Showing posts with label Bangladesh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bangladesh. Show all posts

Friday, January 14, 2011

Must-see TV tonight: ABC News 20/20 on cover-ups at The Peace Corps re murder, gang rape of American volunteers; Pitt & Jolie as a bad Tarzan & Jane



ABC News 20/20: Parents of Slain Volunteer Say Peace Corps Error Led to Murder
Anonymous Whistleblower's Name Revealed to Suspect Accused of Sexually Abusing Children
By Anna Schecter and Brian Ross

January 14, 2011


The family of a 24-year old Peace Corps volunteer from Atlanta, Kate Puzey, says agency personnel set her up to be murdered by revealing her role in the dismissal of an employee she accused of sexually abusing children at a school in the African country of Benin.


Read the rest of the story at: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/parents-slain-volunteer-peace-corps-error-led-murder/story?id=12607274&nwltr=blotter_featureMore





ABC News 20/20: Peace Corps Volunteer Murder
Cousin of victim Kate Puzey: 'It's hard to be a girl in that part of the world.'


ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross:
Why Would Anyone Want to Kill Kate?
20/20 Investigation: Scandal Inside the Peace Corps

Story at:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/peace-corps-murder/story?id=12583120



ABC News 20/20: Peace Corps Volunteer Describes Brutal Rape

Jess Smochek said she was gang raped while working in Bangladesh.

January 12, 2011

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/video/peace-corps-volunteer-describes-brutal-rape-12600417

ABC News 20/20 Investigation: Scandal Inside the Peace Corps airs tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern on ABC-TV.

As I've mentioned here previously, I've had many friends from IU and former housemates in Washington, D.C. who were former Peace Corps volunteers in countries ranging from Mali to Nepal, quite literally, Timbuktu to Kathmandu.
In fact, I've even had Thanksgiving Dinner at a friend's home in Northern Virgina and around a large table, been surprised to discover that I was the only one there who hadn't been in the Peace Corps.


I'm sorry to say that the stories Brian Ross tells of a disconnect between
Peace Corps HQ and the emotional and physical depredations suffered by American volunteers surprises me not a whit. According to Ross, nine-hundred Peace Corps volunteers have been sexually assaulted or raped in just the past decade. 900!

Yet the New York Times hasn't had a single story about assaults against Peace Corps volunteers since 2002.
It's like they think they're part of the South Florida news media, where stories happening right in front of you don't see the light of day, but Lisa Petrillo news stories -practically infomercials- on eyebrow surgeries for middle-aged yentas MUST make 6 p.m. newscasts.


I've heard days and weeks of stories of both heart-breaking tenderness and of the perils of feeling sorry for people who lived in poverty or near-poverty, and hearing how brazenly evil and corrupt many of these residents were, involved as they were with organized crime and the black market, happy to subjugate their own town or neighboring ones thru fear, violence and physical intimidation, while government workers in their area knew full-well what was going on.

The latter had practiced the art of looking the other way, either due to fear or unwillingness to be the bearer of bad news to some Ministry office.

(That behavior sounds awfully familiar to Floridians, does it not he said knowingly?)

When you know about these sorts of things from having been eyewitness to them, you feel the need to unburden yourself and try to tell others whom you think will profit from knowing the truth, which is why I never tired of hearing these stories from my friends, even if they often were such downers that we were drinking by the end of the story.
Even when I'd already heard the story before.


Daniel Patrick Moynihan described the Peace Corps in a letter as:
“a rip-off by the upper middle classes. Fortunes spent to send Amherst boys for an interesting learning experience in Venezuela,” paid for by “men equally young pumping gas on the New Jersey Turnpike.”

An even more negative and eye-opening view of what often happens when the West tries to help the poor and gets in the way of common sense public policy and hinders the responsibility of the people you're trying to help to actually help themselves, comes in the form of this prescient 2005 New York Times Guest OpEd essay by writer Paul Theroux, whose books and essays I've read for many years and who is, himself, a former Peace Corps volunteer to Malawi.

But
Theroux was so much more than the average volunteer, and is more than just a critic of the bureaucracy of empire aid, as this makes clear:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Theroux
He puts his money and his body where his mouth is.

I read this essay in The Times the day it was printed, cut it out and still have it in a folder.

It's a keeper!


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/opinion/15theroux.html?scp=20&sq=%22Peace%20Corps%22&st=cse

New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rock Star's Burden
By Paul Theroux
December 15, 2005

Hale'iwa, Hawaii

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself :Bono"- as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.

Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

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See more at: http://abcnews.go.com/2020

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/t/paul_theroux/index.html

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/authordetail.cfm?authorID=2221107