How to Break Into Development, Pt. 1

This is part one of a two-part post on getting involved in international development work.  Read part two here.

One day back in May 2009, I was sitting at my desk at my office on Boylston Street in downtown Boston reading Next Billion.  I had decided the week before that I would quit my job in September and leave the U.S. for an adventure.  After a cursory review of the options, I decided backpacking and teaching English weren’t for me, and settled in development.  At the end of the article I was reading about micropayments for solar energy in Brazil, Mike MacHarg, then a graduating MBA student at my alma mater, wrote a comment asking the author to get in touch with him, leaving his email address.  I am not sure if that author ever did contact him, but I did, and the meeting we set up in a Starbucks in Boston set in motion a chain a series of small-world moments that culminated in someone coming up to me two weeks ago in Brew Bistro, a bar in Nairobi, and introducing himself as Erik Wurster, formerly of E+Co, otherwise known as the person Mike first put me in touch after our meeting three years ago.  He is living in rural Rwanda now, working on a solar energy startup called UpEnergy, and happened to be in town for a clean cookstove conference visiting a friend of mine.  It’s a small world indeed.

These stories aren’t unique – in the relatively small global international development community, everyone has a story extending six degrees on some direction before boomeranging back to them.  And these stories are, to me, essential for explaining out to break into this work.  From the beginning and right through until the end, guys like Erik and Mike have been connecting me to people from around the world, and through those connections, I have learned about different jobs, companies, roles, and honed in on what it is that I am trying to do.

But for people who are trying to break into this world and have no idea how to begin – in other words, myself three years ago – I will pass on some valuable advice given to me by my father’s partner’s son-in-law when I was a lost soul.  After college, he had moved to Zimbabwe back when it was still called Rhodesia and taught science in a school outside Harare.  When he asked what I wanted to do and I responded “work abroad in development”, he knew he would have to bring it back to square one with me.  So he gave me some advice I have since passed on to many people once in my shoes (metaphorically speaking, not the shoes you get on shoe hero).

Entering the job search with “must work abroad in development” as the only criterion is both wrong and much more common than one would think.  So, the son-in-law gave me some parameters to help me narrow down my own hunt.  There are three questions to ask before starting to look:

  1. Where do you want to go?
  2. What do you want to do?
  3. What kind of organization do you want to work for?

The first question – where do you want to go – is a big one.  For some people, this is the easiest to answer.  Wanting to learn a language (like Spanish) or already knowing one (like Kiswahili) are good reasons to work in Peru or Tanzania, respectively.   For me, location did not matter.  I wanted to go to South America, but didn’t really care either way.  I was up for anything, and moving to a place I knew nothing about only added to the sense of adventure.

The second question – what do you want to do (more specifically, what sector interests you) – is more difficult to answer when you don’t know anything about the subject matter.  For people with prior knowledge and experience – academic, professional, or otherwise – it is possible to narrow down your options.  Broadly, there are a few key areas of international development work: public health, water and sanitation, education, economic / livelihood development, financial services, agriculture, and a few others.  You could further split each of these into emergency relief efforts and ongoing systemic programs.  It is admittedly difficult to narrow this one down when you barely know the difference between public health and clean energy in this specific context.  But, if you are not like me, then perhaps you can pick a couple that interest you and learn as much as you can before honing in on one or two.

The third question – what kind of organization do you want to work for – was actually the easiest for me to answer (actually, the only one I could answer).  With three years of practical experience under my belt, I felt strongly about working for a company that knew how to leverage my skills.   This last question helped me narrow my search down to a few organizations that had not only a reputation for innovation, but also a fellowship or consultancy program that provided immersion without long-term commitment.  Ultimately, the decision came down to the volunteer consultant program with TechnoServe and the Kiva fellowship.  Kiva got back to me first, so I signed up with them.  The following years, I decided to give TechnoServe a shot and moved to Ghana.

The reason it is so important to answer this question is because there are so many organizations out there are incredibly different.  I have personally run the gamut, from technology-based non-profit to USAID to what some people refer to as the “McDonald’s of education,” without any of the negative connotations.  Some non-profits and NGOs are poorly-run and unprofessional, with a questionable impact on the poor.  Others are led by visionaries with a wealth of experience, providing opportunities for mentorship.  Some, like Engineers Without Borders Canada, are based in the field, while others, like Planet Finance or Grameen Foundation, spend more time in the office.  Choosing the right organization can easily be the most important of the key variables.

In the next post, I will add a fourth question, and discuss other issues.


Develop Economies’ Music Recommendation

The End of an Era: Leaving Nairobi

On Sunday, I leave Nairobi for Thailand, where I will spend a month visiting various beaches and diving various reefs.  Of the many transitions I have documented on this blog, this one is most significant, as it is the most final.  After Southeast Asia, I return to the United States for the foreseeable future, embarking on the next phase of my career as an MBA student at MIT.  Right now, from the Flamingo Cafeteria in the Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, waiting for the second leg of my flight to Nairobi from Zanzibar, where I spent the last four days SCUBA diving and lounging on the beach with a new group of multicultural friends, I will begin the long process of trying to make sense of my three years working abroad in international development.

