Economics, Opium, and Fairytales

One of the things you try to avoid if you are more interested in happy endings somewhere over the rainbow than stereos and a new living room set is thinking about economics. Economics is about money, and to a romantic, money is crass if not downright dangerous. It cheapens the eye, fills the mind with greed and covetousness, and turns the mind from the heavens to things of the earth. Like buying cool sweaters or paying off your student loan. Oops, guilty. Coming halfway around the world with vaguely romantic notions of helping people hasn’t rid my soul of economic scheming. Try living, and you’ll notice quickly that most of your problems have money in them somewhere, while you, more to the point, don’t have enough. It’s the same when you start trying to help people with their problems; they don’t have money either. So at some point we need to think about economics. It helps with helping people, and it also helps with acquiring sweaters and paying off student loans.

If my heart were as wild and free as I like to pretend it is, I would say “hang it all, I’m going to fling off my loans, hand out my sweaters at Main and Hastings, and dwell with the poor, craft poetry, and start building heaven.” But try telling that to the banker to whom you owe your university education, or to the Afghan trying to feed his ten children and pay off his mortgage. The world may need dreamers, but interest also needs to be paid, and kids need food, and dreams aren’t usually good currency. I’ve still got a crack-brained notion that heaven is more real than this thing called the “real world” that people keep shaking at me, but heaven doesn’t pay the bills, so I’ve been forced to come out of it for awhile and notice how things work on this side of the rainbow, in the so-called real world.

Since I’m in Afghanistan, I’ll start with the opium trade. It’s big business here. At harvest time, the drug traders set up whole markets and trade goods for opium. Two kilos for a goat, etc. Opium is good currency; it’s portable and dependably pegged to something with good market value, while the local currency unfortunately isn’t quite soft enough to wipe your nose with. Besides, opium is easy to come by. Kids can run through the fields at harvest time, scrape off a bit of the brown gold into a baggy, and trade it in for an ice cream. (I’m not lying about this; next time you see your parents, tell them they were wrong – money does grow on … well, not trees, but flowers, at least).

But the business of opium, like all great capital ventures since the Industrial Revolution, creates an ethical mess. The reasons for this might be pretty clear to us. Drugs are bad no matter how many mouths the money from them feeds, just like working kids to death at the ripe old age of 11 in the textile mills was bad, no matter how much more they clothed the populace. But if you’re feeding the mouths, or counting the take from a day at the factory, you might not see it like this. Let me take you through it a different way. You probably like your Nikes, right? Do you chuck them out and switch to recycled tire tread sandals when you find out an eight year old in Thailand spent 14 hours in sub-human conditions to make them? If you’re like most of us, probably not. You keep jogging around the seawall, Nike keeps selling shoes, and the kid keeps sewing on swooshes. We tend to think we’re not responsible for things we can’t see, and seeing a program once on TV about the kids in Thailand doesn’t count.

It’s the same here. The farmers here might know about all the addicts whose lives are ruined by what they’re growing, but they’re not rubbing shoulders with them everyday. Besides, there’s a great market for opium products and no (enforced) laws against growing it. So really, it’s a great way to shoe your kids, put food in their bellies, and buy a new house while you’re at it. You see the problem. The moral route through the situation is a tricky one: heroin addicts on one hand, hungry kids on the other. If yours are the hungry kids, you may be tempted to look at things economically rather than morally, and the economics are quite simple. Growing poppy makes sense.

It makes the most sense when you’re starving. While I was in Baharak last week, I talked with a man who works for the British Foreign Service and who shall remain nameless in the fine tradition of British agents – we’ll call him “Bond”. His job is to research the economics of the drug trade in Afghanistan. He said that people started growing poppy here because of the drought three years ago. The kids were going hungry and everyone was broke. Well, almost everyone was broke. A few wealthy men decided to help out everyone else by giving them mortgages for their land to pay off their debts. Then these philanthropists allowed people to sharecrop on their mortgaged land and take 50% of the profits. They told them to grow poppy so that the profits would be high. Then they dropped the penny. To buy back their land the farmers would have to pay double the mortgage. If the farmers had enough land so that their 50% of the take would give them enough to feed their family and start paying off the mortgage, or if they hadn’t mortgaged all their land and kept a bit to grow their own crop, they will be able to slowly crawl out of debt. The rest are out of luck, and the rest are most people.

