Opium Season is about Hafvenstein’s time in Afghanistan in 2005, when he was working for a USAID funded cash-for-work project that was supposed to supplement the income of people who were due to lose money because of a poppy-eradication campaign.

The problem with donor driven programmes

What makes this book such a good  read is not only that it is well written, but also that it gives excellent examples for what’s wrong with donor-driven aid programmes.

From the very beginning, the project was not driven by the needs of the population, but by the donor’s requirement to create 2.5 million days of work in a Helmland province within a year. Hafvenstein writes: “Everything else – the amount of money we spent, the total number of people we hired, the nature of the jobs we created was flexible.”

In other words: whether the work made sense or was even counter-productive hardly mattered, as the project managers were struggling to meet the expectations of USAID. The worry that was constantly on their – and their bosses – minds was that if they failed, they wouldn’t get the next, bigger project. A poignant reminder that today, aid is a frequently seen as business first and something that can help people second.

Having money is not the same as having resources

Joel Hafvenstein writes about this with great honesty and explains very well how he reflected on these issues more and more the longer he worked in Afghanistan. The book also illustrates the lack of resources and the frustrations that a lot of aid managers have to deal with on a daily basis, even if the project is well funded. His efforts to get from one day to the next without screwing up on a monumental scale will feel familiar to many people who work in the non-profit sector.

Last but not least. I like “Opium Season” because it contains a lot of background information on the history of  the region and helped me to appreciate that hardly anything is clear-cut in Afghanistan.

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At a street corner there was a big gaggle of riot police who had set up an improvised command post the and were processing a group of young people who had been arrested. To the left and right passer-bys were taking photos with their mobile phones while prostitutes stood in the doorways, probably bemoaning the lack of customers.

Damaged shop window. Photo: Cavorite

Then, all of a sudden, a wedding part showed up on foot in the middle of all this. The bride in her white dress, the groom and all their friends slowly made their way through the police cordon to go to wherever they were heading. It’s too bad I didn’t have a camera.  The contrast of them,  the whores, police in riot gear and people  being tied with wire straps and loaded into police transporters was truly bizarre.

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Passport with Euro notes. Photo: Christopher Elison

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The journalists asked all the usual questions and I gave easily quotable answers. But afterwards I was thinking that there is another aspect we didn’t talk about: The feeling of not belonging.

The other day I was at my bank (UBS) in Switzerland. Here, the banks have terminals in the entry area that can be used to do online-banking from within the bank. That day, the queue at these terminals was really long but I could see that the two bank tellers didn’t have any customers. So I went in and said (in French) that I have a bill to pay and could I please do this here.

Speechless

And the guy had the arrogance to tell me: “No, we cannot do that. You have to do that at the machines.” And I just stammered “Ah. Oui. Merci.” Afterwards I was sooooo angry at myself. I was so angry at not having the vocabular to tell this guy: “Bullshit. You can do as much and hopefully more at your terminal than I can do from the foyer.” Which is of course what I should have done and which I would have done if this conversation had taken place in German, Swedish or English. But my French just isn’t up to it.

Afterwards I was thinking about how often that has happened to myself; that I just except something because I lack the language skills to make my point. Fortunately I couldn’t remember many of these occasions but I could remember a few. And it made me think of the foreigners who live in my own country and what that does to a person over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is important to learn the language of the host country (I started my French course in the first month of my stay in Geneva) but odds are that you will never learn a language as well as the locals.

And that probably makes you a little bit more insecure, a little bit more docile and less likely to stand up for yourself.

Functioning in an environment where you don’t understand the language (properly) is hard. And it’d probably be a good experience for everyone to be in that situation – and not just for holidays but longer so that you have to deal with all the small stuff like the bank, the landlord, the local municipality.

Maybe then we’d have a little bit more tolerance towards other people.

Have you been in a situation where you accepted something because you could’t express yourself properly?

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We are not the headquarters

The role of the IFRC secretariat is to represent the 186 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies internationally and to be a resource to them. That means we are not the ones telling e.g. German Red Cross what to do – the National Societies tell us what to do. We are there for them. That also means that we cannot do anything on a National Society’s territory without asking them first.  I could not for example contact Mashable directly and ask them to promote our social media channels without going through the American Red Cross. And while there is a good reason for that – it’d be confusing for most company’s if wo different Red Crosses called them – it adds complexity.

No local base

While millions of people worldwide are volunteering for the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, the IFRC secretariat has no direct connection with them. All volunteers are with a specific National Society. That means, that one of the most interesting routes one can take with social media, i.e. getting people to do something locally, is as good as blocked for us. We cannot ask volunteers directly to do anything – the National Society has to do that.

We cannot fundraise

One of the iron rules we live by is that the secretariat cannot actively fundraise on a National Society’s territory. That means we cannot use e.g. Facebook causes or even Google Ads to ask for money. All we can do is use these tools to spread information. Unfortunately that means that one of the simplest “asks” we could attach to our social media activities – asking for donations – is totally verboten.

As a result many of our social media activities seem to lack a point. If you cannot ask people to do anything for you, then there’s a risk of the whole thing becoming just a vanity exercise.

This also means that measuring success is very difficult because you primarily deal with rather fuzzy criteria like “awareness raised” or “influence increased” rather than “amount of money donated through this activity”.

A big sister who can do whatever she wants

To make things even more interesting we have a sister-organization in Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that doesn’t have to observe any of these restrictions. I’m not going to go into great detail what the difference is between the two organizations (read this Wikipedia-article about the Red Cross Movement if you are curious) but in a very simplified way one can say:

• Mandate: The IFRC deals with natural disasters, the ICRC with everything related to conflict.
• Governance: The IFRC is an International Organization and represents the 186 National Societies, the ICRC is an independent Swiss organization that woks together with many National Societies but doesn’t answer to them.
• Funding: The IFRC gets most of it’s money from the National Societies, the ICRC gets most of it’s money from the states party to the Geneva conventions.

Fortunately for us, the ICRC is even less comfortable using social media then we are and much slower to adopt these tool – but that is changing.

What I can do

Of course there also things I can do:

• First and foremost I try to use social media to get the Red Cross Red Crescent message out. Frequently that simply means being a a good resource and telling others about the tools that have been produced in-house and which can be used by anyone. Unfortunately our antiquated web site cannot track direct downloads which makes measuring success very difficult.
• Secondly I can develop tools for National Societies who want to use social media themselves.
• And thirdly I can bring together people from different National Societies who might be able to help each other.

So now you know – this is the kind of environment I’m working in.

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