By way of background for those who do not know the history of Develop Economies, I left my job as a strategy consultant in Boston three years ago to work with Kiva, a microfinance funder, in the Philippines.  After the better part of a year, I moved to Ghana to work with Technoserve, a non-profit focused on market-driven economic development.   Six month later and one year ago to the date, I moved to Nairobi and found employment as a business analyst with Bridge International Academies, a chain of low-cost private primary schools serving slums in Nairobi.  When I arrived, we had 15 schools in Nairobi.  Today, we have 73 throughout Kenya.  Next year, Bridge will have hundreds more around the world.

In addition to working, I have found time to travel here and there, squeezing in six months of independent travel in six countries Asia and another seven in East and West Africa.  I have met thousands of interesting people from all over the world.  To illustrate the point, I spent the last three days with a group of Dutch medical students, a Moroccan working in Paris, an Austrian on working at the embassy in Nairobi, two Germans living with nuns in rural Uganda and Tanzania, and an Australian physiotherapist on loan from the International Olympic Committee to the government of Zambia, tasked with preparing their athletes for the 2012 games.  More substantively, I have forged strong relationships with friends and colleagues during my time living in the Philippines, Ghana, and Kenya.  To write a series of posts summarizing the lessons of the last three years without discussing the people would be incomplete.

Before I arrived, I understood very little about the theory of international development and even less than the practice.  Fortunately, I have found valuable mentors to provide advice and guidance in navigating this complex world.  The validity of the business adage that it is not what you know but who you know that matters can be debated, but, in my case, knowing people has helped tremendously in not only finding jobs, but adjusting to new environments, making friends, and learning about new things.

Today, I understand much more about development, in part from my work, research, and writing, but also because of the conversations I have in my living room, or on a bus in Rwanda, or a train to Mombasa on the coast of Kenya, or in an email I received from someone I met a few times about what they are studying and reading.   The entire experience has made me smarter and more knowledgeable.  And trying to parse the source of it all is challenging.

While I may not be able to completely break down my experience and pinpoint the source of this professional and, more importantly, personal growth, I can begin to catalog the lessons from the experience.  And with that in mind, I will be writing a series of posts to wrap things up.  In the next two posts, I will talk about how I got into this work and give some advice for anyone thinking of doing it themselves.

Should You Pay a Bribe?

Around the world, money talks.  In some places, it speaks in a whisper; in others, it is like your humble correspondent at a party after one too many dark and stoney’s – loud and obnoxious.  And in Kenya, many, if not all, businesses, will at some point find themselves deciding whether or makes financial sense to pay a bribe.

Corruption is not a third world vice.  There are enough Swiss bank accounts and shell companies in the Cayman Islands to provide evidence for first-world malfeasance.  This corruption, while destructive, is difficult to identify, because it is built into the infrastructure of the system.  It is a tax code that makes no sense except to people who understand how to take advantage of it.  But in some places – Kenya being one of them – corruption is in-your-face.  At every turn, you might be asked for a bribe.  Police set up roadblocks simply to collect “something small” from drivers.  Ministers exact rent from anyone seeking to do business in their districts.  From the lowest traffic cop to the highest levels of government, corruption is rife.

For companies, dealing with corruption is a very real part of doing business.  The system – particularly within the government – moves slowly, and sometimes not at all.  A work visa could take two weeks or two years to process, depending on who you know and, more importantly, who you pay.  If you are a vendor trying to buy a storefront, obtaining a construction permit means putting 2,000 Kenyan shillings in an envelope to “expedite the process.” To be sure, greasing the gears of the system leads them to move more quickly.

But doing so exacerbates the problem, providing positive reinforcement to those collecting bribes.  And once a company is identified as one that pays bribes, there is no end to the gravy train.  Once they have paid a bribe somewhere, companies operating in multiple cities or provinces will have to pay the same tax everywhere.  The question then becomes, is it worth paying a bribe to make doing business easier?

Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.

There are some, including Develop Economies, who have made that claim in the past.  Why not?  After all, civil servants are underpaid.  Their superiors extract money from them, and on up the chain.  Not to mention, placing restrictions on American companies through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) only puts the U.S. at a disadvantage when competing against companies from nations with no such regulations.

But that, unfortunately, is not the truth.  Corruption is a parasite, feeding on society, preventing it from making forward progress.  Businesses that are bled dry from corrupt entities will cease to make investments in growth and expansion, as they are increasingly less rewarded for risks.  Roads and bridges that allow commerce are rarely built.  When they are eventually constructed, they work is so shoddy that it falls apart during the next heavy rainfall.  This, of course, is good for the contractor, who also happens to be the minister who commissioned the road to be built in the first place.

For multinational businesses, paying bribes is part of the expansion process.  And with the BRIC countries – three of which (India, China, and Russia) happen to be among the most corrupt in the world – accounting for much of the growth in this post-Western global economy, gaining access to the billions of people in these fledgling economies means paying bribes.  Among the guilty are some of the world’s largest corporations.

Wal-Mart, for example, just came under scrutiny for paying over $24 million in bribes to obtain construction permits in Mexico.  The stock market responded to the company’s unscrupulous business practices, driving the stock price down 7.5% and causing $17 billion to evaporate into thin air.  But Rana Faroohar of Time magazine explains the conundrum:

The scandal tells you that doing business in the world’s fastest-growing markets can be fraught with peril. Emerging markets now account for the bulk of the world’s economic growth, as well as about 30% to 60% of the revenues at many U.S. multinational firms. Indeed, one of the reasons that the stock market has done relatively well throughout the downturn is that it was buoyed by U.S. multinationals earning more and more of their money in these still relatively fast-growing economies. This is particularly true of packaged-goods and retail firms like Walmart.

