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.

A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

The rain came last week. And then something strange happened; it didn’t stop. Downpour downshifted into drizzle and settled in for two days. When it began I sat contentedly on the porch watching my foot-tall corn plants drink it in. At last, the rain!

But then came the leaks, one drip, then another, until all my buckets and bowls and pots and pans were catching water. Ploink, boip, cachink, ding…it sounded like an old west saloon shootout, bringing the smell of wet dog instead of death.

On the second evening text messages started coming from my site mate Andrew.

“I don’t know how much longer my poor house is going to hold up!”

“I can see light coming in through the roof!”

“Mud is coming into the room. I think the roof is going to fall.”

By morning it was time for an evacuation. Peace Corps contacted Kiffa’s World Food Program office and arranged a car. At the time I was in our leaky office, breaking down the computer system, putting everything in plastic bags, and hiding it in the driest corner.

I hitched a ride to the WFP office, and, dripping wet, presented myself to the director. He snapped his fingers, and suddenly I was in a pick-up truck with driver Mohamadou So, speeding towards Sagatar. (Nothing like being white in Africa, I thought…) Through town, right at the big mosque, around the hospital, and then dropping into a gully. So downshifted, plunged into the floodwaters, and shot me sideways glance, smiling as though to say “you think this baby can’t make it through a little water?” Water was coming over the hood of the truck, but we made it across coming and going.

We reached Andrew’s house and found his host family huddled under their concrete hanger. “How’s it going with the rain?” I asked. “The rain is good!” they answered. Even when their houses are falling, Mauritanians praise God for the rain.

We loaded the truck with Andrew’s belongings – mattresses, metal trunks, bags and buckets – in less than ten minutes. The footprint of the average Peace Corps volunteer is about one shoe-size above a camping trip.

On the way to my house, So pointed to piles of mud and logs and shaking his head. “See there, that was a house yesterday.” I shook my head too. What can you say?

Everyone expects a few thundershowers during Mauritania’s brief rainy season. Rumbles and flashes on the horizon, the temperature drops, everything becomes calm, and then it’s upon you. Sheets of water fall from the sky, punctuated by thunder claps and explosions of light. An hour later, it’s over.

But when rain falls in excess Mauritania just isn’t prepared. Brick and mortar turns to sludge, inviting gravity to finish the job. And then a year or two down the road, the locusts come, as they did last year, devastating the food supply and further entrenching the life-support system of foreign assistance.

The topic of Kiffa’s English Club the week before the storm was Hurricane Katrina. We talked about the devastation, the government’s response, and tried to imagine a similar situation in Mauritania.

“All the people would die,” my friend Issa said gravely.

Days later, the destruction was right before our eyes. Family and friends spread the news from other cities, like the dykes breaking in M’bout and destroying 400 homes, and some children drowning in another town.

Of course, the storm was but a fraction of a percent of the strength and scope of Hurricane Katrina. But wading through muddy water, helping to evacuate a friend, seeing the remains of families’ homes, I felt a cold irony. Just days earlier I was thinking about how hard it was, living in this desert, to relate to the biggest natural disaster in the history of my native country.

The recent rains were in many ways a catastrophe. But what falls quickly in Mauritania is rebuilt quickly too. There’s no insurance, but there’s little to insure. People will patch up their homes or build new ones without many complaints.

And the trickling sound of water filling the well next to my house reminds me that this inundation will mean more water for people, animals, and gardens over the next year. And, gulp, for the next plague of locusts.

Rearranging Deck Chairs on The Mauritania

In one of the world’s poorest countries, mothers watch their children go hungry, men struggle to find work, the government robs its own people, and development workers discuss the difference between a result and an impact.

Imagine the scene: two-dozen development workers from an international NGO sit amidst empty soda cans and packages of cookies in an air-conditioned hotel. All eyes are on the facilitator up front, as flip charts are flipped, slides slide, and problems are pondered.

It’s all in French, and nothing makes sense. This is not terribly surprising, but then a slide is shown translating USAID’s latest project planning terminology into French. Inputs, outputs, results, impacts, projects, programs, objectives, strategic objectives.

What a relief! It’s not a language barrier I’m bumping into, but rather a nonsense barrier. What, after all, could possibly be the difference between a result and an impact? Or an objective and a strategic objective? And how could it possibly be worth an entire workday to talk about it?

The seemingly innocent tagging of the word ‘strategic’ onto an activity is the focus of this column. At first it looks clever, but in fact it is something that people who aren’t doing anything do to look busy.

I should know.

For awhile I worked in the field of strategic communications. Many of the most productive practitioners in this area call themselves public relations or PR professionals. I learned that the ones talking about strategic communications were the ones to be avoided at all costs.

The worst day in the history of mankind, according to Jean Jacques Rosseau, was the day the noble savage first drew a circle around a piece of land and said “that’s mine.” I’m not about to argue with a man who is far more famous and dead than I am, but I will nominate a second worst day: the first time someone put the word “strategic” in front of another word.

