{"id":157,"date":"2008-08-08T19:35:28","date_gmt":"2008-08-09T00:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=157"},"modified":"2008-08-08T19:35:28","modified_gmt":"2008-08-09T00:35:28","slug":"repost-this-was-to-good-not-to-share","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/08\/repost-this-was-to-good-not-to-share\/","title":{"rendered":"Repost: This Was Too Good Not To Share"},"content":{"rendered":"

from brad delong here:<\/a><\/p>\n

More Alden Pyle Blogging…\"\"<\/a><\/h2>\n
\n
from Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal<\/a><\/span> by Brad DeLong<\/span><\/div>\n
\nFrom Ron Suskind’s latest, The Way of the World<\/em> http:\/\/g-ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/books\/harper-gms\/Suskind-ChamberlinExcerpt.pdf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Wendy Chamberlin spends a day trying to redesign her website. The Middle East Institute has a large educational arm, where anyone off the street can learn the region’s languages or get cultural acclimation, and she\u201fs looking to expand those programs. Online is the way to go.
\nOn this late spring afternoon in 2008, after her assistant has left, she finds herself thinking about the big idea, the way to transmit to the world what she considers true American values\u2014values, she feels, that have been twisted in this era by the plans and prerogatives of official power. Over the past months, she’s sketched out this idea or that, some combination of the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps, but different\u2014tailored, somehow, to what’s needed now.
\nAnd today, like other days, she keeps coming back to the same moment, something that happened in 2005 that changed her.
\nOn that spring day almost exactly three years ago, her helicopter left at dawn from Khartoum, Sudan\u2014the headquarters, in the mid-1990s, of Osama bin Laden\u2014headed for an enormous refugee camp in Darfur, three hundred miles west.
\nChamberlin, then the acting UN High Commissioner for Refugees, had a meeting at the camp with UN officials and representatives of the Sudanese government. Such meetings were always tense. The situation in Darfur was worsening by the day\u2014and it was the kind of crisis she was convinced the world would be seeing more of. The immediate cause was climate change, a rapid rise in temperatures that had turned northern Darfur, the western edge of Sudan that borders Chad, into a wasteland. Most of Sudan’s 40 million people were Arabic-speaking Africans, including northern Darfur’s African Arab tribes, who were forced by drought to migrate south with their cattle. They began to fight with non-Arab Africans in southern Darfur\u2014a group that had long sought independence\u2014in a conflict that rapidly escalated in 2003, when the Sudanese government began arming northern Darfur’s brutal Janjaweed militias. By 2004, as the slaughter\u2014and the displacement of millions\u2014was well under way, Colin Powell called it genocide, \u201ca consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities.\u201d
\nA year later, Chamberlin arrived at an enormous tent city of fifteen thousand refugees.<\/strong> In the few hours before her meeting with government officials, she realized that the entire refugee camp was run by a twenty-seven-year-old American, a young man just four years out of college.<\/strong>
\nAmong the dizzying problems at hand was the matter of how women who had to leave the refugee camp to collect firewood were being raped and murdered by Janjaweed militants. The young man, who worked for an NGO, Refugees International, had negotiated a tenuous truce with the government so that representatives of the African Union\u2014sort of a mini-UN, representing fifty-three African countries\u2014could accompany the women.
\nThis one kid had to be the liaison to the government, which was hostile\u2014they’d burned all the villages in this region, which had created the camp\u2014while making sure all the food and water actually made it to the people.<\/strong>
\nIn the big tent at midday, the arguments about the attacks on the women raged between Sudanese officials, Chamberlin, and a representative from the UN Human Rights Commission stationed at the camp. The young man was silent.
\nAfterward, he and Chamberlin stood outside in the 120-degree heat.
\n\u201cWhy didn’t you say anything?\u201d she asked.
\n\u201cIf I say anything too strident to the Sudanese officials,\u201d he explained, \u201cthey’ll just kick me out. They’ll declare me persona non grata, and then who will do what I do now?\u201d<\/strong>
\n\u201cI realized,\u201d Chamberlin recalls, \u201cthat the guy from the UN Human Rights Commission, who was fairly ineffectual, had his role: to wave his finger in the faces of the Sudanese about the women or delayed shipments of food and water. You needed someone with a diplomatic presence, who had some protection.
\n\u201cBut it was the kid\u2014this American kid\u2014who was holding it all together.\u201d
\nChamberlin remembers standing there, speechless, feeling, she says, the young man’s \u201cvulnerability and responsibility. I asked him ‘How are you managing this?’\u201d<\/strong>
\nHe didn\u201ft say anything for a minute, as though no one had ever asked him this.
\n\u201cI feel responsible for the lives of these people,\u201d he said.<\/strong>
\nTwo years later, sitting in her Washington office, Chamberlin can hear his voice, and see him standing there.
\n\u201cI’ll bet every one of those fifteen thousand people knew that kid, who, without preaching to them or telling them what to do or how to be more like us, was their lifeline. And none of those people he managed to keep alive will ever forget that. They’d met an American.\u201d
\nToday, as she packs up her briefcase, Wendy Chamberlin\u2014who, like so many other characters in this American drama, simply wants to feel the surge of moral energy again\u2014has her program, her big idea.
\n\u201cI want to multiply that kid by a thousand, by ten thousand, and give him anything he needs.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from brad delong here: More Alden Pyle Blogging… from Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal by Brad DeLong From Ron Suskind’s latest, The Way of the World http:\/\/g-ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/books\/harper-gms\/Suskind-ChamberlinExcerpt.pdf: Wendy Chamberlin spends a day trying to redesign her website. The Middle East Institute has a large educational arm, where anyone off the street … <\/p>\n

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