Many of these markets are rife with corruption–but graft is not necessarily perceived as a serious crime in some places. It’s more a way of doing business. In Mexico, “the bulk of retailers pay bribes,” says one veteran Mexican fund manager for a large U.S. financial institution. Indeed, Mexican firms are the third most likely to have to pay bribes, right after Russian and Chinese ones, according to Transparency International, an anticorruption NGO.

If that is the case, then how can these multi-national firms enter these markets without playing (or not playing, depending on whose side you are on) by the rules? Dealing with governments where corruption is endemic pose a fundamental challenge to doing business in developing countries.  But the truth is that buying into that system – stock price aside – will only make it worse.  Once a company has established itself as one that is willing to play the game, there is no end.  It is difficult, but abstaining and refusing to pay will be better for the business in the long-run.

There are ways around the system.  The courts, as corrupt as they may be, can be an avenue for justice.  But unfortunately, when time is money, patience can be a financial burden on the business. Still, paying a bribe will be only cause more problems for a business in the future.


Develop Economies’ Music Recommendation

A Trip to Bridge International Academies

A child in class at the Bridge International Academy in Embu, Kenya

After one year living in Kenya, my time here is fast approaching its end.  In a few weeks, I finish work with Bridge International Academies.  I am heading to Southeast Asia for a few weeks of rest and relaxation before moving to San Francisco to help my brother launch a start-up for the summer.  After that, I am returning to school to pursue an MBA.  And so ends my two and a half years on the road.  This weekend, as I visited one of our schools, I was reminded about what a rewarding experience this has been.

I have lived in three countries – the Philippines, Ghana, and Kenya – and traveled to many, many more.  I have learned an incredible amount and experienced things I never imagined I would experience.  Much of it is documented on this blog.  But the most rewarding parts have been the work and the people.  Being a part of organizations whose missions have been to make things better for others less fortunate has been a privilege.  Working with the folks who commit themselves and their time to realize the vision has been rich and rewarding.

This weekend, I had a chance to go see the grand opening of our 65th school in the town of Embu in the Central region of Kenya.  I shared a taxi with a group of seven from the head office – members of the IT, research, government relations, training, and marketing departments were present.  Embu is three hours from Nairobi and the scenery was pleasant.  Once you leave Thika Road, the Chinese-built superhighway that is emblematic of the surge in investment in Africa from the East, and pass through Ruiru, the landscape becomes more rural and green.  The rolling green hills felt more like Rwanda and Uganda, where flat ground is hard to find.

Rainfall – particularly during the rainy season in April – is high and the floodplains are ideal for growing rice.  We passed the Del Monte pineapple farm, which made the farms I visited in Ghana look like the herb garden I had on my balcony in Boston.  The lime-green rice paddies that followed reminded me of the rural areas on Negros Island in the Philippines, where I used to ride on the back of motorbikes and tricycles to visit borrowers.  When we finally reached the school, everyone was excited to stretch their legs and get to work.

Construction on half the school continued as we helped with last minute preparations for the grand opening ceremony.  Kids lined up to see the face painters, parents spoke to the teachers to learn more about the school, prospective children sat in class and went through lessons, and the community elders filed in to dedicate the school.  It was great to be a part of such an important event.

Me with the newest teachers at Bridge International Academies

My days at work consist of sitting in an office, analyzing data, managing our longitudinal student testing, and generally sitting in front of my two computer screens, looking at Excel spreadsheets and word documents.  When that is your job, it is easy to lose sight of what you are doing and why you are doing it.  So visiting the school, watching the kids learning and seeing the excitement on the faces of the parents was important for me.

As I wind down my time here in Kenya, I am proud of the work Bridge International Academies is doing and the impact we are having on informal settlements and poor communities.  Bridge has the potential to create a minimum standard of education for every child in the world that is much higher than it is today.  Hands-down, it is the most innovative company in the education space at the base of the pyramid and has created a model that will be studied and replicated by organizations across the world.  I will be sad to leave, but I am optimistic that the company will change the world.  Loyal readers know that a cynic like me is hesitant to use that expression for anything.  Mine has been an exciting and meaningful experience, and the trip yesterday really drove that point home.

Here are some of the photos of the trip:


Develop Economies Music Recommendation

Burma Finally Opens Up

For months – no, years – Develop Economies has been shouting it from the rooftops.  From a foreign policy perspective, the strategic value of Burma is undeniable.  It is the only country in the world (besides Pakistan, which is strategic for different reasons) that shares a border with three of the four BRIC countries (Russia, India, and China).  But now, in light of several major non-symbolic gestures by the ruling military junta in Burma, the U.S is finally dropping its ideological opposition to an incomplete democracy and, as of a few days ago, has decided to ease sanctions on the country.

A foreign policy piece from the New York Times explains the decision:

As Myanmar loosens the grip of decades of military dictatorship and improves ties with the United States, China fears a threat to a strategic partnership that offers access to the Indian Ocean and a long-sought shortcut for oil deliveries from the Middle East.

With the United States reasserting itself in Asia, and an emboldened China projecting military and economic power as never before, each side is doing whatever it can to gain the favor of economically struggling, strategically placed Myanmar.

