The Road to Hell (14 page)

D
espite the confrontation, Cassidy returned to Qorioley optimistic that once Marks came down to the project site, they would get things straightened out. Chris assured everyone that Marks would be there to clear up the salary situation. And when Marks didn't show up, Chris made excuses. He's busy. He has to set up the office in Mogadishu. He has to be in contact with Westport. In reality, however, Cassidy was fuming mad. Since Qorioley was the only place Save was working in Somalia, he had no idea why they even needed an office and a big house in Mogadishu.

Months passed and no Marks.

The bush telegraph operates fantastically well in Somalia. If you punched someone in the nose in Beledweyne and then drove nonstop four hours to Mogadishu, the news will have arrived before you and the family of the aggrieved victim would be there waiting at your doorstep to settle the matter.

So when John Marks started spending weekends at a friend's house on the coast in Brava, word hit the project very quickly. Brava is two hours south of Qorioley, and to get there you have to drive within a few minutes of Qorioley. As soon as Marks showed up at his beach house, everyone in Qorioley knew it.

After several weeks, Cassidy walked into a staff meeting and overheard an angry conversation. He understood enough Somali to get the gist, but waited until after the meeting to ask Hassan Ilhan about it.

“These guys are pissed off. He's renting a house and driving by here every weekend. He's spending money using our vehicles and our fuel but we're not getting paid.”

If you want to insult someone in Somali you say, “fuck your sister.” It's not a phrase to be taken lightly, and a Somali might use it five or six times in his life. Words are important. Words kill. Before a Somali says something, he usually considers it carefully.

Hassan Ilhan was insistent that Cassidy should confront Marks with the problem: “You're a
gaal
and he's a
gaal
You both work for Save the Children. Do something, goddamn it,” Hassan shouted.

Chris finally confronted Marks. “We're taking the money and not delivering the work and pissing people off. We go over there and tell everyone we're committed to the project. Then we just disappear when it's time to pay the workers.”

“You're getting paid. Keep your mouth shut,” Marks said.

C
assidy never thought of resigning. His commitment was to Somalia, not to Save the Children. There was nothing they could do to him, no discomfort was too great to bear. He was going to stay. He was going to prove to the refugees, prove to Hassan Ilhan, that this
gaal
was different. This one was going to throw his lot in with the people of Somalia, not with the government, not with the aid agencies, but with the refugees. Cassidy felt that he would have to redeem the image of the West in Africa. He would erase the legacy of a hundred years of colonialism and deceit.

He would make Hassan Ilhan his ally. The two of them would make the project succeed. If Ilhan were doing up a résumé, he might put down that he had people skills, at least compared to Cassidy.

A system was developing between the two of them. “We could always come up with something. He was good with the numbers too. It's rare that you find someone who complements your strengths.”

Although Cassidy complained about the bureaucracy, he relished the fight. His trips to Mogadishu became more frequent. Together he and Hassan Ilhan stormed government ministries and began demanding resources. They accused Save of corruption. They accused the Ministry of Agriculture of corruption. The Somali government, Cassidy charged, was not living up to its end of the bargain.

T
hen there was a visit from the new Africa director for Save the Children. He arrived in Somalia telling the organization's staff that there were negative stories about Save in the press back in the States. Reporters were investigating the organization. He was concerned that some of the reporters might show up in Somalia, might start asking questions about projects and project funds. “Don't talk to the press,” the assembled Save staff was
told. “All queries must be directed through the public relations office in Westport.”

Cassidy raised his hand. “What are these rumors that we're not supposed to talk about?” he wanted to know.

“Since you're not supposed to talk about them, you have no need to know. It's not important.” Cassidy persisted but only succeeded in alienating the regional director and everyone else in the organization. (Ten years later, when I was doing my own investigation of the organization, they likewise sent out word to their worldwide staff that no one was to talk to the press without the presence of the public relations staff from Westport.)

Cassidy wondered if there was any relation between the investigations and the problems he was having in Qorioley. Everyone knew Save wasn't paying bills. People with jobs support hundreds of others. Local refugee leaders came to Cassidy and accused him of stealing the money. In turn, Save's Mogadishu office said they weren't getting money from Westport.

“We are committed,” headquarters assured Cassidy. “Don't worry about funding. Save the Children is here to stay. We are a community development agency.”

A
t a meeting in Mogadishu, Chris discussed the financial situation of the projects with Marks and his financial officer. Chris remembers, “I was basically saying, Here's my budget for the year, here's the disbursements that we've had, and when are we going to get the disbursement that we need to cover the project expenses? This money has been allocated, earmarked, obligated, and we need to get it into those accounts to run the projects. When you're having difficulties making payroll, it puts management in a bad position, and I wanted this situation corrected.

“On the books we're carrying this money, and in reality it's nowhere to be had and, like I say, you're basically being corrupt. I want an answer to this. I want the money that is allocated in the project according to the project documents.”

“Is your salary being met? Are your needs being met as an individual?” Cassidy was asked.

Marks finally showed up unannounced in Qorioley one day. It was a Friday, the day of rest in Muslim Somalia, and Cassidy had some visitors for whom he had just roasted a goat. Why the hell couldn't he show up on a workday, Cassidy wanted to know. this is, after all, work. This is the only work we're doing in the country. Yet he can only find the time to come here when he's passing to his weekend recreation.

Cassidy lit into Marks. “Dammit, that is U.S. taxpayer money that Save the Children is using. We have a responsibility to the taxpayer too, to be sure they're getting a positive result from that. It's a rip-off. Everybody is losing on this deal except a couple of individuals at the headquarters level.”

