If you’ve spent any time in the low-income countries of the developing world, you can’t help but dwell on dynamics of poverty and the enduring challenges of development.  These dual issues permeate nearly every interaction you have.  I found myself back in Niger and in Burkina Faso for the first time over the last two weeks for a work project, and I grappled nearly constantly with these ideas.  In countries as underdeveloped as these, with deprivation and inequality staring you in the face at every turn, it’s hard to ignore.  Working again with aid organizations and government ministries, it brought back a lot of fond memories but some persistent anxieties as well.  The old internal debate once more raged in my head and tugged at my heart about the extent to which I was a part of the solution, the problem, or merely the status quo.  While I’m still an aid believer in general, my defense of the aid industry has become less full-throated over the years and my estimation of its benefits more qualified.  I continue to believe that there are great programs and people hard at work in the neediest corners of the globe (and I know a lot of these people), but there is no silver bullet or we would have stumbled upon it years ago by dint of the sheer volume of our various well-intentioned interventions.

Throughout my various developing-world posts, I have met two distinct kinds of people who tend to get involved in the aid industry.  The first kind are the heart-on-their-sleeve idealists who have always had a yearning to work in the poorest corners of the world and for whom aid work is a siren song they cannot ignore.  For them, it’s akin to a religious calling—a mission not to convert but to help, to soothe, and to succor.  They have yet to find a country too desperate or a region too remote, and their identity is subsumed by their work.  The second kind—my lot—are the ones who recognize the importance of the work, are happy to contribute the small difference they can make, and are happier still to return home at the end of a contract.  We enjoy the feeling we get from a job well done but have been known to count down the days until our next R&R.  We like the work and we like helping people, but the profession doesn’t necessarily define us.  Many of us often move on to headquarters posts or other careers after putting in our shift in the field.  Both groups have good motives and the best of intentions.  But for one group it’s a calling while for the other it’s a job (albeit a largely altruistic one).

I’ve met many such whole-hog, Kool-Aid drinking aid workers in my various stops in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.  Much like their brethren in the Peace Corps, these true believers are happy to trek out to the most distant outposts and serve the most destitute people.  They live for this, and they become ingrained in the local communities, often adopting local customs.  They learn obscure dialects for which there is no practical purpose.  They deeply love and respect the societies in which they live and are truly saddened when they eventually move on to another post.  Or, in the bleakest of circumstances, are evacuated when the situation deteriorates beyond an acceptable level of risk, leaving them disconsolate.

In many ways, I admire the whole-hearted devotion of the true believers to these communities as well as the depth of their conviction of the importance of their missions.  They are the converted, and they need no external validation to do the things they do or make the sacrifices the make.  I had a friend in the Central African Republic (CAR) who happily signed up for a year in the remote north of the country where a 40,000-person internally-displaced persons (IDP) camp had popped up at the bishopric after religious violence; the bishop himself had even been kidnapped by a local militia at one point.  I spent two weeks there, training locals how to set up and run a refugee camp—an experience for which I was only marginally qualified—and longed for the relative comforts of the capital like cheddar cheese, imported fruit, and cold beer.  Some people are just cut from a different cloth.

As to the rest of us, while we willingly set off with the best of intentions, it’s my sense that we content ourselves in making a short-term impact, secretly harboring the notion that long-term change is often beyond our limited scope of intervention.  We observe the depth of the problems in places like CAR and Haiti and wonder aloud what good the decades of aid has done.  At the extreme end of this line of thinking, you have the Dambissa Moyos and Bill Easterlies of the world, arguing that perhaps aid should be abandoned altogether since it has failed to deliver on the promise of development.  I do not now nor have ever put faith in this fatalistic assessment of the aid industry.  Admittedly, aid does a poor job of promoting economic growth, but I have seen the palliative effect of emergency & disaster relief and the small but important comfort it has brought people in desperate need.  What is needed is simply a more pragmatic assessment of those things that aid does well and those things that it does not.  But even here I betray the skeptical eye that lands me squarely in the second camp.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two most satisfying experiences I’ve had in the aid world have been the two toughest assignments.  In both Haiti and CAR, we were faced with desperate situations and people in clear need.  With our missions more concrete and tangible, so too were my feelings about them.  In Haiti my job was to build transitional shelters for those who had lost their homes in the earthquake.  And to build latrines, dole out small business loans, and provide psycho-social support.  People always prefer getting stuff to services.  It’s human nature.  You can count on it in a society in which you can’t count on much.  It was easier to justify and easier as well to explain to my friends back home.  In CAR, after the government collapsed and half the capital fled to churches and mosques in fear of their lives, we delivered emergency food rations to the displaced who took refuge at numerous churches around the city.  Not surprisingly, it feels good to give something, much as it feels good to get something.  It was difficult, emotionally-draining work, but I felt it mattered, at least in the short term.

