design.  At night the structure lights up and people take photos.

On the western bank is a European-style street of expensive restaurants and hip cafes.  The adjacent Presidential Palace likewise has a glass dome in the center that loudly signals Tbilisi’s modernity, and among developing countries that produce this clash of old and new, I think Tbilisi’s version has been well executed.

It’s hard for me to discuss much about Georgian people as a whole, because 90% of my interactions have very fortunately been with my friend Tato and his family.  Tato works for an NGO that I visited on my first full day in Georgia, and ever since he’s been taking me out for Georgian meals, giving me tours of the city, and inviting me into his home where I watched several World Cup matches.  Next to Tato, my best friend in Georgia must be his cocker spaniel, Choppy.


Coming from Moldova, or the land of terrible food, Georgia has been a blessing.  Most dishes are some combination of potatoes, peppers, onions, lamb or pork, and a surprising amount of cilantro.  Eating sausages for multiple meals per day has reminded me of Hungary and Romania two summers ago.  Overall I’d say the cuisine is excellent, albeit shy of Turkey’s gold standard eats.



I was also impressed with the number of churches in Tbilisi.  They’re almost--but not quite--as common as mosques in Istanbul.  In Avlabari, they recently built the enormous Trinity Cathedral.  The central church is part of a complex of nine chapels that is about 4/5 the size of a football field.  The church is actually most attractive from the outside.  The interior, like many orthodox churches here, has bare walls in favor of ground-level altars and icons.

Once inside the central church, the amount of space is somewhat underwhelming.  Large pillars shrink the floor space a great deal, and while the architects created a very tall church, they didn’t make it exceedingly wide.  For someone who has been in Mimar Sinan’s Selimiye Camii, where the pillars are ingeniously integrated with the walls to make the interior entirely open, the Trinity Cathedral was in this way a little disappointing.

Perhaps the best surprise of Tbilisi was a movie theater that twice a week plays films with English subtitles.  I was lucky that both films they played while I was here--Good Bye Lenin! and In July--were good films, and ones I hadn’t seen before.  For a film buff who hadn’t been in a movie theater in more than a month, this was a welcome treat.

Tomorrow I leave Tbilisi for Israel, which will of course be a unique experience.  Apparently, the Syrian stamp in my passport means that I’ll have to go through an additional level of security where I will strip completely and someone will yell at me in Arabic to see if I respond, among other stations.  Wish me luck!

The Low-Down: Part 2 of 5

NOTE: So, me talking about trains or movies and telling travel horror stories is great and all, but this here is the real reason I'm going all over.  This is from a boatload of hard work and money, so if you're at all interested I encourage you to take ten minutes . . . or just pretend you did.

In Moldova I researched the partnerships between various NGOs and the U.S. Embassy Democracy Commission’s Small Grants Program. My primary interests, as always, were whether the development projects represent grassroots movements or top-down reforms and the sustainability of the development projects and the organizations themselves.

My investigation of these topics was particularly information-rich in Moldova for two reasons.  Since I was researching the U.S. Embassy, most of my interviewees spoke English fluently, and a shared cultural background made the important interviewer-interviewee dynamic easier to manage.  Also, I had access to many different role-players in these relationships.  At the U.S. Embassy Democracy Commission in Chisinau, I interviewed the Grants Specialist, a Moldovan working for the embassy since 2003, and the grants assistant, an American and former Peace Corps. Volunteer.  I also interviewed the founder and director of the Independent Journalism Center, the administrator of Promo-Lex (a group of human rights lawyers in Moldova), and the director of a project for teaching youth about using media.  Most interestingly, I spoke with several Peace Corps. Volunteers who worked in these organizations.  Because they were American students interested in development, quite like I am, they had neither loyalty to their NGOs nor to the granting institution.  In essence, I had a guarantee of their sincerity.

My first question is whether the U.S. embassy’s grants reflect grassroots movements that an NGO’s “constituents” have asked for or the priorities of the donor institution simply being implemented via local NGOs.  In Macedonia, for example, the USAID project I researched seemed to have a major democratic deficit.  The project, which was meant to increase transparency in local government, was proposed by USAID and contracted to a team of three NGOs who started civic centers and gave recommendations for increasing transparency in local government.  Importantly, no one ever consulted the communities about whether they really wanted more transparent governance, or if they wanted something else more. 

This previous experience contrasted with the Democracy Commission’s small Grants Program.  Projects are proposed by the NGOs, and grants that are awarded have “no strings attached.”  The U.S. Embassy funds according to a mandate of helping Moldovan democracy consolidate, but even this is interpreted liberally and pragmatically.  For example, if regional or local governments are hostile to the idea of projects for strengthening democracy, the Small Grants Program may fund environmental or social projects as well.