Most people don’t grow poppy because they want more TVs and, as long as they get to watch music videos on satellite from Pakistan, don’t give a rip about the addicts on the streets of the “civilized” nations. They do it because they’re skint, starving, and the guy who now owns their land is telling them they have to. He’s the one with satellite dish. He’s the one with everything, really. Because of all the land mortgages, parts of the province are almost feudal. In some places one village owns the next one, and in Baharak a privileged few own most of the land in the district and quite a bit in the surrounding districts as well. When the civilized nations come and walk through the poppy fields, trying to solve their own domestic drug problem by shaking pious fingers at the farmers, the glutted few aren’t there. They’re watching TV.

And they’re not the only ones. We’re all watching TV, too, maybe trying to forget the smack addict shivering outside the door. Economically speaking, our countries are the market, so it turns out that a big part of this problem – ethically speaking - is ours. We’re trying to solve it by running over to Afghanistan and telling the poppy farmers to just quit it already because they’re ruining our neighbourhoods. Or better yet, we get our governments to run over, so we can keep watching Friends. But you don’t solve the problems of your own ruined people by ruining the lives of other people far away. Well, actually, historically speaking, that is how you do it, but it’s not exactly a shining moral victory, is it?

People do what they can to get out of debt. Afghans grow poppy. I do aid work. They do what they do because Lord knows growing wheat will ruin them and the UN will bring more anyway. I do what I do because the pay is good and the holiday options in this part of the world are better. Scratch most of us, and there’s money underneath our reasons for doing things. That’s the economics part. People also do things for less cynical reasons. The Afghan farmers are trying to feed their kids, and I’m trying to make the world a better place. You’re reading this, so you must care a little too. We’re all practically in cahoots. So what about the damned poppy?

A lot has to happen, and it has to happen all at once, in perfect synchronization, or it won’t work. If you’ve been paying attention to anything I’ve been saying about how things work – or don’t – in this country, you’ll be shaking your head before I even go into detail about this. “Perfect” and “synchronization” are two words they don’t use much here, and they never use them together. So basically, this won’t work. But if it did, here’s how it would go …

“Mr. Bond” says growing poppy in Afghanistan is a high-profit, low-risk venture, which means it pays a lot and there’s not much in the way of deterrents when you do it. Growing wheat, on the other hand, is a low-profit, high-risk venture, which means the UN hands out wheat so why should anyone pay us for it?, the soil’s not that great and if the crop fails we’re probably all going to die, and someone else owns our land, so we can’t grow what we want anyway, even if we wanted to grow wheat, which we don’t (see above). So what has to happen is that growing poppy has to become a lot more risky while growing wheat simultaneously becomes profitable and risk-less enough for people to switch. In practical terms, this means the Afghan government has to actually enforce their anti-drug laws instead of trotting them out on special occasions, like when other governments offer to give them money. At the same time, we have to pump millions of dollars of aid into community development, agriculture practice, water supply, health care, and the like so that people can get the basics of what they need while growing wheat instead of dope. And while all that’s happening, people need a bail-out plan for their land mortgages so the greedy opium barons will stop squeezing them in the vice, stop watching TV, and start doing something useful, like trying to avoid the new law enforcement.

Yeah, right. Maybe I should just pay off my loan and get out of here. Maybe you should go back to watching Friends. Maybe we should just let them grow poppy in Afghanistan and shoot up on Hastings.

Unless.

