I Was in Colombo Yesterday

(Written 19th May 2009)

I was in Colombo yesterday, the day they overran the LTTE.

In the grand scheme of things, maybe it wasn’t a world event. It made international headlines for a couple of days. The overthrow of a notorious rebel group. The slaughter of a group of men dubbed psychopaths and meglomaniacs, along with several hundred of their most stalwart fighters. More than thirty years of implied and overt conflict, finally brought to a bloody and inauspicious end at the edge of a salty lagoon on a strip of sandy coastline that few people- other than its locals- have ever seen or heard of- let alone know how to pronounce properly. Mired in controversy amidst allegations of human rights abuses on all sides and the alleged slaughter of cilivians.

Click here to keep reading…

WA Monochrome

Black-and-whites from last year’s trip to Western Australia.  No reason.  Just cos I felt like it.

1. The old goal in Fremantle beneath a cloudy sky.

2. I love windmills as a subject, but the light at this particular shoot didn’t sit well, until I went for a high-contrast approach instead and went with the silhouette.

3. The subject- an old cast-iron fireplace- leant itself to the black-and-white treatment.

4. More windmilly goodness- this time a more classical angle framed against a flat horizon.

Frozen in a Moment

I went with friends A and M to the waterpark the other day.  We had a glorious sunny day (with a chilly wind), and M in particular was more excited than I have ever seen a child get- quite literally quivering with excitement at the sight of the coloured slides and water-drenched playgrounds, prancing like a pony on the spot while she waited for the sluggish adults with her to keep up (or not).  She had a great time.

Water makes for an awesome photography subject at almost any time- its textures, the way it changes, the way it plays with the light…  There’s a myriad of different combinations, each of them unique.

In a flash of brilliant foresight I took the WP DC-21 dive case for my Powershot G9 so that I had a splashproof camera.  In the case I don’t get as much control over shutter-speed and aperture, so I set it on Program, had it underexpose the shots slightly by default, and let the camera chose its settings.  In the bright sunlight, the camera compensated by choosing a fast shutter-speed.

I spent a bit of time at the bottom of some of the slides catching M and A as they hit the splash-tray at the bottom.  And splash they did.  Even the process of taking the photos was fun, as spraying water slooshed over the camera lens- and my nasal passages to boot.

With the fast shutter-speed, the camera froze the sprays in beautiful moments of physical expression.  Strings of loosely-associated water-droplets hanging in space, great shimmering sheets of translucent fluid frozen like ice in a moment of time, and the beautiful fluid contours that to the naked eye break apart quicker than we can take them in, but captured by light sensors, remain like some crystaline architecture.

These shots are some of my favourites- made more fun by the bright colours of the playground themselves.  I’m especially fond of this last shot and the way M’s face is (by pure chance) framed by the tube of hurtling water.

Note: Click the photos to see more detail.

How to freeze splashes with the camera:

It really comes down to Fast Shutter Speed.  The faster the shutter speed, the sharper the droplets of water will appear (i.e. the less distance they will be able to move during the time the shutter is open).  Speeds around and beyond 1/1000th of a second will give best results.  Increasing the shutter speed obviously decreases the amount of light getting into the camera (a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second lets in half the light photons of 1/500th of a second- obviously) so you need to be able to compensate for this.  Shooting on a sunny day will allow faster shutter speeds (but you can’t always control this).  Increasing your aperture (to numbers like f/2.8) will allow more light in so you can balance the faster shutter-speed.  Likewise increasing your ISO (from, say, 100 to 400, which allows the image to expose 4 times quicker) also has the same effect.

Note the downsides.  Shooting on a sunny day can lead to high-contrast photos (bad for portraits, as a rule) and if you shoot into the sun, expect backlighting effects (like the black-and-white, above), lens-flare, overexposure or a loss of colour.  Increasing the aperture reduces the depth-of-field (the amount of the image front-t0-back which is kept in focus)- when shooting close to the subject you’ll find that as little as a few inches of the photo only are sharp, while the rest falls quickly out of focus- great artistic effect if you nail it right (or get lucky- see the last shot).  Increasing ISO adds ‘noise’ or ‘grain’ to a photo (depending on how good the sensor is) so shots may appear of a lower quality.

If you’re not comfortable managing your camera’s settings on fully manual (M) mode, and the automatic (A) mode isn’t giving you the results you want, set the camera to the time-value (Tv) mode, which lets you directly control shutter-speed while automatically compensating the other exposure values to give you the parameters you want.

