A USAID Worker Takes An African Lover - Foreign Aid Was Never So...Appropriate

Marisa Jones had gone to Miss Porter's, a girls finishing school in Farmington, CT and then went on to Briarcliff College, a place for well-brought up young women from good families of modest ambition whose early training gave them a universal sense of social ease, a kind of instinctive gracefulness which might not be the stuff of high professionalism, but good enough for respectable salons of Georgetown and  Park Avenue.

 

Marisa spent a desultory four years at Briarcliff, pleasant enough but without the intellectual or social engagement she had hoped for.  To be sure there was Rob from Yale and Harvey from Dartmouth, Christmas cotillions in New York, and winter weeks in Palm Beach; but something was missing, some emotional gadget, some on-off switch to inner feelings. 

And so it was that she decided to join a program unreservedly good and helpful for others and particularly satisfying for the worker. A bit of the adventure of the unknown in the rainbow coalition of the Third World and two years to figure out what's what. 

Her parents were supportive but less than enthusiastic.  Staunchly conservative, they eschewed the do-good schemes of Eastern liberals, but thought that a sojourn in what had become a racial Never-Neverland would more than likely straighten out any of the kinks and tangles that Briarcliff had added to what had been a calmly uncomplicated personality. 

She wasn't sent to Africa as she had hoped but to Albania of all places, the playground of the Maoist, Pol Pot wannabee Enver Hoxha who turned the country into a peasant wasteland before he was dismissed and exiled; a place without institutions, democratic or free market traditions, a desperate nowhere of a place. 

But like a novitiate in the Carmelite order, Marisa accepted her assignment and vowed to do well and to help the country on its way towards membership in the Commonwealth of Democratic Nations. 

Tirana was a dump, a wrecked, miserable city and a poor excuse for a capital of anything let alone a shithole on the Adriatic from whose shores thousands of refugees plied the sea for an Italy which didn't want them, never wanted them, and did its best to keep them out.  If she and her co-workers did their bit to keep Albanians in place, it would be worth donors’ dollars. 

However, like most rootless, feel-good programs, it was nothing more than window dressing, a flimsy charade for improving American-Albanian relations.  No one on either side of the partnership cared for anything but geopolitical recognition; and so Marisa languished in an old Soviet-style cement block with no heating, eating rancid tripe soup and millet cakes three times a day, and sleeping badly or not at all because of the marital squabbles to the left and right of her, the feral dogs yapping and whining in the courtyard,  and the noise of diesel engines and buck shot echoing off the apartment blocs. 

After six months she had had enough, but despite the experience and sensing that there was something more to be had outside the Main Line, Gstaad, and the Vineyard, she applied for an overseas position with USAID.  She was exactly what the agency was looking for - a woman with pedigree, international experience, conservative, patriotic loyalties, and a desire to do good. 

She insisted on Africa, land of mystery and romance and home to Rousseau's noble savage, an uber-man preternaturally attuned to the environment and life within it; and so it was that she was assigned to one of the continent's most desperate, blighted, and poorly-managed countries.  

'Ahh', she said as she stepped off the plane and walked into the arrivals area, a chaotic, miasmic vision of hell from which anyone but a young, progressive-minded young women would turn away.  Every African was her brother, her soulmate, her fellow traveler on the journey of life. 

The gantlet of touts, barkers, thieves, and thugs through which she had to pass to make it out the door was impressive even by African standards.  It was a pitiable nightmare of gross horrors - the blood curdling African reality dismissed only by the likes of Marisa.  She was on a USAID mission to an important African friend of America, and she would do her best to make her country proud. 

Relieved of her luggage, shaken down, robbed of every last cent of foreign currency, shoved and sidled by beery, insulting officials, she was still sanguine.  Again, like a Carmelite novitiate, she had no qualms about leaving secular illusions behind. This, raw and unfiltered, was the black experience, and she embraced it. 

 

The Hotel Independence, the only possible place for an overnight stay while awaiting American solicitousness was - again to most visitors - a rathole of infestation, a disgusting pit of ordure, shit, and indifference.  Her reservation? Gone, disappeared, but 'Madame, we are here to please' clerks assured her that the room to which she was directed was deluxe. 

A lockless, airless, closet abutting airshaft and elevator reach was even to Marisa's sanguine, marvelously unclouded eyes, a hellhole.  'Tomorrow is another day', she said before retiring, pulling back the grey, unwashed, disgustingly stained sheets of her bed and lying down. 

It was only when the next morning when Armand, the USAID fixer, the greeter, and the gofer came to fetch her, did her spirits rise. He was what she had come to expect, a glossy, burnished, unblemished, virile African man out of legend and folklore.  'Welcome', he said, smiling. 

Admittedly Marisa was at that moment quite vulnerable what with her long, arduous journey, the miseries of the airport, the penitential conditions of the hotel, and her dreamy hopes of deliverance; but still she could not believe her good fortune.  Not only was she delivered, but delivered into the hands of this dreamy black African man. 

Of course M'bele had paid his way into this privileged position of formal, official greeter.  For every ten shlumpy, overweight, ugly mid-level bureaucrat women who stepped off the plane, there was a Marisa Jones, a desperately lonely girl who wanted only companionship and affection. 

M'bele had learned his trade well, and insinuated himself into the life of the young American by progressively seductive steps.  He helped her get settled in her new lodgings, government residences on the bank of the river in the diplomatic enclave - a special corner of the capital in name only, for it was as pestilential and rotten as the worst native quarter of the city but with a view. 

M'bele knew how to milk despair; how to seduce by promise; how to bed by hopefulness; and so it was that he became savior, saint, and stud to the ingenuous, naive, novitiate Marisa Jones. 

The affair, if you can call it that because M'bele had other clients to service, lasted only a few months, but months that Marisa recalled as the happiest of her young life.  Straddled, bound, taken by this glorious African man redolent of incense and spice, his ebony skin reflecting the moonlight which flowed in through the open window which overlooked the river and the plains beyond, she was in a delirious world of abandoned passion.  This was the Africa she had always dreamed of. 

When M'bele left her floating along with the water hyacinths down to the sea, she was surprised and disappointed; but she knew that the African man was not a faithful creature, and that his potency derived from his profligacy - he thrived on sexual seriality and that diversity was the aphrodisiac all Western women responded to. 

Her project? The usual indifferent desultory enterprise to do good, improve the status of women, children, and the nation was a second thought; but so it was to the American government planners who only wanted to secure rare earths, political fidelity, or geopolitical firewalls against China. 

USAID never ever had any intentions of 'doing good' or fulfilling a humanitarian commitment.  It was in the business of preserving the Big Man status quo, lining the pockets of autocrats and their minions to keep them loyal to the Stars and Stripes, nothing more.  The agency looked the other way at accounting time, never blinked at the millions in offshore personal accounts flush with US funds, and happily sent ingenues like Marisa to act in the vaudevillian charade. 

Donald Trump fulfilled his promise to eliminate waste and fraud and so shuttered the doors of USAID, leaving Marisa without an African lover and a pleasant sinecure 

And so it was that she left her African idyll and was folded into the millions of desperately hopeful, unemployed progressive minions sent packing by Elon Musk and his storm troopers. 

'So be it', she said, tucking into bed with her black inner city lover, the closest she could get to the real African thing, but any port in a storm, and Pharoah Washington was just the man to jiggle her rigging.