Most importantly, the NGOs themselves claim to have a mandate from their constituents, which they have experienced or tested.  In the case of the Independent Journalism Center, the director explained that, before her project:

“We did needs-assessments for the media in Moldova every two years or every year.  We were asking managers of media organizations what kinds of projects were needed, what were their biggest concerns,  what are the qualities of their employees, what are the problems with the graduates of the journalism departments . . . The graduates of standard journalism departments were educated academically, but when they came into the newsroom they didn’t know how to hold a microphone. They didn’t know how to construct a story.  They didn’t have any practical skills.”

Her solution was to found the School of Advanced Journalism in Chisinau with funding from the U.S. Embassy.  At this school, the same members of the media sector who complained of a lack of professionally trained journalists now actually teach the classes.  In this story, there’s a very clear demand from a group of Moldovan constituents, and the eventual project seems well-planned to address those constituents’ needs. 

Likewise, the Promo-Lex director emotively explained the demand for his NGO in the community:

“People come here and they cry.  They cry because we don’t have a mechanism to protect them . . . We ask them what can we do for you and for others in your situation?  Many times they give us ideas you need to help us to do this this this.  After that we have meetings, brainstorm, and we identify solutions.  This is the difference between us and others.  Others just look who propose some programs, some money for activities, and after that they decide what activities they can do.”

As the Promo-Lex director articulates, these projects are ideal because they respond to the needs of the community, not the donor agency, and because the grants are a means to serving that constituency, not the financial survival of the organization.

It’s important to credit these organizations, rather than the U.S. Embassy, with the virtues of these projects.  They are not democratic and successful mission-driven organizations because of the U.S. Embassy’s grants.  The U.S. Embassy’s credit in this situation is giving these NGOs the authority over their own projects, rather than imposing the will of the donor institution. 

By far the most interesting aspect of my research in Moldova, with the most diverse range of insights, was how institutions address sustainability--after the money goes away, can the project and the organization survive? 

In Macedonia I found that the institutions did not seem to have a clear idea or strategy for sustaining their projects in the future.  In Moldova, the two very strong organizations I worked with talked seriously about how their projects and organizations are sustainable.  But the U.S. Embassy Grants Specialist--to my enormous surprise--spoke very pragmatically about the sustainability of these projects:

“Sustainability is a long unreachable goal at this point . . . We’re working with the democracy-building NGO and they’re relying only on foreign funding because no local companies will fund democracy-building NGOs . . . Of course we want the results of our projects to continue.  So far the only sustainability is the hope that someone else will jump in to fund this project for the next twelve months, or maybe the mayor’s office will jump in.”

The last sentence is certainly disconcerting, and by all accounts an accurate depiction of Moldova‘s civil society sector.  Essentially, the strategy for the sustainability of organizations and the sector as a whole, in the view of the U.S. Embassy Grants Specialist, is donor dependency.  Pursuing this question further requires an understanding of the legal and cultural barriers that face the civil society sector, and thus necessitate grants for NGOs.

Legally, there aren’t policies to incentivize donation, like giving tax credits for donation to NGOs.  Also, companies fear that donating to charities will bring unwanted attention from financial authorities.  This is related to the high levels of corruption throughout Moldovan society.  According to the grants specialist at the embassy, many companies use double accounting, and might report very low or negative profits to the government.  Thus, donating to charity would make their reported income dubious.  There is legislation now that might address some of this, which would allow companies to divert 2% of their taxable income to foundations and charities, rather than paying it to the government.  The NGO administrators I spoke to all felt that this would be a positive development.

A more long-term barrier is Moldova’s cultural disposition toward NGOs.  The U.S. Embassy Grants Specialist described NGOs as being associated with “mismanagement of funds and doing nothing for really high salaries.”  He continued,

“Partly the NGOs are to blame because they do not work good enough with the constituency . . . You only hear about all the money that is coming to Moldova, and since NGOs aren’t transparent . . . You have this lack of trust and this negative attitude because the NGO doesn’t work with the people and try to explain what they do . . . Only about three or four percent of people have very high trust in NGOs.  Since there’s only three percent of trust in NGOs, a company doesn’t have the motivation to fund NGOs because they’ll be funding structures that are negatively viewed by people.”

A Peace Corps. Volunteer echoed this observation saying,

“In Moldova there’s a distrust of NGOs . . . There’s an active resistance to the services of an NGO by the church in my town . . . The whole notion of volunteering your time, fundraising, giving to charity, is completely foreign to them . . . There’s also the element of corruption . . . NGOs are mistrusted because they think people are getting funding and just pocketing, which sometimes that’s true.”

What results is a civil society sector financially dependent on foreign donors because of a lack of support from their constituents, private companies, and the various levels of government.  Across the board, my interviews reflected that the civil society sector in Moldova was awash in grant funds, and there was a myriad of theories about how this might negatively affect the society.