Note that to get the right moment of splash and the best sprays, you need to get the timing right.  Pre-focusing the camera on the point of impact is your best bet.  Pre-focused, most SLR cameras are instantaneous so it comes down to your reflexes.  If you’ve got a point-and-shoot or compact camera, these have varying delays (even pre-focused) so you’ll need to be familiar with these.  Alternatively you can set the camera to multiple-exposure mode and hold down the fire button.  A good camera can take several frames per second (depending on the motor/drive and the format of the exposure (RAW, hi-rez JPEG, lo-rez JPEG) and can capture several shots of action to give you a good chance of getting the shot.  Most point-and-shoots have slower drives and often have long delays between frames so you could miss the fun.

Of course, you can just point, shoot and hope for the best.  That works too.

Moments in Space and Time #1: Dunes at Tizirzak

The Sahara Desert is a spectacular place. I’ve commented elsewhere (and repeatedly) just how much I love deserts, and how much I love wild places. I won’t go into that again, but that goes a long way to explaining just how special the Sahara is.

I’ve got a number of memories from the Sahara. It is, of course, a vast terrain. The largest tropical desert in the world (Antarctica, a cold desert, being the largest, and a place I have yet to visit), in fact only a small portion of it is covered in the sand-dunes which we so frequently associate with it. Most of it is bare gravel plains- on the one hand a barren, dull and numbing landscape, but somehow too all the more brutish and hostile- and therefore exciting- for it.

The boundary between Sahara and Sahel (that vast biome larger still than the desert, a semi-arid savannah landscape of mixed brush, grassland and thin forest that stretches into Africa south of the Sahara proper) is a blurred one, so it’s sometimes hard to know where Sahel ends and the Sahara begins. I think of rutted sandy tracks through the mixed woodland of south Darfur, of gravelly volcanic plains spotted with tufts of sun-bleached grasses in Kenya’s Turkana district, and of the single roadway snaking west to east across the empty expanse that is southern Niger, lifeless dusty plains mixed with scrawny millet fields and ephemeral stream-beds lined with trees that grow verdant with brief, sporadic rains.

The Sahara itself is more obvious. I recall watching the sandy ridgeline on the horizon that seemed to follow us for hours on the road northwards to Gao, in eastern Mali. The dunes that rose on the north bank of the Niger River as we drifted slowly by on a wooden canoe for several days. The white dune sea that covers the land north of Tomboctou’s outskirts beneath a sky equally white with heat-haze. Vast gravel plains pocked by violent, distorted outcrops of rock in central Mauritania, bulging in a lens of shimmering hot air.

But it was my first experience of the Saharan dunes that really took my breath away. Four-wheel driving north of Agadez, an area now off-limits to tourism due to the threat of rebel activity and landmines, we drove first to Iferouane, where we spent a night or two, and then onwards up sandy wadis as the landscape grew more and more devoid of the signs of human existence. Rocky outcrops, the edges of the Air Mountains, stuck up from plains of dust like broken towers. The sky was crystaline blue and the air clear and sharp, dust blowing in our wake. We saw camels and thorn bushes, the only signs of life.

In the late afternoon we reached the dunes. Stopping the vehicles, we piled out onto the golden sand, leaving our sandals within paces of the car doors. Like children at the beach we raced each other up the dunes. I remember sand between my toes, hot on the surface and cooler beneath. I remember a sense of awe at the sight of the sea of dunes that spanned out before us, walled on one side by the spectacular ferocity of the mountains. In the low afternoon sunlight the faces of the dunes were turning a golden yellow colour. Their ridges were traced in dark contrast, the beautiful contours of windswept shadow.

I took photos. Ad nauseum. I hadn’t yet- and haven’t again- been to a landscape so intense in wild beauty, so photogenic, and so unspoilt. Within hours of our departure the next day, wind would have erased all trace of our footprints and tyre tracks, and the grumble of our diesel engines would be replaced by the murmuring of a warm, restless desert wind.

The dunes at Tizirzak were my baptism into the Sahara desert, the fulfillment of all my Lawrencian hopes and expectations (T.E., not D.H.). Few times have landscapes exceeded the vision I had for them in my mind’s eye, and indeed the beauty of the Sahara itself can be an elusive one- many days of emptiness for a few short hours of revealing beauty. Without a doubt, however, the beauty carried in the great sand dunes of the Sahara is the match of almost any scenery on earth. I continue my plotting to return to that corner of the world once more and soak in the wild beauty of that harsh, arid yet ever enticing desert.

