Eradicating Smallpox v. World Peace

From William MacAskill's Doing Good Better.  

In the twentieth century alone, smallpox killed more than three hundred million people.  Fortunately, in 1977, we eradicated it.   

It's difficult to comprehend just how great an achievement this was, so let's make a comparison.  Supposed we'd achieved world peace in 1973.  How many deaths would have been prevented?  That timescale includes the killings of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, the two Congo wars, the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  If you add up all the wards, genocides, and terrorist acts that occurred since 1973, the death toll is a staggering twelve million people.  Prior to its eradication, smallpox killed 1.5 to 3 million people every year, so by preventing these deaths for over forty years, its eradication has effectively saved somewhere between 60 and 120 million lives.  The eradication of smallpox is one success story from aid, saving five times as many lives as world peace would have done.  

Things I’ll Miss in Abidjan

I leave Abidjan this evening.  Some of the things I’ll miss:

• The daily sense of adventure from life in such a strange and vivid place. 
• Speaking French – I’ll never be as good as I would like to be, but I’ll always enjoy the challenges and delights of learning all the little nuances. 
• Tennis nights with Christophe and Lauren – sometimes at the end of yet another epic match with Christophe, the termites would start flying onto the court, buzzing around our heads, and the once-beautiful, but now run-down tennis courts at Hotel Ivoire would feel like a scene in some dystopian futuristic world where the only remaining activity was to try to summon the energy to return one more volley.  Then afterwards, we would cool off at La Dolce Vita with Tuborgs and chorizo pizza. 
• Wednesday evening pick-up soccer at Le Temple du Foot 
• Mangos – cheap, delicious and twice a week our housekeeper Sarah would go buy them and leave a bowl full of chopped up mango for me. 
• Il Solé Mio in Assinie – the most idyllic place in Cote d’Ivoire.  Tropical bed and breakfast on the beach.  To get there, Sheila and I would take a shared bus to Bassam and then a taxi to Assinie and then a water taxi to the village from which we would walk to the inn.  Assoundie, the ocean beach neighborhood of Assinie, is adorable.  An African village on the beach, it’s a decade away from becoming a full out tourist trap, but for now it remains undeveloped enough that you can see the vestiges of pre-colonial life.  Groups of men chanting while they tug in old wooden fishing boats at sunset; and kids running wild everywhere, turning back flips and playing in the ocean.  At the inn, there are hammocks, beach chairs, a long stretch of beach to explore, big waves to frolic in, seafood and pasta dinners with wine, and a neverending supply of adorable, unsupervised children. 
• Frisbee Sundays at the Lycée Classique – two hours of sprinting around in hot afternoon sun with a bossy Italian, a bunch of Ivorians and a few ex-pats; yelling at each other when the other team scores and celebrating touchdowns with elaborate dances; and then water and lying in the grass dripping with sweat while the sun sets. 
• Will, Dexter, Manu, Marius, Flor, Priska, John, Florent, Micah, Gregory, Diego and the rest of the Frisbee guys  
• Cracro for lunch at work with Dom Dje, Noelle, Ghislaine, Toure, Madame Yapi and Professeur
• Ivorian food – Poulet braisé, alloco, banane braisé, Fanta cocktail, Tuborg beer 
• French food – Yop, salted butter, brochettes de mérou, fondant chocolat, the tarte aux mangues at the Hotel Pullman 
• Cheap taxis with fast, efficient drivers who have complete mastery of their vehicles.  My first week I thought that they were reckless and that I would die in a car accident here.  I gradually came to realize that they are driving grandmasters; they have 10,000 hours of experience hustling through tight spaces in terrible traffic.  Now I get impatient when I have to ride with mortal drivers.  I’m tempted to pitch a reality show that would pit NASCAR drivers against West African cabbies. 
• Taxi rides along the lagoon 
• The rainy season (applicable only for rich people) – they have fantastic rainstorms here where it just pours for 24 or 36 hours in a row.  It’s magical and beautiful, if you have a comfortable shelter and you’re not foregoing your meager income because of the rain. 
• Eating fish and seafood – I learned to eat fish a couple of years ago, but I learned to actually enjoy it here.  I'm excited to eat it in the U.S. at places where they take the bones out and use marinades and sauces; not excited to pay five times as much. 
• Not craving food at every instant – food just isn’t as good here, so I think about it less.  Unlike the U.S. where I spend my work morning looking forward to lunch, here I don’t think about lunch until I physically have trouble concentrating on work. 
• West African music – it’s upbeat, it has a nice beat, and it is now familiar, yet still pleasantly exotic. 
• Slower pace of life – no smart phone, no twitter, nothing to do on my morning commute, but sit and think.  Everything takes longer here, so there isn’t much point in being in a hurry.  Life here is inherently inefficient, so you just get used to things not working and the fact that each task is a self-contained action, not one link in an endless list of things to accomplish.  

Up next: Things I won’t miss from Abidjan. 

Abidjan Observations - Ultimate frisbee, soda pop and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Sheila left Abidjan a few days ago, so I should have a bit more time for blogging these last several weeks in Abidjan.  Some initial observations from the past few months: 

Ultimate Frisbee – This has become my favorite activity in Abidjan.  I still feel pretty blah about the sport of frisbee, but the weekly habit of it here is great.  It’s organized by Diego, an Italian who works for an international NGO here, and there are a few other westerners who attend, but the most religious attendees are the Ivorians.  There is a core group of about 10 regulars, mostly guys between 20 and 30 years old, although there is one young woman and one kid.  In recent weeks, they’ve discussed creating a national Ivorian frisbee federation, and I’ve been having fantasies about making a Cool Runnings type movie or book about them. 

I only see most of them once a week, but these are probably the most meaningful relationships that I’ve formed with Ivoirians.  It’s a good group of people, and it’s been fun to get to know them through the medium of sports.  Sports are such a great leveling force where differences of class and culture can be mostly wiped away for a couple of hours of running and throwing and yelling at each other and celebrating touchdowns. 

