the best insights are often gained by just hanging out with people. You strike up a conversation with the desk clerk or the passenger sitting next to you. You never know where it will lead.
Much of the time, I rely on colleagues to translate. I mean this in the broadest sense—not only the literal translation of words and phrases from another language but interpretations of history, society, and culture. I have also learned not to take what I am told at face value. In any country, there is no single, accepted history or vision for the future; instead, there are many perspectives, and they are constantly in motion, fanned by the winds of politics, nationalism, and identity.
I’ve been weaving my notes into narratives, trying to put places and people in historical and cultural context, since my travels to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia in the mid-1990s. I have also written articles for newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. The Central Asia stories, originally sent as e-mail letters to family and friends, formed the basis for my first offbeat memoir, Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia, published in 2016. It recounted my travels and work in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
This book has a broader geographical sweep, describing a broad and circuitous arc around the Indian Ocean with insights into the history, geography, politics, economy, climate, and belief systems of four countries where I’ve traveled over the last decade. My journey begins in Madagascar’s chaotic capital, Antananarivo, then wanders through the Central Highlands, the eastern rain forest, and the savannah and desert of the southwest, offering glimpses of the history, culture, and politics of a beguiling but desperately poor country. From Madagascar, I make the long leap northeast across the Arabian Sea to the Indian subcontinent. India defies all generalizations because of its social, ethnic, and religious diversity. My narrative begins in the capital Delhi, then broadens out in space and time, exploring the colonial legacy, the partition of British India, and the country’s demographic, economic, and environmental challenges. From the north, I move to the ancient kingdom of Hyderabad, and finally to the underdeveloped “chicken-neck,” the northeastern states of Assam and Meghalaya. Then I follow the Brahmaputra River south to Bangladesh, a country defined by its rivers and struggle for independence. From the traffic jams and garment factories of Dhaka, I travel to the rice bowl and commercial centers of western Bangladesh, to the tea gardens of the northeast, and to the delta region—the front line for climate change. My journey ends in Indonesia—at Banda Aceh, ground zero for the 2004 tsunami, the noise and traffic of the capital, Jakarta, ancient Yogyakarta, and the beaches and backcountry of Bali.
Ambivalent about Development
My first experience in international development work came in December 1995 when, at short notice, I took an assignment to set up a journalists’ training center in southern Kyrgyzstan, a region that had experienced ethnic conflict over land, resources, and political power. My US embassy liaison flew with me to the city of Osh, stayed a couple of days, and then left, wishing me good luck. I spoke only a few words of Russian and had few contacts. I hired a student as interpreter, found an apartment, visited local media, launched a search for a center manager, and enlisted Peace Corps volunteers to teach English classes in exchange for Internet access.
Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan’s economy was still in freefall: factories and collective farms had closed, the currency devalued, pensions almost worthless, and power cuts frequent. Often I was the only diner in a restaurant where a sad-faced waiter apologized that most items on the menu were not available. In subzero temperatures, families squatted on the broken concrete sidewalks, their possessions—kitchen utensils, auto parts, school textbooks, old clothes, Soviet memorabilia—spread out on blankets. I don’t know who was buying because most passersby were just as poor as the sellers.
Before my work in Kyrgyzstan, the problems of the developing world had seemed remote and abstract to me—a wire service report on the latest famine or civil war somewhere in Africa, a TV charity appeal with images of suffering women and children. Now I was seeing them for myself. My experience convinced me that I had the skills and temperament to work effectively in an unfamiliar and challenging situation. A quarter of a century and two revolutions later, the Osh Media Center is still going strong, despite political and financial pressures.
Over the next twenty years, I returned frequently to Central Asia—to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. For my university, I took student groups to Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, and Thailand and managed an exchange program between Indonesian and US television journalists. I had two Fulbright Teaching Fellowships—in Kyrgyzstan (1996–97) and in Kazakhstan (2011). In Asia and southern Africa, I have worked for a veritable alphabet soup of international and government organizations. I have conducted workshops on training techniques for broadcast managers and worked with journalists to improve their reporting on social, economic, and environmental issues. For six years, I led a team that offered a global training course on communication for development (C4D) for UNICEF staff, with workshops held in Ohio, Johannesburg, and Hyderabad. The Madagascar research fiasco was followed by a successful two-year project to introduce C4D curricula at universities in Bangladesh and improve the research skills of faculty.
To work in development, you have to believe you can make a difference, however small, in people’s lives. It’s all too easy to become frustrated—by bureaucracy, ill-conceived project goals, and especially unrealistic timelines. Social and cultural change occurs slowly; no mass media campaign, however creative or far-reaching, will suddenly transform people’s attitudes and behaviors. It may take a generation for people to change the way they think about issues such as child marriage or girls’ education, and another generation to do something about them. Yet donors demand fast, measurable results that will show up as a good return on investment in annual reports and press releases. They account for the funds they receive on a yearly basis and have to report results. The “annual report syndrome,” as an eloquent critic of top-down approaches to development, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, calls it, “is one of the worst enemies of development” because it “forces a chain of lies and exaggerations from the grassroots level up to the implementers and funding institutions.”2
The “lies and exaggerations” often begin earlier in the cycle, when government and international development agencies invite bids for contracts. In the United States, a relatively small number of not-for-profit and private-sector organizations, most of them in the Washington, DC area (earning them the sobriquet of “Beltway Bandits”), compete for lucrative contracts—not only from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) but from the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as from other agencies. Because all the bidders are staffed by seasoned professionals and have a host of consultants on their rosters, it’s difficult to pick a winner based on expertise. More often than not, the agency awards the contract to the bidder who promises the most for the least money and has lined up an impressive list of partners and collaborators. After winning the contract, the organization spends months negotiating a work plan; inevitably, goals and activities are scaled back, and partners dropped, because there isn’t enough money to do what was originally promised.
Although development agencies pay lip service to the idea of community participation, most projects are designed and implemented by professionals to meet donor priorities. In many sub-Saharan African countries, more people die each year from malaria or diarrhea than from AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, yet more money is earmarked for reproductive health than for mosquito nets and oral rehydration kits. Even when reproductive health is a priority, aid comes with conditions; USAID contractors are shackled by Congressional guidelines that specify the percentage of funds to be spent on abstinence programs, even if condom distribution has more impact.
“The more we invest in development, the more we contribute to the growing of the cemetery of development.” That’s Gumucio Dagron’s gloomy assessment. Newly built schools are closed because no money was allocated to pay teachers or buy desks and books. Water and sanitation systems are abandoned because no one knows how to maintain them. Gumucio Dagron offers a catalog of failed projects—abandoned hospitals, broken-down vehicles, and “two thousand post office mail boxes rusting under the rain in a village of five hundred illiterate families who neither received nor wrote letters.”3
I cannot