In other posts, I have been less sure of my contribution and less convinced of my value relative to my cost.  Yes, I am a good aid worker because I am smart and have certain skills that are in demand: I can write a clear, compelling proposal in English; I have managed large groups of people and territories without pissing off my employees or offending the local communities (too much); and I am a good facilitator and trainer with a lot of teaching experience.  But am I three or five or even ten times more productive than the local professional who would replace me in order to justify my price tag?  I often wonder.  Could those resources be put to better use?  Would my salary be more effective simply doled out in cash to the people I was charged with helping?  Many economists now argue just that.  I’m really not sure, but a nagging voice in the back of my head says “perhaps, perhaps, perhaps”.

And I struggle when I’m in these societies with the different sides of the inequality coin.  When I think about per diems and stays in nice hotel rooms in developing-world capitals, I wrestle with the disparity that stares you in the face at every turn.  You exit your hotel, as I did in Ouagadougou numerous times this week, and you’re immediately surrounded by people who want you to take their taxi, buy their phone card, or shop in their store.  And this gets annoying after the third time, and you have to fight the impulse to be progressively less polite.  What would I do, I try to remind myself, if one of the only sources of income and economic advancement in the country presented itself?  Would I pursue it, knowing that I might be making myself a nuisance, but that such opportunities were few and far between?  Would I try to befriend people, with a cynical and narrow eye to the best way to profit from a situation?  And how cynical would I become in short order?

This is not to say that most people in the developing world befriend you or show you kindness merely to get something in return.  Far from it.  I have always been amazed at the general positivity and good will in many of these desperately poor countries.  Niger, the least developed country in the world (according to the UNDP), is a case in point.  I have received innumerable kindnesses and been on the end of too many mitzvahs to discount the inherent goodness of most people in poorer countries.   When I went back to work out at the ramshackle gym in the national soccer stadium last week in Niamey (because of course I did), I was greeted by numerous people who remembered me from the previous year.  I got more spots, man hugs, and fist bumps in that week than I have in three of years of working out in the same gym in LA.  I have consistently been taken care of and looked out for by friends, colleagues, and strangers alike.  Redirected when wandering into places or neighborhoods I shouldn’t go.  Guided when hopelessly lost.  Or merely smiled upon because I was there and locals gave me the benefit of the doubt, knowing that I probably could have chosen differently.  I’ve received enough puzzled, good-natured looks in mutatus in Kenya or shared taxis in Niger to know that most people find you a happy mystery.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s still nicer to be rich in a poor country than (relatively) poor in a rich country.  It’s not an unwelcome luxury to be able to eat at the best restaurants and saunter into the best clubs.  In a persistent legacy of colonialism and the tiered society that it engendered, your whiteness is often your passport.  I’ve talked to friends of color in the aid industry, and they report very different experiences in this regard, not surprisingly.  It’s another lingering, powerful bastion of colonial/economic/white privilege.  But I still very much enjoy having my laundry done and my house cleaned for me.  All of these activities promote the local economy, but they also perpetuate a segmented society.  Such are the dilemmes morales and uneasy indulgences of aid worker existence.

I think that these reservations are a natural part of an imperfect system and part of any career field (teachers, social workers, health care professionals) in which empathy is key and inequalities persist.  I wish I felt the unconditional love for the profession of the converted, though I know that they struggle with these same issues.  Myself, I’ve only ever felt that innate sense of calling and fulfillment from one job: teaching.  It’s why I’m aiming to go back to the field, albeit at the university level.  And I’ve only felt that sense of community belonging and true kinship in two countries (Ireland and Israel), and they’re far from developing.  But when the next great disaster comes, and come it will, I’ll be ready to answer the call.  Not because it’s my life’s calling but because I know that I have the skills and experience to help, egged on in no small part by my latent Catholic/Jewish guilt.  When I finish a contract or position in Haiti, or the Central African Republic, or Niger, I definitely like the feeling of telling people what I’ve just done.  It makes me sound like a better person than I really am.  The dirty secret is that I’m not a true believer, just a willing conscript.  And hopefully that’s good enough.