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The Lightbulb Moment
 

The 1.4 Billion Reasons presentation aims to be a lightbulb moment for audience members, to illuminate, somehow, a clear path ahead and provide the strength of heart to walk it. Everyone has her own lightbulb moment, when she glimpses the part she must play in the larger world (and, correspondingly, bore all her friends and acquaintances describing it). This is mine.

The girls told me that their employers called them donkeys, ânes. In the shed where we talked, they reported this with little visible anger, only small traces of bitterness, just a hint of shame in the creases of their eyebrows. They cried when they reported being beaten, raped, or when they worried about losing their jobs as domestic workers, and some raised their voices in anger; but none seemed particularly disturbed about this dehumanizing appellation.

When I started interviewing domestic workers in Mali for a project during my study abroad, I expected to hear terrible stories. I wanted to know the worst about this system of servitude, and I certainly learned awful things, but the first time I cried in an interview was when a girl told me that her employer called her an animal.

Their words affected me so strongly, I think, because they demonstrated so clearly the foundation of the issue. Domestic servitude in Mali is fraught with problems, and each instance of abuse relies on the basic assumption that the servant is not a person. The women related sagas of long hours, horrible conditions, sexual abuse; and all of these things could be summed up with one powerful epithet: donkey.

It's no surprise that humans have trouble understanding that other people are, well, people. But this particular instance brought home to me how even subtle dehumanization can lead to large-scale abuses. These girls became domestic servants because they had no other options. They grew up, for the most part, in farming communities, and came to the city at age twelve or thirteen to raise a dowry. They wandered the streets until an employer picked them up, and they worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. What happened to these girls in their employers' homes was an obvious violation; but the revelation to me was that their rights had been violated a long time before they ever arrived in Bamako, from the moment they were born.

When we see cases of extreme abuse – child soldiers, or victims of torture – we know instinctively that rights have been compromised. It's easy to identify the perpetrator and the victim, and accordingly, we open our wallets and our hearts. But we often forget that people end up in dangerous and harmful situations because they have been denied their rights from the very beginning. When we see someone who is hungry, but not famine-level, ribs-sticking-out, Ethiopia-in-1985 hungry, it's simple to write it off as an unfortunate matter of circumstance, but not really requiring our attention. We see no need to alter the way we live our lives, because the connections are too distant, and the abuse not severe enough.

Before I went to Mali, I certainly planned to donate to worthy causes, to spend a spring break or two with Habitat for Humanity, and read even the most impenetrable articles about famines. After Mali, I found a new determination to stretch my understanding of the human experience, and to address human problems at their most basic level.

Seeing a lightbulb is about understanding in a place deep in your bones, in your belly, that all people have equal value, that no person deserves to be called an animal. That the poverty of whole nations is not an unfortunate circumstance affecting some, but an injustice to all. I can't say that my lightbulb illuminated my path forward with blinding clarity; but I can say that in a small, dark shed in a back alley of Bamako, I talked to some women who made me certain that I should walk it.

 
Posted by Meg Watkins in What Can I Do? for column GPP - United States on Apr 18th 2012, 08:24
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Good Aid/Bad Aid or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
 

When I first arrived in Malawi with the Peace Corps, I thought all its schoolchildren needed was computers and pencils to achieve the intellectual standards of the developed world. After a year or so, I realized that the problems in Malawi's education system, and culture as a whole, had much deeper roots.
           
The truth is that our aid efforts in countries like Malawi often do no good, or even negatively impact the culture. Moyo's Dead Aid and the works of William Easterly outline how our development assistance can prevent African nations, in particular, from evaluating closely their own financial resources, and should be phased out. Other scholars, like Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier, say that in fact more aid to Africa is necessary. All – Moyo, Easterly, Sachs, and Collier – agree that the only path forward for Africa involves the development of its own industries and markets, which necessitates some private sector involvement.
 
No matter where you fall on the issue of aid in the future, we can all agree that aid now could be better spent. The problems with bed-net distribution in Africa – that people don't use the nets properly, that free nets put local manufacturers out of business, that recipients hoard nets and sell them at 100% profit – are well-publicized, but I was still shocked to see USAID mosquito nets acting as my neighbor's curtains. My school received three computers from an American church, but we didn't have electricity. Nor did we have the concave mirrors we needed to fix the microscopes donated by Bausch & Lomb.

