The annual win a trip with Nick Kristof Contest
In Cairo, sometime in the late 1830s, after a drought or a monsoon, Gerard de Nerval bought a Javanese girl. He made the choice with great difficulty, as, for one thing, the slaves his Mohammedan broker proffered all looked the same, “as happens with primitive races”, and, for another, Nerval meant his slave to be at liberty—even to leave him, if she wished. Hard choice, then: find a girl who stands out, but not so much that he would feel compelled to possess her. Casting his eye over the women on display, all with skin like Florentine bronzes, Nerval finally focused on the “metallic spark” in the “almond eye” of the Javanese Zeynab, who had been captured by pirates as a young girl. He barely haggled over her price!
I recount this scene because Nicholas Kristof is my Javanese slave girl. That’s why I would like to win a trip with him. Kristof stands out just enough. Sure; he types up workmanlike prose, with clunky metaphors and corrupt punctuation, and, yes, his column serves mainly as a stage on which to pose Boy Scoutish acts of charity. But, embarrassing as he is, both as a writer and an adult, he offers something that your average posturing, exploitative tourist of suffering doesn’t: an all-expenses-paid trip!
I’m in it for the free stuff! I admit it, but make no mistake: I want to laugh and cry at the wretched of the earth, too. Why, it almost doesn’t matter to me what torment in particular I’ll observe. I’ll sip a warm Coke while I watch a pregnant woman die because of malpractice, and I’ll nibble meat-on-a-stick while witnessing a boy dissolve under the advances of malaria. Hell; I’d even find satisfaction in the death of an old man, so long as rebels shoot him or hyenas eat him or something.
Even more than feeding on individual pain, like some sort of psychic vampire, I want to absorb the horrifying conditions that make life intolerable for teeming billions, like a vast blob from outer space. Open sewers call to me, as do polluted water systems (I imagine purifying them with the introduction of local-beer-produced pee; every drop helps, and I’ve probably got more antibiotics in an average piss than Kinshasa sees in a year), toxic building materials, spoiled food, and a total lack of medicine. Why not throw in corrupt and brutally oppressive governments, too? I’m just visiting!
Now, this is beginning to sound like nostalgie de la boue, but I assure you that, if I have a hankering, it’s for nostalgie de la pu. I mean: I don’t think I romanticise dysentery, but it seems to have worked for Cortez and Rambo and Bruce Willis’s dad in Pulp Fiction. And for Nick Kristof himself! (That’s right: I don’t mind adding Kristof’s bright star to that worthy constellation) In other words, I’m a man: I’ll take on a disease easily curable for a first-worlder, if only to tip my hat to the poor bastards who have to live in the effluent I’ll leave behind. It’d be unseemly not to.
Of course, all of that, the looking and the doing, amounts only to experience. What about the work? The Trade? The Craft? You have to spin that shit into gold, so to speak. You can’t just watch someone die without making a living out of it. There are many ways to do this. Tom Friedman and the ranks of ordinary newsmen chill in penthouses, conducting interviews over the hum of air conditioners, making only slightly more cabbage than Kristof does. But they get it wrong in the end. Dead wrong. Take Friedman: what a dork! The world isn’t flat; it’s a globe. A round, luscious globe, if you take my meaning. While bringing home the bacon counts for a lot, scoring the pig matters more. And with the trip on Kristof’s dime, I know what I’ll be spending my money on! What? Sometimes it takes more than straight-up cash to convince? I’m not worried. I’ll tell her I’ll set up her parents in a Delaware suburb and I’ll learn Chinese or whatever. Swish! Nothin’ but net!
In sum, the problem is human nature.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
How to do it?
This past Wednesday, the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship at New York University hosted Ami Dar for a speaking engagement open to the public. Ami Dar founded Action without Borders/Idealist.org, a project that serves as a virtual meeting ground for non-profits. In operational terms, it's a giant database of do-gooders.
Ami spoke and then answered questions for an hour and a half. Much of what he had to say--and most of the questions put to him--concerned the functioning of non-profits. He offered advice of the following sort: if you want to do non-profit work, get comfortable with money. Non-profits are obsessed with money, precisely because they aren't out to make a bunch of it. Learn how to read a balance sheet; know your financials; get used to to thinking about bottom lines.