Strategic objectives. Strategic communications. Strategic planning. Dazzling, right? Intimidated, aren’t you? But what does it all mean? Nothing! So then, you can just take the word out, right? Not so fast. Try those words on their own. Objectives. Planning. Communications. They sound flat, like an AM radio in the 21^st century.

Let’s blow up this paradox from the inside by taking it to its logical extreme. I have an idea. In fact, it’s a strategy. No, even better. A strategic strategy. Let’s get back to basics and use words like “work” and “plan” and “task.” In fact, if your business or NGO’s plan has any words longer than five letters, take them out. Take it from me, you’ll be grntd to achev suces.*

* Nominated for “Worst Ending To A Blog Entry,” 2005 Blogger Awards

Applied Freakenomics

In Freakenomics, Stephen Levitt’s much-hyped new book explaining social science phenomena in terms of economics, the author makes a provocative statement about parenting. Imagine your child plays regularly at the houses of two friends. One house has a swimming pool. The other has a gun. Your child is safer at the house with the gun by a factor of 100.

More than 500 children under the age of 10 drown in swimming pools every year in the United States. One of them lived across the street from my aunt and uncle Agnes and Bill in Franklin Square, New York. It’s always the same tragic story, with a baby/toddler/youngster slipping into the backyard while the caretaker is distracted. Five minutes later, a family is destroyed.

Upon my return to Kiffa in July, I walked down the rocky hillside from my house to the fast food restaurant run by a hard-working man named Boubacar. His quick and cheap sandwiches have kept me going over the last year, and what’s more, he is a friend. Boubacar taught me about Mauritania, the restaurant business, and life in general. He managed the business for someone else and was dying to strike out on his own.

Boubacar rarely took a day off, so I was surprised to see the restaurant shuttered on a weeknight. I got the story from another regular the next day.

It turns out that his son Sidi drowned while I was on vacation. Mauritania has very few swimming pools, but concrete reservoirs and tanks are everywhere, storing water for drinking, irrigation, or commercial activities. The back of the restaurant opened up onto a brick making enterprise, and Sidi must have somehow drowned in the concrete reservoir. The family packed up and left Kiffa without a trace.

Sidi was six years old, and he and his five-year-old sister Aisha were an adorable pair. Sidi was the lapdog, wanting to please his father, and Aisha made enough mischief for them both. As Boubacar observed, when he disciplined Aisha, her big brother cried. When he disciplined Sidi, his little sister laughed.

I returned to Kiffa with new ideas for Boubacar – how to get a line of credit sufficient to start his own restaurant – and with photos – one of me wearing the purple wax print boubou he gave me, and another photo of his family. It’s a grainy night-time shot, with the flash lighting up the dust and sand in the air. But the scene is clear enough – a family captured in time, just before a catastrophe. Boubacar looking proud, his wife Kumba smiling bashfully, and their two children. Aisha the troublemaker. Sidi the quiet kid who one time rescued a kitten and raised it with food scraps and condensed milk.

I will try to find Boubacar in Nouakchott, but with probably 20,000 Boubacar’s and no leads, it won’t be easy. If I do find him, I have the photos, and a few phrases of condolences from my Hassaniya book, which hinge on an idea that’s also familiar in much of America: trust in God, he has the master plan for our lives.

Reading Freakenomics from Mauritania has taught me that not all statistics are the same, and that they’re useless by themselves. The Western world’s obsession with data may be neurotic but it has benefits – every death is labeled, categorized, and pushed through regression analysis. Products are made safer. People are made aware. In the developing world, people fall into wells, get thrown from cars, die of preventable diseases, and are largely forgotten. At best, the information is fed to under-funded governments or development agencies that attack problems as best they can.

Now Kiffa is short one clean restaurant, one dedicated entrepreneur, one honest family, and, worst of all, one good little boy. A good little boy who liked to save kittens. Could you invent a sadder story than that?

The Peace Corps Reserves Problem

In early August, the media unearthed a seemingly dull detail in the US military's recruitment policies. A newly enlisted soldier can now serve two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in lieu of the eight year on-call period following active and reserve duty.
Here's a dramatic re-enactment of a recruiter's pitch after Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz) and Even Bayh (D-Ind) slipped a few lines of text into the 2002 defense budget:

"All right, one more time. You got your 15 months of active, two years Reserve or Guard, then you're on speed dial for eight years in case things get ugly. Hey why the sour face? Ok, you're right. Eight years is a long time, the world is an unstable place. You're an intellectual. I like that. What if I told you that instead, you could teach English in Nighmaristan for 27 months?"

"Where do I sign?" the imaginary recruit asks, the recruiter smiles, and next thing the poor kid knows he's being screamed at face down in a mud puddle somewhere in Mississippi.

Three years ago when this legislation was being drafted, Peace Corps' congressional affairs staffers were apparently busy playing minesweeper at their desks on 20th and L Streets.

Peace Corps has since admitted it DIDN'T KNOW about the legislation until after it passed. Granted, it was buried in a 306-page bill, but isn't that why you hire legislative affairs staff?

Let me belabor the enormity of this ineptitude even further. Legislation is being drafted formalizing a linkage between Peace Corps and the U.S. armed forces. It's the very type of linkage that Peace Corps has fought FIERCELY since it was founded 40 years ago as an independent agency...AND THEY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT!