There is a gulf in culture and social class that can’t be entirely overcome of course, and the frisbee gang are definitely a different social class.  They seem mostly lower-middle class for Cote d’Ivoire (which would qualify as very poor in the U.S.).  I’m not even sure what many of them do in life, but that’s mainly because most of them don’t have formal jobs or stable incomes.  One is a grad student, another a bouncer, but most seem to be drifting, surviving in that fuzzy grey area of a society with few formal jobs or opportunities for a stable, sufficient income. 

In any case, I’m happy to have passed through their lives for a few months.  It’s already my favorite memory from Cote d’Ivoire – Sunday afternoons, laying in the grass after frisbee, drenched from running around in the African heat, laughing and passing around water bottles while the sun sets on another week. 

Soda pop – I don’t normally drink soda in the U.S., but it is glorious in West Africa.  I drink a few per week now, especially after soccer, frisbee or tennis, but sometimes just because it’s hot and humid and I’ve been sweating all day, and soda is cold and sweet and hydrating.  Also, if you get it from a maquis, they serve it in glass bottles, like out of 1950s America.  I highly recommend the Fanta Cocktail. 

French lesson – The word for "stoplight" in Ivorian French is "tri-colored fire."

Global Problems, American Solutions – A couple of nights before Sheila left, we were at dinner with some friends, and we got to discussing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  A couple of people hadn’t heard of it, so those who had were explaining what they knew about it (it’s twice the size of the continental U.S.!).  Then we started discussing what could be done about it, and one woman, an American Foreign Service Officer, suggested that we should just bomb it.  Such a fantastically American response.  Is it a problem?  Yes.  Okay, let’s bomb it. 

Abidjan Observations: Life at the Office

Like all offices, my office has (eventually) become a comfortable and familiar place over the past few months.  Upon arriving at the office, everyone goes into each other’s offices for handshakes or bisous.  My coworkers are nice people and friendly with me, and I’ve begun to get to know them on a more personal level.  For their part, they’ve gotten used to having me there.  They’re no longer that intrigued by me, although they still enjoy telling me about how things work here and they get a kick out of me eating local food. 

The office is not always a well-oiled machine however.  Some recent logistical problems: 

• The door handle to my office is broken and has been for three months now.  It’s not totally broken; you can jam it back onto the protruding piece of metal, and it will open and close, but you’re always one forgetful moment away from yanking it off the door and having to re-jig it onto the door. 
• A few days ago there were three baby mice or rats running around my office for most of the afternoon.  Not pleasant. 
• Our internet doesn’t work.  A neighboring office in our building does have internet and their internet usually works, so we often use theirs.  But this puts us in the position of relying entirely on them for internet, so if they show up late or leave early, we are out of luck.  Our internet was working the first few weeks when I arrived, but it soon went out and it hasn’t been back.   

On the positive side, I’ve been eating lunch with a colleague or two most days now.  We usually eat braised bananas and roast peanuts, which we buy for dirt cheap from a lady near our office.  It comes out to about 30 cents per person, and I quite like it as a light lunchtime meal. 

A Day at the Beach in Cote d'Ivoire

Observations from a recent trip to Grand-Bassam:

Renting a car -- Sheila and I decided to go to the beach a couple of weekends ago.  We’d been once before, but had gotten a ride from an embassy staffer with a car on that occasion.  My bus ride to Yamoussoukro aside, we’d yet to leave Abidjan on our own.  I’d heard that renting a car was the way to go, so I asked a couple of co-workers, and one told me that he had a friend who did car rentals and he could get me a good deal.  I asked whether the car came with a driver and he said that it was customary for it to come with a driver.  I called him the day before to confirm, and he told me that he would bring the car over himself at whatever time we wished.  At 8am the next morning, my coworker did indeed show up with the car, and only then did I realize that he would be serving as our rental car driver for the day.  It’s probably worth noting that this colleague is a mid-level official in our office.  More worryingly, he was also the driver for the return trip from Yamoussoukro, who you may remember from this previous post.  He was surprisingly professional though.  He drove us to Bassam, went off and did his own thing for several hours while Sheila, Will and I lazed about the beach, and then drove us back to Abidjan.  Cote d’Ivoire… a beautiful and strange land where government health official moonlight as rental car drivers. 

La Maison de la Lagune -- The beach itself was quite nice.  We went to La Maison de la Lagune, a few kilometers outside of Grand-Bassam.  La Maison de la Lagune is owned and managed a by sweet, older Frenchwoman named Catherine.  It was beautiful, with views of the lagoon on one side and the Atlantic Ocean/Gulf of Guinea on the other.  Sitting on beach chairs for the day is free so long as you get lunch; and lunch (merou (grouper) brochettes, ratatouille, and Fanta Cocktail) was excellent.  We've been fed a steady diet of stories about ex-pats getting pulled away by the undertow and drowning, so I'm terrified of going in too deep, but we waded out to waist height and even body surfed a bit.  All in all, it was one of the nicer days we've had so far in Abidjan.  

Observations from Abidjan: A Time Machine to the Pre-Google Era

Digital Desert -- My relationship with technology has changed since I've been here.  This, despite having very decent internet connectivity.  Our house has wifi that extends to every room and works flawlessly 96% of the time.  I can maintain email relationships with friends, follow American basketball and European soccer, read my favorite websites, and write blog posts here.

But it's like being able to access this stuff from the Moon.  The internet provides very little added convenience to my daily life here in Abidjan.  Google Maps has a map for Abidjan, of course, but there is very little detail.  Unlike, say, Polson, Montana (population 4,488), where I can look up the exact location of the nearest UPS Store or the lone Mexican restaurant in town, and go down to street level and glance around, there is shockingly little information about Abidjan (population 1,929,000).  There are popular restaurants and bars here that simply don't exist on the internet.  Back in the U.S., Sheila and I like to laugh about the pre-internet days when you had to know exact directions beforehand in order to get somewhere, but Abidjan is a time machine back to that era.  If you make plans to meet a friend at a restaurant you've never been to, you need to ask him for directions as well.

