Evening Shadows (Dispatches from Kabul)

On Saturday afternoon, June 18, a group of young men approached the entrance to the Kabul central police station and proceeded to detonate a bomb attached to one of their vests while the others opened fire at whomever happened to be standing around. Nine people were killed.

When I heard about the attack, I did a mental calculation as to the last time I had passed by the police station, and when I might have passed by again.

It happened midday, about 1:30 p.m. The time when lunch is settling in your stomach. You run out for an errand, maybe, or make a phone call, squint your eyes at some emails you need to return—while somewhere else in the city people are dying.

***

I had come to Kabul two weeks earlier. Caught the mid-morning flight from Dubai. Ascend, up and up, over a skyline thick with high rises, sharp glass and steel that cut into the humid, polluted air like a forest of dead trees.

A few hours later we descend into Kabul. Flew in low, or at least it felt low, skimming the tips of the Hindukush mountains, which surround the city like a massive fortress.

Those mountains—staggering, raw. As imposing as thunder.

The plane bumped and jolted in the wind. Felt like we might be tossed down into those peaks, like we could be swallowed up and disappear.

***

I was in Kabul to support the Health Economics and Financing Directorate (HEFD) of the Ministry of Public Health as they evaluate a conditional cash transfer program that was recently piloted. The scheme gave cash to mothers conditional on them giving birth in facilities and having their children fully immunized with DPT3. The program also provided incentives to the community health workers who are supposed to encourage and help them.

As part of my assignment at HEFD, I conduct key informant interviews with health policy and program experts. They tell me about their projects—We train midwives. We create guidelines. We build capacity.

They whisper about the latest controversies, like the survey that shows a maternal mortality ratio (MMR) much lower than the one calculated in 2006—which showed an MMR of 1,600/100,000, the highest in the world. Some don’t believe the numbers. Others are worried what they will do to funding.

Informants complain about other programs, about being left out of conversations and meetings. Once I gain their trust, they lean in, keen to tell me, the rooky, what their business is really like. Their comments about their Afghan colleagues are full of admiration and distrust:

—They are great at extraction, one says. They’ve seen a lot of people like us come through.

—They’ve learned how to survive, says another.

Everyone is very helpful and misleading.

***

It is Friday, the Holy Day. Early morning and the compound is empty, the sky gray.

The night before, I was awoken at 3 a.m. by a tremor. Kabul is near the meeting of the Indian and south Eurasian plates and there are frequent rumblings. Suddenly awake, alert, I strain my eyes to see the ceiling, the outline of the door. I imagine the walls caving in, crumbling to pieces.

Now on the road, I’m unsure where to go. Look out the window, men and women snaking between cars on their way somewhere. Everything about them is long and elegant: long beards, long drapes of white, taupe, gray, billowy blue chadaries. My own head scarf keeps falling clumsily to my shoulders.

My driver leans heavily against the steering wheel, while the shooter in the front seat, an AK47 draped lazily between his legs, picks at his teeth. We pass by a mosque, a market, crooked back roads that lead to the foothills beyond.

The police station is on our right, the same one I will pass twice a day for the next two weeks, the same one that will be attacked a few days after I leave. I hardly notice it, though. I’m looking in the opposite direction, at a wall peppered with graffiti. Something is scrolled in blue paint in Dari next to images of birds, one after the other—wings open, flying.

I ask the driver what it means, but he doesn’t speak English well and hesitates.

Then: It means we want a better life. It means everybody should have a happy life.

I think: Of course. It means Peace.

***

The pub on the U.S. Embassy compound is called the Duck and Cover.

Meet some friends there one night, two young American guys working on civilian-military relations for General Petraeus. Over beer, I tell them about the incentive program whose evaluation I’ve come to support. They tell me about another incentive program, this one to empower (read: arm) local police forces, also called militias.

Despite the fact that Karzai is a Pashtun, there are many who see him and all the other vestiges of security, as illegitimate, a mere reconfiguration of domestic power structures to serve external interests.

The Afghan National Auxiliary Police and the Afghan Public Protection Program are meant to protect the people who are on the right side of the war. My friends at the U.S. Embassy believe in the program. It’s not perfect, they say, but it’s a good thing to do.

