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.

The Prelude

This summer is the culmination of a lot of planning and hard work.  As though life is proving a point, making all of my summer research successful will require even more planning and hard work.

For the next ten weeks I’m traveling to at least five countries on four continents as I research development projects, via a grant from the Circumnavigators Club Foundation.  In Macedonia, the Central African Republic, Georgia, Israel, and China, I will be researching development institutions--like the World Bank and USAID--that are giving grants to support non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) development projects.  You can read that again if you want. 

This research combines two interests of mine.  First, I’ll learn more about development, and how it’s being implemented in several different contexts around the world.  Second, I’ll be looking at bureaucratic politics in these institutions.  How do the aid institutions and NGOs work together?  How is power or expertise in this relationship distributed?  How does all that effect the final outcome?

I’m trying to remain as open-minded as possible, so I’m not designing exact experiments and test cases.  To give myself just a bit of direction, however, I will be comparing the projects in at least two respects.  How do they ensure sustainability of the development they produce?  That’s not referring to much-in-vogue environmental sustainability, but rather, if the aid agency and all its money were taken away, would the effects of the development project remain?  Also, how much control does the NGO have over the project, as opposed to the funding agency?

So that’s the plan.  It comes with a few ironies that I enjoy.  For example, my own research is funded by a grant from the Circumnavigators Club Foundation.  Thus, all of the questions I ask about how financially accountable these projects are, whether the money could have been spent better elsewhere, and how control is distributed between granter and grantee are questions one could also ask of myself.  I’m watching these aid agencies and NGOs, but who is watching me?  You, perhaps?  That's basically the same level of accountability most NGOs have too.

The other irony is that while I am observing development around the world, I will also be--one would hope--experiencing my own development.  From my current view, twenty-four hours before departure, correctly executing this research and making the most of this opportunity will entail more than focus or talent.  It will require continual adjustment to new cities, languages, and cultures.  Loneliness and boredom will doubtless descend on me.  On the more positive side, I’ll surely learn more than just what I’m researching.  If nothing else, traveling to new countries and reading in planes and airports for hundreds of hours will help ensure that.

My hope is that ten weeks from now I’ll understand more about development, the world, and the future.  If you’re interested in my development research, or in my own development (no promises), you can just follow me here.