The Obama administration would like a swift foreign policy success in an election year. Having another country move from dictatorship toward democracy on Mr. Obama’s watch would be a political achievement; having a friendly country on China’s border would be a strategic one.

Before, the United States and, specifically, the Obama administration were hamstringed from extending an open hand completely by serious economic sanctions on the government.  These sanctions really only hurt the people of Myanmar, as other countries – specifically China, South Korea, and even France – had major natural resource deals in place that lined the pockets and secured the ruling position of the military elite.  Now that they have been lifted – or are at least close to being lifted – the U.S. can start to influence the country in a way never before possible.

The opportunity to guide a high-potential country with major strategic geographical interest in a region where the U.S. has had declining influence over the past decade is exciting indeed.   And, not to mention, the real beneficiaries of this opening up will be the people of Myanmar, who will be exposed to another world, both socially and economically.

Why Jim Kim is Right for the World Bank

As faithful readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of the Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions and decisions.  Specifically, I like his deference to nuanced conditions and his emphasis on achieving the objective over claiming credit.  In my neck of the woods – specifically, Libya, Somalia, and Uganda – he understands and appreciates the nuances that made previous incursions into the region unsuccessful.  I think he understands that multilateralism and mutual respect can achieve more than the cavalier dependence on American exceptionalism.

That is why when I read that he endorsed Jim Kim, co-founder of Partners in Health with Paul Farmer and a giant in the field of public health, for the World Bank presidency, I tipped my hat.  Since its establishment, the executive positions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been held by an American and a European, respectively.  Former French finance minister Christine LaGarde recently replaced Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn after – in one of the great ironies in the history of the institution – he was arrested for allegedly assaulting a Guinean woman.  So when Robert Zoellick announced he would not re-run for the top spot at the World Bank, people debated whether Obama would be the first to break the streak and allow a non-American to run the Bank.

There is good reason for the Americans to run the bank.  For one thing, it was created by the U.S. and the Allies in 1944 at the tail end of World War II.  Though it started as a lender to post-war European economies, by 1968, the World Bank had shifted its focus to developing countries, funding infrastructure projects and enacting various poverty alleviation strategies. With some policy shifts here and there – most notably during the Reagan years, where neoliberalism was the approach du jour and the Bank’s sister institution, the IMF, created controversial structural adjustment programs that saddled many developing countries with tremendous amounts of debt in exchange for opening their economies – the Bank has focus on eradicating poverty and improving the lot of the four billion people living below the poverty line.

Kim, the MD/PhD

Unlike many previous World Bank presidents, Jim Kim is not a bureaucrat, politician, or World Bank insider.  He is a proven innovator and a man whose commitment to the cause cannot be questioned.  He has an MD/PhD from Harvard and has worked with some of the pre-eminent public health institutions in the world.  In founding Partners in Health, he built an organization that now employs 13,000 people in 12 countries, serving the poorest populations in the world.  Most recently, he served as the first Asian-American president of Dartmouth College.  In a letter to The Guardian, Professor Martin McKee explains why Kim is a smart choice:

Some commentators will no doubt be offended by the idea that someone who is neither a banker nor an economist could occupy this post. Others may think that, in these difficult times, we need someone like Jim Kim, who combines academic rigour with practical first-hand experience of the reality facing the world’s poor.

Jim Kim is a perfect candidate for the World Bank presidency.  He is a first-generation Korean immigrant with a proven record of success.  He is clearly innovative and committed to the work that the Bank is mandated to carry out.  Having spent his life outside of government, he is apolitical and carries no baggage.  Unlike one of his top competitors, Jeffrey Sachs, his positions on development are much more nuanced and his views less explicit.   Recently, Sachs withdrew from the race and endorsed Kim himself.  I find myself in agreement with his assessment:

Obama has shown real leadership with this appointment. He has put development at the forefront, saying explicitly, “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”

Kim’s appointment is a breakthrough for the World Bank, which I hope will extend to other global institutions as well. Until now, the United States had been given a kind of carte blanche to nominate anyone it wanted to the World Bank presidency. That is how the Bank ended up with several inappropriate leaders, including several bankers and political insiders who lacked the knowledge and interest to lead the fight against poverty.

The Bank can be where the world convenes to address the dire, yet solvable, problems of sustainable development, bringing together governments, scientists, scholars, civil-society organizations, and the public to advance that great cause. This is a global imperative, and we can all contribute to fulfilling it by ensuring that the World Bank is an institution truly for the world, led with expertise and integrity. Kim’s nomination is a tremendous step toward that goal.

Over the past few years, I have talked about Jim Kim a lot after my father – a physician and Dartmouth graduate – recommended the book Mountains Beyond Mountains about the work of Kim and Paul Farmer.  My dad often compared people to either Farmer or Kim.  The former loved working in the field directly with patients, while the latter preferred tackling the problem at a high level, prioritizing policy over practice as a way of maximizing his impact.  Clearly, Barack Obama’s endorsement is both recognition of Kim’s record and another example of the strategic underpinning of Obama’s approach to foreign policy.  After all, if Obama plans to pivot away from the Middle East toward Asia, endorsing Kim, an Asian-American born in Korea, sends the right signal.  Plus, Kim’s impeccable record exists in spite of his American citizenship, yet the presidency of the World Bank would still remain in the hands of an American.