Peace Corps Director Gaddi Vasquez, who signs my $150/month paycheck but receives precious little praise in this newsletter (resume summary: former cop, oversaw Orange County municipal debt default, Bush supporter), was put in a comically awkward spot when asked by the Washington Post's Alan Cooperman to describe Peace Corps' role in shaping the legislation in question:

"There might have been a discussion, there could have been some dialogue on this, but obviously that didn't happen."

To carry the minesweeper analogy further, I think that qualifies as clicking on a mine. Next game try the 9x9 grid, guys.

Let's try both sides of this issue. If you look at this new military recruiting policy as just that, a military policy, it technically has nothing to do with Peace Corps. Members of the armed forces will apply to Peace Corps like everyone else, with no preferential treatment, says a PC spokesperson.

So veterans will face the same system -- the same nice but short on details recruiters, the same condescending and self-serving placement officers who seem to relish putting people light-years away from their skills and experience -- as the rest of us. Why all the fuss?

What's the difference between this and any employer that uses fixed term contracts telling its employees under what conditions they can leave? (Lawyers, I'm getting out of my league here I realize...)

Well, for starters, the U.S. military is not just any employer. It happens to be an employer that is rather disliked (or misunderstood, at least) in many of the countries where Peace Corps operates.

Let's take Luke in Mauritania as an example. Occasionally people ask about my connection to the U.S. Government. I state that Peace Corps is an independent agency, with no connections to the CIA, the military, or the State Department. People nod politely, but often they don't believe you. Why should they? The legislation in question creates an admittedly tiny connection, but still, there it is. On paper. A soldier or sailor can fulfill part of their military service obligation by serving in the Peace Corps.

And it's worse than it sounds. That's because what sounds reasonable to anyone who can read and understand this article might not play in much of the developing world. In my experience, poor and uneducated people have a bigger appetite for conspiracy theories than people with money and diplomas. Reputation management is delicate in any context; in a country full of conspiracy nuts, it's impossible. Even the weakest link, real or imagined, between Peace Corps volunteers and other arms of the U.S. government could put volunteers at risk.

A recent guest on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews (Matthews was a PCV in Swaziland from '68-70) imagined a chilling scenario: a terrorist group learns that a veteran who served in Iraq is now living in a remote village in Uganda, or Morocco, or why not, Mauritania. And he's armed with a shovel and a watering can. It's not unreasonable to think that this volunteer could be targeted.

This is what political scientists call unintended consequences with big smiles on their faces. You want to help two honorable organizations, and instead they gain little and put people at risk.

I say they gain little, because the tactic does nothing to deal with the actual problem at hand -- the military not hitting its recruitment figures. (Note: This is not about Peace Corps recruiting. They get 12,000 applicants for 4,000 PCVs and are ready to expand if given the cash the President always promises) Think about the average recruit. Can you make a compelling argument that this person is interested in being a Peace Corps volunteer? Admittedly, veterans make excellent PCVs. After all, they have technical skills, a work ethic, and toughness. Contrast that with your average 23-year-old English Lit graduate... But how many of these folks thought about Peace Corps before they enlisted? Probably very few.

I have the utmost respect for Sen. McCain, for both his own service to the United States and his promotion of national service. But I think he made the wrong call on this bill, and while the authors were able to get what they wanted quietly, we were bound to find out eventually.

At the end of the day, I am not worried, though. The issue is too far in the weeds to ever be noticed by 99.9% of the people I encounter. And that 0.1%? I'll think about that later and keep my shovel by the bed.

What interests me more is another recruitment opportunity: Peace Corps legislative affairs staff. How do you enlist for that gig? Decent pay, great location, plenty of time for minesweeper, and you don't even need to track what's happening on the hill. In Peace Corps parlance we call that The Easiest Job You'll Ever Love.

My Hero's Chili

I don’t know Ben, but I respect him. Around 50 years ago, this fellow opened what is now a legendary black-owned restaurant in Washington, DC called “Ben’s Chili Bowl.” It’s a can’t miss late-night stop in the nation’s capital, so I absolutely had to go back on my recent visit.

Imagine walking into a narrow diner at three in the morning. You see a single row of vinyl booths on the left, a half dozen fry cooks on the right, and a line of 30 customers in various states of sobriety and alertness. 1970s funk music is blasting. Mirrors and signed publicity photos of African-American celebrities line the walls, and a collection of homeless people wait outside for change and extra food.

The workers are fast and efficient, and nothing like Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, but still I didn’t want to mess up, so I rehearsed my order silently as I advanced in the line. Chili-cheeseburger, chili-cheese fries, vanilla milkshake. Chili-cheeseburger, chili-cheese fries, vanilla milkshake. When my turn came, I ordered well. When my food came, I didn’t leave a scrap. When the heartburn came at sunrise, I took it like a man. Just like Ben would have wanted.

