The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 logical advances are only really good when they help sat- isfy these basic needs and create jobs. Nothing works if you are unemployed and constantly hungry. One factor that has always existed on the continent and continues to grow is spirituality. Harnessing that deep reservoir and directing it toward achieving good works would be a great boon to development. Unfortunately, much of this spiritual activity is misdirected. There are still places where more money is paid to witch doctors than on the education of children. The same can also be said of the amount of money spent on ostentatious funerals and on al- coholic beverages. In some areas, excessive alcohol con- sumption and the use of traditional narcotic plants (e.g., qat in Somalia) have created dysfunctional societies. To remind myself of just how complex and fragile human societies are, I also keep in my office a 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart , by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. And next to my computer, I’ve posted the 1919 poem, “The Second Coming,” by W.B. Yeats, fromwhich Achebe drew his title phrase. Development is, after all, about muchmore thanmoney. If a country needs loads of external aid to develop, it prob- ably can never do so. A closer examination is needed of those key things that keep people poor, but do not require outside funding to be fixed. In the meantime, it is likely that the poor will always be with us and, thus, the aid worker will always have work to do. We often overlook that culture, values and work ethic matter a great deal, and that you cannot re-engineer entire societies overnight. Born in Kansas, “Made” in Africa Still, I long for the “old” Africa, where a good harvest filled the family granary and lasted until the next harvest (that is rarely the case today). HIV/AIDS was unknown, aquatic weeds had not clogged all of Africa’s waterways and plastic bags had not yet littered the landscape. Climate change was not a consideration, and human trafficking, the drug trade and terrorist acts were also unknown. I am glad that I got to know the continent when I was able to see many things that no longer exist ― like the now- F OCUS