What is more, most streets don't have names here, so there are no addresses.  Directions are given via to landmarks.  To take a taxi home, I tell the cabbie that I live "in Vallon (neighborhood) near the Ghanaian embassy (landmark)."  To go to work, I ask to go to "Plateau next to the Pullman Hotel."  Yesterday, Sheila wanted to go to an African dance class, so she had to call a friend who told her to tell the cab driver that it was near the pre-school in Cocody, and if he didn't know where the pre-school was, to say that it was not too far from radio station RTI.

Google is considerably less useful to daily life here.  At work, I was looking through our office's official Strategic Plan for the year, and one goal was to revise the SNFSCUS.  In the U.S., your first response is to google unknown acronyms, so I tried that.  Nothing.  So I googled "SNFSCUS Cote d'Ivoire."  Still nothing.  "SNFSCUS Cote d'Ivoire Ministere de la Santé."  Nope.  I ended up having to ask my colleague, Dom Dje, but then he couldn't remember either, so we spent 90 seconds trying to puzzle it out.  (Final answer: Stratégie National de Financement sur la Couverture Universelle de Santé.)

Last week, Sheila's iPhone started getting a message saying that her telephone service had been restricted.  In the U.S., the first step would be to google the problem and then to call customer service.  Here, a google search does not turn up any forums or other discussion of the problem, and when you call the customer service line, it says that all lines are busy and tells you to call back at some other time and then hangs up on you.  Our service provider's offices are closed from noon Saturday until Monday morning, so we had to wait until Monday to head over to the Orange office, wait in line and then ask in person how to fix the problem.

If there is one bright side to living in a technological backwater, it's that I've completely kicked my Twitter addiction since arriving here.

Weather in Abidjan -- The weather here is so boringly consistent that people don't even make small talk about the weather.  

Parenting and New Years in the Cote d'Ivoire

Sheila and I feted the New Year at the house of a Colombian-French couple with a bunch of ex-pats.  It was a fun party.  A bit of an older crowd, but that didn't stop most of them from splashing into the swimming pool at midnight for champagne toasts and general merriness.  Salsa dancing was promised, but never materialized, although we left at 1:30am, so perhaps we just didn't stick around for long enough.

Most striking was the laissez-faire attitude of the ex-pat parents.  We came with Diego and Sophie and their one-and-a-half year old daughter Emilie, who was pulled from her bed, bundled off to the party, and then deposited in the back yard in a portable crib covered with a malaria bed net.  Next to the bed net-covered crib of another sleeping baby.  And these were just the sleeping kids.  Any child above three was allowed to stay awake and frolic around playing soccer or video games into the wee hours of the night.  Sheila and I couldn't help but admire this attitude.  We first thought it was a French thing, but a visiting Frenchwoman assured us that it was an ex-pat thing, that it would be unusual in France as well.  I suppose it makes sense.  The type of parents who are casual/selfish enough to drag their kids along to Africa so that they can continue their adventurous pre-child lifestyle are the type of parents who would drag their kids to parties so that they can maintain their pre-child social life.

I don't yet have strong impressions about Ivorian parenting, but the dynamics around age are interesting.  There is a much clearer hierarchy among the ages here, and society just seems to operate on the basic assumption that youths will obey their elders.  When our car broke down on the side of the road on the way home from the village festival, it broke down next to a roadside concrete shop where a handful of teens were working.  My friend Hilaire ordered them to push the car back and forth a few times while we tried to get it started.  At ultimate frisbee, there are often a couple of kids hanging around hoping to play.  If we're short of players, we might invite them to join us, but they are ordered off the field immediately upon the arrival of more senior players.  

Village Festivals, Social Capital and Soft Power

La Fête de la Sagesse et la Richesse -- This past Saturday, a friend took us to a festival in a village near Dabou, about 90 minutes outside of Abidjan.  There was music, dancing, food, colorful outfits, relentless sun, and an endless ceremony with long-winded speeches.  It was a lot of fun.  In particular, there was lots of music and dancing, both traditional African dance and more modern stuff, in which I participated.

Being in the village, rather than Abidjan, was much closer to the Western conception of "Africa."  We weren't even the only white people at the festival, but white people are clearly a rarity in those parts, and I was an object of fascination.  Barefoot children followed me around.  Someone asked me if my hair was a wig.  They all wanted to touch my arm hair, as they'd apparently never seen anything like it.  I told them that I had the blood of the wolf.

Christmas in Abidjan -- There are some spectacular displays of Christmas lights here.  The bridge to Plateau is lit with Christmas lights shaped into beautiful, colorful flowers.  I assume that the government pays for this, and you can argue with the decision to prioritize funds for this purpose, but I do think there is something to be said for creating an attractive and happy environment for citizens.  Many private establishments also have impressive displays of Christmas decorations.

Queueing and Social Capital -- At the village festival, there was a lunch buffet for a group of us.  Even among our relatively wealthy group, the social capital was absolutely atrocious, with people shamelessly cutting each other to get ahead in the buffet line.  My initial impression has been that social capital is actually worse among the wealthy here, perhaps related to an increased sense of entitlement.

I've been noticing the lack of social capital a bit more in recent days.  I went out to buy a couple of things on December 24, a busy shopping day, and there was a disgraceful amount of cutting and other uncharitable behavior.

That being said, these are minor points, and I've found most of my business dealings to be quite honest.  Prices aren't always fixed, so people might charge me a bit extra for being Western, but people don't try to cheat me outright.  I've never given someone money for a good that was broken or a service that went unperformed.  

Soft Power -- The U.S. has a great deal of cachet over here.  A cabbie recently told me that even having a brother or a cousin in the U.S. can gain one a great deal of status.