Juicy Pants, Reassuring Bailey

I took my seat on Jet Blue’s San Diego – New York flight. I had everything – Direct TV on the seat in front of me, a novel in my hands, and new people to spy on. I focused on the two seats to my right: a mother-daughter combo. The mom was cute, dark, petite, with a white sweat suit that looked trendy and expensive. Maybe it was those “Juicy” sweat pants I had heard about, with the word Juicy written across the butt. I could only wonder. The girl was maybe five, cute, smart looking. I listened intently and reviewed what I’d learned so far: the girl’s name was Bailey, and they were headed to New York.

We took off and minded our own business until Bailey’s mom spilled grape juice on her pants. Juicy pants. Juice on her pants. I laughed and tried to pretend there was something funny on the TV. She gave me the international sign of “I wanna get out!” so I stood up to let her find the lavatory. I settled back in and began devouring my new book, Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. The mom had been gone quite a while, but I didn’t notice until Bailey began to cry. Her distress call punctured my zone of consciousness slowly, like a police siren coming from the other side of town. I looked over, and her whimpering turned to bawling, and then into body-wrenching sobs.

“What’s wrong, Bailey?” I said. She replied immediately, as though waiting anxiously for my question. “I want my mommy!” More sobs. Ok, she wants her mommy. Couldn’t have made herself more clear. I twisted around in my seat. Empty aisles. Not even a flight attendant slinging peanuts. How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten minutes? 30 minutes? She couldn’t have very well gotten off the plane.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, pretending we were old pals, “she went to the bathroom to clean off her pants.” Her juicy, juiced up pants. At least the crying had stopped, temporarily.

I glanced back at the cover of my paperback book, wanting to open it but thinking Bailey might need some distracting for a while.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I’m four and a half, and I’ll be five in two days,” she said confidently.

Either her understanding of fractions wasn’t so good, or this girl was aging dangerously fast. She’d be older than me in 12 and a half weeks, I calculated. I put my sarcasm aside for a moment.

“Do you live in San Diego?”

“Yeah.”

“Going to New York on vacation?”

“No, my mom is taking me there for a class.”

That’s odd, I thought. What five-year-old San Diegan takes classes in New York? I pictured a chess champion, or the youngest holder of a seat on the New York stock exchange, or more likely a TV commercial actress. She looked just like the actress in “Life With Mikey,” that bad movie where Michael J. Fox plays a talent agent. Adorable, ambiguously ethnic, the kid could pass for Indian, Puerto Rican, Lebanese, whatever you need. And when she wasn’t crying, she was as cute as they come. She could promote breakfast cereals, toys, cookies, even cell phones and insurance if she had the right script.

She had calmed down a bit, but still I craned my neck to look back and again saw nothing. What happened to Bailey’s mom? I thought back to my first flight alone. I was around the same age, also going to New York from the west coast, and I sat next to a man who taught me how to play Solitaire. He showed me how to set up the columns, how to move cards, how to draw from the pile, how to put your aces in separate stacks. He was a kind and patient man, and I wondered if I could help Bailey get through this crisis. Did I have a deck of cards? Was Solitaire seven or eight columns? Instead, I imagined myself as a hostage negotiator, stalling with small talk.

“A lot of times on planes you have to wait a long time to use the bathroom,” She nodded. But another glance told me there was no line at the lavatory, and I hoped Bailey wouldn’t look back.

“Your mom will be right back.” She nodded again, a little less vigorously.

My eyes went back to the book, and I stared at the cover. A sliver of a Japanese girl’s face on the right, her right eye looking past the frame, half of her pink lips in view, one nostril. And on the left, an artist’s rendering of Sputnik, the Russian satellite. I had just started the book and didn’t yet grasp the connection between a young Japanese girl and the Russian satellite. Maybe it’s about a young history-obsessed woman who falls in love with another Cold War buff. Maybe Sputnik is a metaphor for something impressive, but essentially useless. A propaganda ploy. A public relations move. A dinging machine floating through spa-

“Excuse me.” A tap on my shoulder jolted me back to reality. It was Bailey’s mom, de-juicified at last. I stood up, she took her seat, and I sat down, wondering if I should say something. “Bailey was starting to miss you,” I reported, placing my bet on an understatement.

A Typical Day In LA

Where in Los Angeles can you buy a shot glass, a cheap plastic bracelet and Chinese finger cuffs for 40 dollars? The answer is bar/adult playground Dave and Busters, and that’s what I did with my friends Chang and Mark on a warm July Saturday in Los Angeles after lunch at In’N’Out Burger and almost blowing up a gas station trying to jump a dead battery.

We won the bulk of our gift shop tickets playing Skee-Ball – bowling’s under appreciated cousin – but we did pretty well shooting baskets and playing the classic carnival game where eight people roll balls into holes and each player’s horse clunks awkwardly from right to left across the “track.” “Roll ‘em, race ‘em, horsy chase ‘em!” is the best description I’ve heard.

The modern video arcade features dozens of head-to-head racing games – Formula One, stock car, dune buggy, Jet Ski, Harley Davidson, big rig – and we tried them all. However, you realize pretty quickly that they are all essentially the same game. You just sit on a slightly different shaped thing, and the screen shows a barely modified track or cityscape. In any event, your game is over in 24 seconds and you walk away wondering how you ever got a driver’s license.

