The Philippines: Inverse Peace Corps

So this is what I’ve been doing for the last three weeks, traveling around the Philippines and looking at things like those tremendous rice terraces. Doesn’t that look like a backdrop, or like we’ve been green-screened in? I’ve been startled at how often I get thoughts like that, so disappointingly referential: This feels just like an adventure ride in an amusement park, I said to myself as we paused in the mountain jungle for the heavy machinery lifting dirt and rocks out of our way. Like when I was little and saw a sailor and asked myself why he was wearing a teddy bear suit.

But there’s no complaining, because the disconnection of this vacation has been the best kind. No smart phones! And although I wonder whether anyone has ever had a perfect tropical beach day without at least a millisecond of a Corona (or in this case, San Miguel) advertisement flickering through your head, really, there’s no point thinking about the intrusion of commercial postmodernism when you have a bar crawl to get to. Also: those two fingers I’m holding up are not because I’m Asian and in front of a camera, but because it’s the second stop on the crawl.

I have, however, had the more real and less shakeable feeling the whole time here that I am experiencing an inverse Peace Corps. The similarities between the poor parts of the Philippines and (frankly, all of) Kyrgyzstan are peculiar but pervasive: the people look the same, are wearing the same flip-flops and texting on the same cell phones, setting up shop in the same rusted storefronts, selling street snacks and spitting. The beauty of the country, the shitty minibus rides to get to the remote areas: very reminiscent, although the people wear color and the jeepneys in the Philippines are like New Orleans parade floats sometimes–a long way from the black tracksuits and neutral cars of Kyrgyzstan. Take this tricycle for example, which my boyfriend gamely curled up into a fetal position to ride in (everything is sized for scrappy, tiny Filipino people and he, like my statuesque girl friend in KGZ, can’t buy shoes here): it could be of either country.

But there are differences, big ones. For one, the level of privilege we are mired in is a trip in itself. We wake up every day and have breakfast made for us, our clothes washed and ironed, our sneakers scrubbed; we get taken everywhere by hired drivers in the backseat of cars. Thanks to the boundless generosity and hospitality of my mom’s high school friends, we’ve been swept off to polo clubs and rooftop bars on a daily basis, and today we’re going yachting on Manila Bay.

Second, I am in a lot of ways more out of touch here than I was in Kyrgyzstan, despite this being my “motherland”–the country where my parents were born. Just like in Kyrgyzstan, I’m being frequently mistaken for a local. Unlike in Kyrgyzstan, I can’t speak the local language, and don’t even try to, although twenty years of overhearing my parents speak on the phone in Tagalog means that I probably could get some sentences out if I wanted. And although the situations are different–pretty much everyone in the Philippines speaks English anyway, and the country is very, very Westernized–it’s still strange.

Also, where I spent 40% of every given day in Kyrgyzstan trying to wrap my head around the impossibly complicated process by which the people in my town might better their lives, here I’m living (and so quickly, thinking) like someone who’s never left the upper class. We passed through provincial towns and I, like every oblivious tourist, felt like I was doing my part by buying a thing or two, thus “putting money in the local economy.”

But if PC taught me anything, it was that you can adjust to anything, and faster than you thought–and this state, like most things, is temporary and circumstantial and best if just consumed in the present tense. So I’m off to enjoy the last two days here: have read The Tiger’s Wife, The Paris Wife, How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley, The Blue Sweater, Between Parentheses, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Fun Home, and James and the Giant Peach, and will review on the plane!

The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly

I’m reading The Blue Sweater (thanks for the recommendation, Liz!) by Jacqueline Novogratz right now and am slightly stymied by the force of her ambition as a young person, and the UVA-at-its-best-and-worst rhetoric with which she talks about it (“I wanted to be a bridge, an instrument of peace wrapped in a love of financial statements, of telling stories through numbers, of trying to build companies through strategic financing and management support”). But it’s very compelling (although a little overwhelming for someone trying to write a book about aid!) and much in line with the message of William Easterly in The White Man’s Burden, subtitled Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

The dour yet wonderful message itself runs opposite of the End of Poverty view, that doubling the amount of aid under a strict plan of distribution will put an end to global poverty. Easterly’s book states the only solution to the “tragedy in which the West spent 2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of malaria deaths” is to infuse aid with more accountability, smaller ambitions and micro-scale plans, and communication with the actual poor people they are trying to help. The long book is full of extremely disheartening charts and studies stating things like “They found aid’s effect on democracy to be worse than the effect of oil on democracy” and showing exactly how highly IMF intervention is correlated with government failure.

In Kyrgyzstan, in my very limited personal experience with aid distribution, things were a huge shitshow. After the revolution, hundreds of millions of dollars of aid poured in. Relative to other developing countries, there were not too many agencies active in this little country, population Houston (5 million), and the agency outposts were small. It is not too hard to keep track of where your stuff is in Kyrgyzstan, unless it gets stolen unexpectedly, which is what happened: all the USAID money disappeared. They poured absurdly large amounts of money into schools near the military base, bought a few generators, and then the other $135 million, the prospect of which had brought an absurd amount of elation to communities with grant-writing PCVs, just kind of went away.