Unless, that is, you believe in such silliness as doing something even if it’ll never work. Despite our practical, irony-laced culture, I think we secretly hold hair-brained hopes about things like this. It’s just that we do it with kind of stupid things. We sit white-knuckled and tipsy in the sports bar, willing the hapless Canucks to crawl their way back to a sudden death over time goal to take the semi-final game. (I’d say “final game” but the Canucks don’t ever make it … wait, they did once, and I think the sleepy Vancouverites rioted - my point remains). We still buy lottery tickets, and some of us still go to nightclubs, hoping to meet someone, although the odds of winning at either game are the same: very bad. Even though we don’t believe in fairy-tales, Disney still sells like hotcakes. So if we can do it for this kind of tripe, why not for starving farmer’s kids and the addicts in the neighbourhood?

There I go again, back to the fairytales, and I really wanted to talk economics. I’m sure there’s a way of describing this with market equations so that it’s a bad idea economically to grow poppy, but by the time the farmers here understand it, they’ll be dead of starvation – or boredom. In the meantime, we’ll keep plugging away with our hopeless programs and flaky government and hang on for the happily ever after, even against the odds. If you want something to do over there, you could invite the local addict home for dinner and see if he maybe he started out needing a friend and ended up with a needle. It’ll be a long road back to the friend, but it’ll take us awhile to sort out this poppy thing here, so you’ve got time.

The Trouble With Helping People

I’m having trouble with my fairytales. I like to try to view the world with a bit of wonder, so I come up with ideas like God’s disguise is an old man you give your lunch to and heaven is where frogs turn into princes. It helps me with the stale language of faith droning out of churches and gives a little glory back to a tired world. But sometimes it’s hard to keep it up.

We drove out to Baharak today. It’s a beautiful town in a green valley where three rivers meet to flow west through Badakhshan. It’s a nice place with a lot of farmland, not enough of which is used for wheat. The rest is for opium, but I’ll leave that alone for the moment. For now, what you need to know is that the town is hopping with industry now that the harvest has come in and everyone’s spending the take on making their houses nicer, or just making nicer houses. If you’re in the right business, this place probably has a higher employment rate than anywhere in Canada. Tradesmen can name their price. But good luck trying to find one. My friend works with an NGO with a gigantic operation based in Baharak. He told us he’d been trying for a month to get a carpenter to build a railing around his second-story balcony… without luck. People are busy, too busy. They’ve just been given a big hydroelectric power station, and we had to reverse down a whole block because some guys had a ladder propped up in the middle of the street to string up power lines, and they wouldn’t move. The bazaar was bustling, and business must be good, since rent for a shop on Main Street has recently gone up from 300 USD a month to 2000. Housing is not any cheaper. Rent for a dumpy place – a “fixer upper” it would be called back home – costs as much as a furnished two-bedroom in the Canadian suburbs. All of this in one of the poorest places in the world, according to the UN surveys. It’s hard to gauge these things. Apparently the UN doesn’t count the satellite dishes. Or satellite dishes don’t mean people aren’t poor. But surely it must mean they’re not really poor. On the other hand, the kids outside the satellite dish houses are drinking out of the ditch, same as everyone else. The point is it’s hard to tell who’s the poorest around here, which makes it tricky because that’s who we’re trying to help.

What we mean to do here is known in humanitarian aid lingo as a food-for-work project. You hire people to work on some project like building a water supply system for their village and pay them in food. You usually do it in places that are “food insecure” which is a fancy way of saying they don’t have enough of it, can’t produce enough of it, and it’s not coming anytime soon. In other words, you do it in places where people are starving, and ought to be grateful for food. The town of Baharak didn’t seem too stretched, but maybe we were missing something. We asked around. Other groups shrugged about food-for-work. They said it doesn’t work most of the time, because everyone gets more from their garden plots of poppy. When it does actually work, you know you’ve found the poorest of the poor because they’ll accept it. Sort of. The funny thing about the poor is that when you help them, they smile, bob their heads up and down, put their hands over their hearts in gratitude … and complain. It’s not enough, it’s not the right thing, it’s not what we wanted, it’s not a TV. The funny thing about the poor is that you start by wanting to help them and end up wanting to kick them in the teeth.

