NGOs, Seinfeld, and Baseball Fans

One recent summer evening I finished dinner, brushed my teeth, and zipped into my mosquito net for the night.

I picked up ‘The Master and Margarita’ (Bulgakov’s colorful weave of Pontius Pilate and Satan visiting Stalinist Russia) and tried without success to focus on the text. Maybe the weather – 97, humid, not the slightest insinuation of a breeze – had something to do with it.

Before clicking off my headlamp and surrendering to the heat I read one last sentence: “Then Nikanor Ivanovich was visited by a dream, at the basis of which undoubtedly lay the experience of that day.”

That night I dreamt I was working for the New York Yankees. I was in Yankee Stadium, standing on the edge the field during a night game, with none other than Jerry Seinfeld. My responsibility was to make sure that Mr. Seinfeld was enjoying the ballgame.

I was, to put it mildly, good at my job. My every word and gesture made Jerry explode with laughter, and our conversation was so good I don’t think either of us were following the game or even knew who was playing.

At one point he had me on his shoulders like a toddler. I looked down and said “Thank you for supporting the Make A Wish Foundation, Mr. Seinfeld.” We laughed hysterically until a solemn call to prayer flowed out over the stadium loudspeaker, and I opened my eyes to the dawn creeping towards Kiffa. God was Great, but Newman’s “Jerry!” was nowhere to be found.

Like Nikanor, my dream was also based on the experiences of the day. But instead of life in Moscow, I was absorbed in the broken promises of the international development business.

It’s an almost inevitable fascination as you travel around West Africa and get caught in the tangled web of programs, initiatives, and pledges spun across poor countries.

One example is a respected international NGO’s promise to donate mosquito nets to the health clinics in a friend’s village in Senegal – a promise that, even if kept will undermine the local economy. The rainy season has nearly passed, and the nets have not yet materialized. The villagers, waiting for the handout, never went out and bought nets themselves.

Instead of getting angry about this quiet scandal, I slapped my forehead and reminded myself that I joined THE PEACE CORPS! A development organization! Pondering my somewhat humorous fate, I thought of a silly analogy. It would be like getting a job with the New York Yankees and then complaining that all your coworkers are baseball fans.

Then, voila, the dream. But why Seinfeld?

During and after college I spent some time in the comedy business, performing (badly) occasionally and booking a gig in Berkeley. I hung out in comedy clubs as much as five nights a week, networking and studying the art of being funny on command.

My dream relationship with Seinfeld was inspired by his mentoring of Orny Adams (check out the interesting documentary “Comedian”). Adams, a marginally talented, manic-depressive comic befriends Seinfeld during his post-retirement effort to build a new club act from scratch. Suddenly, Adams gets top-notch representation and finds himself on Letterman and the road to success.

(This was a couple years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him broken down on the side of that road with his thumb in the air now…)

It’s odd that the dream of most comics is to not have to do stand-up comedy anymore. Being funny under lights for 45 minutes every night in a different city is how you carve your comedic persona out of stone, but after 15 or 20 years, it’s only logical to want to scale it up. “Why don’t you record my show, and play it on television while I get some rest!”

Do development workers at the NGO level seek the same exit strategy? Do they hone their craft, implement their projects, and build their networks, with the hope of getting a job with The World Bank, the UN, USAID – so they can stop living grant-to-grant, have a nice office, and dispense money and advice to the NGOs that do the work?

That was the opinion of a European lawyer I met recently in Dakar, currently on assignment to the United Nations.

Someone once taught me that every industry – development, comedy, and baseball included – is a pyramid, with the folks on the bottom doing whatever they can to scratch their way up.

At the base of the comedy pyramid you have thousands of open-mic performers, willing to do just about anything for a paid gig. And in development you have the small-fry NGOs, ready to do just about anything for a grant.

Not that this is always a bad thing, but people are often willing to put aside their principles and play whatever tune their patron wants to hear.

Then you have the outliers, the folks that seem to burn on passion alone. In comedy, there’s Bill Cosby, whom Seinfeld visits on a pilgrimage of sorts in “Comedian,” to see how this now grandfatherly figure could possibly do a pair of two-hour shows, with no intermission, almost every night of the week.

In the development field, you have the folks who innovate and do their jobs well. And you have the NGOs that carry out their assignments with an eye towards making an appropriate and lasting impact in their communities. Not just checking off boxes or being the flavor of the month.

But as always, the top of the pyramid is small. The number of qualified staff members at the donor and NGO level is by definition limited by the amount of dollars raised. So consider Jeff Sachs & Co.’s plea to rapidly double or triple the amount of money spent on foreign aid programs. Given the already large amounts of cash shoveled into foreign aid programs, ‘absorption capacity’ is an unanswered question both for the deliverers and the recipients.

Think about it this way: could you double or triple the amount of comedy club headliners overnight? Or add 15 new Major League baseball teams and still have a good level of play? Some would argue we’re already stretched to the limit.

A staff member of a major development donor in Senegal suggested to me recently that the goal of Sachs’ drumbeat is mostly just to get Africa’s agenda “on the table.” And he went one step further, saying that this huge increase in aid “is never gonna happen, anyways.”

Then what is the point of putting it on the agenda?

At the end of the day, baseball is baseball, and comedy is comedy. It’s not life and death, and besides, the market will decide how many teams and how many HBO specials.

But the development business is fiddling with the existence of billions of poor people, who like the Senegalese villagers and their mosquito nets, are waiting for the handout.

We owe it to them to either deliver on our promises or, better yet, change the foreign assistance paradigm entirely. Now that’s a dream worth having.