—But I thought we are trying to disarm people?

—Well yeah, one of them says, we arm the locals so they can protect themselves from the enemy.

How can you tell which is which?

***

There is a restaurant called Cedars House near the central business district. My colleagues and I sit outside, in the garden.

There are so many gardens in Kabul. Sprawling, with trim lawns, lined with pink and red roses.

The evening is cool. There is a quiet murmur all around us: the chink of glass, conversation in the moonlight. Our meal is slow and meandering, the conversation drifting like smoke.

My Ministry colleagues tell stories. Their days at university in California, St. Louis, the Netherlands, Liverpool. They talk about cricket on the weekends, homes full of relatives, their crowded lives. They poke fun of each other, tell jokes, talk fluidly about philosophy, poetry, literature.

Shards of their pasts are occasionally exposed. One’s boyhood as a refugee in Pakistan. The dark days of the Taliban when they all grew long beards.

I study them. It’s like trying to keep my eye on a flame. I want to understand their lives, but I’m on the outside, straining to look in.

***

They say some expats can’t leave warzones. They get stuck in the netherworld of expat life—behind walls, lonely but never really alone. Submerged in motion, in alcohol, some of them, in constant work. Wake up one morning and realize the only place they feel comfortable is in places where they are uncomfortable.

A storm passes through one afternoon. I’m standing underneath an overhang at the security office with Beth, a British security specialist. She’s open and friendly—shakes my hand, offers me a cigarette as we watch the rain.

She was in Iraq for a while, passed through Sudan, then Kabul.

—I tried to be normal for a year, she laughs. She moved to South Carolina, started a business. “It didn’t work.”

Later, back at the Duck and Cover, I watch her compatriots at the bar: older men with tanned, deeply lined faces, and tattoos on their arms. One wears a gold crucifix, which hangs down over a t-shirt emblazoned with expletives.

It’s karaoke night, and one of them gathers himself solemnly at the mic. A hush falls over the room while he sings:

Would you know my name… If I saw you in Heaven?

***

There’s a lake just outside the city. Some colleagues and I have lunch—Karayee (lamb with tomatoes and garlic), cucumbers, flatbread and yogurt—while lounging on Afghan rugs. We’re in an open-air bungalow of sorts, on stilts that juts out over a cliff above the lake.

It's a rare midday break from the office, and for a while we are all quiet together, looking out over the water, which changes color in the pale afternoon sunlight, from turquoise to shades of grayish blue.

They are like ship captains, these men: smart, realistic, ambitious, trying to navigate the choppy waters of politics and money and ego that are the stuff of the aid business.

There are something like 62 donors to Afghanistan. Six provide more than 90 percent of external support. Aid flows amount to more than 50 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product: official ODA from OECD members rose from US$87 million in 2000 to US$2.2 billion in 2005. [1]

The United States is by far the largest donor. Since 2001, the U.S. has appropriated US$127 billion for the war, and the U.S. military is currently spending nearly US$100 million per day in the country, a total of around US$36 billion per year.

The question on everyone’s mind is Sustainability. It’s the first thing informants ask when I mention the HEFD program to help save mothers’ lives. How will the Afghans, how will any of us, they ask, make this last?

One afternoon, I meet an American official who sneers at the money being “dumped” into Afghanistan. What about the taxpayers at home, she says? Too much money is never enough!

But the amount of aid that ends up in government coffers is hugely reduced by the fact that an estimated 40 percent of all aid goes back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultancy salaries (like mine, with my health insurance and pension, benefits some of my Afghan colleagues do not receive)—a total of some US$6 billion since 2001.

Later, I ask an Afghan colleague about the American official I met. He smiles thinly and looks out the window of our car.

—She has a lot of power, he says.

I think I see a flash of disgust in his eyes.

***

It’s early evening. A friend and I go up to the roof of the guesthouse where I stay, pull some concrete blocks together and sit down, look out over the city.

