up to the implementers and funding institutions.”2
The “lies and exaggerations” often begin earlier in the cycle, when government and international development agencies invite bids for contracts. In the United States, a relatively small number of not-for-profit and private-sector organizations, most of them in the Washington, DC area (earning them the sobriquet of “Beltway Bandits”), compete for lucrative contracts—not only from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) but from the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as from other agencies. Because all the bidders are staffed by seasoned professionals and have a host of consultants on their rosters, it’s difficult to pick a winner based on expertise. More often than not, the agency awards the contract to the bidder who promises the most for the least money and has lined up an impressive list of partners and collaborators. After winning the contract, the organization spends months negotiating a work plan; inevitably, goals and activities are scaled back, and partners dropped, because there isn’t enough money to do what was originally promised.
Although development agencies pay lip service to the idea of community participation, most projects are designed and implemented by professionals to meet donor priorities. In many sub-Saharan African countries, more people die each year from malaria or diarrhea than from AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, yet more money is earmarked for reproductive health than for mosquito nets and oral rehydration kits. Even when reproductive health is a priority, aid comes with conditions; USAID contractors are shackled by Congressional guidelines that specify the percentage of funds to be spent on abstinence programs, even if condom distribution has more impact.
“The more we invest in development, the more we contribute to the growing of the cemetery of development.” That’s Gumucio Dagron’s gloomy assessment. Newly built schools are closed because no money was allocated to pay teachers or buy desks and books. Water and sanitation systems are abandoned because no one knows how to maintain them. Gumucio Dagron offers a catalog of failed projects—abandoned hospitals, broken-down vehicles, and “two thousand post office mail boxes rusting under the rain in a village of five hundred illiterate families who neither received nor wrote letters.”3
I cannot be as pessimistic as Gumucio Dagron, but I have my own catalog of ill-conceived and botched development projects that have failed to make a difference in people’s lives. I’ve also seen well-planned projects that have helped lift people out of poverty, improved their health, and provided their children with education. In my experience, the best investments are in human resources, in helping people gain the knowledge and skills they need to make a difference in their own countries. That’s why I’ve gained the most satisfaction from education and training programs. Of course, not all my workshop participants apply what they have learned to become better managers, journalists, or C4D professionals, but some (maybe more than I realize) do so. And when they are passing on what they have learned to others, I know I have achieved something.
I continue to worry about the unintended consequences of development aid. We need to feed the hungry, but will massive food shipments depress prices on the market and drive local farmers off the land? International charities urge individuals to buy desks for schoolchildren so they do not have to sit on the dirt classroom floor. Would the money be better spent on population control, reducing average family size (and the number of schoolchildren)? In some countries, foreign aid accounts for almost half of the government’s annual budget and a significant percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Are we creating a culture of dependency, a neocolonial relationship between the donor and receiver countries, by making them continue to rely on foreign aid?
Put me down as ambivalent about development.
Postcards
I am from a generation that enjoyed sending and receiving postcards. I haven’t received many recently. It’s easier to post a selfie to Facebook from under a beach umbrella than to get out of your chair, find a shop, buy a postcard, write it, buy a stamp, and mail it. But I miss sending and receiving them. For me, the pro-forma “Weather lovely, wine cheap, pâté de foie gras gave me indigestion, wish you were here” greeting was never enough. I bought cards with the largest possible writing space and usually managed to cram more than one hundred words about my travels into the left-hand side.
This book, like Postcards from Stanland, combines personal experience, interviews, and research. It is not intended as a travel guide. It’s not an academic study or the kind of analysis produced by policy wonks, although it offers background and insights. Think of it as a series of scenes or maybe oversized postcards (with space for a few thousand rather than one hundred words) that I would have sent if you were on my friends and family list. Which you can be, if you send me your e-mail address.
two
Indian Ocean World
“Historians visualizing the Indian Ocean,” wrote the Sri Lankan academic Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “have been like the five blind men in the old Indian fable conceiving of an elephant by feeling different parts of its anatomy. They have come up with partial views of sections of the Ocean, or of the Ocean viewed from sections of bordering land or from the perceptions of different people who traversed the Ocean.”1 But not the ocean as a whole. The Indian Ocean world stretches far beyond coastal areas—in other words, it is a region linked to, but not limited by, a body of water.
The ocean-as-world perspective is generally attributed to the French historian Fernand Braudel of the Annales school who used the Mediterranean Sea, not territorially bounded units such as kingdoms or principalities, as the framework for study. Similarly, the Indian Ocean world is a vast interconnected region, from interior Africa to the Middle East to China, whose boundaries have shifted in time and space as military, economic, and cultural empires have risen and fallen. It was built on commercial networks, including the slave trade, the movement of peoples and their cultural assimilation, and the spread of religions, particularly Hinduism and Islam. In his introduction to the essay collection Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, Michael Pearson concludes that “ties and connections, elements of commonality, stretching all over the Indian Ocean” mean that “we can indeed write of an Indian Ocean World.” With the rise of India and China and competition for sea lanes, oil, and African minerals and markets, “the Indian Ocean world represents a strategic arena where the forces shaping a post-American world intersect most visibly.”2 Foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan describes the Indian Ocean as “the coming strategic arena of the twenty-first century.”3 The concept of an Indian Ocean world allows me to venture beyond coastlines and port cities to interior regions, linked to the ocean by rivers, colonial conquest, trade, migration, and culture.
MAP 2.1 The Indian Ocean world (map by Belén Marco Crespo)
What ties together four seemingly diverse countries—Madagascar, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia—besides their proximity to the Indian Ocean and its historic trade and settlement routes?
First, there is the monsoon. It has different names and comes at different times, but it always comes. The monsoon determines when you plant and harvest, when and where you travel, even when you get married, have children, or bury your dead. It is both a curse and a blessing. It brings death and destruction yet provides the water vital to survival. In northeastern Madagascar, the cyclones of January and February sweep away bridges and roads and leave communities stranded; six months later, farmers harvest cash crops of cloves, lychees, and vanilla. In Bangladesh in 2017, the first rains came early (in April), ruining the first rice crop in several regions. When I returned in August, the waters of the Padma (Ganges), Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Meghna, and their tributaries had left northern regions under water, washed away roads, bridges, and railroads, and forced