Chang drove home, because he won all the driving games. I was in the front seat struggling to get out of the Chinese finger cuffs (Chang refused to reveal the secret escape maneuver, and he isn’t even Chinese!), and watching Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” on the car’s in-dash DVD player. Yes, you heard me correctly. In America, you can have a DVD player installed in your car. It’s probably illegal, but it’s undeniably awesome.

So we’re creeping through LA traffic, losing our cool, and watching Michael Douglas creep through LA traffic, and lose his cool. For my money he gives the most enjoyable performance of his career, with Exhibit A being his disgruntled character’s justification for busting up a grocery store with a baseball bat: “I’m exercising my rights as a consumer.” Don’t try that line on the officer who nabs you for the unlicensed mobile movie theatre.

The rest of the day was punctuated by dinner at a Korean restaurant, watching old episodes of News Radio, falling off a hand-truck and almost breaking my neck, and staying up until sunrise talking about who knows what with friends old and new. Just a typical day in Los Angeles.

Book Review -- Serving the Poor Profitably

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

By C.K. Prahalad

Wharton School Publishing

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid talks about reducing poverty at a time when rock stars and economists alike are calling for a mammoth increase in foreign aid. What’s the connection? Just that the folks crying about the stingy rich and the desperate poor are ignoring the force that has and will continue to bring about poverty reduction. Business.

University of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad’s book uses b-school case studies to explore how corporations can profitably serve the planet’s four billion people living on less than $2 a day (the bottom of the economic pyramid, or BOP).

The prize is that often-painful business cliché – win-win. Companies profit while the BOP enjoys better products and services and the dignity of being catered to by a world that traditionally looks at them as charity cases. As the idea goes, poor consumers are empowered, their purchasing power increases, and the winnings get bigger. WIN-WIN, as it were.

Prahalad comes along at an important historical moment, because as Bono and Jeffrey Sachs sing in harmony for more money, the uncomfortable fact remains that anti-poverty programs as typically practiced are not effective. More bluntly, they don’t bring large numbers of people out of poverty. The countries with the most success in doing just that over the last 50 years (South Korea, China, India, etc) have put the development of strategic industries and a coherent development strategy well ahead of extending their hand for foreign aid.

While the book is at times poorly edited, overly focused on India, and lacking cohesion between case studies, it explores some brilliant business ideas that can turn the previously unreachable poor into empowered and paying customers.

Prahalad builds upon the provocative assertion of Hernando de Soto (the economist, not the explorer) that the world’s poor aren’t actually poor in the way that we think. His case studies show how an innovative approach to serving poor markets proves that the poor have money to spend and desperately want the goods and services that can improve their quality of life. They just can’t buy them with existing pricing or distribution systems.

Take CEMEX, a multi-billion dollar cement company that decided to profit on the observation that if you take a drive through most cities in Mexico, it seems like half of the houses are perpetually under construction. Even though Mexico’s poor already buy CEMEX cement, the company bet that it could serve them better by providing materials and advice on credit to small groups of homeowners.

CEMEX started a BOP-focused program called Patrimonio Hoy where three people from the same city form a group, make payments for 70 weeks, and have construction materials delivered to their houses along with architectural and building advice. The credit-savings scheme works such that after five weeks, materials worth the first ten weeks of payments are delivered (each member pays 120 pesos per week). This business model keeps customers honest (they are invested, lateness is punished, and they appreciate the trust), and CEMEX earns a 12.5% membership fee along with sales of its cement at a slight premium. After three years, customers seem happy. CEMEX has 36,000 of them across 23 cities in Mexico and is adding 1500 clients per month. And the default rate so far? Less than half of one percent. Unless the general manager is lying, that’s impressive.

The other case studies, for example Unilever’s distribution model in rural India using female entrepreneur sales reps in villages or Jaipur Foot providing high-quality prosthetic limbs at a profit for $50 show that poor people want your products and will pay for them too, on the right terms.

What is the right way to serve the poor profitably? Many of the tactics are not new – creative financing options, individual use packaging, and pyramid-style marketing programs just to name a few – but they allow scalability by tweaking the revenue and cost sides of the equation to suit the idiosyncrasies of emerging markets.

These tactics are important in serving the poor, but unfortunately, they often cannot reach the very bottom of the pyramid. CEMEX for instance targets people living on $5-15 a day, not less than $5. But it’s generally the case with development programs involving cost recovery that you won’t be reaching the poorest of the poor. The fact is an unfortunate one, but development work is full of harsh realities that are either heeded or foolishly ignored.

Prahalad’s thesis, that the world’s poor represents the biggest untapped growth opportunity in recent history can come off sounding a bit crass. But it’s not, because any profit-making scheme that exploits the poor is unlikely to be a lucrative long-term market for the company. Successful companies that push the boundaries of exploitation through high prices and oligopolies – the book gives Western Union as an example – can present opportunities to creative companies. CEMEX, for example, is outflanking money transfer firms by allowing Mexicans living in Los Angeles to wire money directly to cement distributors for their houses back in Mexico.