Sounds now familiar of the city at dusk: Early evening traffic jam. Some men gathered on the side of the road talking. A stray dog barking down a dirt alleyway. Beyond, the mountains stare back at us, harsh, haunting, somewhat obscured in the shadows of the setting sun.

Then the wind picks up, blowing dust and sand in our eyes. Feels like little needles against my skin.

A few days later, my friend will skype me to tell me about the attack.

I will ask him with a kind of panic if he is okay. How did it happen? Were you afraid?

And what will it take for these things to end?

—I wish I had an answer, he will say.

---

[1] See: Who Owns the Peace? Aid, Reconstruction and Development in Afghanistan, Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra.

History’s teachable moment for a new generation

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s life.

The events of recent days have us looking back to that day ten years ago, when we were smacked out of complacency by violence that, for the first time—at least for my generation—was happening, not to someone faraway, but to us.

Then in our early twenties, we responded with fervor—we were prepared to defend our country and our values. We hung flags outside our homes and spoke in slogans dripping with patriotism. We were mesmerized and emboldened by an idea of ourselves as victims.

There was little appetite for questioning. Fury was hurled at those who dared to consider the broader issues raised by the attack. This response was understandable in those early days—and dangerous. It laid the foundation of support for the violent wars we were about to wage.

Years went by. There were invasions and casualties. Men convinced of their moral superiority hunted for other men convinced of the same.

Eventually, our fervor waned. My generation grew up, married, had kids, got jobs and degrees. We became accustomed to vague, protracted wars in distant lands, which became abstractions, mere headlines flickering on our computer screens.

Then, the moment. An assassination, a reckoning.

Once again, there are spontaneous gatherings in the street, flags waving, sirens ringing out—only this time there are no tears. This time it is jubilation that we feel.

And a narrative is formed (correct or not): a gun fight, innocent women used as shields by evil men, the necessity of the kill.

Our decency is confirmed again.

Ten years ago I wrote on these pages a short note to my generation—the generation that would be shaped by this ongoing crisis—that we had a responsibility. In the wake of September 11, we had a responsibility to confront the wrongdoings of our nation—to not only talk about American values, but to fight to make them real. This was our jihad, I said, our struggle.

Ten years have passed.

And though there have moments of national reflection, of change and great hope, we remain, for the most part, bystanders to history.

Meanwhile, the world is changing all around us.

Revolutions are bubbling up to overthrow the slovenly, morally bankrupt stooges—the dictators of the Middle East—drunk on their own power, in bed with Western powers. And what is so extraordinary is that they are succeeding, in some places, not because of the violence of a high-profile terrorist organization, but because of the peaceful and persistent demonstrations of ordinary people.

This should resonate deeply with Americans. We are a country marked by a deep belief in equality and freedom for all. We are a people with a fierce commitment to the idea that all people have the right to live free from oppression, free from fear, free to believe and speak what they want.

But instead of resonating, these revolutions seem rather to lay bare the tragic contradiction of our country—our soaring values and fearful practice.

We believe in peace, but not when war is necessary to maintain it. All people are born free, except for those who live in countries where our interests supersede those inalienable rights. Unsavory dictators should be overthrown, but there are exceptions. Democracy is the best form of government, but only for people who will vote our way. Justice is impartial, but not for everyone. Targeted assassinations and frontier justice are criminal, but not when they are carried out by the nation who suffered the pain of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

My generation has submitted to these plausible lies, which force us to become involved in greater and greater contradictions about who we are.

It need not be this way. What my generation lacks is not belief in freedom and justice for all, but rather, the hope that our efforts can make a difference.

We’ve gotten older, maybe even a little tired, a little cynical (yes, even at thirty). We’ve found ourselves deriving a strange satisfaction from resignation, from the assumption that some things will never change.

But then like a drop of water from a tap you thought had gone dry. Like a door blown slightly ajar by the wind. Like hearing a sound in a disused room, you turn your head.

It's the sound of people cheering, of flags flapping in the wind, of feet stomping on the ground they refuse to leave.

These are not the celebrations of death we have witnessed in this country over the last week. Real hope can’t be found there.

These are the celebrations—and demands—for freedom in capitals all over the Middle East. They are a reminder that it is still possible—for average people to disrupt the quantifiable order of things.

