Death of American good works

Our family lived in West Africa for two years when I was a teenager. One of my friends worked for USAID helping to build a small palm oil factory for local villagers.

Palm oil was used as cooking oil in Guinea, the West African nation where my father was stationed with the U.S. Information Service.

Mostly he taught English to locals and put together publicity on visits by American artists and projects such as the palm oil factory. For my part, I went to a Guinean school as the only white kid in an all-black classroom that was taught in French.

At the time, the palm oil project was regarded by the Americans and by the Guineans as a good thing, a project that helped Guineans while promoting the American image abroad.

The work by the aid agency was often done in tandem with Peace Corps volunteers who were spread out across the country, taking jobs essentially without pay as teachers and nurses. One of them, a lovely, dark-haired 20-something woman who seemed like a true goddess to a 14-year-old, nursed me back to health after an operation in Kankan, in eastern Guinea, that left me without an appendix.

But even at the time — this was in the mid-1960s — the Chinese were competing for the hearts and minds of the Africans, supporting building projects in the region that that they promoted to the local people through billboards that I can still see in my mind’s eye.

Maybe there was a bit of a flip side to the work of agency in that our neighbor in the Guinean capital Conakry was a USAID official and I still remember him explaining how he fattened his salary through liberal use of his per diem allotment.

But I remain mystified as to why an aid program that is rarely talked about or covered or even noticed by most Americans became a central attack point for the new administration. It is as though any government program not geared toward company profit is by default corrupt.

It is doubly strange because the notion of good works and generosity are bound up in the ethos of the American people — an ethos reflected within my own family going back in time.

Grandfather was a Christian preacher who relied on the moral principles gathered within the Sermon on the Mount, advancing compassion and mercy over materialism and domination. He preached in Disciples of Christ churches, a group within the larger movement of independent Christian churches in America.

That ethos also came forward in my experience as a reporter and as a young man who rode a bicycle across much of the U.S., talking to people along the way. Americans as a whole are a generous and forgiving people.

So this new deal where good works by our nation are by default seen as corrupt and even sinister runs counter to that culture and history.

Among my relatives, many remain closely tied to the Christian faith. They include a cousin from Alabama who last week posted with approval a social media comment on work by the American aid agency.

“When I was working in the Congo in their first (and only) elections, the civil war had ended with estimates of 50,000 orphans under 18 in the capital. Many had been forced into becoming child soldiers in civil war,” said the comment. “Al-Qaeda & other terrorist groups saw it as a Job Fair, recruiting by offering food, money, shelter, a way to get off streets.

“USAID officials were fighting this by offering alternatives of job training, shelter, medical care, psychological help for the traumatized orphans,” said the witness. “I saw this work. Tens of thousands of potential terrorists were given an alternative life and embraced it with relief. No twelve-year-old wants to continue a life of violence and death if given another path.

“This is soft power,” he concluded. “We could have waited to confront the threat with our military. But it was far more efficient, cheaper, to spend USAID dollars than waiting until they were killing Americans.”

So it is true that the people of our nation have voted for regime change.

But I don’t know that they voted to accelerate global warming, eliminate the wondrous flora and fauna of our planet, and incinerate America’s good works.