Environmental issues are brushed on lightly throughout the book, but most questions are left unanswered. For example, marketing to the poor with single servings of everything from coffee to shampoo is an effective strategy, but it can lead to streets filled with trash. However, in a developing country where the government has neither the budget nor even the interest in running a sanitation system, it hardly seems fair to blame corporations for giving customers small sachets of powdered laundry soap over a large bottle if that’s what they demand. Yet the environmental question is a big one, and perhaps another book is needed to address it in this context.

It must be said that Bono, Sachs and the rest of the MORE AID NOW chorus raise an important point – the rich world has ignored the poor world for too long, and it’s time for a change. But inviting the Fortune 500 to the table is the only way to bring about that other often-painful cliché – sustainable development. And it needs to go far beyond charitable giving or corporate responsibility programs. Prahalad and his b-school researchers are on the right track. It’s time for the business world to take their products to the poor.

Exclusive Excerpt from “The Casio Killer”

Dan Brown’s latest Robert Langdon adventure

Chapter 96

AS THE complexity of the puzzle seared the synapses of his brain, all Robert Langdon could think was how much he hated pickles.

He tried to focus as he steered the rented Dodge Stratus into the parking lot of Houston’s First Methodist Church. After a nod to Stacy, they jumped out of the car and ran, hand in hand, towards the front door of the church. A drab, gray, boxy concrete structure, it was one of the least architecturally significant buildings in the history of religion. Langdon tingled with excitement.

He rapped three times on the massive oak slab door and listened, trying sort through the events of the previous 24 hours. The midnight call to his Cambridge house from the head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, desperately seeking his advice on a string of murders of the world’s top environmental scientists. Meeting geologist Stacy Bernstein, heir to the Vlassic pickle fortune, who despite the loss of her father just hours earlier seemed eager to sleep with him. The three victims, killed inside three churches in southeast Texas, all found with Casio calculators in their pockets. The number visible on the screen in each instance, 71077345. Taunting him like a numerical ghost.

“It’s one of the mmm-ost s-s-s-s-ophisticated encoding systems ever created by m-m-man,” Robert described to Stacy as they sat locked inside the walk-in freezer of a grocery store in Corpus Christi.

The discovery of the first example of an adding machine used as a code, Langdon explained through chattering teeth, won historian Rector Von Richter the Nobel Prize in 1924. Richter showed that Marco Polo secretly proposed to Princess Xei Xeling in 1292 through a message left on an abacus.

Langdon liked to use this example with students of his Crossword Puzzle Trivia Posing As Symbology course at Harvard.

“Does anyone know what came of Polo’s proposal?” he asked his class one autumn morning. Roland Vandenberg, star of the baseball team and class clown, raised his hand.

“The most annoying swimming pool game of all time?” The class roared with laughter and Langdon shook his head. A lifelong swimmer, Langdon new the Marco Polo pool game better than most. He considered telling his class that he wrote his Master’s thesis on it but realized they would never understand.

Snapping back to the present, Langdon grasped the polished brass handle of the church door, and finding it open, he entered. To the rear of the church a one-legged man in a kimono hopped towards the emergency exit. As they started in pursuit, something entered Langdon’s field of vision from above. He looked up, and a wave of nausea spread over him. Hanging from the rafters was a middle-aged man in Dockers and a cornflower blue dress shirt.

His jaw dropped as he recognized the victim – Jim Bundy, Professor of Oceanography at UC Santa Barbara and vociferous critic of offshore oil drilling.

Stacy pulled over a chair from the corner of the entryway and stood to get a closer look. “His chest pocket!” she gasped, reaching up towards his shirt. She removed a calculator and handed it to Langdon.

His eyes bulged as big as golf balls when he saw the familiar string of numbers. 71077345. Mocking him like the phone number of a girl who was screening her calls. Like Vittoria, for instance, the attractive entanglement physicist he slept with in “Angels & Demons” just hours after falling out of a helicopter.

“It’s the same code!” Stacy whispered.

“Yes, but what could it mean?” Langdon looked at his new friend, suddenly wishing she was Sophie, the cryptography expert from “The Da Vinci Code” who was cute, smart, and happened to be a direct descendent of the Son of God. He hadn’t seen Sophie since she cracked the keyless entry system to his Ford Expedition and fled his Cape Cod timeshare last autumn.

Langdon gave Stacy the calculator and did a handstand against the wall to try to regain his composure. For some reason, he always had his best ideas upside down.

Suddenly, the answer came to him like a fortune cookie with the answer inside. UPSIDE DOWN.

“Stacy, give me back that calculator,” he said, flipping back onto his feet and feeling the blood rush back to his legs. He turned the device around and looked at the screen.

ShELLOIL

“But what could it mean?” Stacy said breathlessly, looking over Robert’s shoulder. “It sounds like Yiddish.”

Langdon clicked his tongue in disapproval and smiled. “You’re a pickle heiress to your very core, Stacy,” he said, hoping he hadn’t said something anti-Semitic. But there wasn’t time for apologies. He had cracked the code.

He was already halfway to the car when Stacy ran out of the church, yelling. “She lloil? Shello il? Robert!”

