Two Interesting Articles on International Service

Two articles that recently caught my eye on international service; the two go well together.  Definitely an interesting read for any idealists considering Peace Corps or shorter term stints abroad.

Two Hell With Good Intentions, by Ivan Illich

IN THE CONVERSATIONS WHICH I HAVE HAD TODAY, I was impressed by two things, and I want to state them before I launch into my prepared talk.

I was impressed by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers overseas springs mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was equally impressed, by what I interpret as a step forward among would-be volunteers like you: openness to the idea that the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Latin America might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones without any way of returning the gift.

Greg Mortenson, and when it’s hard to know how many cups there are in three cups

The humanitarian philanthropic world is aflutter this week over the news of Greg Mortenson – literally, he became a trending topic on Twitter two days ago.  For those unfamiliar, Greg Mortenson is the co-author and main protagonist along with his charity the Central Asia Institute (CAI) of the bestselling book Three Cups of Tea and its recent follow-up Stones Into Schools.

The mountaineer turned humanitarian started building schools, primarily for girls, in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan after a failed attempt summiting K2.  Or so everybody thought, until 60 Minutes aired an investigative wackjob last Sunday that called a number of books’ claims and CAI’s finances into question.

Some serious questions are already being asked of 60 Minutes’ reporting, but if its story holds – and indeed it has been followed this week by a much more in-depth, researched, and less sensationalist work by Jon Krakauer – then Greg Mortenson is in danger of becoming the Bernie Madoff of international philanthropic humanitarianism, not because Mortenson is being accused of anything criminal (yet), but because he risks becoming the symbol of something much larger.

Biden visits Moldova!

Opera house decorated for the visit.

I know I’m a little behind on this one, but on March 11, Moldova played host to a very exciting visit from our Vice President, the Honorable Joseph Biden.  In case you missed it (his visit happened the same day as Japan’s earthquake and tsunami), here is the AP story.

The Vice President’s visit marked the highest level visit of a U.S. official to Moldova in its history.  Though he was only on the ground in Moldova for 6 hours, you wouldn’t have known it from the country’s enthrallment in all things Biden for a good solid week before, and many days after as well.

Biden met with the government while Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden toured a wine cellar outside the capital with the Prime Minister’s wife.  The Vice President then gave a speech to a large crowd in front of the opera house (video embedded at the end of the post), which was followed with further meetings, and then a closed door event for U.S. Embassy Staff and Peace Corps Volunteers.  Needless to say, volunteers were more excited than even the Moldovans, and I’m not just talking about your own political junkie of a blogger here.

The only picture I've been able to find that offers proof I met the Vice President.
Where's Zach? Look to the left, in the top row.  It's a little like Where's Waldo...
(click to enlarge)

Response to Alms Dealer

Just finished Philip Gourevitch’s “Alms Dealer,” in October’s The New Yorker.  One part review of Linda Polman’s “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?”, it’s a very powerful and thought provoking article its own right.  The article was posted to my Facebook wall by Lindsay Toler, one of the brightest fellow volunteers I have the pleasure to serve with here in Moldova (and a healthy, which clearly speaks to her good character).  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about international aid – its ethics, its effectiveness, and its unintended consequences.  Until now, my thoughts have been mostly focused on development aid, so this article struck a chord and made me think about development’s humanitarian cousin.  What follows are some unorganized thoughts that originally began as a FB comment but grew too long for that medium.  Not the update friends and family back home were probably hoping for, but it’s the one that got written.  Preemptive forgiveness given if you decide to skip it.

The article starts on the familiar terrain of the greed v. grievance debate within conflict studies.  The whole argument is premised heavily on the greed side of this debate, within the academic camp of liberal rationality.  In short, people are rational, including warlords.

The initial problem then that this article forces is that constructivist bane of all rationalist attempts to remake the world into a better place (realism and liberalism alike): rules are not stable, and as soon as the rules of the game are known, rational actors adjust to manipulate the rules in their favor.  The result is a constantly shifting arms race of changing rules.  Unfortunately, as the tomes of failed humanitarian interventions show, the “bad guys” seem to figure out how to work the old rules in their favor much quicker than the “good guys” can come with new rules to prevent them from doing so.