The Prom

Victoria, as I like to point out on a regular basis, is perhaps the most under-rated portion of Australia.  Travellers coming here know about Sydney with its Opera House, Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach.  They know about Queenland’s Surfer’s Paradise, Cairns, Townsville and Cape Tribulation.  Images of Uluru in the Northern Territory are stamped on most western kids’ collective memories as the archetypal travel image for Australia, matching the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben as one of the most recognizable landmarks on the planet.  Even Western Australia is getting known for its outback trips, beaches, wineries and general expanses of vast wilderness.  Only Tassie and South Australia seem to drop further down the list of travellers’ itineraries.

I rate Melbourne as easily the most enjoyable place I have lived, overall.  It has a smattering of everything.  City life, with great cafes, restaurants, culture and an Asian-cosmopolitan vibe.  Rolling hills and wineries in the Yarra Valley and now, increasingly, the Mornington Peninsula (check out their Pinot Gris’ and Pinot Noirs) and near Geelong (best Chardonnays coming out of Australia now, in this humble quaffer’s opinion).  Mountains for outdoor enthusiasts (though the skiing is distinctly average) in the Victorian Alps.  Dramatic plunging coastline drives (Great Ocean Road), beaches (bayside and oceanside) for lounging, playing and surfing, deserts, rock-climbing, and big open countryside.  All within a couple of hours of the Central Business District.

Melbourne’s downfall, maybe, is that a) its bounty isn’t that well advertised, and b) you really need a set of wheels to enjoy it.

In other words, it’s just not that backpacker-friendly.  So they all go to Sydney, where they see Bondi, the Opera House, the Harbour bridge, and then go out and get trollied.

As various friends of mine have pointed out, Sydney is like a one-night stand.  Melbourne is like a love-affair.

I’m actually okay with this.  It means that some of our special places stay a little more special, a little less well trod.

One of our local haunts is a household name in Victoria, although folks who haven’t travelled here or who aren’t fans of Ken Duncan’s photography, may not have heard of Wilson’s Promentory. Known as Wilson’s Prom, or simply The Prom, it is a peninsula sticking out of the southern tip of Victoria where a land-bridge joined mainland Australia to Tasmania within the last fifty thousand years (moments ago, geologically speaking; indeed aboriginal Australians, not to mention countless animals, are believed to have crossed back and forth along it before rising sea-levels swallowed it into the Bass Straits).

I went down to the Prom a couple of months back with friends A and M. It’s a national park, and a delightfully peaceful one at that (at least, it is if you go out of season). Miles and miles of wild coastline wrap around dry rocky hills covered in scrubby brush. A devastating bushfire season last year hasn’t substantially diminished the grandeur of the landscape. The sea is clear, the waves plunging. The sand is soft and expansive. There are walks, swims, and plenty of corners to explore.

We camped, as most people do. With a four-year-old in tow, long exploratory treks were out of the question, but we did some enjoyable trundles through the bush and along beaches, and enjoyed the fresh air. By day three, the sun was out and the sky turned a cloudless rich blue colour that ached to be drunk.

I only got the briefest of tastes of The Prom, but am hungry for lots more, and it’s made it up onto my list of places in Victoria that I need to explore in considerably more detail. And I’ll make sure I bring my camera with me then, as well.

The Kirk

My housemate bought a kitten the other week.  He’s a ragdoll, and he’s called Kirk.  Some obscure reference to the Gilmore Girls which I refuse to give air-time to.  He is none the less an extremely cute little bundle of fluff (even if he did soil the kitchen floor this evening).  These photos were taken of Kirk at about 13 weeks.  I’m not usually the cutesy, pink, hello-kitty, Anne-Geddes sort of photographer.  However, Kirk’s general adorableness made it very hard to resist snapping away some portraits.  And posting the results.

Thanks for indulging me.

Moments in Space and Time #2: The Shrine at Annapurna

My trek through Nepal was one of repeated moments that hang viscerally in my memory, and there were probably several that could have made this list, so although this is the second I’m mentioning, in a way I’m showing terrible restraint.