These instances of useless aid did more than waste postage. I had noticed a crumbling structure at the edge of my school's property; I was informed that it was an unfinished classroom originally built by the EU. When I proposed a capital campaign in the village to finish the structure, which required only making mud bricks and buying some cement and aluminum sheets, for a total materials cost of about $50, I was met with flat resistance. Why should they raise money, the school board argued, when surely some agency would come along to build it for them?

The problem wasn't that the donations were too generous, or too many. It was that they were illogical. From a Malawian point of view (as well as my friends could explain it to me), Americans have so many microscopes and computers that they can afford to just throw them anywhere, even where they won't be used. If your only exposure to America is its thoughtless extravagance, is it any wonder that you lose respect for its donors and agencies? When I visited Livingstonia, the first settlement of British colonists in Malawi, I was pressured to take plastic tubs of knitting supplies down the mountain to my school. They'd been sitting in a shed for years, apparently, without any clear destination; nobody wanted the skeins of yarn and crochet hooks.
 
I truly believe that Americans want to help people, and that people in the developing world need our help. I think we're just not very good at supplying it. It's too far away, and the lifestyle is too foreign; even after spending two years in Malawi, I'm still not sure what Malawians need most or how to help. But ignorance is no excuse for apathy. What we need is better research, more insight, and greater ambition. It's not enough to send books. True progress will come from policy change and an mindset shift: the sooner we acknowledge that working with people in developing nations benefits us as well as them, the sooner we can all move forward together. The best work we can do is about facilitating independent economic development, providing infrastructure and credit markets, knitting together people rather than yarn.
           
People often ask us what they should do to help. Donating clothes, books, or computers is a very nice thing to do, and I have no doubt that the recipients of such items are grateful to get them. But I think our responsibility to the developing world is much greater, and much broader. We've got to distribute vaccines and medicines, but we've also got to change minds, donors' and recipients', about how charity works.
           
And while we're at it, we could use some concave mirrors.

 
Posted by Meg Watkins in Aid for column GPP - United States on Mar 30th 2012, 14:20
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Is Disaster Relief the Best Way?
 

I have to admit that I learned about last year's earthquake in Japan through a commercial on VH1. After a few weeks in the Malawian village where I lived with no radio, television, or newspaper, I came to the capital for a weekend off, and between Nicki Minaj videos and sips of beer, saw an ad for the Japanese Red Cross.
“What's with this ad?” I scoffed to my friends. “Like Japan really needs our aid.”
 
The bar's patrons stared at me, incredulous at my insensitivity, and after some light mockery, explained what had happened in Japan.
 
I joined the world in mourning Japan's tragedy, but despite its callousness, I think my original sentiment had some merit. Why does it take a well-publicized disaster for us to acknowledge a loss?
 
21,000 children die every day from preventable causes; that's 7.6 million per year. An estimated 316,000 people died in Haiti's 2010 earthquake. The world's governments pledged $2.1 billion in relief for Haiti in 2010, and in the same year private donations to the same cause reached $1.1 billion (whether those funds were actually spent effectively is another matter). By contrast, WHO estimates that GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, prevented 3.4 million child deaths between 2000 and 2008; their budget for 2010 was $1 billion.
 
We respond to disasters because they strike us as extraordinary, outside the natural scope of things; the death of a child from malaria or measles is sad, but only part of the world's inevitable march. The deluge of media coverage that follows a tsunami surrounds us with heart-wrenching photographs for a short time, but even the most compassionate among us cannot stand constant exposure to the world's quotidian tragedies.
 
This is not a critique of our generosity after disasters. I am proud to live in a nation, and a culture, of sympathy with the world's most vulnerable. I worry, however, that our sympathy is easily manipulated. Studies show that the probability of donating aid, and the amount donated, are heavily influenced by shared colonial history, shared language, media coverage, and distance. We don't send money to people we can't picture, who live far away.
 
The problem is that these people are precisely those who are most vulnerable in a disaster. The third of the world's population living in low-income countries is 90% more likely to die in the event of a natural disaster than those living in high-income countries. This disparity could be chance; it so happens that the world's recent deadliest disasters, like the 1984 drought in Ethiopia and Sudan and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, have happened in low-income countries. But it is also true that a lack of infrastructure, government corruption, and vulnerability to disease render low-income countries more susceptible to fatalities in disasters, and less able to recover afterwards.
 