I had a run of five cab drivers in a row who told me that their dream is to move to the U.S.  One had saved up $4,000 for his application, only to have the money stolen through a fraudulent service (very common here).  Another is in the process of trying to save up $8,000.  These are shocking sums for people who probably make about $10-$20 a day.  The driver who is saving towards his $8,000 goal says he's been saving money for 10 years now, ever since he was 18.  Most of them hope to drive taxis over in the U.S.  Such a tragedy that we make it so difficult for them to get over to the U.S.

Expatriate Conversation

This was another world in Malabo, the world of the colonialist.  Or better, ex-colonialist.  An African servant was passing out the drinks, another tended Guillermo and Marisol's small son, and a third prepared the fire for cooking.  The hors d'oeuvres had been imported from Cameroon and Spain.  The style of the conversation was the kind one seems to find among expatriates in almost every developing country I know: a combination of gossip about leading figures, complaints about "the system" and "the people," and great cynicism. 

That's from Robert Klitgaard's Tropical Gangsters, written in Equatorial Guinea in 1990, but it could have been written in Abidjan in 2013.  Although in fairness the U.S. Foreign Service crowd is not like this.  I've found them to be culturally sensitive, and they are not integrated enough into Ivorian life to know any interesting gossip.  The UN crowd on the other hand...

Families, Governance and Stability

More observations from December in Abidjan:

Culture of Family Making -- There are 21 million people in Cote d'Ivoire in 2013.  There are expected to be 30 million by 2030.  When I spend time around Ivorians, it's not hard to see why.  Making a family is just such a big part of the culture here.  I've yet to meet a cab driver who doesn't have a wife and kids.  I haven't discussed this issue in detail with people, but there doesn't seem to be any concept of deciding whether one wants a wife and family, as we do in the U.S.  Getting married and having babies is what one does here.  My colleagues made fun of me recently for saying that Sheila and I were considering having kids soon, mocking the idea that planning a family should require such organization and forethought.

Governance in West Africa -- In a team meeting at work, a colleague yelled at another colleague for recommending a policy that Ghana had implemented.  "If we were even one-third as well governed as Ghana, that might be possible!  Or Rwanda!  But you know that's not possible here!"  It leads one to believe that Ghana is handily winning the West African Wager.

Governance in the Ministry of Health -- That being said, I've been impressed with how knowledgeable and competent all of my co-workers are.  They are intelligent, well educated and they have a good understanding of the issues facing their country's health care system.  I suppose I had fantasies of coming here and teaching them how to improve their health care system.  Instead, I find that this has been almost completely a learning experience (remind me to use this paragraph for my next college essay!).

Anyway, it's a good lesson for me about the value of experience and institutional knowledge over education and theoretical knowledge.  I knew a lot of health care policy generally, but very little about Cote d'Ivoire's health care system, its institutions, its way of policymaking.  The latter issues are clearly much more important categories of knowledge for my work here.  Remind me of this next time I talk about wanting to get a PhD.

Progress -- I did make a few semi-helpful suggestions during a team strategy meeting at work this past week. My French is getting better and I'm feeling increasingly competent.

Post-Coup Stability -- I don't know what it was like during the coup, but things seem pretty stable now.  The "crise" was bad, and people are clearly scarred by it, but life seems to have gone mostly back to normal.  On the surface, the country is building as if unconcerned about the possibility of future turmoil in the 2015 election.  Roads, bridges and buildings are springing up.  My office at the ministry of health is embarking on a complicated reform of the health system that will take several years to fully implement.  For a new arrival like me, the only real evidence of the crisis comes from the occasional stories of taxi drivers or Ivorians who talk about the people and things they lost.  I very much hope that the elections go off smoothly.  For the majority of Ivorians with whom I've discussed, their main concern seems to be stability.  One cab driver told me that he doesn't care who the president is, that his president is his children and trying to give them a better life.

Cultural Differences -- In the bathroom at work (in the Ministry of Health!), there is a sign above the sink that says "Interdit de pisser dans le lavabo" ("Urinating in the sink is prohibited").

December Observations on Life in Abidjan

Language in Cote d’Ivoire – Language stuff is very interesting here.  I think it might be the best place in the world to learn French.  Unlike most places in Africa, French is a native language for almost everyone.  And unlike France, Belgium or Quebec, people speak very little English, so you don’t even have to battle over which language to use. 

In public life, Abidjan is almost exclusively French speaking.  Cote d’Ivoire has ethnic languages, but there are so many ethnicities with so many languages that Abidjan residents speak almost exclusively French with one another.  Even in remote regions, French is the language of school instruction, so everyone is a native speaker, or close enough.  The Burkinabe and Guinean immigrants don’t always speak as well, and their accents are thick, but they are from Francophone countries, so they still speak better than me. 

This hodgepodge of French dialects makes for a forgiving learning environment.  There are so many accents and dialects that people just assume that my poor French is an odd dialect.  I ask taxi drivers to guess where I’m from and they always guess France. 

And very few people speak English.  Not even my highly educated colleagues.  They clearly studied it in school and sometimes hear it in movies, but they are not accustomed to using it in daily life.  And the cab drivers and vendors don’t speak at all, so there’s not even the temptation to use it in daily interactions.

(Perhaps I’m not giving France enough credit as a place to learn French.  Paris is very cosmopolitan, and that’s the place where I’ve been, but surely there are rural regions in France that are more Francophone than Abidjan, yet just as non-Anglophone.) 

Abidjan Natives and Unicorns – Abidjan is a bit like Paris or Washington DC in that no one is actually from Abidjan.  Everyone is from a village in one of the regions, and they moved here for work.  Even if they were born here, their family is from the village and they go back for festivals. 

The Lecture Circuit – This past Saturday, I gave a presentation for a class of high school students on The Role of Girls in the Classroom in the U.S.  It was in English at CUSA (Connect USA), an English language institute run by an Ivorian friend here in Abidjan. 