Who would have ever thought?

###

As published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on May 8, 2011. I worked at the Trib from 2004-2005.

The Birds of Appetite

Where there is a carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. …

This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory … enrich the birds of appetite.

[But here] there is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the “nothing,” the nobody” that was there, suddenly appears.

It was there all the time, but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.**

***

A friend of mine, Enrico Pavignani, is working on a fascinating case series about the health sector in fragile and failed states. Well known for his work on Mozambique, Enrico has been working in health in some of the hardest and poorest countries in the world for some 31 odd years.

An early draft on Somalia notes:

“The lack of capacity is constantly invoked to explain the sorry condition of the healthcare field in Somalia. … Nobody would challenge the view that the aggregate performance of the health service delivery system is dismally poor. But poor performance is not uniformly distributed across the health space. …The proliferation of private healthcare outlets, including many of a certain size and complexity, implies some management capacity. The constant growth of the healthcare field, despite all its shortcomings, suggests initiative and entrepreneurship—and hence capacity.…

Orthodox aiddom has tended to focus on the three administrations of Somalia: the Ministry of Health (MOH) of the Transitional Federal Government, which fulfils the prototype of a virtual, absent and disinterested health authority, playing a fictitious role for external consumption; the Ministry of Health and Labour (MOHL) of Somaliland, eager to be recognised as legitimately ruling over the health services provided within its territory; and the Ministry of Health of Puntland.

The MOHL of Somaliland, although belonging to an administration not recognised by the international community, is submitted to the barrage of capacity-building interventions that have become a trademark of the aid industry. The recognised MOH of the Transitional Federal Government is spared this sort of support. Donor agencies in general harbor a deep mistrust of all three administrations, manifest in the reluctance to even contemplate the use of aid management instruments that apportion some control to indigenous health managers.

Then there are the local health authorities. Given their meager (or non-existent) budgets, most struggle to perform their basic functions. The support they receive from international agencies and vertical programmes is in most cases provided in exchange for the execution of specific tasks. These bargains allow for the survival of the concerned local health authorities, but do nothing to nurture their institutional advance as sector-wide local leading agents—in short they do nothing to build capacity, even though this may be the level where it is most needed, and where that type of support could be most effective….

The pervasive perception of a crushing capacity shortage may have its roots in searching for capacity in the wrong places, and in expecting that it manifests itself with familiar signals, like mastering the English jargon used by the aid industry, formulating elegant funding proposals, handling indicators or submitting solid accounts. The striking point is that many indigenous health initiatives have prospered despite (or maybe because of?) their lack of such capacity markers.”

***

One of the reasons development is hard is that donors, as well as those who implement programs, must make decisions about how to best help a country based on inadequate information.

When we don’t have enough information, or when we are pressed for time (as we always are), and looking for the right information is deemed too costly, we fall back on habits, on what is known, on what has been done already. We go to the usual people and talk about the usual things.

Sometimes, this is enough. But sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, making decisions about aid this way results, as Enrico’s discussion of capacity-building in Somalia suggests, in aid geared towards things as we see them, and not as they really are. And like birds of appetite, we miss things that could improve the impact of aid because they are not our kinds of prey.

We could do things differently.

Enrico suggests that in Somalia, investments in local-level capacity development could provide better returns than focusing on the ministries. More generally, he says that capacity discussions should focus on the incentives that condition the performance of the healthcare system as a whole, rather than on the individual and organizational skills that capacity-building measures are supposed to generate. “Provided with appealing enticements, Somali actors have demonstrated their individual and collective capacity to deliver results."

He also suggests a consideration of the thriving private health sector in Somalia, which remains outside most donor portfolios, despite its recognition as a key player in the healthcare arena.

And what about the host of other donor follies identified in the case study?