This means that the best and most effective steps we can take to help people affected by calamity happen before, not after, disaster strikes. Writing of the current famine in the Horn of Africa, Suzanne Dvorak, chief executive of Save the Children, said, “We cannot forget that these children are wasting away in a disaster that we could - and should - have prevented.” Jane Cocking, Humanitarian Director of Oxfam, called the famine a “preventable disaster.” They say this because its terrible effects were the result of a human, not natural, problem. Patrick Webb, an expert in food security at Tufts University, said, “Actually, a lot of famine happens when there is food in the market. It's about people's inability to acquire that food. Famine represents a catastrophic failure of all the systems that people rely on to survive.”
 
Disasters give us impetus. But the problems that make natural events so, well, disastrous, are already here. The UN estimates that every $1 invested in preparedness strategies saves $7 in emergency relief; imagine the impact that long-term investment in development could have on disaster fatalities and damages.
 
And what does it take to qualify as a disaster, anyway? I'd argue that the 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty are suffering from a disaster of the worst kind. Their calamities are small in scale but extreme in effect; their earthquakes are those of the heart. And the floods that inundate them are not of kindness and sympathy, but of indifference.

 
Posted by Meg Watkins in Poverty, Aid for column 1.4 Billion Reasons on Mar 7th 2012, 09:44
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Live Below the Line USA: Part I
 

Over the next week we will be sharing some US specific stories of Live Below the Line and also some recipes and tips for this year's challenge!

Here is Meg's story.

 
Somehow, at the end of our week of office-wide Live Below the Line challenge, it did not seem unreasonable to order a bacon cheeseburger and macaroni and cheese for the same meal.
 
A few days previous, the Global Poverty Project New York team began our Live Below the Line odyssey at Trader Joe's in Union Square, where we purchased groceries for the oncoming week. Armed with mediocre math skills and superhuman ability to stand in lines, which are substantial in Manhattan, we navigated the aisles. The first goal? Starches. We bought 3 three-pound bags of brown rice, four bags of dry pasta, and a few potatoes. Thanks to iPhones, we discovered that a two-pound bag of dried beans would become five pounds of cooked beans, meaning that the 89 cent cans were a better option in terms of portion sizes.
 
Our next stop was the produce and protein aisles. Half the team trolled amongst the fruits and veggies, looking longingly at the broccoli and spinach, while the other half checked prices in the meat section. On $1.50 a day, however, greens were not an option and neither was meat. Although we had assumed that these items would not be affordable, the hard truth of eating rice and beans for each meal for a week began to become a reality.
 
We did manage two important splurges: a can of parmesan cheese and a box of teabags. We had all tried to wean ourselves off caffeine, with limited success, in the previous week or so, terrified by the prospect of a stimulant-free week. This meant that when we discovered an extra $1.50 in the budget, I scampered gleefully to the tea aisle and snagged a box of black teabags. Although it wasn’t the gourmet coffee we had grown accustomed as New York residents, it kept us sane during the hectic work week.
           
Having recently returned from Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer, I thought that Live Below the Line would be relatively easy. After all, I'd spent the past two years eating rice and beans, regularly bemoaning the lack of soy sauce. But Live Below the Line was an unexpected challenge. For one thing, it was isolating. I went with friends to the bar, and sat with a glass of tap water while they downed cold craft beer. I smelled my landlord's butternut squash soup simmering on the stove and gazed pathetically at my Tupperware of plain pasta.
           
This all sounds very self-indulgent, and to some extent, it is. I didn't feed anybody else by doing Live Below the Line. But the experience was revelatory – by the end of the week, we were all zombies staring at our computers, unable to focus on anything other than our growling stomachs. And, of course, we have desk jobs. I can't imagine facing hours of hard labor on the same amount of calories.
           
Live Below the Line is not about playing poor. We knew, the whole week long, that we had the choice at any moment to buy a slice of pizza or a sandwich, and of course we still had access to health care, clean tap water, and the comforts of our apartments. Rather, LBL is about showing solidarity with the extreme poor; acknowledging that the differences between people in our world are profound, but that it is possible to feel real empathy for another; recognizing the enormous and undeserved gift we have been given by being born in our nation and time.
           
Friday night, we broke our fast with cheap greasy nachos and margaritas. (A note for future participants: your stomach will not thank you for following a week of plain starches with tequila and jalapenos). It was a fun night, made more so by our renewed commitment to serve the people who have no choice but to live on $1.50 per day. And by the knowledge that the next morning, we'd eat bagels.
Posted by Meg Watkins in What Can I Do? for column GPP - United States on Feb 24th 2012, 07:43
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