The group of Peace Corps. Volunteers explained how many NGOs select broad mission statements, for example, “helping disadvantaged groups,” with which they can “jump from grant to grant” and adjust their mission statements according to the donors’ priorities in a given year. 

The U.S. Embassy Grants Assistant suggested that the abundant funds in the civil society sector may be diverting talented individuals away from government service and private sector jobs. 

The U.S. Embassy Grants Specialist even suggested that the donor agencies which pay higher salaries than NGOs and try to hire locals were in-effect poaching the most talented staff from the civil society sector to help implement their own grants programs. 

From talking to the NGOs, it’s clear that NGOs do not even ask the private sector for money, since apparently enough is available through grants.  For example, Promo-Lex, which claims it could be financially sustainable without grants, says it receives no funding from private companies.  When I asked why, the director explained, “Because we didn’t ask.  Because we have a lot of activities and we’re full.  It’s not necessary.”  The NGO director who implemented a project to educate youth about using media likewise said, “I have experience getting funds from businesses, which is really complicated.”

It appears that NGOs have stopped asking for funds from private donors, because it‘s become accepted that companies won‘t help and because there is enough funding from grants that it‘s not “necessary.”  Most striking are the comments that getting funds from businesses is complicated, or that the NGO is too busy to be financially independent.  This reflects an unhealthy relationship between donors and civil society.  Presumably with fewer grants, these NGOs would find time, due to necessity, to ask more private companies for support.

In fact, there is evidence within Moldova that this is true.  According to the Grants Specialist from the U.S. Embassy, one NGO comprised of college students, AIESEC Moldova, does get financial support from companies.  When AIESEC applied to the U.S. Embassy for funding, the Grants Specialist negotiated a deal in which the U.S. Embassy would fund half the money for a project, but AIESEC would have to get the rest from private donors, so as not to become donor dependent.  “The donors have to take this into account, not to destroy something that has been built,” he said. 

One Peace Corps. Volunteer echoed my sentiments on sustainability in development exactly:

“Helping Moldovans to solve problems by themselves and improving their ability to solve problems for themselves should be the overall goal of development.  If grant money was spent on helping organizations look past getting grant money, then that would be a better use for this money.”

If sustainability is a priority in Moldova’s civil society, and I think it should be, donor institutions would better spend their time and money lobbying for changes in policy and funding projects to change the cultural stigmas surrounding NGOs in Moldova.  The U.S. Embassy is doing an admirable job of this, evidenced in its negotiations with AIESEC and their encouragement to NGOs to be more transparent to the public.  More institutions doing the same would be a much greater help to Moldova than the status quo.

On Train Travel

My train from Chisinau, Moldova to Kiev, Ukraine left about two hours ago.  It’s just a small, unnecessary adventure en route to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I’ll be in about thirty-six hours.  Right now I’m alone in my four-bed sleeping compartment, and I’m surprised at my own affection for this locomotive. 

Unlike most Americans my age, I actually have a lot of experience with trains.  When I was five and six I made the trip numerous times between my grandparents in Arizona and my home in New Orleans.  Last year I rode China’s bullet trains all over.  My great grandfather was even a railroad conductor and head of the union.  I remember his photo on my grandmother’s living room mantle-piece, standing straight in front of his train.  I heard the train still exists, probably resting on retired tracks in an overgrown field outside of Duluth.

Whatever experience or family lineage I may have, riding in this sleeper compartment is an original experience.  I’m alone, where I can contemplate, and for once I’m not wholly focused on how many more hours I‘ll be sitting up.  This specific train--a leftover from the Soviet Union I suspect--is old, heavy, and tired.  It brutishly thunders ahead.  Still, upon setting my mattress and pillow, stale-smelling and slightly damp though they were, I found myself giddy.  The train, I have quickly decided, is the perfect way to travel.

Watching Moldova’s green hills under dark clouds pass me by--beautiful, but not unique--I considered some different explanations for why this train and I are such fast friends.  Psychologically speaking, one must note the train’s phallic shape, which has served as a useful metaphor for men before me--opening Renoir’s The Human Beast and comically closing Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.  I suppose this is the kind of sub-conscious association that might draw a young man.  But this wouldn’t be unique to trains of course, considering Boeing jets and submarines.  There is simply a coincidence of anatomy, psychology, and aerodynamics in the universe.

Another possibility is that my sleeping compartment, population me, is the only form of transportation I know where I don’t have to deal with other people.  My disinterest in strangers makes this a big plus.  But I don’t seek solitude.  In fact I’d pay exorbitant amounts if it meant I could choose any one of several friends to accompany me on this train.