• As in other disrupted (i.e., war-torn) contexts, donors set very lows bars in terms of the support they provide in Somalia. The donor imperative to disburse often overrules most other considerations. As an example, UNICEF drug kits were for a long time distributed to unsupervised health facilities that had no requirement to report back. Similarly, funding continues to be provided by some donors to under-performing hospitals, whose accounts raise concerns.
• Only a few donor officials are allowed to devote their entire attention to Somalia. Most scramble around, handling large and diverse portfolios covering several East African countries. Their quick turnover undermines memory: functioning arrangements are forgotten, lessons learned are ignored, abandoned models are rewrapped as hot novelties, and old mistakes are repeated.
• There is a glaring mismatch between health needs and funding allocation and levels. For example, among the diseases targeted by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, tuberculosis ranks high, malaria middle and HIV/AIDS at the bottom of major health concerns in Somalia. The respective funding shares, however, are reversed, with HIV/AIDS getting the largest and tuberculosis the smallest donor allocation.

These follies are hardly unique to Somalia. They are also things that we can do something about.

*The countries in the case series include Afghanistan, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Haiti, Palestine and Somalia. For information, contact: enricopavignani@hotmail.com

**Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton

The Ambiguity of Aid (Zambia Journal)

Driving through Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, is like a first trip to Las Vegas. Everything is in your face, something to see. Dusty streets, potholes like craters, people hanging off the back of pickup trucks, women wearing babies like backpacks as they hack away at maize, the smell of smoke from burning trash on the side of the road, horns honking, traffic that moves like liquid.

Almost two-thirds of Zambians live below the international poverty line—around 7.5 million people. The average life expectancy is a stunning 46 years. Only 58 percent of the population has access to clean water.

Zambia is a poor country. It is also a cauldron of donor activity. In 2005, the country received $1.7 billion in official development assistance—that’s 17.3 percent of gross national income for a country of 12 million people.

“The question people ask,” says Justin Mubanga, the Director of the Economic Management Department at the Ministry of Finance and National Planning, “is, in the last fifteen years Zambia got so much aid but there was little progress. What caused this?”

Some people say that aid caused this. They say that it has hampered, stifled and retarded Africa’s development. But there are others who say, on the contrary, that aid improves the lives of the poor and makes the sick well.

Gordon

Gordon Brown is standing at his desk in a crisp navy blue blazer and khaki slacks, a phone in one hand, the other tapping his keyboard. Even standing still, he’s humming with energy.

Gordon is the 35-year-old Zambia country representative for Africare, a U.S-based non-governmental organization (NGO). His job is to develop new programs, oversee those that already exist, and form alliances and partnerships.

It’s a long way from Augusta, Georgia, where he grew up. “The first time I walked into a store [in Africa] and nobody knew who I was or cared, I felt like I fit in by not being noticed, you know what I’m saying?”

Africare’s work in Zambia centers on health, food security and agriculture, and emergency response. Their projects, Gordon says, are about meeting peoples’ essential needs. So for example, they are helping to install something called PlayPumps, a merry-go-round of sorts that, when children spin it, pumps clean water into a storage tank that can be accessed by a simple tap on the ground below.

“Market forces alone aren’t enough to solve the problem of poverty in Africa. If we take the Darwinian approach—if you have resources, then you’ll succeed—if we believe that and act on that belief, people will die.”

There are many who think that putting things in such stark terms is just a clever way to drown out the voices of critics.

“[But] it’s okay to be motivated by wanting to do good,” Godron says. “We don’t live in a purely dog eat dog world. We want to believe there’s something greater. We want to be able to respond to need. Not everything we do is about self interest.”

Boyd

Looking at Boyd is like staring into the bottom of a well. His eyes are small and dark, impenetrable. I ask him: What is it like to care for orphans? What is it like to live in a village in the Zambian bush? What is it like to be poor? My words are like arrows shot into the ocean, pointed and tiny against the vast waves.

We pick him up at a small church made of exposed cement blocks where he and other volunteers are being trained in Gender Equity. The words seem sterile and queer in the dust beneath the jacaranda tree, where a little girl stands, hiding in the folds of her mother’s skirt, while some wazungu (white people) try to coax her to speak

Boyd Hamuchemba lives in Shimukuni, a village two hours up the Great North Road from Lusaka. He is a volunteer caregiver with a PEPFAR-funded program called RAPIDS (Reaching HIV/AIDS Affected People with Integrated Development Support). RAPIDS gives him training, a bicycle and a modest medical kit, and Boyd and his wife look after eight orphans, three of whom are his dead brother’s children, and five from the surrounding village. He visits them each week and records each visit in a ledger that is signed by the orphan’s guardian. If they are hungry, he tries to bring them food. If they are sick, he gives them a ride on his bike to the clinic. It was a volunteer caregiver like him who took Boyd to a clinic in February 2008, where he was diagnosed as HIV+.

