Freelancing and Feminine Hygiene

One of the real joys of freelancing (hire me) is the diverse and delicious number of topics you get to research—especially for wiki-addicts like myself. In the past two months, I've written about (among other topics):

– Seawater air conditioning
– Balinese boutique resorts
– Fuel cell energy storage
– And.. the cold, deadly and cyclically impoverishing effect of misinformation about feminine hygiene in Africa. Fun huh.

From Kristof's blog last week:

Over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly evident that one reason girls in Africa drop out of school is menstruation. They don’t have hygiene supplies, and they’re embarrassed about what might happen during their periods, so they stay home. That leaves them more and more behind, and eventually they drop out.

This is an unmentionable, and so it hasn’t been much discussed and I haven’t seen hard data on it, but I’ve heard it whispered about all across Africa. Some aid groups, such as the Campaign for Female Education, now distribute pads and underwear to girls as part of the effort to increase female attendance in high schools. But pads are expensive and there are issues with disposal of them, partly because of taboos about blood.

Clearly equipped with empathetic expertise, I got to help write a chapter about this very same (female) subject for a book, which will be published this fall in conjunction with the fantastic NGO CARE. It makes sense. I'll post details when it comes out..

Darfur. Giving. Complexity. Etc.

Good intentions don't always work with reality (and sometimes make things worse), and I find that fact simply, increasingly, terribly paralyzing.

William Easterly—whose excellent blog I mentioned in this post and who's made a career out of highlighting how aid is often misguided—writes this post about a book about some well-intended NGOs (possibly) making things worse in Sudan:

In brief, he accuses advocacy campaigns like Save Darfur of making the achievement of peace in Darfur more difficult by portraying the conflict simplistically between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans,” and by advocating foreign military intervention.

I’ll repeat just a few points from Mamdani that stuck in my mind, but I encourage you strongly to pick up the book.

• The Save Darfur campaign repeatedly ignored and distorted the facts on the ground.


• Darfur is an insurgency and an extremely vicious counter-insurgency, but there was never the intent to eliminate any specific group and so the word “genocide” is inappropriate. But the word “genocide” gave the West and the UN a free hand to intervene.


• The prospect of foreign military intervention encouraged the rebels to hold out rather than agreeing to a peace deal, while hardening and attracting additional support for the position of the government to “defend national sovereignty.”


• There were also terrible atrocities on the “good African” side.


• The “good African” side includes one key player, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), that is an opposition Islamist movement that was previously on the “bad Arab” side in the North-South civil war (note: disconcerting, especially if you've read this book) between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans.”


• There was a sharp decrease in violence after 2005 just as the Save Darfur campaign picked up steam.


• The ICC is not credible to much of the non-Western world as a judge of war crimes since the US itself does not subject itself to the ICC, and since the ICC seems to selectively prosecute US enemies and turn a blind eye to war crimes by US allies.


• The Western pressure based on distorted facts has set back attempts within Sudan and within Africa to reach a peace settlement in Darfur, which is the only way the tragedy will end.

None of this is to deny the enormous human tragedy in Darfur. But Mamdani’s analysis makes one wonder: is it possible that ill-informed outsiders with the threat of military power on their side can make things worse rather than better?

Anyone who knows care to comment?

This nothing new—on all levels of aid—even without getting into military complications. Kipling called the worst forms of it the "White Man's Burden." We've met more than one pastor who steals from his own orphanage, and there's a long sad history of governments creating dependent, depowered (it's a word) poor communities. Most of the beggar kids here have pimps watching nearby.

Seems like the world just exploits the human attraction to good v evil, the tendency to reduce things to that which we can understand and act upon, and really horrible realities on the ground that a still, in fact, dying for assistance.

So... how to help when so much aid is ineffective and some runs the risk of impeding progress?

Nick Kristof, on cue, offers encouragement in a recent column about giving. :

Many people doubt the effectiveness of foreign aid, and a new best-selling book called “Dead Aid” by an African finance expert, Dambisa Moyo, even argues that government-to-government assistance is often harmful to recipient countries. It’s true that aid of all kinds is harder to get right than people usually assume, but the kind that has the best record is grass-roots investment — with strong local buy-in — in health, education, agriculture and microfinance. I’ve repeatedly seen these kinds of programs transform families and communities, from Africa to Afghanistan.

Frankly, this kind of aid is also pretty beneficial to the donor. For my part, I gain far more than $24 a month in psychic value from sponsoring Yuneiris, and my family’s tiny foreign assistance projects also remind my own kids that there is a world out there in which children have needs greater than the latest iPod.

Will my dollars and letters utterly transform Yuneiris’s life? Probably not. Will they make a significant difference? Probably yes. Is it worthwhile? For me, absolutely!

So, I guess... give in faith and obedience and a belief in sovereignty, give with due diligence, give with the right motives, give with realistic expectations about effectiveness, and give in the realization that we're not called to save the world. But... regardless... give, especially where you can't serve (the worst problems in the world, I'm increasingly deciding, are all fueled by and fought with the bottom line).

Thoughts?

Read Con's sorta-similar post (featuring Bono!) here.

Somaly Mam

I just finished Somaly Mam's book about the realities of trafficking and prostitution in Cambodia. It's enlightening and terrible. She writes beautifully, and I finished it in a daze.

Here's a Nick Kristof column and video about Somaly and her book back in September.

In the past when I’ve seen Somaly and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn’t figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Somaly with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: They kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter.

Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Somaly organized on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Somaly’s shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.

Yet Somaly continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.

“If you want to buy a virgin, it’s not easy now,” notes Somaly, speaking in English — her fifth language.

....

In her book, Somaly recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was “adopted” by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Somaly ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his “property,” not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.

Yet even after that, Somaly occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Somaly untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.

.....

The world’s worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalized by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an Amber Alert and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don’t fit the “missing blonde” narrative. The system is broken.

You can visit Somaly's foundation here.