Nope.  The locomotive is just the best metaphor. 

Cars confer a false sense of power, an illusion of agency.  The driver controls speed and direction; jostles for favorable position; secretly races opponents; tries to make “good time.”  Generations of muscle cars, or worse--Hummers--express what shiny armor might have five hundred years ago.  Hybrids aren’t much better--yes, with incremental baby steps you can save the world.  This cannot represent life, with GPS systems like prophets, lifeless and all-knowing.  One would have to include a lot more drunk drivers and runaway brake pads.

Buses are simply too uncomfortable to be a favorite mode of travel, regardless of any usefulness in analogizing life.

Flying is too far the opposite of driving, divorcing the traveler from the journey.  The change of location is abstract, not experienced.  For people in a hurry it’s perfect, but that’s not how people live their lives.  No one actually wants to arrive at their final destination.

The train, or maybe this train in particular, is different.  You have freedom.  To sit, sleep, or go to the dining and lounge cars with other warm-bodies, a mix of solitude and community at the discretion of the passenger.  But this free will is bound within larger constraints.  You don’t control the speed, and the train will get there when it gets there.  One can feel the bumps of the journey, but it’s not unpleasant.  It even sounds a rhythm, mimicked in the big band jazz standards I played in high school.  The train lulls and slumbers, while its passengers sit, talk, think, and wait.

P.S. Several hours after writing the above paragraphs, I was joined by four Moldovan hooligans.  For three hours their drinking and laughing kept me awake.  I didn’t say anything, only tried to communicate my contempt with vain body language.  Not speaking Russian was one problem; being outnumbered was another; the decisive factor was probably cowardice.

It reminded me that the unfortunate problem with trains, for me, is the other people who ride them.  It’s elitist and prejudiced to say so, but not inaccurate.  How I wish I could have traveled by train a hundred years ago or more, when it was the choice mode of travel for the cultured and well-behaved.  I suppose there would have been train robberies to worry about, but at least that would leave a better story than four Moldovans drinking wine from a two liter bottle in my sleeping compartment.

My Time in Moldova

My CAR debacle brought me to Moldova, where I spent my first few days staying with a friend from home, Erin Hutchinson.  Erin knew several peace corps volunteers and US embassy employees who worked with NGOs and grant programs in Moldova.  I spent my first few days reaching her contacts and setting up meetings.  All this time I was in Erin’s small town of Comrat, where people actually speak a dialect of Turkish.  Once or twice I tried using my Turkish, but their accent was really difficult to understand.  It was more effective to just let Erin use her Russian.

After a few days I left Comrat for the capital, Chisinau.  Chisinau’s city center is much more developed and bourgeois than I expected.  Moldova’s official GDP per capita is about $2300.  That puts it just ahead of North Korea and just behind Sudan.  But the center of the Chisinau feels almost like Budapest.  There are cafes, nightclubs, a McDonalds, art galleries, and public parks.  There are Mercedes and BMW’s driving the well-paved streets. 

I truly can’t reconcile this.  I borrowed a Lonely Planet on Eastern Europe from someone at the hostel, and about Chisinau’s wealth it basically said we have no idea where all the money comes from and we’re not about to ask.  Based on reputation I would presume the money comes from mafia, sweatshop-owners, and human traffickers.

Because much of the cuisine here is priced for these high-end lowlifes, I’ve spent much of my time here in Chisinau being quite hungry.  The city certainly doesn’t enjoy Turkey’s abundance of delicious street food.  Yesterday Erin and her mom were passing through the city and they treated me to some great Uzbek cuisine.  But I greatly want to learn where the commoners go for cheap and tasty eats.

From the city center of people, government buildings, statues, and expensive restaurants, it’s about a ten minute walk to my hostel.  The hostel has one room with six beds, and for most nights my only roommate has been an Italian guy with a disturbing mission.  Apparently his Moldovan girlfriend left him so he has pursued her to Chisinau to convince her to take him back.  In the midst of long silences where I’ve been reading or transcribing interviews he’ll ask me out of the blue: What do you know about women?  Have you ever been in love?  I’m sure I have some greater ethical responsibility to deal with stalkers like this, but I just try to keep my words with him to a minimum.  He doesn’t seem dangerous, just weird.  That said, if either I or a young Moldovan girl just back from Italy disappear, someone please inform Interpol about a 5’5’’ Italian man in his 20’s who listens to Pink Floyd.

Assuming I survive, however, the next few days will mark the end of my fourth week (out of ten) in my circumnavigation.  After four weeks I have gotten good information in two countries, which was my goal.  My reading pace has slowed in Moldova, but I think that's because my current book, Ian McEwan's Solar, is not the most entertaining.  I plan to catch up while in transit to Georgia.  The last few days I've also increasingly missed home and my friends.  This is a little strange since in Moldova I've actually had a friend from home, but maybe this is just the effect of being now four weeks into traveling.  It's not really something I can dwell on, since I'm not even halfway.

