Today was one of those life-in-a-developing-country-recovering-from-disasters-head-exploding sort of days. The kind of day where I spent hours winnowing the wheat from the chaff and am still unsure which pile to keep.
It all started off well enough. I had a great conversation with the director of Shechen clinic about the challenges of managing donor expectations and beneficiary realities. He had story after story of well-meaning donors wanting to give - but with strings. Wanting to give what they felt was needed without taking the time to learn what was really best for the beneficiary of their supposed generosity. Wanting to “turn Kathmandu into New York” without any consideration for what Kathmandu would like.
My second meeting left me feeling like an enabler. I had read before jumping on a plane that the Nepalese government had yet to distribute one lousy rupee of the USD $4.4 billion in aid they have received from various aid organizations, governments, et al. Chatting over tea with a Bangladeshi-born Princeton graduate and Nepali resident I learned that I am potentially just a cog in the wheel of the larger problem. (Well, not me exactly - but NGOs as it were.) You see, the more NGOs step in and raise money and fix Nepal, the less likely it becomes that $4.4 billion will ever be used for rebuilding. The various political parties can go on for ages not agreeing on a reconstruction plan and that aid money will go the way of Ecuador’s fund to prevent oil drilling in the Amazon. Slight of hand, wave of wand and money is gone.
The day rounded out with a discussion about a post-earthquake camp of residents from a certain mountain village. A camp I visited my first day in Nepal. Turns out the “representative” from the village who filled me in on events has a house in Kathmandu and has never actually lived in the village. He claims the villagers are unable to return home and they need to make a life in KTM for at least a year. Yet the new information I received today is that rebuilding of the village has begun and the people from this camp want to go home now. Given that my source for this information is the head of a large, reputable organization that supports communities in creating cooperatives to become self-sufficient, I’m sort of inclined to believe the original story was the chaff.
By four o’clock I was having flashbacks to a night in college where I was literally banging my head on a frozen Minnesota sidewalk alongside my roommate’s boyfriend as we chanted, “What am I doing here?” (Note: that night involved the consumption of what was clearly more than the recommended dosage of Two Fingers - the beverage, not the band.) I was sent to Nepal to get the story on projects that had already been agreed to. Projects I thought had been vetted. Now I’m seriously questioning, what am I doing here?