***

The adult (aged 15-49) HIV prevalence rate in Zambia is 14.3 percent, according to the country’s 2007 Demographic and Health Survey—the seventh highest prevalence rate in the world. Anti-retroviral therapy was introduced in 2004, and 120,000 people now receive treatment in no small part because of the vast sums of money PEPFAR has poured into the country—more than $269.2 million in FY2008 alone. (The entire budget of Zambian Ministry of Health in 2008 was $317.5 million.)

PEPFAR has been criticized for devoting too much money to a single disease and for channeling aid mostly through international NGOs, circumventing the government. One afternoon I asked Dr. Ben Chirwa, Director General of the National HIV/AIDS/STI/TB Council, if Zambia’s battle against the epidemic is too reliant on donor funds.

“AIDS is a global problem,” he said. “It is beyond what any one government can do.”

What about the Washington economist who termed ballooning U.S. funds for AIDS treatment an entitlement that is unsustainable?

Dr. Chirwa just grinned like a pumpkin. “Life is priceless,” he said.

***

Boyd showed me around his compound—the hut where he stores food, his two goats, a checker board carving in the dirt where his children play games. I ask what he would do without RAPIDS.

“I was already a guardian and parent. But the work has become easier. When given a bike, it lightened my work. I felt very good.”

Aid is keeping Boyd alive. It is also helping him help kids in his village who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. He would do it anyway, but the help makes his burden light.

Joy

I meet Joy Hutcheon at her office on the second floor of the British High Commission, on Independence Avenue. Joy is country director for the Department for International Development (DFID), the national aid agency of the United Kingdom.

Joy’s interest in development began early. “I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been interested in the different ways people do things in different parts of the globe.” After a visit to India, she applied for a position with the U.K. civil service, marking the Overseas Development Administration (DFID’s predecessor) as her first choice.

“For any country,” she says, ‘the way it is governed is so fundamental. I had the feeling that [in government] I could change something.”

***

The U.K gives about two-thirds of its aid to Zambia directly to the government, more than any other bilateral donor. The idea is to help build the accountability and capability of the state so it can provide for its citizens. Aid to an NGO that buys HIV/AIDS medicine will save lives today, but working with the government to improve its drug distribution system (one of the things DFID is doing) will help all Zambians access essential medicines over the long term.

Chris Pain, who works for the GTZ, the German development agency, as an advisor to the Ministry of Finance, attributes much of Zambia’s strong economic performance over the past four years to budget support, and the way it is helping to slowly strengthen the civil service. “Budget support opens up the whole budget for discussion, so it’s good for enhanced transparency.”

Justin Mubanga at the Ministry of Finance (MOF), who oversees the economic technical cooperation department (the four people in the MOF who manage donors), says that budget support has brought some predictability to the flow of funds, and the division of labor helps “but they still want an audience. They come indirectly to tinker.”

One of the ways donors “tinker” is through the performance assessment framework. Twice a year, they meet with the government to assess its performance on a number of predetermined indicators. If the indicators are not met, funding can be pulled.

Monitoring the government’s performance is necessary because donors must sell aid to policymakers and their constituencies back home, and assure them that funds are not being wasted.

“You can’t have budget support without being worried about corruption,” says Joy.

DFID is trying to help the government create an environment in which finances are well-managed and where corruption is not tolerated. So for example, DFID is helping the MOF install a single Treasury bank account (as opposed to the 300 or so accounts it currently has), to make is easier to track spending. The result is that corruption is more noticeable, Joy says, but there are also voices prepared to speak out and challenge it.