Of course my primary activity here has been my research.  I’ve been talking with NGO administrators, peace corps volunteers, and US embassy officials all associated with the Democracy Commission Small Grants Program within the US embassy.  I’m trying to arrange two more interviews for today or tomorrow, and then I’ll be set for a train to Kiev, Ukraine, and a flight to Tbilisi, Georgia from there.  The unexpected detour to Moldova will leave my research a little unbalanced--three of my five countries are former Socialist republics all struggling to adjust to the Western model of development and civil society in similar ways.  But the research, which I’ll detail more about later, has been successful, and Eastern Europe has been good to me.

Getting In (and Out) of the Central African Republic

About ten days ago I wrote a prematurely apologetic and dejected blog-post explaining why I couldn’t go to the Central African Republic.  At that time I had a flight to CAR in 24 hours, and Fed-Ex couldn’t return my passport and visa for 48 hours.  I urged them to move mountains to bring my passport back in time.  I was actually sitting in a travel agency with the offer to cancel my flights and get $100 back when I made one last call to Fed-Ex. They said--to my enormous surprise--that there was a possibility my passport would come in time.  I waited, not even knowing if the passport had a visa for CAR inside.  I had no way to contact the CAR embassy, since their contact numbers didn’t work and my own embassy didn’t even know how to reach them.

My passport arrived about 12 hours before my flight, visa included.  Initially ecstatic, I momentarily considered whether I should still go to CAR.  I had already made a few back-up plans, and in some ways they were more attractive prospects than going to CAR.  Ultimately, I decided to go to CAR because I earned my grant with a proposal that included the country, and I felt strongly that my research on development would be incomplete without Africa.  

The best thing about CAR was the family that hosted me, which my contact had arranged. 

Obviously, the living standards were different than what I am used to, with only cold water and intermittent electricity.  Concrete floors and a wall topped by broken glass shards for security.  But for their country this family had a beautiful home, and that’s truly how I remember it.  

The father was a pastor so the house doubled as a church.  

Most of the family only spoke French, but we communicated enough, and enjoying World Cup football thankfully doesn’t require much conversation.

Unfortunately, my research in CAR was doomed from the start by a catastrophe of miscommunication.  My first two contacts at the World Bank had said I was welcome to come.  They had referred me to someone at the country office to coordinate my research.  This person later wrote my invitation letter, in which she invited me to help her with own project.  

In my first and only day at the World Bank country office in Bangui, CAR a few things went wrong.  The person who wrote my invitation letter turned out to be a secretary, who obviously did not have the authority to invite people to do research at the country office.  I assume she was just trying to be helpful, or she was caught in a confusing bureaucracy, but at any rate my contact was the least important person there.  The most important person, the country office manager, had never heard I was coming and basically said I should leave.

I briefly looked for alternative places to research in Bangui, but this proved futile.  I could only use internet cafes where the bandwidth was too weak to open my email.  Clearly coordinating a whole new research plan with new contacts would be logistically impossible.  

I could have stayed the next twelve days in Bangui and waited until my scheduled flight to Tbilisi, Georgia on July 1.  Part of me really wanted to.  I could have explored the country, though that wasn’t too safe.  Certainly my host family was welcoming and kind.  In the end I decided the opportunity cost of staying put without a World Bank project to watch over was too high, and I needed to be spending this summer learning what was in my research proposal, which I didn’t think I could do in CAR.

I managed to fire off one email to my brother Justin.  I asked him to book me a plane ticket to Moldova (one of the Plan B’s).  I didn’t even have a chance to confirm with a friend in Moldova whether I could stay with her (I managed to call her from the Madrid airport hours before my arrival).  To confirm the flight with me, my brother had to make numerous international calls, which I could only receive by wading into a nearby field until I could find a network.  48 hours after arriving, I was on a flight out of Bangui.

It was an all-around demoralizing experience.  I don’t know why three people welcomed me without asking their boss, nor why a secretary thought she had the authority to officially invite me.  But neither of these would have been a problem if I had done my homework enough to make sure the people I was talking to were the right people to be talking to.  I was also so committed to going to Africa that I turned a blind eye to some of the warning signs that it wasn’t a suitable situation.  The consequence is that I wasted time and money, quite a bit of the latter.  

There are a few tinges of silver lining.  Although I had gotten myself in the wrong kind of situation, I knew how to get out of it.  I called my brother and I gave him a fairly clear assignment.  The narrow mandate and his own business skills brought a solution in a matter of a few stressful hours.  This has also made me more conscientious with my next research sites.  I’m taking greater care to vet my contacts in Georgia than I did for Macedonia, CAR, or Moldova.  