I’m a nervous public speaker, but it turned out to be a lot of fun.  I asked the girls whether they wanted to have careers and why.  This being a classroom of upper class kids, all of them wanted careers, with the main reason being that they wanted to be “independent” of their husbands so that their husbands can’t tell them what to do.  I then asked the girls whether they would like to earn more money than their husbands, to which they replied that yes, that would be great. 

I then asked the boys whether they would be okay with their wives earning more than them.  Absolutely not, they all said.  “If the wife earns more than her husband, he cannot tell her what to do,” one of the boys informed me.  I then asked how many of the boys agreed with the following statement: “My wife should have to do what I say, but I should not have to do what my wife says.”  Nearly all agreed.  This set us up for the big reveal, of course, where I told them that my wife earns more money than me, which of course brought gasps of shock. 

The students were really fun.  They spoke surprisingly good English (for Cote d’Ivoire) and they seemed to enjoy the classroom debate – I haven’t been to a regular class here, but I assume that school is shaped by the French model of sitting like statues while a professor drones on about theory.  They were also very well behaved.  The discussion was spirited, and many were eager to speak, but nobody spoke without being called upon, although they did wave their hands a bit wildly and call “Sir! Sir! Sir!” in hopes of being called upon. 

More Observations from Yamoussoukro

More Observations from the Atelier National de réflexions sur une Strategie Nationale de Financement Basé sur la Performance en Cote d'Ivoire in Yamoussoukro. 

• On Friday, the last full day of the workshop in Yamoussoukro, I was nominated “president” of my workshop group.  For context, at the beginning of every daily workshop, each group nominates a president.  The president's job is to call on people to speak and to keep the discussion moving and the work on schedule.  My nomination was out of politeness, not out of any sense of Africans deferring to Americans; I had been pretty quiet the previous day, and I believe they were trying to be inclusive. 
• Being president was a very stressful, very memorable experience.  Everyone is quite formal; they call you "president" or "monsieur/madame le/la president" throughout the time that one is president.  Things quickly descended into chaos though.  At the best of times, it takes a very strong leader to keep control of these group-writing sessions, and my linguistic and cultural ignorance were huge obstacles.  Even if I spoke perfect French, the cultural unknowns made effective leadership very tricky (Should everyone be allowed to express their viewpoint on every issue? Am I allowed to interrupt government officials 30 years my elder?).  And my lack of Ivorian institutional expertise left me completely unable to contribute on several important points (there was a long debate about exactly which Ministry of Health offices should be involved in regulating the “purchasing agent”).  And my French is far from perfect.  The upshot was that I completely lost control of the meeting.  Everyone ended up arguing about tiny, esoteric points for the first four hours.  The senior group member kept on giving me reproachful looks and he publicly "exhorted" me to take better control of the meeting, but it was not to be.  I implored the group to move forward, but was completely powerless to move things forward as I might have been able to do in English.  Finally, with 45 minutes until we were expected to present to the wider conference, the group seemed to confront the reality of our time constraints.  We threw together the final 75% of the work in broad, panicked brushstrokes during that last half hour and presented an adequate enough final product in the restitution session. 
•  In fairness to my Ivorian colleagues, this was about the same as most group work projects I’ve experienced.  At Booz Allen, we spent the first week writing scripts via group and it followed the exact same pattern.  We would spend an entire morning arguing about comma placement in Script #1, and then write the last four scripts in an hour.  The work group in Yamoussoukro was a bit panicked at the end, but probably not memorably so for most of the group members. 
• Participating in workshops in a different language is fun because it allows you to zoom out and appreciate the quirks of human nature.  When you can’t fully follow the semantic thread of the conversation, you pick up on body language: adults roll their eyes or refuse to make eye contact with a person who is disagreeing with them.  They spend 90 minutes on facebook, completely oblivious of the conversation, but then their laptop battery runs out, so they join the conversation and then immediately get so fixated on a point that they won’t let the group move past it for half an hour. 
• The drive home from Yamoussoukro was a fascinating cultural experience.  I rode back with four of my colleagues at DPPS.  Our driver, Touré, was the most junior member of the team.  He was very offended when I tried to put on a seatbelt, assuring me that he was a terrific driver. 
• The freeway is one-lane, so passing other cars is a necessity.  Our driver was a decent enough driver, and not overly aggressive, or at least not overly aggressive compared to the Abidjanais cab drivers.  We passed cars regularly, and for the most part without great danger.  But I dozed off after a couple of hours, and I woke up to screams and found our car accelerating towards an oncoming pickup truck while another pickup truck blocked our path back to the safety of our lane.  We survived that, but then, half an hour from Abidjan, the driver lost concentration for a bit and almost swerved off the road.  My supervisor, woke up with a start, and immediately yelled at the driver for his reckless driving.  The rest of the car chimed in, and the driver got so offended that he pulled off the side of the freeway and stormed off to smoke a cigarette to calm himself down.  He eventually returned, having apparently resolved to enact some revenge.  We spent the next 90 minutes behind a semi-truck that was traveling 15 miles per hour and spewing horrible black smoke.  As further punishment, the driver turned off the car radio and we sat in silence (although he did put in earphones for himself to listen to music from his smart phone).  The driver’s tantrum didn’t even have the desired effect, as my supervisor had lapsed into a deep slumber in the passenger seat.    
• After the long journey crammed into the middle of the back seat, I was pretty eager to get home, and I even offered to take a cab so that the driver wouldn’t have to drive me all the way back.  He wouldn’t hear of it though and insisted on taking everyone back to their own houses.  We started by dropping off a coworker whose house was situated on a dirt road on the outskirts of the far opposite side of our sprawling capital.  He insisted that we all come in for a beer, and the group, somehow warmly reconciled by now, happily accepted, and we chattered happily about the tranquility of the remote location.  We then headed to my place on the other side of Abidjan, where I couldn’t help but invite everyone in for a second beer. 
• It was a very long day and a long week, but very good for my French and for my understanding of the Ivorian health sector.  So long as I concentrate, I now have little trouble following the lectures or group discussions at the workshop.  I learned a good amount about both the structure and implementation of our Performance-Based Financing program, as well as institutional insights that are never written into formal government documents.  I’m still not at a place where I can understand my Ivorian colleagues when they laugh and banter in a personal setting, but I’m improving and, on good days, I feel optimistic that I will get there. 