I came here with an idealist’s question: “How do you make the world a better place?” That, apparently, is what I’m up to, besides paying off my student debt. Surely there’s a simple answer. This is what they write the stories about. If you are the woodcutter’s nice (but picked-on) son in the fairytale you give your lunch to old man who turns out to be a wizard and gives you a golden goose. The world turns out right in the end. But now that I’m here, I’ve got a new question: “What on earth are we helping people for, anyway?”

When they psyche you up for helping people in Sunday School, Scouts, and Seventh Grade they don’t tell you that people will grouse about it. They don’t tell you what to do when the old man turns out not to be a wizard at all, but a belly-acher who keeps asking for your lunch everyday and complaining because there’s not enough mayo. They don’t tell you what to do when the old geezer takes your lunch and sells it at a profit to someone even more unfortunate and goes and buys himself a TV. They don’t tell you what to do when you kiss the frog and it just ribbits and puckers up for more.

This type of work is championed. People stand up in churches and parliaments and award ceremonies and list all they ways the poor have been helped. The audience nods appreciatively, happy to be in proximity to such noble work. Those poor poor, how good it is to help them. No one really wants to burst the bubble, but the truth is the poor grumble.

And don’t think it’s just here. In Vancouver I used to buy sandwiches for guys begging on the street. I’d take them to food stores or McDonald’s rather than give them change because I thought it would be more helpful than giving them money for who knows what. I was surprised at how picky they were. One guy insisted on two tall chocolate ice cream cones instead of dinner. Some guys just wanted the money and would walk away from me in disgust when I offered to buy them food. I’m not sure why I was surprised at that. I guess I just assumed that the really poor were an honest bunch, down on their luck, and happy for any help they could get. But it turns out that they’re just like you and me, trying to get ahead. Except they don’t do it in all the civilized ways we do it in, edging people out of jobs and getting better grades; they do it by being tricky. After you take away all the advantages of wealth and birth, and add in years of oppression of every kind, the one worldly resource left to the poor to get TVs and the so-called good life is plain old cunning. They don’t tell you that in the World Vision ads, but there it is. It puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it? Are you still supposed to give your lunch to the old guy if you’re pretty sure he’s pulling one over you?

I’m sure there are some clever and well-researched answers to that question. There are whole doctorate programs devoted to answering it, no doubt, but the old guy is still out there, taking your lunch. They still all claim to be the poorest of the poor in every village. If you come to give out carpets, they hide theirs in the cowshed and get more. If you’re building cowsheds they pull theirs down and get a better one. Not all, of course, but the really poor are tricky to find, harder than you’d think. If they’re really poor, they’re probably bedridden and sick and can’t make it to your survey, or women with no freedom and all the kids and no time to come and tell you. And even when you find them and help them, some wealthy, gun-toting, drug-smuggling landowner with the ethical development of a two year-old comes and takes it all away from them – if he doesn’t already have it. So now what?

Now we try to apply what we learned in the doctorate programs, which amounts to being tricky ourselves about handing things out. We do monitoring, which means sneaking back and taking a peek after we’ve handed stuff out, to make sure they really needed it. We give them half of it, wait to see if they’ll be good, then give the other half. Then, when we’re sure we’ve actually helped people, we write up the numbers and turn them in for a chance at getting more money from the people who fund the helping of people. This may eventually work, but there are a lot of factors involved. I won’t explain them, because when I just tried to write about them I read it over and decided my explanation would be clearer if I deleted it. Let’s just say it won’t be sunsets and roses and happily ever afters for Afghanistan anytime soon, short of a miracle.

Personally, I’m in favour of the miracle. The way we’re doing it now, it’s like the woodcutter’s son is setting up a bureaucracy to give the old man lunch. It kind of kills the story. I tend to favour the heart-warming turn-about in my stories, the part that J.R.R. Tolkien called the eucatastrophe – when things that have been going terribly and hopelessly wrong take a sudden turn for the good ending we all thought was impossible but wanted anyway.