These silver linings were not enough to satisfy my dad, however, who delivered to me a nine-point list of “boo-boo’s” by which I had screwed up in CAR.  The spirit of his letter to me was correct: At 20 I have coasted through life and very rarely made mistakes--mistakes of an academic or professional nature at any rate.  20 year olds who haven’t seriously failed at something can develop a dangerous sense of invincibility, and perhaps that was my malady in CAR.

The greatest concern that I heard from my family, in particular my father, was that I was unsafe in Africa, but I don’t think I was.  The closest to danger I came in CAR was when I wasn’t looking where I was going and a car splashed red mud across my front.  But that sort of encapsulates a lot about what happened in CAR.  So now I’m trying to look where I’m going more carefully, and I still haven’t washed the mud from my shoes.

The Low-Down: Part 1 of 5

I’m almost done with my time in Macedonia, which I’d say has been successful.  I’m here investigating a USAID project that has given funds to a team of three NGOs to increase local government transparency in municipalities across Macedonia. 

The division of labor is thus.  The NGO Info-Centre receives funding from USAID and is responsible for documenting where it all goes.  The NGO Info-Centre, which handles multiple projects simultaneously, has delegated the project tasks to two other NGOs, the Center for Civil Communications (CCC) and the Educational Humanitarian Organization (EcHO).  CCC has prepared research to find out how transparent each of four municipalities currently is, as well as how transparent the citizens think their local government is.  This involves questions like: Is there a phone line where citizens can report corruption or make suggestions? If so, is it always staffed with an operator? If not, are all messages returned and relayed to the responsible officials in the local government?  EcHO, meanwhile, has established and overseen civic centers in each municipality where citizens can come and speak their mind. 

Thus far I have interviewed one of the two USAID officials in charge of the project, the director of the NGO Info-Centre, the director of CCC, an anti-corruption expert in Macedonia, and one local government official.  I have also observed a workshop hosted by CCC and EcHO with the officials of one municipality government, in which the CCC announced many statistics from their research that didn’t sit well with their audience.  That leaves at least one more NGO administrator and, if possible, the other USAID project manager as well.

In my interviews I have pursued a few key questions.  First, how do all of these institutions cooperate?  Are decisions made by hierarchy, consensus, deliberation, etc?  I’ve truly been surprised at how cohesively different groups are working together.  The USAID officials, who are from Macedonia but--in their own words--definitely working for the United States, have a positive relationship with the three NGOs.  The NGO administrators feel that USAID is well-intentioned, benevolent, and not too overbearing or demanding.  Likewise, the three NGOs cooperate very well.  The NGO Info-Centre is atop this small pyramid because they receive and distribute the funding, but the NGO administrators collaborate weekly on their progress, and they have friendly personal relationships with each other.  Perhaps this is because this trio of NGOs was self-organized.  The NGO Info-Centre chose its two partners.  Finally, the NGOs working to make local governments more transparent have a balanced relationship with the government bureaucrats.  At a conference with both groups, the NGO administrators and local government officials mingled socially during meals and debated vigorously in meetings.  Importantly, these local governments were not forced to participate in this project; they were asked and they agreed.  Likewise, the NGOs telling them how to be more transparent do not have coercive power.  They tell them how transparent they are and what they can do to be better, but these are only suggestions, which can be rejected.

My second question regards how the project can be sustained in the future.  The project ends in three years, and the funding source--USAID--is scheduled to move out of Macedonia in 2015 (then again one should probably be skeptical of any US exit strategy).  I’ve found this aspect of the project weak.  There certainly isn’t a unified idea between the institutions.  One NGO administrator suggested that USAID’s funding will probably have to be replaced by funding from foreign NGOs.  Another said that the civic centers that have opened in each municipality aren’t expensive to maintain, so sustainability shouldn’t be a problem.  The same administrator suggested that maybe the local government will see the benefit of the civic centers and pay to keep them open.  That would be a very democratic solution assuming the centers remain autonomous, but can one truly expect people to faithfully monitor officials who have power over their paychecks?  Overall, there doesn’t seem to be any sustainability strategy, or a clear appreciation that one will be necessary.