Like many returned Peace Corps volunteers, I emerged from the experience with a frustrating, engaged cynicism. While I hated the way people in Kyrgyzstan couldn’t write up a budget or plan, the way they spend their year’s income on one wedding and then can’t feed their kids well–I understood that all of that was due to the accident that I was born in the rich, educated West and they were not–and who am I, an American, to talk about either reasonable wedding spending or sensible childhood nutrition?

I obviously have no idea what the answer is, but my personal bottom line is this: aid still matters. The Divine Hand that gave us Michele Bachmann could have easily made us all worm-ridden Cambodians rather than blog-reading members of the bourgeoisie. There are tons of poor people in the developing world who are willing to work frontier American-style to get their families out of poverty, and although a criminal amount of aid has been wasted in a failed attempt to reach them, there is definitely a solution. This solution probably involves aid agencies getting their heads out of their asses and giving poor people the real, small opportunities they need without the weird, donor-centered rules that create serious problems for people who grew up in fields and not classrooms. As Easterly says, you can’t go five miles on a road in Tanzania, but you can book a nonstop flight from New York to LA in about five minutes without having to create a strategy, an action plan, and have a bureaucrat “assess your needs for air travel over the next year.” And as Novogratz says in The Blue Sweater, “philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.”

And, which I find even more disheartening, these are the people who’ve already made the significant jump to understanding that one should do more than dress up for a few charity dinners and clock an evening at a homeless shelter. Inefficient aid bureaucrats, despite their failings, are light-years past the upper-class high school senior I talked to yesterday that said that “white people face more obstacles and discrimination in today’s world than any other group“–an opinion that is not at all uncommon, among complete idiots.

Anyway. Here are the 5 most killer points from The White Man’s Burden.

1. Too big of goals equals no results. “If the aid business were not so beguiled by utopian visions, it could address a more realistic set of problems for which it had evidence of a workable solution.”

2. We are idiots to think input equals output: “the pathology that, in aid, the rich people who pay for the tickets are not the ones who see the movie.” As in, agencies advertise how much money they are putting into a project, but not anything about what comes out of it.

3. Donors should stop insisting on anything except for results: “The political incentives to do token amounts of everything are too strong.”

4. A nice alternate tactic is remarkably easy to conceive: “Just respond to each local situation according to what people in that situation need and want.”

5. The larger the intervention, the more danger it poses: “Artificially straight borders [those drawn by colonial bureaucrats] were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunization, less access to clean water…”

I will forget the fact that my school’s director once conducted a needs assessment of my village and decided that our greatest need was a “relaxation club” or “disco.” Aid, done correctly, still works.

Last Night at Chateau Marmont, by Lauren Weisberger

Did I ever admit that I liked The Devil Wears Prada? Because that is a fact about me that I no longer find embarrassing. There’s something about the state in which I have suddenly found myself (telling my puppy to “poop for Mama,” listening to my boyfriend be like “Oh, I’m Jia, I’m anti-establishment, look how much I’m over my sorority“) and the recent slew of head-in-ass articles like the GQ “Middlebrow” piece that has just been sapping my energy for any type of snarky judgment about likes and dislikes.

Clearly, if you have read this blog, I am no stranger to judging people by their tastes, but it’s a flawed science. Lately I’ve been reading Lauren Weisberger, watching Workaholics and eating two-thirds of my meals from the $1.50 taco truck parked next to the biker bar. Am I, at my core, just a ditzy ex-frat boy turned Mexican construction worker? The answer is simply no. I’m inching towards the conclusion that the soft idiocy of America’s tastes is determined by the simple fact that everyone works too hard. Sometimes you just want to buy a taco with your pocket change, take off your pants, and watch dumb stuff.

I will say that I hated Lauren Weisberger’s next two books after Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing and (especially) Chasing Harry Winston. Similarly, I am going to hate the chick flicks they turn into (they’ve been optioned by Universal already), and the “comic” actresses cast for how well their oversize facial features mask collagen implants, actresses who will have to fall down in heels approximately 7x over the course of the movie so that audiences will find them approachable.

But Weisberger’s latest, Last Night at Chateau Marmont, is quite entertaining and here’s why. The heroine, Brooke, is a nutritionist who works two jobs to support her sexy undiscovered rockstar husband (who is “artsy” and, naturally, forsaking a massive old-money fortune except for the house in the Hamptons). Julian gets discovered, the tabloid rumors start flying (he’s fucking everyone! she’s jealous like a shrew!), and Brooke is delightfully normal and predictable about it. Normal unfortunately meaning that she spends the whole book fighting insecurity and jealousy, but to be fair Julian turns into an asshole, both telling her to lose weight for the paparazzi and also screwing around with someone fatter than her. Can you imagine? Bottom line, it’s really enjoyable to read a book with a narrator who is openly like:

“Would it kill Julian to give her a little attention? ‘I think I might be pregnant,’ she announced.

‘You are not,’ he replied automatically.

‘How do you know? I could be. Then what would you do?’ She managed a faux sniffle.

He smiled and finally–finally!–put down the magazine. ‘Oh, sweetheart, come here. I’m sorry, I should have realized earlier. You want to cuddle.’