The trouble is that I get so in love with eucatastrophes that I forget all the work that goes into them. Tolkien again: Frodo and Sam have to keep struggling away, hopelessly trying to do their bit for the beautiful ending to finally come. They can’t even see it coming, they barely even believe in it, they just keep moving. And maybe that’s the real miracle, anyway: that we keep going. What this means is that somehow, even with no good reason to believe in a good ending to all this, we believe in it anyway and keep going. It means – to come back to fairytales and my big question – it means that no matter how he gripes you should keep giving the old man your lunch. Maybe after enough tuna and mayo, he will become a wizard. You should keep kissing frogs, not because they taste so good, but because princes do, and just maybe…

I’m saying all this because I suspect that in the end, we’re all grumpy old men and frogs. For instance, roads in Canada are so good that roads here dream about them at night, and so do I, after seven hours of potholes and boulders. But you didn’t think about the wonderful roads on your commute, did you? You swore at all the traffic. Griping villagers and muttering commuters, we’re all the same breed. If we write people off, if they have no chance to be wizards and princes, well, then maybe life in general has no chance, because none of us are that good. Some of us have just been given a chance at real life, that’s all, and we can’t quite bring ourselves to ditch it, even when not ditching it means slogging away at real life for the rest, for grumpy old men, warty toads, and grouchy villages in Afghanistan.

All this gets a little personal. It invades your space, makes you swallow your indignation and give up your own life a little to make room for the life of this rabble of ingrates. Mother Teresa told people she didn’t want their excess, but for what they gave to her poor to cost something. So your extra change in the UNICEF box might not quite do it. And it’s not just in Calcutta or Afghanistan that it costs. It may cost us to leave our nice homes to go serve soup to the bums downtown for an evening, for example. Then it may cost us our comfort to begin talking to one of them, cost us our Friday night to spend time with him, and cost us our nice home when we invite him in and he soils the couch and steals the stereo. It all may cost us. But what exactly are we living for – Friday nights, nice couches, and stereos? Probably. But should we be? That’s another question I have.

I’m not sure I’m ready for all these costs, but I do know that I’d rather have a eucatastrophe than a stereo. I’d rather have a kingdom called heaven and a world gone right than a satellite dish. And more to the point, maybe, I’d rather have these things with wizards and princes than a lonely kingdom to myself with old men and frogs croaking outside. It’s probably not quite sound, but I have this idea that it’s not heaven until we’re all there. And that means I need to go out and invite them all in, grumps and frogs and Afghans and all.

My Three Worlds

While I am here, I live in three worlds at once. One world is this place, this land with its people. At night I see stars here as Abraham and the ancients saw them, sparkling like jewels in heaven’s crown. You can almost see the lines of your hands in the starlight, you could almost guess your future from them, or dream it at least. Last night’s rain was new snow on the mountains and the white of it is unbelievable under the moon, and even whiter under the sun. The clouds that brought the rain were blown in violently by an all-of-a-sudden wind in the afternoon, which raised the dust of three rainless months and twisted it into billows and whirlwinds everywhere. People walked through the streets with scarves over their faces, women tried to hold their veils in place, and young men giggled to each other as the female form finally appeared to them in outline, drawn on burqas by the wind. After the rain there came the mud, slurping and splashing all over the streets now, spraying everywhere when the jeeps drive by. Children pick their way through it to drier places and carve out little pits to play marbles. They wear shoes but no socks, and their shirts are too thin for the sudden winter cold.

The work goes on. All week I have been interviewing for staff. It’s a strange procedure. Strange because here my world lines up in a collision course with this one and it’s like the equestrian society and the grade 8 chess club trying to have a game of rugby; everyone’s playing by different rules and no one knows what game it is. I don’t know what impression the interviewees have of the purpose of an interview, but it is different than mine, I think. I am interviewing for drivers. I expect that for the most part men who know how to drive will come. I will ask them questions to determine roughly to what extent they know basic things about driving safety and local procedure, such as it is – or isn’t. Up to this point, they oblige, telling me what I want to hear, which is that they know all about driving. Then we go out to the jeep and they try to fit the key into the air vent, or steer with the gearshift, or drive through the wall. People leap out of the way and everyone escapes death narrowly. I breathe deeply, thank politely, and move on to the next candidate, wondering what on earth I’m missing here.