Very quickly, however, the article leaves behind technical questions of why intervention might fuel conflict, and goes for the moral jugular of humanitarianism, whether there can truly be any neutral or unambiguously good intervention.  The single most prescient sentence: "The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect."

VOTE! (If I can, you sure can too!)

Rocking the vote from Moldova!

The Colorado Primaries were Tuesday, and after weeks of wrangling, I just barely managed to get my ballot sent in the nick of time.  Voting from overseas is no small feat – I had to be extra attentive to make sure the proper paperwork was filed before leaving the States, and there was a lot of back and forth to ensure that my ballot arrived in time.  Amongst my Peace Corps colleagues, I’m about as on the ball as it comes with voting from abroad, and still, it was in just under the wire.

For other overseas voters who may be reading this, I urge you to visit the Overseas Vote Foundation’s website for comprehensive state-specific information, including election dates (general and primaries) and filing requirements.

At this point, my generation’s poor voting record is borderline cliché, but what is less well known are that the barriers to voting abroad make this another demographic with consistently low turnout.  The irony of this story is that many of us overseas are engaged directly in some form of service to our country: Foreign Service Officers, military service members, and of course, Peace Corps Volunteers (to name just a few).

As a volunteer, voting is more than just a civic responsibility: I take an oath to promote the three goals of the Peace Corps.  The second of these goals is to “Promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.”  For me, it’s hard to feel like I’m living up fully to the spirit of that goal without participating in what is arguably the most revered American political institution.  At my nation’s inception, voting (even if narrowly conceived at the time) went to the core of what set us apart.  Since then, it has occupied a central thread of our national narrative.  The right to cast a ballot has been bound up in America’s greatest national struggles and discourses: class struggle, the Civil War, feminism and women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War.  (And today, perhaps the role of concentrated economic interests’ influence…)

My curriculum for Health Education/Life Skills this coming year includes civic education.  How am I to dig into this topic with my students if voting is treated like something one checks at the airport check-in counter, valued less than the luggage one would never fail to pick up on the other end of a flight?  Moreover, the issue takes immediate relevance in Moldova, where there's been an intense discussion in recent years between the leading parties, focused at least topically on the electoral method of choosing the country's president.

Fellow volunteers looked on with a bemused curiosity that failed to hide a decent amount of skeptical cynicism.  That’s okay though – I have another month or to get them to register for the general election this fall.  In the meantime, should my ballot fail to be counted, at least it is on account of a system ill-suited to handle the international voter, and not a personal disenfranchisement.

But rather than look at all the barriers, I prefer to look at all the help I received.  Big shout outs go to:

• The Peace Corps, which was extremely helpful in getting the required paperwork printed and scanned.
• The Denver Elections Office, which has an incredible staffer handling overseas voting, and
• The Overseas Vote Foundation, which is the excellent organization which first got me involved in overseas get out the vote operations back in 2008 when I was living in Budapest.

With so much conspiring to help the American abroad to vote, any excuse is really just that: an excuse.

Post Script for the Expatriate:

If you presently reside abroad, and are interested in voting issues, the Overseas Vote Foundation is in constant need of volunteers for its non-partisan get out the vote operation.  Visit their website, follow the org on Facebook, and help spread the word wherever you are based.  OVF also operates special branches:

Youth Vote Overseas

Military Voter Services

The Democratic and Republican parties both offer special sites geared toward members living overseas as well (Democrats Abroad and Republicans Abroad).

2009’s Proposition 8, or First Wednesdays in November

First Wednesdays in November are starting to become something of a tradition in split personalities for me – I wake up feeling relieved as a progressive, and troubled as a gay man. This year was no different, with Maine’s voters repealing the state legislature’s gay marriage act, yanking the right to marry from waiting couples for whom it finally seemed close. This rebuke came amidst a wash of other special elections results that, while not good, were probably the best Democrats could reasonably expect during a heavy recession and after two landslide cycles.