An hour later, Langdon and his not-so-bright geologist friend were on a chartered jet headed to Alaska. He tried to rest, knowing that the very future of clean and renewable energy rested on his shoulders.

Foxhole Cooking

For the first time in the history of foreign assistance, an international relief and development organization has issued a famine alert for its own employees. Due to poor grain harvests and dwindling livestock counts, Peace Corps volunteers in the African Sahel are dropping at an alarming rate. Size 12’s are wearing 4’s, and pants lacking drawstrings are now adorning scarecrows in vegetable patches.

The United States Government has responded to this emergency with typical generosity and efficiency. Until further notice, PCVs can request Meals Ready-To-Eat (MREs) from their medical office.

As a city volunteer, I generally get enough to eat and suffer only from monotony and small portions. In fact, the military rations are probably more closely intended for two married volunteers on the edge of the Sahara, who subsist on boiled grains, occasional meat, and their imaginations. We’re talking about two narrow individuals before Peace Corps, but now I’d estimate they weigh a combined 135 pounds.

So it wasn’t without a tinge of guilt that I sucked in my stomach and limped into the medical office complaining of blurred vision and a diet of boiled cardboard. I limped out with high-calorie, vitamin enriched, and surprisingly tasty proof that women play an important role in military policy and planning.

The days of You-Know-What On A Shingle are over. My entrée options include Vegetarian Fettuccini Alfredo, Beef Teriyaki, and Chicken Strips with Chunky Salsa. You can start off with jalepeño cheese spread on a vegetable cracker, or maybe some spiced apples. And for dessert, why not enjoy a cup of coffee and lemon pound cake?

The best part is there’s no stove required, thanks to the smartly named OPN63 NSN 8970-01-321-9153 heating unit. Just plop the main course into this plastic sack with a chemical wafer at the bottom, add water, and in 10 minutes it’s ready. They even throw in a kind piece of advice: “the contents will be HOT.”

I can’t find an expiration date anywhere on the packaging, but judging from the serial numbers on the rancid Snickers bars, I’m guessing our batch is from 1998. But the shelf-life is impressive, as the parts of the MRE are zipped up separately in high-tech shrink wrapping by DOD contractors like Sopakco Packaging, Mullins, South Carolina. I imagine the corporate tagline “You make it, we’re fixin’ to pack it.”

Each meal comes with an accessory packet containing plastic spoon, napkin/TP, wet wipe, tiny bottle of Tobasco sauce (I imagine tiny Mexican women squeezing tiny red peppers), matches, and beverage powder, everything it seems except for a temporary tattoo or hologram toy.

As if this all wasn’t quite enough, the boxes are stamped with nutrition information written in unmistakable Pentagon-speak. “Fortification Provides you the Additional Edge to Maximize Your Performance.” I suppose, but after the beef stew and brownie, the last thing I’d want to hear is “MOVE OUT, MEN.” I require a nap, sir.

From one perspective, MRE’s are a desperate last resort to starvation, and my level of enjoyment stems mostly from the memories of American food evoked in the face of monotonous desert fare. But still I’d say that MRE’s are so ingenious and fun, it’s only the low pay, physical requirements, and dislike of raised voices that’s keeping me from enlisting right now.

Until then, I’ll assume the diet and attitude of a 21^st Century Yossarian with a billet that’s decidedly more Rear Echelon.

No Respect

My knowledge of the American comedy scene is on a serious time lag. First I read that Rodney Dangerfield died. Then someone tells me that Johnny Carson is doing the great open-mic in the sky, both of these events occurring last year. And finally I hear that Mitch Hedberg, one of the most talented comics of my generation, was recently found dead in his hotel room before a gig in New Jersey.

Now that I’ve dimmed the lights, allow me to introduce the shaky and blatantly opportunistic premise for this segment. Did you know that before getting his big break Rodney Dangerfield was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania? I found his final site evaluation hidden away in my regional office. Here are the highlights…

The Peace Corps, man, I’ll tell yah, it’s a racket, they pay you fifty bucks a month. I could make more dough juggling for the blind.

And you get no respect at all in the Peace Corps. No car, no money, no wife, no respect at all. People think I’m an albino panhandler, I tell yah.

A lot of drug use in the Peace Corps, though, I tell yah, I can’t keep up with these kids. The Peace Corps motto should be Semper High. Just my luck, no Marines in the audience, go ask your recruiter to explain that one.

But I smoked dope here in Mauritania one time, and I tell yah, it wasn’t pretty. Why’s that, I’ll tell yah why, there’s no good snacks. I got the munchies and ate my house. It’s tough, I tell yah.

Not a lot to do out here in my village, I can tell you that much. They don’t have dirty magazines here, so I have to watch my neighbor breast-feed her kids. The other night I asked if I could be next, that’s how bad it is.

My host family, that’s some group, I tell yah. My father is half Pulaar and half Moor. He wants to beat himself up but he’s too lazy. It’s tough. And his wife, I tell yah, she’s 16, she’s his cousin, sister, niece and possibly his mother too. It’s a mess.

You know they circumcise the women here? It’s supposed to make it impossible to enjoy sex. When I heard that, I called my ex-wife and told her it wasn’t my fault after all. Come on people, these are called jokes.

