By TIM WATKIN
Huddled over his hot chocolate, James Addis takes a minute off from worrying about the weather in Ethiopia and the racial hatred in Kosovo. He worries, instead, about David Beckham's haircut. As World Vision's communications officer in New Zealand, worry comes with the job. But haircuts?
It's the sheer fatuous waste of it all, you know. Not the $900 it cost; it's the column inches and television minutes spent talking about it that bother him.
The hair went in late April, about the time aid agencies were jumping up and down and pointing at Ethiopia, warning of imminent disaster. It was two weeks and more before the world paid attention. Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin accused rich countries of waiting to see "skeletons on screens" before responding to appeals for help. It's only stretching the point a little to say that haircut cost lives.
Addis, every inch an aid-man with a Kathmandu jumper over his shirt and tie, looks up from the table: "I'd love to get the sort of coverage that David Beckham got for his haircut."
In Addis' business, coverage means dollars. Because you are reading this story, Addis hopes that some of you will give some money to World Vision. Addis wants you to keep reading. If you stop reading now, you may not learn enough to care, to contribute.
So here are the bare facts: After two years of a border war with Eritrea and three years of drought, nearly 10 million Ethiopians and 800,000 Eritreans need aid to survive. The failure of the Belg rains between mid-February and mid-April has made conditions particularly precarious. This crisis now extends to Djibouti, Kenya and Somalia. Figures from the United Nations last week estimate that $US193 million ($419 million) is needed for food and emergency relief.
To get big money like that, you need big coverage. Without it, the public will lack awareness and motivation. Politicians won't feel pressured to commit aid budgets. We won't give money. It means life or death.
"I don't know whether I should say this, but we at World Vision know that if there is not a great deal of media interest, there's not much use running an appeal. You won't raise the dollars. It's a bizarre and terrible thing, because you're really saying that you're providing aid not entirely on the basis of need but on the basis of something as fickle as whether it gets media coverage."
Are people so capricious and the media so influential?
Here's a test in which you, the reader, can take part: think of the last time you gave to charity. Did you learn about the issue or cause through the media? Think about how you read the first two sections of this newspaper. Which headlines attracted your attention? Did you catch the celebrity gossip? Did you even open the World section?
The media knows of your appetite for catchy or celebrity stories, stories you can relate to, and shocking stories. So it meets (some would say encourages) that demand.
Addis works in this ethical quicksand. As he turns the issues over in his mind, he turns the spoon in his hand. Over and over, round and round. These are complicated questions — compassion competing with dependency, means with ends. The spoon keeps turning.
"We play the game, of course. We get celebrities on board to front things like the 40 Hour Famine and so on. It is a bit of a game.
"Another factor, too, is that most of the people that the news media is geared to tend to be white people, privileged people. Take an African story like Zimbabwe with the white farmers being pushed off their land. That generated huge interest. I'm not saying that the media is explicitly racist, but their readers and their interest comes from people who are not too dissimilar to the people who are being kicked around. They have a bias.
"So you have a few white farmers being kicked off their land in Zimbabwe. You have 8 million people in Ethiopia threatened with hunger. And the news is about the few white farmers in Zimbabwe. It's an extraordinary thing to have to deal with."
But the issues go deeper. The spoon keeps turning. Even if an agency can get media interest, there is then a dilemma about whether the coverage might be misleading, manipulative or might undermine the subjects' dignity. The picture on this page — of the nurse and child — is the kind of image that prompts debate in aid offices and newsrooms alike.
"That's exactly the dilemma you face. On one hand you're accused of exploiting the poor by using these really awful images to raise money, yet on the other hand that's precisely what happens. The awful images do raise money."
The fact is, Addis trades in misery and disaster, somehow trying to extract pity and purpose from the rubble and sell it to the world. He knows, paradoxically, that the greater the misery, the more pity he can produce and sell. It's an ugly predicament because in so many parts of the world ugly things are happening — famine, war, and other brands of evil.
In 1996 Addis was in Rwanda, in 1998 he spent nine months in Sudan — "that was a very severe famine, much worse than Ethiopia" — last year it was Kosovo and Timor.
He was in the first-aid convoy going into Kosovo from Montenegro.
"It was exciting because we didn't know if the road was secure. KFOR [the UN Kosovo Force] had come in from the south and we were coming in from the west."
As they visited villages, Addis saw the destruction.
"It was pure evil. You'd go into villages where they couldn't use the well because it was full of bodies. I'll never forget this old chap standing at a well looking down and trying to decide whether the person at the top that you could see — because there were a lot of bodies under the water as well — was his wife, you know.
"There was something deeply unsettling about that in a way that Ethiopia wasn't unsettling. Because it's a very developed country ... the calculation of it."
The personal challenge is finding a way to deal with that kind of human agony up close. Addis copes by seeing lives turned around. When he arrived in Sudan he saw lots of starving children and heard silence.
"But when I left, you saw kids laughing, crying, causing the nurses all sorts of problems because they wouldn't stay where they were supposed to.
"I came back to New Zealand and the HR [human resources] manager said, 'You've obviously seen some grim things, would you like some counselling or something?' I said the best counselling was to see the transformation."
The most remarkable improvement he's seen occurred in places like Saatusa, where New Zealand donations have been sent. Fifteen years ago locals were starving. Thanks to irrigation channels and drought-resistant crops, they are living off money saved from selling surplus bananas and mangoes in Addis Ababa.
It's a success story, but just another micro-success. While aid can save lives, can it make long-term differences on a national level?
Frederick Lyons, head of the Kenya-based UN Development Programme, says unless fundamental problems such as government corruption are solved, "money spent on long-term aid programmes is likely to be misspent — it is very likely to fail in its key objectives."
Addis agrees that if "a tyrant or a fool" is in charge, the benefits of aid are hampered. But it's also a question of perspective. The media doesn't show the improvements made between disasters.
"We're always focusing on the immediate problem, so the immediate problem never seems to go away."
And frustrating as it is that Ethiopia is spending $2.17 million a day on the war, he says the Government is "very much involved in the aid arena" and is doing "a pretty darn good job."
But that's still reacting to disaster, not entrenching progress. Structural, political change is needed for that, surely. Change like debt reduction by developed countries.
Addis looks again at the picture of the nurse and child.
"This sort of scene is not a solution. It's a good action but not a solution. Once this nurse goes home the problems which led to this child looking like that will still be there. But development is a solution."
He has a case to make.
"The reason why we did not have a situation comparable to 1984 this time was because of the development work that's gone in."
What's more, that development work can prod the required political changes.
"The whole thing is about empowering the community. They form committees and they get used to planning and organising things. That often translates. To get beyond a certain point they have to negotiate with a local government representative. Their kids are able to read and write, so might write letters to a government authority and learn the political process. So I believe that although development is perhaps a slow process, it does bring fundamental political change."
The spoon stops turning. In that kind of change, there is hope. It is a hope New Zealanders seem willing to support — World Vision in New Zealand received $1.5 million for Kosovo last year and has $484,000 so far for Ethiopia.
It is a hope that instead of being perpetually spoon-fed, poor Ethiopians and those who share such poverty around the world will be able to build a way of life that is both sustaining and sustainable.
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