Yamoussoukro Observations

Observations from Yamoussoukro - December 4-6, 2013 

• On Wednesday morning, I took a bus from Abidjan from Yamoussoukro, the bizarre nominal capital.  It was the first time I’ve taken a bus in Cote d’Ivoire and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it all was.  The ticketing office was quite professional, with standard prices and official printed tickets.  There was a terminal with benches, a television set and no panhandlers.  The bus itself was mainly middle class.  Several people in my vicinity pulled out books during the trip.  It was a bit crowded (there were about 80 people squeezed into a normal sized travel bus), but clean and secure.  Out of 80 travelers, I was one of two Westerners and there was an Indian as well. 
• The bus had a couple of television sets that played an Ivorian sitcom throughout the trip.  The volume was a bit low and I had trouble understanding the dialogue, but it seemed like most of the plot centered around older men checking out or flirting with attractive younger women and then getting yelled at by their wives.  This is apparently a very relatable concept, as the passengers particularly enjoyed these scenes. 
• I’m now in Yamoussoukro for a workshop to produce the national strategy paper for implementing “Performance-Based Financing.” 
• We’re staying in the Hotel President, the nicest hotel in Cote d’Ivoire.  It’s lovely, the rival of any hotel I’ve stayed in.  I’d make snarky comments about the cost, but I know that we’re actually paying a very reasonable price for room, board and conference space.  And in fact it’s the World Bank paying.  And I’m quite confident that the cost is significantly less than the State Department paid for our Fulbright Pre-Departure Orientation.  Fair is fair, I guess. 
• Once again, most documents are produced via group sessions.  Every afternoon, we divide into groups to produce some sort of document or presentation which we then present to the entire conference at the end of the day. 
• A fun realization about group workshops: counter-intuitively, the period after lunch is often the most productive.  Post-coffee break, the pedantic among us will spend hours debating thrilling semantic issues such as whether the “government” or the “government budget” is a “source of revenue.”  Post-lunch, lethargy takes over, and the obstinate become subdued enough that the group can actually get work done. 
• We had a moment of silence at the beginning of today's session in honor of Nelson Mandela.  
• Google Glass with face recognition would be incredibly useful in government conferences. 

Observations from Abidjan - November 10-21

More observations from the past couple of weeks here in Abidjan:

• It's quite satisfying to feel more comfortable with the culture here.  When taxis or street vendors try to rip me off, it's now amusing rather than stressful.  One does start to feel a certain pride about it, and it's easy to see why the "old travelers" -- those delightful snobs who have spent significant time in developing countries -- can become so insufferable about Africa novices.  
• Learning a language -- particularly French -- as an adult is such a long road.   I often feel like I've stagnated or that my progress is so slow that I'll never achieve true fluency.  I've gotten to the point where small talk and business interactions are no problem at all.  But the nuances still escape me.  Being able to hold a conversation in French is one thing; being witty or interesting or fun at a party in French is quite another.  These are subtle and difficult skills that one spends a lifetime honing even in one's native language.  
• Likewise, French at work has been a major barrier to integrating myself into my job here.  My co-workers use a lot of Ivorian slang when they speak between themselves.  I miss out on the nuances of conversation and then there are all sorts of technical terms that I don't recognize.  I spend a lot of time fake laughing at things that I don't understand, which I dislike, but it's a lesser evil than asking someone to repeat something every 15 seconds.  Also, the nuances of workplace interactions with supervisors and co-workers often require a subtlety for which my clumsy French is ill-equipped.  My French will continue to improve, and it already has improved a great deal since I've been here.  But on those days where my co-workers are laughing together and I'm grasping at straws, trying I'm trying to cling to the thread of the conversation, it can be very frustrating.  I suppose I'll never be truly fluent; just progressively less incompetent.  
• During a recent conversation with a Belgian Congolese (white Congolese-born Belgian) businessman who has spent his entire life in Africa, he told me that the corruption here in Cote d'Ivoire is worse than it's ever been.  That's probably to be taken with a grain of salt, since he's only really been based in Abidjan for the past few years.   
• I mentioned in a previous post that there are usually chickens running around near restaurants and fruit vendors and cell phone credit vendors.  I still don't totally understand how they keep track of which chickens belong to who.  And what if one of the chickens gets hit by a car?  The taxis make no effort to avoid the chickens, sometimes accelerating towards them.  There are also chickens that run around outside my office, cock-a-doodle-doo-ing with great gusto throughout the afternoon.  Also, you constantly see chickens crossing the road here, which never gets old.  
• It rains here most days, but rarely for longer than 15-20 minutes.  
• As an indication for how far off the map West Africa is, "Ivorian" is not in the lexicon of my cell phone (purchased here in Cote d'Ivoire!).  
• Sauce gumbo is a popular Ivorian sauce made from a vegetable called gumbo.  It's one of the more vegetarian friendly dishes around.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that gumbo is French for snozzcumber.  
• I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a week in San Francisco with Sheila and family and friends.  

More on the Rights-based Approach

Feminist Out Of Water had a good post about the "rights-based approach" and I wanted to respond to a few points.  She starts by articulating several of the critiques of the rights-based approach made by Easterly and Blattman.  She counters these critiques several arguments about freedom and inequality and about the importance of consulting the poor in policymaking:

We are trying to alleviate poverty because poverty is bad. When we say poverty is bad, what we mean is that it is wrong. When we say it is wrong, what we mean is that it is unjust, unfair, unequal, and inhibits freedom. WHOA, I know, nobody likes to make this jump because now we are talking about normative things instead of meaningless things like “efficiency.” 