I got a local girlfriend though, I tell yah, but it’s not fair. I asked her for a strip tease, she showed me her eyes for two seconds. Not fair at all.

And the heat. I tell you it’s hot in this country. How hot is it? By my house there’s a road sign that points down and says “Hell, 15 meters.”

Hey, tough crowd, feels like I’ve been here two years. Ok, it’s been life changing, catch me next week at Ceasars Palace.

The Seven Year Switch

As I was about to begin my English class one evening, a student spoke up. “Mr. Luke, this woman has something to ask you.” I had hardly noticed the lady and young girl in the corner, figuring that a new student brought her kid along. “Tell him, tell him!” she says to the girl in Hassaniya. Reluctantly, then, the girl says, in distinctly American English, “My aunt wants to know if you can teach me English so I don’t forget.”

Some believe that mefloquine, the anti-malaria drug of choice for Peace Corps, can bring about hallucinations, so I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. Teach me English? Most English teachers here can’t construct a sentence like that. I opened my eyes. The girl was still there, with her head cocked at an angle and an expression that seemed to say “well?????” I asked her some questions, and she replied in English, to my continued amazement. “How long have you been here?” I asked her. “I dunno, I kind of forget a lot of things.” I had to be hallucinating.

After that introduction I visited the girl’s family a number of times and established that Hoffman LaRoche Pharmaceuticals has not yet taken my mind. Here is what I know now.

Six years ago, a Moorish couple secured a visa to the United States and moved with their one-year-old daughter Fatimetou to Columbus, Ohio. How they got visas I’m not certain, but Fatimetou told me that her father used to be the President of Africa, which has got to carry some weight at the American Embassy. After a few years another daughter was born and given the name Christine. A few more years and another daughter, this one Lalla. Both of Fatimetou’s sisters are therefore American citizens. Fatimetou is not, to my knowledge.

Earlier this year, the children’s maternal grandfather became ill. The parents decided that the father would stay in Columbus (he works at a grocery store) and the mother would return to Kiffa with her daughters, to be with her ailing father.

Fast forward a few months to the present, and now you have a household in Kiffa featuring a widow, a dozen young adults and three little girls running or crawling around in varying states of American-ness.

Lalla, at around a year old, doesn’t say much. Christine knows English, but is shy, and after a couple visits she would climb on my head but not talk. Fatimetou makes up for them both.

“Why you always wearin’ that hunting hat?” she prods in a vaguely urban accent. “Why you always wearin’ crazy African shirts?” “What is wrong with you, anyways?” When she’s not riding a goat around the living room or begging a nickel off her aunt to buy candy, Fatimetou likes to tease dorky guys as much as any American girl, it seems.

I have my own questions. Are you going to school? Yes, no, sort of, I dunno. Did you get to see your grandfather when you got here? Whispered: we aren’t supposeta talk about dead people! Are you going back to Columbus? Yes, no, maybe, I dunno.

The mother speaks decent English and is generally busy with local politics, running the mandatory street-side boutique, and looking worried about, I presume, how to get back to Columbus.

“Do you have any painkillers?” she asks me one afternoon. “No,” I say, guilt meter shooting up because it’s a lie. “We brought a lot of stuff with us from America,” Fatimetou adds. “But you used it all?” I guess, watching her grandmother cough up phlegm onto her hand and fling it across the room out an open window. “No, we sold it.” Guilt meter drops back to zero.

I think about this family with mixed emotions. Living in Mauritania is difficult, but it’s not that bad for the middle class, so I wouldn’t feel terrible if these girls couldn’t return to America.

But what is in store for them here? Fatimetou and Christine will lose their English. They will be placed in atrocious public schools or perhaps slightly better private schools. They will be expected to conform to the role of a woman in Mauritania, which is changing but is nothing like life in America.

Will they be circumcised or force-fed or reduced to domestic servility? Probably not. From looking at the young black African girl who cooks and cleans and the satellite dish that brings in must-see Mexican soap operas, it seems this family is doing well for now. But that standard of living is most likely based on a few hundred dollars a month sent back from the US.

What was life like for Fatimetou in America? She remembers good things, like Wendy’s and pizza and playing in the snow. She also recalls darker details, like the convicted sex offender who lived in their neighborhood and the school shooting she witnessed one morning at her public school. She claims that she saw two older students fighting, and when she ran to tell a teacher she heard a gunshot. Looking back she saw a boy lying in a pool of blood. He died.

There’s a part of me that doesn’t believe a word Fatimetou says. She has mischief in her eyes, and she has been through a traumatic experience in the last three months, going back to a country and climate and a way of life that conjures up no memories whatsoever. But as rarely as it happens in America, kids do shoot each other and creepy men do introduce themselves to their new neighbors with police escorts. Maybe I’m just offended that she made fun of my hat.

As I sit in the family’s living room and force down a mouthful of mystery meat, at least I don’t fear being shot on the street. Living in Washington, DC, the cuisine was fantastic, but the walk home was more un-nerving. It’s one of the many tradeoffs a seven-year-old semi-American girl and I will have plenty of time to think about.