Looking back on it, Cassidy is even more bitter. “We took their lives away. We stifled the opportunity for them to have a life and raise their kids and have a future.

“Whatever we did for them, they were still damn refugees, captives in the refugee camp. They were learning to be different people, learning to act in ways that they were never trained to act. They couldn't rely on themselves any more. Essentially, we were telling them, You want to eat? Get in line. No food today? Maybe next Tuesday. Maybe next week. We'll tell you what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat.

“It was a question of control. What happens if there's civil strife and the donors run away? You starve to death. Look. If you've got the skill and tools and knowledge you can be a man. You can march the fuck out of that camp and set up on your own. You can take care of yourself.”

B
y May, the rains made the ramshackle house unbearable. Insects swarmed through the walls and floors. They crept into the food and wandered across the baby's crib. Water dripped from the ceiling and through the walls. Bernie cried. He'd come down with a fever. So Tone and Bernie had moved to Mogadishu to get away from the rains.

After three weeks in Mogadishu Tone wrote back about conditions in Qorioley. Her mood, for the first time, was gloomy as she related her hardships. The house, she wrote, had become unbearable, full of insects and leaks. The laundry never dried. Tone was pregnant again and morning sickness compounded her discomfort. She was, she wrote, unable to face another meal of spaghetti covered with camel meat stew. The baby was due on November 22, and she wrote that they were thrilled. They had decided that the child would be born in Norway or the U.S.

She wrote that Chris was starting to relax a bit more and had begun to read novels, which she had been begging him to do since they'd arrived in Qorioley. The rains had kept them from the beach, but they had made plans to drive along the coast road the next day. Bernie loved the beach, she wrote. And he would sleep some after spending the day there. In general, however, he rarely slept through the night. His sleeping problem was growing worse. Whenever he awoke, she would nurse him, but now not even that was helping.

Since Bernie didn't have his own bedroom it meant that she and Chris were awake most nights.

Tone's letters always promised the Cassidys that Chris would write soon.

I
n April of 1986, the press investigation that Westport so feared was published in
Forbes
magazine. The shocking revelation was that Save wasn't exactly hand carrying donated money to recipient children but was instead pooling it into community development projects where the children lived. Nonetheless, the sponsorship program was still marketed as a way to establish one-on-one relationships with children in the United States and the Third World.

Save tried to make it all sound like a misunderstanding, but in reality the deception was quite deliberate.
Forbes
reported: “SCF staffers find such revelations particularly embarrassing. ‘Many have asked that the ads be more representative of what we're actually doing,' says one field director. We even recommended that we get away from child sponsorship and just sponsor communities. But headquarters doesn't address our questions.”

The
Forbes
article led to an NBC television exposé, and the firing of one employee who spoke with the network. Then, in September 1986, in response to a threatened lawsuit from the Connecticut attorney general, Save the Children agreed to follow new guidelines in advertising.

Under the guidelines, SCF agreed that its advertisements would not state or imply that money is given directly to any particular child or that it will be used to help only one particular child, but was instead pooled and sent in one batch to a community.

The announcement of the agreement between Attorney General Joseph I. Lieberman (later a senator and chairman of the Democratic Leadership Committee) and David Guyer, then president of Save the Children, had an old-boy feel to it, as if it was all a small misunderstanding about fine print. Both men said they were pleased with the agreement.

“I am confident that adherence to these guidelines will allow the public to be fully informed about how this charity operates, and will enable Save the Children Federation to continue its good work in communities around the world,” Lieberman said.

“We are dedicated to preserving public confidence in charitable giving, and the guidelines we intend to follow allow us to accomplish that goal while fulfilling our organization's desire to save the children in economically distressed regions of the world,” Guyer said. He went on to state that Save was happy that concerns raised by Lieberman's office had been resolved
by the guidelines, which, by the way, Save the Children had voluntarily changed already.

In truth, the advertising barely changed, and the agreement received little publicity. Even today, Save's ads, but for a grammatical nuance, seem to imply that the money is going to help your child. The first question asked if you phone them for information still is: “Would you like to sponsor a boy or a girl?”

B
y late 1986, the project, despite all its problems, was 75 percent completed because Cassidy was able to mobilize the people and use what he had. If he'd had the resources on time, it would have been finished. The civil engineering was mostly done. The agricultural engineering canals were 50 percent done. To Chris's mind it was starting to look like a successful project. “We were kicking some ass out there. We had a vision. Some of the farmers were getting into it. Now was the time to really teach the farmers, to teach the management how to run the projects, how to open the gates to irrigate everyone. The training component was the key to making it all work. That was the next step, the important one.”

Cassidy and Hassan Ilhan had nearly made the damn thing work despite the problems with payroll and management. But his story—of a man “going bush,” fighting the system, refusing the bribes, writing checks out of his own pocket—would have a price beyond simple disillusionment with local governments and Connecticut charities. The more time he put into it, the more he reveled in his triumphs, the more fanatical he became, the farther away drifted his family. Tone began to drink more and more and Chris never noticed.

C
hris and Tone and Bernie went to Norway for a month at the end of the year for the birth of their second child, Christopher. The birth had been traumatic. Tone had undergone a cesarean that resulted in minor complications but left deeper psychic scars. While in Europe, Chris spent a lot of time on the phone to Westport. They had him running errands to buy things that were hard to get in Somalia: computer paper, ribbons for printers, a Swedish electric typewriter. Chris packed everything up and took it back with him to Mogadishu, where he arrived—this time—with two babies. Again no hotel arrangements had been made for him, no guest house was provided. No one met him at the airport. “No common courtesy for human beings,” was how Chris summed it up. He dropped the equipment and the receipts at the office and found a hotel for his family.