As someone who works in the field and appreciates the nuances of foreign policy, I applaud the decision to elect Kim.  I look forward to seeing what innovations he will bring to the institution.

The founders of Partners in Health - Kim, Ophelia Dahl, and Paul Farmer


Develop Economies’ Music Recommendation

A Meta-Travel Writing Piece, pt. 2

The beach in Koh Phanang off the southern coast of Thailand.

The other day I talked about the need to really draw your reader in with a short anecdote about something that could never happen in their lives right now, but could if they did what you are doing.  Another key to enhancing the reader experience is to include language that makes your movements seem just a little bit crazy.  Look at what Levin does in this paragraph:

So I hitched a van ride from Puerta Princesa to El Nido, a tiny, dense warren of dive shops that clings to Bacuit Bay in Palawan. What I found, after six hours swerving around goats along a dirt road, was a bangka launching pad to the region’s spectacular islands.

This is genius.  Hitching a van ride could be one of several things.  It could be sitting in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of Filipino cockfighters on the way to a bloody death match, or it could be the driver from the hotel holding a sign outside the airport that says “DEVELOP ECONOMIES.”  The fact is that it doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that the van was hitched and the road was filled with goats apparently unphased by the vans streaming past.

"I rented a motorbike from an old man in Pai and almost hit an elephant."

Later in the article, Levin describes his interactions with the ragtag group of international wanderlusts.  Check this technique out:

All this nautical freedom was affecting my shipmates. Before starting the trip, Marly Pols, 43, a Dutch flight attendant, said she had only thought of the beaches in store. But by the second day we were sharing tales and bottles of rum like a band of leisurely pirates. “This is our home now,” she said as we lounged on the top deck the next morning. “We’re in this together.”

This is a classic move.  I know because I use it in all my pieces of about travel.  It is critical to highlight the fact that these people who you have never met before have become your friends much more quickly had you not met on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no electricity.  In one of my dad’s favorites – titled “Dispatch from a Shrinking Planet” – I described the days and nights with my own band of pirates as I moved from beach to beach around the Philippines:

I mostly traveled alone, and met some cool people along the way.  I dove with a woman representing Slovenia at the World Expo in Shanghai, a professor of comparative religion in Germany, an Italian banker, and some Filipino rastas who happened to be Rotarians.  Diving is a great way to meet people, since you’re out on a boat in the middle of the ocean for eight hours a day, three days in a row, with nothing to do but eat, drink, share stories and play cards.  In fact, some of my best memories are from either from the deck of a boat in the Pacific Ocean, or the bungalows and beachfront bars where I spent most of my nights.

Hanging out with the Italian banker at the front of the boat.

Another non-Somali pirate crew in Diani Beach, Kenya

The key is to highlight the sheer randomness of it all.  Most people wake up every morning and, on average, their day progresses in a similar way as the day before.  But when you are thrown on a boat in the middle of paradise with six strangers from around the world with nothing to do but look at coral reefs, eat fresh seafood, and drink cold beers, you tend to be able to spin a few good yarns.  The fact that you are asking yourself questions like “How did I get here?” and “Is this real?” needs to come through in your writing.  Otherwise, it seems too perfect.

Is this real?

The last element to a good travel piece is the element of introspection.  Traveling is about meeting people and seeing new things.  But it is also about you and the fact that you are doing something sweet.  Here is how Levin closes out the article:

Taking a breather, I crept barefoot off to the beach, empty save for the ghost crabs who hovered by their burrows, watching me with googly-eyes. The tide was a sigh, the sky aglow with constellations, and I was, thrillingly, the only witness.

A notion of independence is essential to good travel writing.  Ultimately, these are not articles about snorkeling with Swedish people in a tropical paradise.  They are testaments to the sense of liberation that comes with doing whatever you want.  It is less about travel and more about freedom.

A few months ago, I wrote a four-part post titled “How to Travel Alone.” In part two, I describe an impulsive decision that was momentous in my own realization that you can do whatever you want:

After an amazing four days of scuba diving in Coron, an island in Palawan that was the inspiration for the novel The Beach, I flew to Manila.  I was planning on taking a bus up north to La Union, a town northern Luzon, to do some surfing.  I bid farewell to a friend I’d met on the boat, and walked to the exit to hail a taxi at around 7 PM.  The main terminal in Ninoy Aquino International Airport has huge glass walls with a view of the city.

I took a moment to reflect on my plans.  Looking out at the city skyline, I thought about the traffic, the pollution, and the seedy red light district where my favorite guesthouse happened to be located.  After a few contemplative minutes, I turned around, walked up to the Cebu Pacific ticket counter and bought a flight to Cebu that night for $30.  I got on the next flight and arrived in Cebu City at 11, called a friend to get a recommendation for a place to stay, took a taxi there and booked a room.

The next morning, I got up early and took a bus to Moalboal, a town two hours south that someone recommended in Coron.  Twenty meters below the surface of the ocean, surrounded by millions of sardines off the coast of Pescadero Island, the decision to re-write the plan was validated.

To this day, I think about staring out at Manila and turning around to buy that ticket.  That, I thought at the time, is liberating.

This sign was hanging in the lobby of the guesthouse I checked into in Cebu the night I booked the flight from Manila.

