In A Developing Country

I've told you a little bit about my day job, which involves caring about global public health, and by extension about the lives and health of those in developing countries (you may know them better as "The Third World", although their designation in both international and U.S. officialese is "LMCs", for "low- and middle-income countries", and others of you may just know them as "places where wogs live"). I take a fair amount of abuse at my day job, because I do not, in fact, except at a purely conceptual level, give a flying fuck about developing countries. I do not visit them and move amongst the people feeling their pain and their need for economic development and improved health care and a decent pinot, although of course I recognize that these folk have this pain and these needs and I am perfectly supportive of throwing money at poor foreigners and their problems, as long as it's other people doing the airdrop and refuelling in Mumbai for a 22-hour flight home.

If it is your personal opinion that this makes me a bad person, I can live with this, and I will suffer your disdain and your wrath and go pour myself another glass of red, and I may even toast your right to hold the personal opinion that I am a bad person. I may even be clinking glasses with you.

Now, the level at which my job involves caring about global public health is at the giving-money-to-other-people-to-do-actual-work level. I don't do any actual work. The things I do, like agreeing to give people money, and keeping careful track of who I agreed to give money to, and calling them names when they don't do the actual work we paid them to do, and keeping track of the actual work that is done, and maybe even, when they say pretty please and offer me sexual favors, shaking the government's money-disbursing tree so that it will just maybe consider actually paying them the money that it, in the guise of me, promised to pay them for doing actual work, are not, in fact, actual work, in the global public health sense.

So the people who do actual global public health work think I'm sort of an odd duck. Sometimes, when the actual work they want to do is borderline stupid, I'll make them dance a little for their other peoples' money; sometimes I'll even make them drink a bunch of Jell-O shooters and dance nekkid, if I'm feeling particularly snarky. I do this in a way that impresses them, at least superficially, because while I am not a global public health person and I do not, in some academic or technical sense, know shit about global public health, I have learned a great deal through the osmosis of boredom (and through the osmosis of having a retired public health official for one parent and the She-Nurse of the SS for another parent). I can manage to ask probing and articulate and cogent questions about the actual work for which these people would like to be paid from the pool of charitably-funded slush that I administer.

They get confused, then, these people. They grok my cogent question and ask when I was last in Brazzaville or Manaus or Chennai, and they get more confused when I answer, "perhaps in my previous life as an officer in Gordon's cavalry," or "well, it was just part of Pangaea back then." Their little highly educated brows furrow and they think, hard, and ask where I've been. And I tell them about Augusta or the other Augusta or perhaps even the north side of Columbus, or if I'm feeling really naughty, I'll tell them that I've been on 125th Street and I was pretty darned sure that was a low-income country, at least it was back then, before Bill Clinton starting hanging out there and blowing his horn or checking out splashtacious booty or feeling peoples' pain or their ta-tas or whatever the hell it is he does in Harlem.

I have charmed these people, so they manage to limit their outrage, because outrage just isn't polite and anyway I could cost their employers thousands of dollars just by farting out a few well-chosen gems of bureaucratic negation if I really were as vindictive as we all like to pretend I am. But they're really, really bothered by the notion that I don't go to Chad for fun. Or for any other reason.

I am so opposed to this notion of other continents that I am wiggling like a thousand rabid earthworms to keep from having to go on a mission to Asia next year, for the grand opening of our newest superstore--the jewel event in our crown of eventitude. Why? Because it's a really, really long flight, the government of the host country is really interested in the mission and I'd have to make a serious effort to behave myself for the entire time I was there, and I don't want to eat what foreign people put in front of me at banquets or risk hurting their little feelings if I don't happen to share their no-doubt hard-earned opinions on what one calls food. Would I see some really, really cool stuff, I mean mind-bogglingly cool stuff that has been on this Earth for thousands of years, in a culture that has outlived ours by that very magnitude, and that anyone in their right mind would dream of seeing? You bet. But I'm not eating jellied octopus pancreas.

If it is your personal opinion that this makes me a bad person, I can live with this, and I will suffer your disdain and your wrath and go pour myself another glass of red, and I may even toast your right to hold the personal opinion that I am a bad person. I may even be clinking glasses with you.

But I can no longer suffer the wrath of my colleagues in the global public health industry, so I am finally breaking down and travelling out to the developing world tomorrow. I have chosen, to be sure, a country that shares our linguistic values, so as to minimize my feeling of alienation from the culture. It is an old country, with a culture that predates ours (which is not hard, since we're still in the pretty darned young range, as far as cultures and governments go). They have some odd culinary habits, to be sure, but I think I can manage to stomach what this proud nation has to offer in the way of gustatory delights. It is a country that has, for more than a few years, depended on U.S. foreign aid of various sorts to make ends meet, and to preserve its most peculiar form of democracy. But it is not to be scorned for that, for is that not America's righteous place in the community of nations? Its citizens are plagued with health problems, most especially bad teeth and a propensity for mob violence. But I will go minister to these unfortunates, and bring to them a bit of the charm and graciousness that marks our fine culture, as I sample and come to appreciate theirs in the spirit of world oneness.

And don't worry, my hotel is right down the street from the British Museum, and there's a Starbucks around the corner. I'll still be able to post.