Five days on from the photograph taken of Macchapuchare at Dawn, we found oursleves in the Annapurna Sanctuary, at the Annapurna Base Camp, sitting at 4,300m beneath the yawning face of Annapurna I. As places go, the Sanctuary is up there as in the top two or three most spectacular pieces of scenery I’ve visited anywhere. Ringed by peaks six, seven and eight thousand metres in altitude, it is staggering in scale, in drama and in wild, unrelenting beauty.

Atop a cliff carved by the glacier at its feet sits a shrine (actually a chorten). It has been erected a short walk behind and above the base camp proper, on an outcrop of rock overlooking the glacier, Annapurnas I and South, Tent Peak, Macchapuchare, and a host of other peaks less well known but every bit as dramatic.

The shrine honours mountaineers who have fallen on Annapurna I. Some names are engraved on brass plaques on the side of the shrine. Others have their names on rocks placed at its base. Among the more prominent is that of Anatoli Boukreev, controversial hero of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, whose actions both saved lives and, argued by Jon Krakauer in his outstanding tale of that tragedy “Into Thin Air” (one of the best mountaineering books ever written in my opinion), placed them at peril.

As one who loves the mountains (though I would never refer to myself as a mountaineer) I found the shrine deeply moving. A more beautiful setting for a memorial could not be imagined.

Sitting there, the quiet was overwhelming. I was alone. I hung my feet over the edge of the cliff. The sun was warm but the November air was bitterly cold. A wind gusted up the valley, and the streaming prayer-flags snapped and rustled. The belief in the flags is that as the wind moves through them, the words written in prayer on the material are carried to heaven. The tips of Annapurna I and some of its companions are so high that they protrude into the jetstream, and to accompany the fine streams of ice-crystals I could see blowing from their summits, I could hear the deep roar of the high-altitude winds like the rumble of a jet’s engines. Beneath the warming gaze of the sun, ice melted and crumbled, and rocks frozen into the jagged surface of the glacier beneath me were released, where they tumbled with sharp clacks that echoed to where I sat. Far in the distance, hidden somewhere on Annapurna’s vast flanks, a giant avalanche released, an unmistakable noise that sounds like a distant train and shakes the air.

It was a magnificent moment, a place that blended the sheer natural beauty of one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes, with the pathos and energy of human endeavour and its cost. It was at once sensual and spiritual, and in some way, greatly hallowed. Places like this I feel I can reach out and touch God with my soul. I don’t cry easily, but sitting for a few minutes in that place, I found tears stinging my eyes.

A quote from the late Boukreev is inscribed on the base of the shrine, and the words ring true for me and, I’m sure, many others who enjoy the mountains. I still find them moving:

“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion… I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment… my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.”

Moments in Space and Time #3: Wapta Icefields

There is a silence that settles in the mountains like something tangible. It’s hard to really explain unless you’ve experienced it yourself. It’s the combination of the muffling effect that thousands of acres of snow has on sound propagation, the white background noise of steady mid-altitude winds rumbling past peaks, and the utter paucity of any human-made sounds such as highways, airplanes and air-conditioning units.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I took this photo on day 3 of a ski-touring trip with my dear friend Mackie, which you can read about in this string of posts here, here and here. We rose early on this morning, a crisp winter’s day in the Alberta Rockies. The sun was shining but periodically subdued by passing mountain cloud. We had put the worst of the ascent behind us climbing up onto the Wapta Icefields, and were now on the icecap itself, gliding along the smooth surface on our quest to find epic powder. While we were moving, the sounds we heard were of the snow-crystals whispering beneath our skins, the hissing of our ski-pants rubbing together as we trekked, and our own heavy breathing. And when we stopped, that beautiful silence.

On the icefields the isolation was magnificent. It was Mackie, me, and what felt like a million miles of nothing. No other humans. No other tracks. Just smooth snow as far as we could see, ringed by inviting mountain peaks that formed something of a bowl and only served to enhance that sense of being cut off from the rest of the world. The peace out there is intoxicating, simply exhilerating, and I can truthfully say that few moments on earth can compete with the pure joy of being up in the mountains, trapped by the glory of creation, simply surviving in that wild landscape.

Flying Paradise

(Note: Click the photos for a larger view of the scenery)

For a guy who pretty much spends his life in airport transit halls, I’ve never been fond of flying. As a kid I was a nervous flier. As an adult I’ve learned to relax on flights where I know the chance of pieces dropping off the plane are relatively slim (ergo Qantas gives me the heebies), although on some of the world’s more dubious airlines (Air Ivoire, Air Burkina, United Airlines) I’ll still crack a sweat. Planes which rock up without even a tail ensigna (thank you Air Mauritania), I’m pretty much up to giving myself the last rites.