So my hat is off to Dan Levin, who successfully made the rest of the world jealous.  Your humble correspondent certainly enjoys writing and thinking about geopolitics, international development, poverty alleviation, and other deep matters.  But he is happiest when writing about life on the road, and the impulsive decisions that make it interesting.  So I hope you learned something.  Because this is a great way to make your friends jealous.


Develop Economies’ Music Recommendation

A Meta-Travel Writing Piece, pt. 1

As a generalization, people who travel are interesting.  Not interesting in the sense that they are unique or intriguing (sometimes that is the case), but that they often tell good stories because they have fresh experiences to draw from.  And within the broader fraternity of travelers, the people who detach themselves from the grid and opt for the most self-indulgent of all pursuits – living on a boat, for example – are really the ones who are out there doing it.  Lately, some fortunate journalists from the New York Times have managed to convince their editors to allow them to do just that, and still get paid for their troubles.  And, in the spirit of the meritocratic nature of the Internet, I am going to give a lesson on travel writing.

Someone (not me) entering the propeller

These two articles – “Out at Sea, Relaxing in the Philippines” and “Cambodia’s Sweet Spot” – are basically cubicle fantasies, subtly acknowledging that the whole purpose of the piece is to make you wish that you were there and not where you happen to be at the moment.  In the first, the author takes a five-day sailing trip from El Nido to Coron.  Faithful readers of this blog will remember that Coron is the place where I cut my diving teeth, descending to 42 meters (12 beyond the legal limit for someone of my experience and designation) and into the propeller shaft of the Okikawa Maru, World War II relic of the naval battles in the Pacific Rim.   In a true case of trial by fire, I followed a Filipino dive master who had forgotten to put batteries in his torch inside the ship and was trailed by a Frenchman who almost got lost taking a wrong turn down a staircase in a 168-meter long Japanese tanker sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.   Fortunately, we caught the Frenchman heading to a different floor before it was too late, though his spirit of adventure would have hopefully guided him out of whichever room in the ship he happened to find himself.

The flight from Coron

The second article is about Kep, a sleepy town in Cambodia that has recently seen a surge of interest from travelers seeking an authentic and laid-back beach experience.  As a young backpacker in 2009, I considered myself what people in the business world call a “first-mover,” descending on the place with a small group of American microfinance volunteers and a Belgian epidemiologist who had nothing but bad things to say about two-term president who directly preceded Barack Obama.  Ironically, the Belgians, led by King Leopold, made the Americans look like Mother Theresa during the 19th century in Africa.  Unfortunately, this blog was only three posts long at the time, and the fourth – classified in my “travel and culture” section” – read as follows:

I am heading to Vietnam until December 23rd, and Cambodia until January 4th.  I am going to try to update the blog as much as I can during the break.  See you in 2010.

Clearly I was not as knowledgeable about geopolitics as I am today.  Had I met this Belgian the 260th post (this one), he would have received an earful.  Fortunately, another Kiva Fellow and frequent travel buddy, Gemma, did know a thing or two about a thing or two, and let him have it.

The only way off the island off the coast of Kep

These articles in the Times follow a classic pattern of travel writing.  Each one opens with an anecdote describing a mundane situation which generally would not happen to in your daily life.  Levin comes out swinging in his piece, opening with a brief paragraph setting the scene:

WE were floating gingerly over a forest of antler-shaped coral when I heard a Swede who was snorkeling with me shout. I popped my head above water and caught only a fragment of his declaration in the slosh of waves: “Monster in a hole.”

When he wrote that line, he surely knew what he was doing, which is to effectively reach out from the pages of the newspaper and grab the poor guy who just wanted to take his mind off the pile of work his boss just put on his desk by the collar and say “See what you could be doing?”.  Now, on top of all that, the man has to deal with the knowledge that someone somewhere is being paid to snorkel with Swedes.  But that is the key to being a good travel writer.  No one wants to read about the guy who stayed on the boat because he was afraid of getting sunburned.  They want to hear about the crazy Swedish guy who is hunting for moray eels.

Hello turtle.

Once you have set the scene, you really need to drive the point home.  Again, Levin pulls no punches in letting you know just how much better his life is than yours.  After finishing the story about the snorkeling Swede, he breaks it down in much simpler terms:

Fortunately, relaxation was never in short supply aboard the Buhay. We were in the middle of nowhere, paradise-style: a sea of high-definition azure stretching to the horizon, dotted only by distant uninhabited islands. After a few days of sailing, life had become a hazy routine: eat, snorkel, chill out. Repeat.

Nothing to do but relax.

I know from experience that this is exactly what happens in the waters between El Nido and Coron.  After getting my open water and advanced certification in the span of a week, I flew to Coron to explore some wrecks.  Normally, you would need a special certification and at least 50 dives before exploring a sunken ship 40 meters below the surface of the ocean.  Of course, I had neither a certification nor anything close to 50 dives.

Fortunately, this is not the case in the Philippines, where the same laid-back vibe that Levin describes pervades every aspect of life, including the risk tolerance of the Filipino beach bum in charge of keeping you alive underwater.  When he asked how many dives I had, I lied and said 15 (it was only 10).  Clearly, I should have gone higher, since his next question was, “How good are you?”  But as a two-year captain of my swim team in high school, very little about the water scares me, so down we went.

In part two of this post, I will describe how to use language and stories to make people jealous.