***

When Joy first arrived in Zambia, before anyone knew who she was, she visited a remote village called Kazuni in Southern Province. She shared a mud hut, walked to the river to get water, burned her fingers cooking nshima, laughed around a crackling fire with the women who were hosting her.

One day, a plane passed overhead. The women asked: what is it like to be way up there, in the sky? She felt clumsy as she tried to describe it: imagine you’re in a bus, sitting next to someone, little windows on the side. Are there are toilets, they asked? Yes, there are toilets. There are trays that fold down, and sometimes televisions. The women stared at Joy in wonder. They would probably never set foot on a plane.

“Everyone in Zambia has a village,” Joy said, “and will talk about going to the village. I have heard people I know say things like: this isn’t so bad; it’s like camping. But it’s your life. It’s everything you’ve got and there is no prospect of it changing.”

After three days she returned to Lusaka, over dirt roads, then paved roads, past buildings until she was back in her office, sitting in front of her computer, listening to the hum of the air conditioning.

As she told the story her voice cracked, like a rock breaking the surface of the water. “I really, really have to be sure that what I’m doing matters."

***

Night comes early in Lusaka. In the dark sounds are amplified. The rustle of leaves, dogs barking down an alley, a car engine trying to turn over.

An aid worker from Ireland once told me about a man she met at a health center who was holding his dead daughter in his arms. He needed a ride home; my friend said she could take him. The coffin he had was too small, but he hurried to squeeze the little girl’s body in, worried if he didn’t move fast enough, his ride might leave. The aid worker panicked: she won’t fit in there, let’s find something else. But there wasn’t anything else, so they took a hammer, knocked the end out of the coffin, and drove home with the wooden casket in the back of the pickup truck, the little girl’s legs dangling out the end.

Sometimes it feels like you’re being swallowed up, pulled under by a rip tide. The enormity of need. The limits of what we can do.

Boyd said it was hard to show up at someone’s home, ask them if he could help, and realize that sometimes he couldn’t. I remember him walking across a dirt path to the garden where he grows vegetables for the orphans; Gordon striding across a school yard to see a new water pump; Joy walking down the hall to meet some government officials.

They put one foot in front of the other.

*This is adapted from a piece I wrote in 2009 for the Center for Global Development.

Reintegration

We used to talk about it in Dar—what it would be like when we went back. Went home. What overload we’ll feel, we said! Shopping malls, anything you want, stuff everywhere, expensive jewelry, perfume, crowded restaurants.

We thought it would be unsettling, unnerving, shocking even. But in so many ways it’s not shocking.

You just go back.

***

Landed at Heathrow at 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday. Zipped through immigration, followed the helpful signs to baggage claim, picked up a trolley for my bags, grabbed a coffee at Costa, and some money at the ATM (there were three to choose from). Used the toilet, then followed the signs to the bus stop, made it just in time for the 5:30 to Oxford.

It was rush hour and the motorway was bustling but moving steadily. Out the window, the hills were soft and green and dotted with sheep. A church steeple shone in the pale yellow sun. Tidy little cars drove down tidy little roads. Ten hours earlier I’d been with Frank, my taxi driver and friend in Dar, driving up the airport road in the sweaty crush of rush hour traffic, guys streaming by the window selling bananas and water.

Of course, I thought. Of course I am back and this is how it is.

I waited for the shock, the smack, but my mind was as flat as the window I was pressed up against.

Set out the next morning, grabbed a coffee and walked down Cornmarket street. Stopped in at Boots and walked down the lotion isle, the shampoo isle, flipped through some magazines. Tried on a sweater at Topshop. Kept walking. Felt listless. It started to rain, so I ducked in to a bookstore, sat down at a table in the café, and looked around at all the people sipping lattes, nibbling on cookies and cakes, talking, and I started to cry.

***

I was happy with less. The struggle we have in the West—with consumption, with the ability, now back again, to gratify any desire, any time, any place, is crushing, crushing in the sense that I sometimes feel so helpless against it.

But there’s another, subtler struggle that keeps burning long after you’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat less and spend less and live, mostly happily, with less.