On my "Slavic features"

In my time here, I’ve more or less become accustomed to Europe’s quirks and conventions. Yet there is one particular habit that continues to take me aback. It normally begins with the question, “where are you from?” This alone is not so odd. Rather, it is the pervasive follow up, “So what is your heritage?” that is indicative of a mindset completely foreign to my thinking about national identity.

Now, the technical answer to this question is: predominantly German, secondarily French and English, with the French having a Belgian influence and the English having a Scottish influence. In reality, however, the adoption of my paternal great-grandfather and the unconfirmed possibility of a Jewish great great-grandmother mean there’s a lot up in the air when it comes to that question.

Heritage aside, I seem to blend in almost anywhere. Eating dinner in Dubrovnik last summer, an English woman craned over and asked if I was English. When I detail my heritage to Germans, they normally nod their heads and say something to the effect of, “Yes, that makes sense…you look German.” Hungarians have mentioned I blend in very easily here…yesterday, a Georgian told me I look Georgian.

Just a few minutes ago, I was moved to begin writing when a woman knowingly looked at me, gulped down the last of her coffee, gave a single crisp nod, stood and decisively walked across the café towards me. Afraid I’d somehow offended her, it was my surprise when she asked if I’m Russian. Not deterred by my answer in the negative, she mused, “hmm…you have Slavic features.”

Perhaps the most amusing part of these anecdotes is that the nationality people project onto me always seems to be their own. It’s like I’m some kind of mirror.

As an American, this obsession with heritage borders on the bizarre. I’m accustomed to the follow-up to “where are you from” having to do with a sports team. Outside of family gatherings, heritage hasn’t been a topic of discussion since a first grade unit on familial histories. In the States, if there isn’t something to mark you as an “immigrant” (darker skin, accent), you’re considered American. There is, of course, a great deal of hypocrisy and irony in this particular construction, but leaving such tensions aside, the point is that in general, once you loose the accent, heritage doesn’t play a huge role in the U.S.

National identities have been a core theme of my class on Central Asian politics. Some of my colleagues from the region consistently defend a primordial view of what it means to by Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, etc. To them, their nationality runs back hundreds of years, rooted in a stable and essential conception of identity. Our professor consistently disagrees, instead arguing that the identities have repeatedly shifted in response to pressures from the outside world and the efforts of elites to define their peoples.

As an American, I’m predisposed to the position of my professor. In the States, we live in a society where identities are constantly changing. Of course, given our history this is not surprising. Indeed, part of the beauty of being American is that the requirements don’t run in your blood, but in a common set of values. While Gov. Palin has sought to define this set of values rather, shall we say, narrowly in the past week, mainly equating American values with Republican values, I believe truly patriotic individuals (who come from both sides of the aisle) reject this conflation.

When people look at me and see Slav, Georgian, Hungarian, English, etc., they do so based on some essential conception of what that group is supposed to look like. But by miscategorizing me, they prove the fluid construction of their own identity. Generally, I bite my tongue and refrain from pointing out this irony. People are so concerned with defining their own culture, a process inherently wrapped up with marking off the differences of other cultures, that they loose the ability to see the similarities. Every time I hear about my Slavic features, I become even more convinced that there can be no such thing.

Birthday Fun and Neo-Nazis

Well, as promised, a birthday update is in order. Generally, last Friday was one of my best birthdays ever, and it far exceeded my expectations (which I had purposefully pegged pretty low, under the assumption that I wouldn’t yet know many people). That much of this post will examine one negative aspect of the day should not obscure its overall greatness, but to skip over the low point would be to miss an event that will affect my long-term thinking far more than the trivialities of parties and presents.

For context, Friday marked the last day of the CEU pre-session. The university celebrated this occasion with the official opening ceremony. No university operates in a political vacuum, but as CEU’s President explained, our mission here is more overtly political than most institutions; George Soros founded the school shortly after the collapse of European communist authoritarianism, giving it “the explicit aim of helping the process of transition from dictatorship to democracy…and to nurture respect for diverse cultures and opinions, human rights, constitutional government, and the rule of law.”

The ceremony was followed by an open reception, at which I received birthday salutations from practically every person I’ve met over the past two weeks. These good wishes were in addition to the numerous messages I received from other corners of the globe (thank you friends and family!)