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Desperation in the Slums of Nairobi

SLUM LIFE: A girl stood outside a school in the Mukuru kwa Njenga slum in Nairobi, Kenya. An Amnesty International Report says the government has failed to incorporate slums, leaving women vulnerable to sexual and other attacks. (Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

On Thursday, I shadowed a colleague of mine as he conducted a survey of one of the slum communities where we have several schools.  For the last few months, I have been analyzing data about the communities where we build schools and understand where demand is highest.  Having spent months looking at scatter plots, I hoped the trip would provide better context and illuminate some of the nuances hidden within the data.  As it turned out, the trip did more than that – it exposed me to the worst poverty I have ever seen.

I met Dickens, a research associate with the company, near the Hilton Hotel in downtown Nairobi.  After a quick breakfast, we walked a half hour through markets, past the bus station where a group of al-Shabaab sympathizers recently threw four grenades into a crowd of people, killing four and wounding dozens more.   We picked up a matatu heading to Lunga Lunga, the densely-populated slum in the industrial area near the airport, arriving at around 9 in the morning.  This is the same slum where a leaking gas line exploded, killing 75 people.  Once you step away from the main road and down into the slums, you find yourself in a maze of narrow roads and alleys surrounded on all sides by shacks made of corrugated iron sheets.

The industrial slum – also known as Mukuru Kwa Njenga – is actually one of the better slums in Nairobi, which is not saying much.  It’s proximity to manufacturing facilities – we surveyed a woman whose home literally bordered a 10-meter wall surrounding a factory – means the residents of the slums have better access to casual manual labor and, if they are lucky, salaried employment.  This access to economic opportunities is one of the main reasons people move to this slum in the first place.

Dickens is a field guy.  He began working at the company a few months ago after a stint running a survey team with a public health organization.   He has a deep knowledge of the conditions in both the rural areas and the urban slums.  When our GPS device failed to give us directions to the school, we stopped to ask a group of a boy and two girls in their late teens.  The girls were drunk and standing outside of a church, where they were picking up their ARVs – the anti-retroviral drugs that prevent HIV from turning into full-blown AIDS and reduce the risk of transmission.

At 6.7%, the HIV rate in Kenya is low compared to other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.  But transmission rates in the slums are high; an estimated 14% of the residents of Korogocho, one of the largest slums in Nairobi, are HIV-positive.  In this slum, where men are paid more frequently, it may even be higher.  Because of the stigma attached to positive status, people prefer to pick up their ARVs from churches rather than hospitals.  We thanked them for the directions and went to find the school.

These slums were one of the first places where we opened our schools.  We have more than five in an area of only a few square kilometers.  Our school in Lunga Lunga is one of the most successful in our network, and watching the children run around the playground and gave some much-needed tangible meaning to the work I am doing.  After meeting the school manager, Patrick, we walked past the school and over a rickety bridge spanning a trash- and sewage-filled stream toward the community where we would continue our research.

residents in the usual conditions of Nairobi's Mukuru-kwa-Njenga slum. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images

While Dickens conducted the survey in Kiswahili, the local language, I jotted down observations and questions in my notebook, not wanting to influence the answers of the respondents.  When a person sees a white person conducting a survey in the slums, they may have an incentive to make their situation seem more desperate in order to secure money.  Whether or not this was the case, I kept my distance during most interviews.

After an interview conducted in a small alleyway, we stepped back into the main road running through the slum –barely wide enough to fit a car – where we saw a young man in his late teens or early twenties being held and pushed by five other men.  Dickens shook his head and speculated that the man had been caught stealing.  “This is not going to end well,” he said.  In the slums, where people are already consumed by stress and on edge from the sheer desperation, mob justice often trumps the formal legal channels.  In the best case scenario, the police would intervene before anything could happen.  More likely, the men took him to the place where he was accused of stealing and beat him mercilessly, possibly to death.  In Kenyan slums, death by beating, stoning, or necklacing for the crime of stealing is not uncommon.  In this case, I don’t know what happened, and I am not sure I want to.

After Dickens finished the surveys, I asked if we could find our school in a part of the slum known as Tassia.  I wanted to see how the school was situated in the community in order to understand how location influences the number of students.  As we walked further down the road, Dickens and I noticed the number of people outside their homes growing smaller until it finally became empty.  When the street opened up into a massive dumpsite filled with burning trash, it became quickly apparent why this part of town was empty.  Dumpsites are notoriously dangerous, as idle youths mill around, drinking chang-a, the local brew, and robbing anyone who happens to venture too close.  Dickens made the decision to go back, and I agreed.  So we turned around and exited the slum along the same road from which we entered.  We caught a matatu back to town and called it a day.

The Dandora waste dumping site is an unrestricted dumping site that contains many hazardous materials. The United Nations did a study of more than 300 schoolchildren near Dandora and found that about 50% of them had respiratory problems. Also, 30% had blood abnormalities that signaled heavy-metal poisoning. (Photo Credit: Brendan Bannon)

The slums of Nairobi are a horrible place to live.  They are cramped, unsanitary, and dangerous.  Girls walking home from school risk being raped along the way, and murders go unnoticed by the media.  Life is as cheap as the rent, which is next to nothing.  I have been to the rural areas of Ghana and the Philippines and seen poverty of a different sort, where people still live hand-to-mouth, but still live a decent, if not difficult, existence.

