Aid Worker Voices

Oh ye of little faith

“I swear, if I hear “pray for peace” once more, I may actually lose it.”

–male expat aid worker

Oh ye of little faith

Faith based NGO’s
Faith-based aid organizations are now and have always been a major factor in the sector. Collectively these organizations continue and refine a trend -most especially among the Christian religions- that has gone on for centuries and, historically, is indeed an integral dimension of colonization. These organizations range from the  ‘big box’ globally influential mega-NGOs to the classic ‘MONGO’ or My Own NGO based in a specific church.  The larger organizations tend to avoid overt proselytization while the smaller ones less so, some being almost aggressively pushing their faith messages.

Q17 asked simply, “Which best describes the humanitarian aid work organization with which you are (or were) most recently affiliated?”  Of our respondents, 17% indicated they were affiliated with faith based organization.

Given the nature of what some aid workers experience in the field, especially in those locations that have undergone what an anthropologist might call ‘cultural disintegration’ i.e., conflict zones, what do aid workers have to say?  How do they address the sometimes massive gap between the lofty messages of religion and the realities they witness?

 

 

Venting from an aid worker
Here is what an aid worker deployed in a post-conflict environment ranted to me over Skype a few days ago:

So, there’s this place where my employer built houses, a mosque, latrines, etc. for a small community of IDPs. Classic relief infrastructure. Was a worthwhile project. At each corner, there is an elevated guard booth for UN soldiers to stand guard at night to protect them. It’s been great-ish for the past 9 months.

Last week, the UN peace-keeping mission in-country decided it was time to stop posting guards. So the booths have been empty at night.

The very next evening, the local community came and stole the metal doors off the latrines. So now no one can poop in privacy.

What kind of asshole steals the bathroom door from IDPs?

Anyway, we concluded the visit and walked out. 50 meters away sat the chief of the local police and the local religious leader. They were all anxious to pump my hand. “Thank you, [my employer]… let’s pray for peace.”

Or, you could just stop stealing from IDPs.

Taking time to share one more time this aid worker went on.

Sorry, but I gotta vent. Here’s another….

Apparently, taking a machete and murdering people against whom one had a grudge of some kind, or to whom one owed money, and then tossing the corpse down a well was so widespread (and continues, to some extent) that it has negatively moved the needle on clean water access nation-wide.

Call me ethnocentric. But this does not seem complicated.

STEP. AWAY. FROM. THE. GODDAMN. MACHETES.

But everyone’s all, “pray for peace.”

I swear, if I hear “pray for peace” once more, I may actually lose it.

Pray for peace?
Both of the anecdotes above illustrate the deep and perhaps pervasive hypocrisy that exists in much of the world
regarding faith and religion.  Go to church on Sunday, cut up or steal from people the rest of the week. Appearing religious for show only perhaps, or,cynically, to apply a smokescreen covering essentially immoral actions.

In my conversation with this aid worker I responded to his comment “Call me ethnocentric” by offering,  “NOT ethnocentric. Warped values are warped values universally.”

The view that says culture forms us completely, the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) as described by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby in their essay Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer , is wrong. We are not born, as Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate with a formless blob of a brain but rather with myriad and complex modules that with timely stimulation comprise our “human nature”  individually and collectively.  We are a moral animal from the inside out; morals come from our primate and pre-primate past, enhanced by further evolution and our expanding frontal cortex.  There is right and wrong, at base.

That said, we are a species prone to contradictions because we have seemingly competing modules in our brains.  Anthropologist Miles Richardson poetically summarized it long ago.  Listen to his words:

“Blind, senseless, uncaring nature produced us. She cast us out of the primate troop, by cursing us with the ability to imagine God and thereby making us one of the most successful species, and certainly the most lonely. Being human is not to be a passive reader of blueprints, it is not to be a puppet on a string of norms, but it is to be man the hero, fighting to make sense of what nature has accomplished with us, the creation of a paradox: a species who can dream of eternal life but who must die, a species who preaches peace but who is more effective at waging war, a species who can imagine perfect beauty but whose shit stinks like all the rest.” (emphasis added)

The importance of this insight for aid workers is clear:  it is NOT ethnocentric to view machete killings and rape as a tool of war or dominance as cultural practices to be accepted. You do NOT have to adopt a convoluted ‘cultural relativity’ perspective I-must-see-things-from-their-perspective regarding all cultural practices you see.  The third position -the one between ethnocentrism and blind acceptance of the cultural relativity- is the one embraced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948.  This third position says there are exactly that, universal and transcendent human rights the violation of which is wrong.

As I have written elsewhere, I do believe that morality is woven into our being as humans and that we do know the difference between right and wrong.  The problem is that, as we have been told many times by anthropologists and writers, oftentimes ‘things fall apart’ and cultures can all too commonly foster dysfunctional and, yes, immoral behavior.

A central part of the cannon in the sociology of religion is Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in which he points out that religions evolved as a mechanism serving to externalize and to give voice to our moralities and in so doing function as a controlling and cohesive force in society.  That aid workers frequently hear the refrain “let’s pray for peace” among those with which they work in the field (and at home) is to be expected…as is the feeling that this refrain can be excruciatingly hollow and hypocritical.

Grappling with the frequently massive gaps between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ is an occupational hazard among aid workers.  The sector as a whole can be seen as our global community’s effort to bridge that gap and confront head on the contradictions inherent in our species.

 

I think it will be a long time until “how things are and how we say things are, are one.”  And so it goes.

 

As always let me know if you have feedback, comments or something to add.

 

 

 

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