The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2023 85 The Pavarotti could take large quantities of food and small vehicles. Inset: When not carrying food, the boat could accommodate about 100 people at a time. food commodities across on boats. Food aid is bulky and heavy (50-pound bags of cornmeal, large tins of oil, and 25-pound sacks of beans). The small local boats, mostly dugout canoes, could only trans- port a relatively tiny amount of food. That’s where Luciano Pavarotti comes in; the renowned opera singer was also a goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR. A charity named “Luciano and Friends” did a refugee benefit concert inMay 2002 and raised enoughmoney to donate a cargo boat. Pavarotti asked UNHCR if he could name it after his father, Fer- nando Pavarotti, who had just died. To get the metal cargo boat to where it was needed, it had to be cut into sections and transported thousands of miles from the coast, then reassembled on-site. A pontoon boat, it was a cheap, efficient way to float up to 63 metric tons at a time across the river. The boat could also transport small vehicles; and when not transporting food, it had enough deck space to take about a hundred refugees at a time. I had certainly not expected to see a boat named Pavarotti on the Zambezi River. But there it was. We can be proud of the ingenuity of the various agencies and the generosity of the American people in supporting the refugees, who had no land to farm in Zambia and no other way to get food. Thankfully, all of them eventually moved back to Angola. International aid sometimes works in strange ways and makes for strange bedfellows. n COURTESYOFCARLHENN