My final area of interest has been whether this project is democratic: do Macedonian citizens want more transparency in their local governments?  For example, local governments have been made more important by a decentralization of power that was encouraged by the European Union and the US.  The project was initiated and announced by USAID, not by any representatives of Macedonian citizens.  The project is implemented by NGOs--obviously not elected.  And the local government officials who consented to participate in the project are not directly elected by anyone; they are appointed by the elected mayor.  When I asked my interviewees if citizens want more government transparency, they were consistently dumbfounded, as though I had popped their paradigm.  Of course they do. Who doesn’t want transparency?   That’s a good question, and one to which neither I--nor they-- have the answer, because they never asked.  The CCC conducted surveys with a thousand citizens, business people, and NGO workers across four municipalities asking various questions about how transparent the local government is, but they never asked: Do you want your local government to be more transparent?  So why didn’t they ask?  Based on my interviewees’ reactions, I would guess that it doesn’t occur to them.  A more cynical explanation is that the question is too risky.  If people answered that they didn’t want more government transparency, the NGO workers would have planned a project for nothing; the project would lose all legitimacy, and NGO employees would have to find a new paycheck.

Two interesting things happened in my interviews regarding this democratic deficit.  Twice interviewees argued I’m a citizen and I want more transparency.  This is an obvious fallacy, since their vision of the society is worth exactly one vote in a democracy, and they, as workers in NGOs that monitor government transparency, have a very biased opinion.  Second, a very interesting statistic was given.  In one municipality, there was not any phone line citizens could call to make complaints, offer suggestions, or make inquiries.  But 70% of the municipality’s citizens answered that there was such a phone line.  Ha! said my interviewee.  This proves that the people aren’t informed by their local government because they think something about the government that isn’t true.  They must be informed!  In my view, an alternative interpretation of this data could be that there is a low demand for such a phone line in the community.  At least those 70% don’t seem to want or need a phone line to call, or else they would have discovered that one didn’t exist.  Also, considering the 70% are simply wrong about the existence of said phone line, we should hardly accept that the other 30% know what they’re talking about.  They might have been guessing that no phone line existed with exactly the same ignorance as the other 70%.

Of course, the conclusion to be drawn is not that Macedonian citizens don’t want government transparency.  The conclusion is that neither USAID, the NGO sector, nor I have any idea what Macedonian citizens want to do to make their government better if we don’t ask.  And changing the relationship between government and the citizens without the citizens’ consent is undemocratic, which undermines the whole point of the project.  Government transparency seems straight-forward enough.  It is unlikely that citizens would say they don’t want transparency in government.  But if that’s the case, there’s all the more reason to ask them and make this project popularly legitimate.

Overall, my experience in Macedonia has supported one of my over-arching ideas about development work.  Despite the flaws that I have criticized, the people I’ve met working in development are all earnest in their intentions and their desires to make the country stronger, safer, and more prosperous.  If I continue to observe this in other countries I visit, it will suggest that the lack of development in much of the world is not the fault of the people involved, but something else.  I don’t know what it would be, but I have at least four countries left to find out.

My Mission on the Side

I want to be educated and thoughtful.  A large problem with this plan has been my historical disinterest in reading.  It’s not to say I don’t read. Every day I read blogs, op-eds in the New York Times, and articles on politics, world events, and history.  I probably spend a minimum of one hour a day reading on the internet.  Likewise, as a political science student, every semester I read thousands of pages for class.

But I rarely read novels, and there’s a shamefully long list of heralded authors whose books I haven’t touched.  Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Ellison, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Nabokov.  Reading is time consuming and it requires patience.  It’s inefficient for learning, indirect in its benefits for useful application, and usually less entertaining than other things I could be doing.  I have a long record of reading the first chapters of a book before petering out.  My attention drifts, and by page 100 I can make an opinion on the writer’s style and ability; thus, I’ve already attained a lot of the cultural capital without having to put in the rest of the work.

There was one year where I was a strangely prolific reader.  I was ten years old, and I read the film novelization of Sleepy Hollow.  Then I read all many-hundreds-of-pages of The Green Mile.  K-Pax and Big Trouble.  These books were all of course in the process of becoming movies at the time, and movies really were--and always have been--my primary “artistic” interest. 

I remember my mom and I going to Borders in New Orleans.  I would look for all the books that I knew were becoming movies, read the first ten pages, and choose the one I liked best.  I couldn’t afford to buy the books so I would just sit at Borders and read a set number of pages each day.  Usually 50, once or twice I plowed through 100 I think.  This behavior died out, probably because I moved to Rio Rico, where the library was pathetic and there wasn’t a bookstore in which to sit and laze.

Every summer since I have tried to fix my reading deficit with some new approach.  Print magazines.  History books. Economics books.  Journals.  The focus of these strategies has been on the end result--being smarter and better.  This is of course a poor strategy for reading books, which require an appreciation of the journey simply because they take so long.

The impetus to try a new approach this summer came at 35,000 feet, flying from Istanbul to New York City.  A few hours before I had been trying to force my laptop back into my security-checked carry-on backpack.  For the life of me those zippers would not meet.  Something had to go.  Laptop? Camera? Folder with syllabi and frequent flier accounts?  Nope.  Instead I tossed Kurt Vonnegut.  Breakfast of Champions to be exact.