That evening, our residence center also marked the end of orientation with a dorm wide party – complete with chocolate fountain, dj, and open bar. By the time 11pm rolled around, I was feeling awfully lucky that my birthday fell on the day it did, and everybody else was feeling pretty good too. Needless to say, under the pretext of my birthday, it wasn’t very hard to round up a large group to take the party downtown.

We caught a bus to the local transit station, where we needed to transfer to a night bus. We must have stuck out as an odd group, but frankly, I was paying more attention to a new romantic interest than the other people waiting to catch busses. My bliss was shattered when shouting drew my attention to three men who were advancing on my friend Som, corralling him in the direction of a busy street.

The aggressors, sporting black leather jackets emblazoned with Hungarian flags, all had shaved heads. Som, of Indian origin, happened to be the only member of our group of a darker complexion. They were drunk skinheads, Som was the easiest target.

By the time I saw what was going on, a number of guys from our group had already put themselves between Som and the skinheads. When the rest of our group joined the others, the skinheads backed down quickly. Apparently, they liked the odds of 3 to 1 a lot more than the odds of 3 to 30. Some Hungarians helped pull the skinheads back – their association with the racists was never fully clear, they calmed the ringleader down, but didn’t appear to be friends.

A few minutes later, one of these Hungarians tried to apologize for the skinhead who had provoked the confrontation. In a broken mix of German and English, he stumbled to explain that the provocateur was a “good man, he just had too much to drink.” Then he switched the subject to rock music.

I tried to sympathize with this lame apology, recalling lessons from a Humanity in Action session last June when I met an ex-neo-Nazi who had grown up with a tough family situation in an even tougher region. People don’t become violent racists randomly – it’s a insidious blight with complex social causes. This skinhead must have had a rough past too. But as I looked at Som, one of the brightest students to befriend me here, a scholar deeply committed to conflict resolution and a caring individual who has been more supportive of my sexuality than any other classmate…as I looked at him, I found myself totally unable to even attempt understanding the difficult past of the cowards who attacked him.

After boarding the night bus, my thoughts continued to take me back to my time with Humanity in Action, where we spent a lot of time discussing the role of bystanders. In a group of thirty people, it had been easy to step in…the odds were pretty favorable to us. But what would have happened if there had only been a few of us? As it was, plenty of our “friends” stood idly by. Sure, a couple Hungarians had stepped in, but many more looked to the ground and “minded their own business.”

For the past four years, I lived in Colorado Springs, the heart of conservative American fundamentalism and a dangerous breeding ground for virulent homophobia. As a teenager, my last family vacation to our favorite summer retreat near Laramie, Wyoming, had been tainted by the recent murder of Mathew Shephard. Still, I’ve always refused to hide my sexuality in public. On board the bus, I wanted to take the hand of my date and find solace in his presence. But with the skinheads right behind us, I was not about to even try. Our relationship had quickly become more of a liability than a reassurance, and all of a sudden, I lacked the courage acquired from years in Colorado Springs.

Earlier in the day, CEU’s president had challenged us to consider how we could make a difference in those societies that remain oppressed, the connotation being those “other” societies in underdeveloped corners of the world. Our run in with the skinheads served as a sharp reminder of just how far we still have to go in the most tolerant societies.

This date, a Romanian born under the brutal dictatorial regime of Ceauşescu, would probably laugh at the triteness of that statement. But to those of us who have grown up in the comfort of liberal democracies, it is difficult to realize how quickly advocates can become bystanders when personal safety is at risk. Faced with this same risk, I myself quickly jettisoned “queer” behavior.

We may never understand why some choose to intervene on behalf of others in these situations…so far, the best catalyst seems to be the strength found in numbers. So stand up, don’t look to the ground, and make sure you’re numbered amongst those who won’t stand by. There are more like-minded people around you, they just need to know they’re not alone. Challenge the banal events of daily racism – those who rely on intimidation are cowards, so confronting the small instances forces the reality that they are a minority fringe. As to the times you’re alone, well, I haven’t come up with much yet other than knowing the signs and paying attention.

Truly, it was a birthday I won’t forget.