But I think these motivations for eliminating poverty are too broad and all-encompassing.  Eliminating poverty is not a way to redress all of the world's wrongs, just one very specific and important wrong.  In fact, I believe that defining poverty as a combination of vast and mushy concepts like injustice, inequity, inequality and lack of freedom is more likely to make the conversation "meaningless," than discussing "meaningless things like 'efficiency.'"

FOOW also devotes significant time to the argument of freedom as non-domination, an argument that I also find too broad:

The reason we humans want to alleviate poverty is because we want to increase freedom for all humans. This is because poverty undermines democratic equality and creates the ability for the wealthy to dominate and oppress (whether directly or indirectly) the poor. This means that the poor are not free if you see freedom as non-domination, which I think is a great way to understand freedom. You can be dominated by your government, through torture or imprisonment. Or, you can be dominated by a multinational corporation, that, with vast wealth and power, can take land away from you without your permission. Or, you can be dominated by your husband, if you are a victim of domestic abuse. There are many way to be dominated. The point is that people should not be so unequal in net-worth or in social standing that they can dominate each other or be dominated by each other or by institutions. It is up to us humans to design institutions that make this a reality.

FOOW says that domination undermines freedom and notes that "there are many ways to be dominated."  But I would argue that there are too many ways to be dominated for "domination" to denote a lack of freedom.  She seems to be arguing that if you live in a society where some people's land has been taken away by a multinational corporation, this does not mean that you yourself are unfree.  Or is it just the person whose land was taken away?  Or him and his neighbors?  Or him and his neighbors and everyone else whose property could possible be taken (now we're up to most of society).  This seems like an awfully big leap.  I don't believe that the existence of companies or people who do bad things shows that the people of that society are unfree.  This would mean that basically all of humanity is unfree.

She also criticizes economic arguments to policy, in which policymakers take into account silly considerations such as cost-benefit analysis.  

We cannot just say, well there is more freedom being enhanced than taken away, and call it “efficient.” Like good – bad > 0. These are human lives we are talking about not mathematical calculations. Moreover, this kind of calculation is not an abstract and morally neutral or practical or pragmatic solution, this is a clear adherence to a moral philosophy that is called utilitarianism. It is one moral philosophy among many, and has not been the premier moral philosophy for the past half-century in any other field than in economics, where efficiency as a moral concept still reigns supreme. I think it is absolutely nuts that economics claims to be value neutral while holding up utilitarianism as their moral dogma, but whatever, that is for another post.

FOOW seems to be arguing for a "do no harm approach" to policy, which I think is extreme and unrealistic.  All government policy does harm to one group or another.  Even a lack of policymaking or a delay in policymaking does harm to one group or another (see United States Congress).  In a world of limited government budgets, a right to health care or a right to a speedy trial, inherently limits the right to clean water or the right to adequate housing.  The only real conclusion that she seems to be making is that it is important to consult the poor more.

And this, for me, is the main problem with FOOW's argument.  There are lots of interesting arguments about freedom and inequality, but no real compelling argument for the rights-based approach.  She seem to be arguing for consulting the poor more, without really do not provide any arguments for why the rights-based approach does this more effectively.  

More Abidjan Thoughts

Observations from the past few weeks here in Abidjan:

• I had strep throat last week, and possibly malaria as well.  I'm better now, but this was a barrier to blogging the past couple of weeks.  
• Internet USB keys here are very convenient.  You can buy a USB key and insert it into your computer whenever you need internet and it provides you with a 3G connection.  I assume that this technology exists in the U.S., but I was completely unaware of it.  
• At the ministry of health, my direction is now pushing forward a plan to introduce "performance based financing" into the Ivorian health system.  This should be an exciting project and I imagine that it will be my core project during my time here in Cote d'Ivoire.  
• A lot of professional documents here are written collaboratively here.  In fact, at every government conference, workshop or commission that I've been to, the goal has been to produce, via group, some sort of document.  This is in stark contrast to the U.S., where documents are composed individually and circulated for editing, and where workshops and seminars are often a waste of time.  Here, the workshop is the most important work activity; everyone comes together, works hard, and produces a policy paper collaboratively.  Still, based on what I've seen so far, I'd probably choose the U.S. model for producing collaborative work.  I do like that the Ivorian model encourages such a high level of collaboration and participation.  But it does not encourage outside research.  It's a closed universe, where a group of people will sit inside a room drafting a strategic plan without bringing in outside research, thereby failing to take advantage of the wealth of easily accessible information available via internet.  It's possible that these judgments are premature.  I have only been to a handful of workshops and commission meetings so far.  
• Abidjan is generally pretty nice.  It is green, there is not too much garbage on the streets, there are lots of nice buildings.  Still, it's not quite as well kept as, say, NW Washington DC.  The main reminder is that my fingernails and the bottoms of my feet are usually dirty here.  Lots of dust flying around always.  
• In general, I've been positively surprised by the level of social capital here.  To get window curtains made, you go to the store, select your curtains and then come back in a week to pick them up.  They don't demand money up front, and it is quite possible that you would never return and they would be out the cost of the materials and the labor.  When we got our furniture made, we left a sizable deposit to allow the carpenter to buy supplies, and, while he wasn't a great carpenter, he did eventually deliver all of the furniture that we had ordered at the price he had quoted.  
• That being said, I left my cheap cell phone in a taxi last week, and the finder did not make any attempt to return it, despite text messages promising a reward.  
• There is no daylight savings time in Cote d'Ivoire.  Which makes sense, this being so close to the equator and all.  Days are always about the same length here.  Sunrise around 6am and sunset at 6pm.  
• There is an odd competition here among ex-pats to see who can pay the least for taxi rides.  I understand the desire to be well adapted to Ivorian culture, but I still don't really understand bragging about negotiating a particularly low fare with a cab driver.  Would you brag about how little you tipped your waiter at lunch?  Is there an ethical difference between the two?  