The urban slums are another kind of poverty altogether.  They are the product of poorly-planned urbanization, corruption, and general indifference on the part of those who could do something about it.  Half of the population of Nairobi – about 2 million people – lives in an area that covers only 5% of the land.  And most people are trapped, forced to grind out a miserable existence or move back to the country, to a different kind of poverty.

I’m glad I went out to the slums, since it gave me perspective, both in my work and my life.  Some people have it bad.  And I am thankful I am not one of them.


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How to Get Around the World

c. 2008. I jettisoned the blazer of corporate America to live more deliberately

Perhaps the most novel and amusing aspect of living abroad is getting around.  In the United States, I spent two years walking through the Copley Square mall to avoid the dismal cold of Boston winters.  When I moved back with my parents to save money for my Kiva Fellowship, I parked my car at Norwood Central and took the commuter rail into Back Bay Station each morning, and back again in the evening.  I actually enjoyed riding the rails for those three months, since it was my first and, to-date, my only taste of suburban work-a-day living.  Every morning, armed with a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a day-old Wall Street Journal discarded by my father, I boarded the train and appreciated the fact that I was a commuter.  And, unlike my fellow riders, I didn’t have to worry about mortgage payments and other of adulthood’s reality checks.

I brought this same zeal with me to the countries I’ve lived and traveled.  And, when it comes to getting around, Africa and Asia do it right.

A tricycle and mini-bus in Bago City, Philippines

I am not quite sure where transportation innovation comes from, but the evolutionary pathway took a radical turn at some point, leaving Asia with the transportation equivalent of the sea animals shown in the Blue Planet episode on the deep ocean.  In the Philippines, the staple of the transportation diet is the jeepney.  These elongated former U.S. military jeeps with two parallel benches in that back and are known for their “flamboyant decoration and crowded seating.” These vehicles would be absurd if they weren’t so practical and convenient.  Each jeepney has a defined route, allowing you to hop-on and hop-off at your leisure, provided you know where you are going.  Amazingly the driver serves as both the controller and the comptroller, handling the money and the navigation simultaneously.  Given the separation of these duties in Africa, this feat is a testament to the industriousness of Filipinos .

A late-night impromptu jeepney charter with some new friends in Manila

For the more rural traveler, the tricycle will get you where you need to go.  Unlike the smaller, more childish version to which most people are accustomed, Filipino tricycles have a sidecar attached to a motorbike.  It is designed for two, but I have seen no less than eight people riding through the rural areas.  This may seem crazy, but it becomes more reasonable once you have seen a family of five on a single motorbike in Phnom Penh.

Sharing the back of the tricycle with a couple of kiddos

Motorbiking in Kep, Cambodia

To take you the last mile, you can pick up a trisikad.  It is the same as a tricycle, except pedal-powered.  It is truly excruciating for the driver, who is carrying 500 pounds of people on a BMX.  I know because I tried my luck as a trisikad driver during one late-night excursion back from the bar on Bantayan Island, which gave me a new appreciation for white collar labor.

Hour #12 on the bus in Burma

Different species belonging to the same phylum as these weird creatures exist throughout Southeast Asia.  The tuk-tuk in Cambodia and Thailand, the motorbike in Vietnam, and the fishing-boat ferry with the outboard motor in waterway throughout Asia give you a taste of the authentic.  Of course, the bicycle is truly the rice of the Southeast Asian diet, ubiquitous and trustworthy.

Riding my bike in Bagan

For some serious grittiness, Africa offers a connoisseur’s menu.  In Ghana, the tro-tro, otherwise known as “the tro,” is the way to get around.  It is a large, rectangular van forged out of hard steel.  Unlike the florid jeepney, the tro is straight monochromatic business.  For a dollar or two, one can “tro it,” as my Canadian friends used to say, long distances.  For a more comfortable ride, you can take the air-conditioned bus, but will be forced to watch Nigerian movies that are generally about witches, adultery, or both.  Unlike Hollywood, where a director might put out one movie a year, Nollywood functions more like the soft-core pornography industry, where directors make a movie a week.

Riding the train to Mombasa, Kenya

For pure chaos, Nairobi is truly Mecca.  Matatus – 14-seater passenger vans operated by a two-man team made up of a driver and a “tout” – careen through the city, spending more time on the sidewalk or the wrong lane than in their own lane, where they belong.  These horrible transports cause problems for everything, creating needless traffic jams by purposefully creating loggerheads and refusing to back down.   As with copies of the Sega game “Shaq Fu,” the world would be a better place if they did not exist.  Fortunately, the city of Nairobi is planning on getting rid of them once and for all.

In my Barack Obama shirt, next to the Tender Lover

There is one saving grace to matatus: their names.  A friend of mine actually compiled a list of the best matatu names over the course of three months.  Here are a few:

  1. Total Pain
  2. Facebook
  3. Hearse
  4. Emirates
  5. Tender Lover
  6. Burberry
  7. Ceo
  8. Short Message
  9. Mystical
  10. Malia Obama
  11. Baseline
  12. Alicia
  13. Compliant MOA
  14. God’s Power
  15. Pirates
  16. Jolly Escort
  17. Christaholic
  18. Seduction
  19. Annointed Reloaded
  20. Karl Malone

Either way, these miserable machines get the job done.  And I will keep riding them until something better comes along.

Anyways, those are some of my favorite forms of transportation.  I look forward to sample the rest of what the world has to offer.

A fishing boat on Inle Lake, Burma


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