So the thought of flying Air Niugini, PNG’s national carrier, as my only way around that particular little slab of paradise, didn’t fill me with glee. In fact, I didn’t have a lot of options. I was stationed in Madang, on the North Coast. It is connected by road to Lae and to Goroka, but not to Port Moresby, where the country’s international airport is situated. In principle you can travel to Moresby by boat. But it’d take you days and days. Most people opt for the one-hour flight.

Air Niugini has, against all the odds, an impeccable safety record. Impeccable in that PNG has some of the most aircraft-unfriendly terrain on the planet. It is effectively a massive range of spiny mountain peaks wrapped in dense jungle, ringed by a thin strip of flattish ground near the coast. During World War II, when aircraft were unpressurized, limiting flying at altitude, PNG was known for its “rock-studded clouds” as huge spires three and four thousand metres high cloaked in tropical mists jutted into aircraft flight-paths. Dozens of airmen and women lost their lives to the unmerciful terrain.

A couple of factors contribute to Air Niugini’s safety record. The first is the terrain itself. It’s so dangerous that to fly it, you really have to know your stuff. Weather can be violently unpredictable, landing strips short. Because everything away from the coast is jagged and steep, there’s no place to put an aircraft down in an emergency- unless you fancy pancaking a struggling jetliner on a 45-degree forested mountainside. If something goes wrong, you’re up the proverbial creek, with neither a paddle nor a parachute.

Air Niugini, while state-owned and run by a Papua New Guinean, also employs the habit of partnering a white Australian in the cockpit alongside every national pilot or copilot flying, the theory being that the Australians know how to fly better. I won’t comment on either the policy or the theory underlying it. However a late friend of mine intimate with PNG flew on an Air Niugini flight some years back where this policy was not observed. Upon landing, the pilots, presumably forgetting protocol, did not use the reverse-thrusters to decellerate the aircraft, but used the hydraulic brakes on the wheels. The hydraulics, unable to cope with the speeding aircraft, promptly burst with a loud bang, and the plane ended up careening down the landing strip and barely avoiding a serious accident. As the aircraft sat ticking over once the crisis was managed, disgruntled Papua New Guineans could be heard muttering to one another in Tok Pisin, “If a white man had been in the cockpit this would never have happened”.*

 

Stories about Air Niugini’s minor mishaps are rife. Friends of mine were on a flight travelling into Madang that, through pilot error, experienced a sudden violent depressurization at 4,000m, and the plane touched down with blood pouring from everybody’s ears. A few years back, a Fokker F100 ran off the end of the runway in Madang and plopped into the sea. Nobody was hurt, and crew and passengers walked off the plane along the wing back onto dry land. It turns out that the pilot had had to land without any ground support because the staff in the control tower had simply gone out and left it.

Worse perhaps than the safety risks were the delays. Air Niugini’s flights were so notoriously unreliable that if any of us were flying to leave the country on a connecting flight, we would generally book two or three flights earlier out of Madang than necessary (there were generally two flights per day out of Madang), just to ensure that we wouldn’t miss our onward leg. Such events were referred to as “TANG-FU”s- Typical Air Niugini Stuff-Ups. It was an acronym we used frequently, and with heavy bitterness.

Over the twelve months I was stationed in Madang, I spent days and days worth of my time in the tiny airport building- a single room with a grubby lino floor and a few rows of plastic bucket seats. Air Niugini operated two types of aircraft- Fokker F50s and Fokker F100s- the number designating roughly the number of seats on the aircraft. Louver windows opened onto the apron, so that when the planes taxied up to the building, a blast of ear-shredding noise would pound the waiting passengers. On more than one occasion I have spent hours and hours trying to get either myself, or colleagues for whom I was responsible onto one of their aircraft.

The story that in my mind typifies the mind-blowing simplicity of Air Niugini’s mismanagement occurred around July 2008. Several colleagues were due to fly to Port Moresby following a disaster simulation. The flight they were booked on was listed up on the whiteboard (no, of course there was no automated screen) as being an F100, coming in from Wewak and continuing to POM. A total of 100 passengers were booked on the leg to the capital. Only when the plane landed, despite having accepted 100 bookings to Port Moresby, Air Niugini had scheduled an F50 with exactly half the number of necessary seats on it.