Or the neighbour comes over to our newly rented office, and it is obvious (to me) that we are up to our necks in busyness. In fact, I am in the middle of a very busy conversation at that very moment. He comes over and does something like pulling rank. I wasn’t even aware that he had a rank to pull. Do neighbours have rank? Anyway, he pulls rank, and along with it he pulls my very new interpreter from our discussion with the mason (who is asking for even more money) to ask rapid-fire questions about why I haven’t hired his, the neighbour’s, son as a guard. Was it because I knew he was the neighbour’s son, and so was prejudiced? It seems that I should prefer the neighbour’s son, regardless of his ability, and be prejudiced against all people who aren’t the neighbour’s son, but if I don’t hire the neighbour’s son, then my prejudice has been misused, and a neighbourly visit is warranted. All of this assumes, wrongly, that I actually know the neighbour’s son from a mud puddle. We conclude our little interpreted chat with nothing actually resolved and the neighbour putting himself at my service. I have no idea what has just happened but I have a feeling that around here this is as normal as a pillowcase. If that seems like a weird simile, you haven’t spent all morning at the tailor’s trying to explain to both your translator and the tailor and anyone else who might possibly get it what a pillowcase is. I don’t even blink at something as silly as a cover for a pillow, and here they don’t blink at neighbours coming at silly times with silly things to discuss. But switch us around and put us in different worlds and we’re stumped for the rest of the day.

We go through the days together, trying to make something happen between the two worlds, between the absurdities of pillowcases and unknown neighbour’s sons. Slowly an office takes shape. Slowly the translator learns about bedding, and bills, and how to calculate quantity and unit costs and totals, how to do things and care about things that are silly, really, but must be done. Life was simple here before I came, if you knew what the neighbour actually wanted, and the polite things to say so that he got nothing and thought he’d won. The poor translator is doing his best. He just finished playing marbles a few years ago. Maybe he doesn’t even know what the neighbour really wants, let alone why I’m asking him to get a receipt for the pillowcases once he figures out what they are. But we get through it, and the neighbour is happy and the tailor might understand and I get my receipt and hopefully something resembling a pillowcase and we all shake hands, the neighbour, the tailor, the translator, and I. The day has been won for the moment and we can leave this half-baked world return to our own sensible ones.

My sensible world is my room, rented at the moment while we renovate our building. I have all the things that I’ve brought with me: too many clothes, vitamins, books, a laptop, good soap, Beethoven symphonies and Simon & Garfunkel albums. Here I can lie on my bed made comfy by an air mattress which cost more than some of my neighbours make in a month, and listen to Radiohead ask me “are you such a dreamer, to set the world to rights?” instead of the call to prayer. Sometimes while Horowitz is playing Chopin on the portable speakers and I’m deep into my umpteenth Graham Greene novel, I almost forget that I’m not at home. But here, when I am alone, I wake up like this in the middle of the night, confronted by the last of the three worlds, as real and invisible as spirit, asking what my purpose here is, asking the same haunting question as Radiohead: “are you such a dreamer…? I believe in invisible kingdoms more real than this place where I breathe air every day, so I am. I am such a dreamer.

The question is how to set the world to rights. I don’t even believe I can, and I don’t believe it especially here. The interpreter told me that the salary wasn’t important; he just wanted to help his country. It’s the right thing to say, but what does it mean? Did he know that helping his country means learning about nitpicking over receipts, and once I’ve taught him to nitpick properly, will we really have helped his country? It’s questionable. There’s more than just what we do here, there’s something invisible behind it all that makes it matter – and keeps me from total cynicism. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in dreams and fairytales. God is like the wizard disguised as an old beggar waiting for the kind-hearted son of the woodcutter to come along and share his lunch. Mother Teresa believed it too, although she didn’t put it like that. She said when she washed beggars, she was washing the body of Christ. Maybe in this world, teaching someone to read receipts will accomplish little, but if I am kind to him, patient, if I can manage to act in love, it matters in the invisible kingdom. And when the things are done that matter in heaven, the earth gets a little better, too. I hope so, anyway. I stake my life on it.