Later, at the post-event dinner at Negril Village (Caribbean! Not bad!), the talk centered mainly on the promulgation of ideas--not only on their dissemination, but on retaining credit for them. People have had their do-gooder ideas stolen and then been forced to deal with the disconcerting fact that the theft has led to some good being done in the world, just not in their name. All agreed that this amounted to an acceptable, if not a fine thing. Further, the discutants pointed out that the more widely and formally one presents ideas--opens them to theft--the more securely the public record identifies the idea's owner. It's almost Buddhist: the more you give away your ideas, the more you own them.
But all of this talk missed out on the one information issue that, I think, remains unexplored. It does all amount to information, really: contact information; guiding principles; ideas. Who's out there doing what? How do they achieve success? What's the next trend in non-profit work? Almost comprehensive, but there remains a whole field of information that, while not proprietary, everyone guards as closely as possible. This information, nobody puts on a website.
It's savoir-faire. Tricks of the trade. Professional experience. Inside knowledge. It's the true nuts-and-bolts stuff. Example: the Funded Transportation Program at the Department of Defense. The DOD has two programs that provide containerized shipping for humanitarian aid: the Denton Program and the Funded Program. Denton arranges shipping through the military. A humanitarian aid agency has, say, a 20' container of medical equipment to send to Darfur, but no money to shipt it. The agency applies to Denton. When a C-130 with some extra space heads to an airport near the agency's destination--Cairo, maybe--the DOD arranges for the placing of the container on the flight. The process plays out in myriad ways, but you get the basic idea of near total inefficiency.
That's where the Funded Transporatation program comes in. Here the aid agency applies through the appropriate DOD office, and a DOD agent books and pays for a container in the same way that normal human beings do it. Straight-up free shipping. Now, there's a list of restricted countries, of course, and inspections, and the DOD occasionally shuts down the program and the DOD employees who run it tend to be morons, but, when it works, it is free shipping.
And when you look at the list of agencies that have accounts with this program, you see what kind of insider information this really is.
That's the kind of thing we need a website for.
Ami spoke and then answered questions for an hour and a half. Much of what he had to say--and most of the questions put to him--concerned the functioning of non-profits. He offered advice of the following sort: if you want to do non-profit work, get comfortable with money. Non-profits are obsessed with money, precisely because they aren't out to make a bunch of it. Learn how to read a balance sheet; know your financials; get used to to thinking about bottom lines.
Later, at the post-event dinner at Negril Village (Caribbean! Not bad!), the talk centered mainly on the promulgation of ideas--not only on their dissemination, but on retaining credit for them. People have had their do-gooder ideas stolen and then been forced to deal with the disconcerting fact that the theft has led to some good being done in the world, just not in their name. All agreed that this amounted to an acceptable, if not a fine thing. Further, the discutants pointed out that the more widely and formally one presents ideas--opens them to theft--the more securely the public record identifies the idea's owner. It's almost Buddhist: the more you give away your ideas, the more you own them.
But all of this talk missed out on the one information issue that, I think, remains unexplored. It does all amount to information, really: contact information; guiding principles; ideas. Who's out there doing what? How do they achieve success? What's the next trend in non-profit work? Almost comprehensive, but there remains a whole field of information that, while not proprietary, everyone guards as closely as possible. This information, nobody puts on a website.
It's savoir-faire. Tricks of the trade. Professional experience. Inside knowledge. It's the true nuts-and-bolts stuff. Example: the Funded Transportation Program at the Department of Defense. The DOD has two programs that provide containerized shipping for humanitarian aid: the Denton Program and the Funded Program. Denton arranges shipping through the military. A humanitarian aid agency has, say, a 20' container of medical equipment to send to Darfur, but no money to shipt it. The agency applies to Denton. When a C-130 with some extra space heads to an airport near the agency's destination--Cairo, maybe--the DOD arranges for the placing of the container on the flight. The process plays out in myriad ways, but you get the basic idea of near total inefficiency.
That's where the Funded Transporatation program comes in. Here the aid agency applies through the appropriate DOD office, and a DOD agent books and pays for a container in the same way that normal human beings do it. Straight-up free shipping. Now, there's a list of restricted countries, of course, and inspections, and the DOD occasionally shuts down the program and the DOD employees who run it tend to be morons, but, when it works, it is free shipping.
And when you look at the list of agencies that have accounts with this program, you see what kind of insider information this really is.
That's the kind of thing we need a website for.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)