In my mind this is a pretty simple set of mathematics, wouldn’t you say? But somehow it outfoxed (routinely) the cerebral giants who managed Air Niugini’s flight schedules.

However the one thing that Air Niugini delivered (for which it really couldn’t take much credit) was the scenery. I’ve noted elsewhere that for all its foibles, PNG is a jawdroppingly, brain-explodingly beautiful country. The jagged mountains that scream “you really shouldn’t be flying over me” are dramatic and awe-inspiring, real heart-of-darkness sort of stuff. Views of the coastline landing in Madang are simply tremendous. Coming in from POM over the Rai Coast, the plane plummets thousands of feet down the face of the Finisterre Mountains, straight out of the pages of Jurassic Park with verdant cliffs dripping with thick foliage.

Even the touchdown (or take-off) in Madang is magnificent. The runway is on the mainland, about four feet above sea-level, jutting out into a pocket of Madang Harbour. Madang itself sits on a series of small inlets and peninsulas, and even spreads out onto the dozen or so little islands plopped in the sea nearby. Outrigger canoes and banana-boats (fibreglass hull outboard motorboats) ply the channels like taxis. The water is azure and palm-trees lean out over the raised reef shoreline. And the aircraft cruises straight down the harbour, views on both sides of the charming waterways and seafronts, until as a passenger you’re sure that the wheels must be churning up a creamy wake in the glass sea.

It’s really quite splendid.

If I never have to fly Air Niugini again as long as I live, I will probably cope with this fact. I do genuinely admire the skill of pilots in PNG- not just those of the small jets and turboprops who do navigate some of the most challenging commercial airspace in the world, but those like the small missionary air companies like MAF whose little single-engined planes are the lifeblood of many remote villages in the hinterlands, and who place their aircraft sans assistance into clearings in jungles or onto steeply-angled landing strips on yawning mountainsides.

And much as I hated it all at the time, flying paradise sure did leave me with some memories.  Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the time flying Solomon Airlines that I spent 8 hours in Honiara because somebody put toilet-paper down the toilet, and a passenger disappeared…

*(It’s worth noting briefly that their colonial history has sadly left much of PNG with something of an inferiority complex, whereby many Papua New Guineans will express feeling less adequate than whites. Colleagues would periodically apologize to me for the state of their country with genuine shame, and the impact on the national psyche was quite plain to see. While some whites do still behave as though PNG is still an Australian colony, it’s saddest of all to see nationals upholding this mindset while they struggle to establish a stable national identity and find pride in their country).

 

All photos except 1 taken on Air Niugini flights between Port Moresby and Madang.

 

Note: For those readers among you who have your own experiences of Air Niugini and the various TANG-FUs you’ve enjoyed, please feel free to share them below- I’d love to hear about them!

Lessons Learned: The Donor and the Consultant

Or: If Lewis Carroll had been an aid worker…

“The time has come”, the Donor said,
“To talk of lessons learned:
Construction projects gone awry,
and other bridges burned.
Coordination meetings miss’d,
And targets overturned.”

“But wait a bit,” Aid Workers cry,
“Before you nick our cents;
For OCHA meetings are so dry,
And never make much sense!”
“No worries!” said the Consultant.
“Opinion’s on the fence.”

“Of whether you do anything,
For folks who are in need.
Evaluations hit the mark,
To which no-one pays heed.
Now if you’d care to change your ways,
You’d shock us all indeed.”

“But what of us?” Aid Workers cried,
“We try our hardest. True,
Each context has its own faux-pas,
And things we mustn’t do.”
“All that is fine,” the Locals said,
“But listen to us too.”

“It was so good of you to send
Your funding and your gear.
But what about the long-term gains,
Next week, next month, next year?
I wish you were not quite so deaf-
For us it’s really clear.”

“It seems a shame,” the Donor said,
“To pour out all this money,
After we’ve promised them so much,
It really isn’t funny,
To find out all we’ve left them with
Is some unwanted dunny.”

“I weep for them,” the Donor said:
“Those beneficiaries
Who every time disaster strikes
Have to be extra wary
Of schemes to build capacity.
Development’s so airy.”

“The government is shot of you
The locals say you’re chumps!
Should you be pulling out again?”
But answer came there- “Humph!
We’ve come with funding to dispose.
Not leaving till it’s dumped.”