Partisan narratives and why America's government fails

Keeping with my kick of reading about making government work, I liked this from Scott Sumner on why the U.S.'s government often functions so poorly:

America has two political parties:

1.  One is so anti-government that they refuse to do serious thinking about how to make government work.

2.  The other is so pro-government that they refuse to make the tough choices necessary to make government work.

Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine

This was an intelligent and thought-provoking book.  It is a terrific deconstruction of the institution of "development."  

The subject of the book is a development project in Lesotho.  It discusses how the Canadian International Development Agency (Canada's USAID) twisted a complex situation into a simple model so that it could apply its standard "development" prescriptions to the situation at hand.  The resulting project was a failure and the book examines exactly why it was such a failure.  

Adapted from the author's PHD dissertation, the book is a bit dry and plodding at times, but it is lucid and full of terrific analysis.  

Some of my favorite passages: 

Often, the question was put to me in the form "What should they do?", with the "they" being not very helpfully specified as "Lesotho" or "the Basotho".  The "they" here is an imaginary, collective subject, linked to utopian prescriptions for advancing the collective interests of "the Basotho."  Such a "they" clearly needs to be broken up.  The inhabitants of Lesotho do not all share the same interests or the same circumstances, and they do not act as a single unit.  There exists neither a collective will nor a collective subject capable of serving it.   

When "developers" spoke of such a collectivity, what they meant was usually the government.  But the government of Lesotho is of course not identical with the people who live in Lesotho, nor is it in any of the established senses "representative" of that collectivity.  As in most countries, the government is a relatively small clique with narrow interests... Speaking very broadly, the interests represented by governmental elites in a country like Lesotho are not congruent with those of the people and in a great many cases are positively antagonistic.  Under these circumstances, there is little point in asking what such entrenched and often extractive elites should do in order to empower the poor.  Their own structural positions makes it clear that they would be the last ones to undertake such a project. 

In a similar vein: 

If the question "what should they do" is not intelligibly posed of the government, another move is to ask if the "they" to be addressed should not be instead "the people."  Surely "the masses" themselves have an interest in overcoming poverty, hunger and other symptoms of powerlessness... Once again, the question is befuddled by a false unity.  "The people' are not an undifferentiated mass.  Rich and poor, women and men, city dwellers and villagers, workers and dependents, old and young; all confront different problems and devise different strategies for dealing with them.  There is not one question -- "what is to be done" -- but hundreds: what should the mineworkers do, what should the abandoned old women do, what should the unemployed do, and on and on.  It seems, at the least, presumptuous to offer prescriptions here.  The toiling minters and the abandoned old women know the proper tactics to their situations far better than any expert does.  Indeed, the only general answer to the question, "What should they do?" is: "They are doing it!." 

This was also interesting: 

If one takes the "development" problematic at its word... the absence of growth in agricultural output... can only be considered an unfortunate mistake.  But another explanation is possible.  if one considers the expansion and entrenchment of state power to be the principal effect -- indeed, what "development" projects in Lesotho are chiefly about -- then the promise of agricultural transformation appears simply as a point of entry for an intervention of a very different character.  In this perspective, the "development apparatus in Lesotho is not a machine for eliminating poverty that is incidentally involved in bureaucracy; it is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power, which incidentally takes "poverty" as its point of entry. 

Things I learned this week in Abidjan

Notes from this past week:

• Animals are harder to remove from day-to-day life here.  There seems to be a lizard living in my air conditioner.  As I write this, there is a centipede crawling up the wall across the room from me.  My roommate found a lizard in her bed the other day.  If you look closely at any table or counter, you'll likely see very tiny African insects crawling around on it.  Happily, mosquitoes haven't been much of a problem though.  
• In a way, it's cheaper and easier to eat healthy here.  Processed supermarket food costs significantly more than fresh food from nearby markets.  The animals are always locally grown (there are chickens waddling around just about every block) and presumably antibiotic free.  The policies that create this -- lack of local food processing companies, high tariffs on foreign imports of processed food, tons of local food producers and sellers willing to earn low margins, lack of food safety monitoring -- aren't really replicable in a developed country.  
• All that being said, vegetable-based meals are not common and portion size is not helpful to the calorie conscious.  
• Eating out at a local restaurant (a maquis) is generally cheaper than making a meal at home, particularly if you're using western ingredients for your meal at home.  The main expense of going out to eat is time; you should count on spending at least 45-90 minutes for a meal.  
• Vietnamese spring rolls (nems) have been adopted into Ivorian culture.  They are cheap and plentiful here, and some Vietnamese places are run by Ivorians.  
• In the same way that a crepe in Washington, DC is expensive and of poor quality, a hamburger or pizza here is always (relatively) overpriced and disappointing.  The extra money that you're paying for a burger here isn't because you're paying for a deluxe burger but because you're paying for the cultural experience of "American food."  
• The lack of activity options doesn't really hurt my quality of life.  In DC, there are several soccer leagues, basketball leagues, kickball leagues and a dozen other sports that I could be playing any day of the week.  Here there is soccer on Wednesday in Deux Plateaux, volleyball on Thursdays at the American embassy and ultimate frisbee on Sundays at the Lycée Classique.  I would never play volleyball or frisbee over basketball in the U.S., but they are 90% as fun and the lack of choice can be liberating (I always just assume that Wednesdays here are for soccer, rather than trying to decide which day to play).  Likewise, with the social scene.  The plethora of nice bars and social activities in DC could be stressful, as it was disappointing not to choose the most fun Saturday night activity.  Here, there are a handful of ex-pat bars and usually just one or two activities per weekend, often with many of the same people.  You may or may not like going to see Diego's blues band, but that's what people are doing most Friday evenings here.  If you want to see people, you go and make the best of it.  
• I suppose this is all just a readjustment of my hedonic baseline.  I suppose that when I move back to DC, I'll enjoy the variety of options for the first couple of months, but then re-adapt.