***

It’s 6pm on a Thursday in Washington, DC, where I’ve settled now some three months out of Africa. My colleague, an old development hand, is packing her bag to go home, putting on a woolen cap to guard against the January chill.

—Terrible out isn't it, I say, while a dark spatter of rain hits the window.

—Yes, she says. I can't wait to get out of here.

She tells me she’s leaving for Bali soon, to wait out the winter. She’s lived overseas for most of her career and misses the field. Life is better over there, she says.

I ask her: why do you think it is better?

I want her to explain it, to explain away the awfulness I’ve felt since I’ve been back, the longing to return.

I hadn’t wanted to leave Africa. I’d realized this gradually during my last few months living on the continent. But things were set, and when I stood on the rooftop in Dar and looked out over the city the night before flying out, I felt a sort of inevitability about it. And a strange sense of loss.

A month later I was back in Washington, walking down K Street on my wait to a meeting, when I noticed my finger: the thin silver band I had bought in Swaziland was gone.

I’d found it at a little shop just outside Mbabane. It was small—two very thin silver bands, one rough, the other polished, fused together. To me, it was perfect. I don’t wear jewelry, but when I saw it, I wanted to seize it, as if I’d finally found some little scrap that fit me. I would look down at it all the time, turn it round and round on my finger.

I ran in my high heels back to the World Bank, to the bathroom where I thought I left it while I was washing my hands, but it wasn’t there. So I ran to the reception and told them I had lost something. I was out of breath, my face was red, and I spoke in the unnatural voice that comes when you are trying to hold back tears.

The woman manning the phones sat up in her chair and asked: Have you gone back to the bathroom and looked for it?

—Yes, I said.

She frowned a little, straightening her navy blue blazer. Have you gone to lost and found?

—Yes. And now there were tears streaming down my face.

She gave her colleague an uncomfortable sideways glance. Sorry, she said. Was it your wedding ring?

—No, I said, choking out the words. But it was precious to me. I can never replace it. I have to get it back.

We searched and searched—the security folks, the people who work in the cafeteria, everyone. But it was gone.

***

I remember sitting around an outdoor fire one night in Lusaka with some expat aid workers. The evening was wearing thin, and while people murmured quietly and stared into their glasses, I watched the fire.

A friend, sitting directly across from me, broke the quiet murmur: Lindsay, he said, what’s your favorite thing about Zambia?

All eyes on me. “The expats,” I said. They laughed quietly.

He pressed on, no really, what is it about this place that made you want to come back?

I said: the space.

***

A friend of mine spent two years in Mauritania. One night in DC, over a dinner of hotdogs and red wine (if you know me then you understand how typical this is), I tell him how hard it is to be back, how unhappy I am, and unhappy I am at myself for feeling unhappy.

—What was it like for you, when you came back, I ask him?

—Everything seemed banal, he said, circumscribed.

I tell him I feel the same way but then point out the irony. I complained all the time when I lived in Dar: “And you? Life here—boring and banal? You lived in a village in rural Mauritania.”

He laughed: “Yeah, I was bored all the time there. But just being there was enough. Just going through the motions was interesting.”

He tells me about being at a party one night and thinking that every conversation was meaningless. “I felt like everyone needed to be shaken out of the routines they were living in. It was hard. And I had a hard time connecting. It was like there were people everywhere, but they were just passing each other.”

It was like what my colleague, now in Bali, eventually told me on that cold January night: “There’s too much stuff here. Over there, we were a part of each other’s lives.”

***

I guess the longing for Africa comes from a combination of these things. I liked having fewer choices; I was happy when I had less stuff.

I liked how involved friends were in each others lives, almost as if we were family. I liked how we saw each other all the time, stayed at each other’s houses, the sense of camaraderie, the way we felt bound together by shared experience, like refugees in a foreign land.

And I liked the sense of freedom, the vastness of the landscape, like staring out across the ocean. I liked getting on planes every other week, hopping between countries as if they were metro stops. And meeting new people who did the same thing, floating out there in space and time.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking back.

But the truth is, being expats in excruciatingly poor countries cannot be the only way to live like that, that is, to live with less stuff, to live together, and to be free. There has to be a way to make that real where ever we are.