This alone did not determine my fate.  Transatlantic flights just about always have movies--if Bride Wars qualifies.  But early in the flight a pregnant woman asked to switch seats with me, and I said no.  OK, I had an aisle seat on an 11-hour flight; her tone was curt, and her husband already had one aisle seat--he should have switched with her, not me!  Well, as luck would have it the audio set-up in my seat didn’t work.  What I wanted more than anything was a book.  By the time I got from New York to Phoenix, an eternity later, I had polished off the first read of the summer.

This time I’m trying to re-capture my practice of ten years ago.  I’m working on entertaining, escapist reads and only tackling intellectual books of an appropriately short length.  I’ve decided to record the books I’m reading here, for two reasons.  First, announcing my intentions creates additional pressure not to quit.  Second, assuming anyone is reading my little inward-focused blog, it adds to the aforementioned “cultural capital” that I can gain from reading these books.  Yes, a full and honest awareness of my own cost-benefit analyses results in some shameless and silly strategic thinking.

So, what I've read so far (I'll update the list as I go):

1. What We Say Goes by Noam Chomsky (8/10 if you've never read Chomsky; 3/10 if you have)
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson (9/10)
3. Runaway World by Anthony Giddens (8/10, if you're interested in globalization)
4. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson (7/10)
5. Solar by Ian McEwan (9/10)
6. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Steig Larsson (8/10)
7. Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan (7/10)
8. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (8/10)
9. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins (9/10, but read Tom Ricks' Fiasco instead)
10. The Giver by Lois Lowry (6/10)

Currently reading: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dosteyevsky

If you have any recommendations for what I should read next, tell me!

My Central African Republic Problem

The second country on my itinerary is the Central African Republic, and even though I have just arrived in Macedonia, most of my mental attention is being diverted toward CAR right now.  That’s because in twelve days I need to board a plane bound for CAR, and I don’t yet have a visa to enter that country. 

From the beginning, I’ve considered it essential that I go to sub-Saharan Africa for my research on development.  It’s the region that has been most disadvantaged by the global economic system historically and currently.  If I studied development--presumably to my own benefit in terms of resume and graduate school applications--without going to the region in which development finds its gravest challenges, I would consider it cowardice and intellectual dishonesty. 

Through email correspondence with the World Bank’s team leader in CAR, I decided that’s where I wanted to go.  The country embodies many of the features that slow development in Africa.  It is land-locked, culturally diverse, mostly agricultural with a very small population, and it has had decades of political instability, separatist movements, and regional wars spilling over into its borders. 

Because the CAR doesn’t have the resources to keep an embassy in a country like Turkey (where I was living for the last year) I had to consult the CAR’s Special Consul in Istanbul.  First I was told I needed a visa, but it was really easy to get one.  A month later I called again to find out the exact details, and I was told I didn’t need to arrange a visa ahead of time.  Based on this, I bought my plane tickets and let the weeks pass by.

About a month and a half ago, I felt uneasy, so I decided to check with the CAR’s embassy in Washington D.C.  In a surprisingly sarcastic tone, the CAR embassy informed me that, indeed, I needed to apply for a visa. Visa requirements include an invitation letter from someone in CAR and a letter from my advisor guaranteeing I would return to America afterward (do they really have a problem with illegal immigration by Americans?)

Initially, my contacts refused to write an invitation letter since it would implicitly endorse my research.  Eventually, one contact agreed to write the letter, but I found myself in an unfortunate race with time.  On May 31 I needed to fly home from Turkey, which required my passport.  That meant that when I received my invitation letter, around May 25, I still couldn’t send a visa application to the CAR embassy because then I wouldn’t have my passport a week later.

So now I have flown to Macedonia with the completed visa forms.  My first task in Skopje has been to express mail my visa application to the CAR embassy in Paris, and now I wait.  If within twelve days my passport and visa return, then I’ll be off to CAR.  If not, however, I go to Plan B.

PLAN B:

Arrange additional research either with other aid agencies in Macedonia (currently I’m only researching USAID), or expand my research of USAID to one or more other countries in the Balkans.  I would be in the Balkans for an extra two weeks.  Currently, I have a flight from CAR to Georgia on July 1.  If I never make it to CAR, however, I obviously can’t make that flight.  In this case I’ll take a bus from Skopje, back across my familiar campgrounds in Turkey, and east into Georgia.

As you can see, Plan B is not terrible.  I would simply have more research from the Balkans and no research from sub-Saharan Africa.  This would be disappointing to me personally (and a waste of some expensive plane tickets), but not the end of the world.  So can I trust European mail carriers to deliver on time, CAR embassy staff to be quick, or customs officers not to pocket my $150 in cash for the visa?  Yikes.