Bits of paper
In my old bits of paper kept from work in Ukraine, this gem appeared. I think it came from a conference in London as I never met Mr Popov. But it seemed to hit the nail on the head at the time. We were all stumbling around in the dark. By the time the project ended we had learned enough to be able to start doing it properly, but by then it was too late, we usually had to start again with a new counterpart in a new country on a new problem. But the reports got better as well as more beautiful.
Bulgaria
Julian Popov, BulgariaCOMMUNICATION PROBLEMS BETWEEN WESTERN AID PROGRAMS AND THOSE WHO NEED THEM
John: We are not here to tell you what to do. We are here to tell you what we do and to learn more about you, about your culture and your experience.
Ivan: Our country is very different from your country. You cannot understand our culture and our problems.
This is maybe the most expensive dialogue in the World. Its maintenance costs each year hundreds of millions of pounds to the western taxpayer. This is a typical dialogue between a Western aid missionary and an East European manager. Usually both sides fulfil their declared expectations: John learns something about Ivan, Ivan proves to himself that John cannot understand him.
However there is something deeply wrong in this exercise. And what is wrong is that both John and Ivan have totally different actual expectations from what they declare in their dialogue. Ivan is usually quite contemptuous about his own culture and situation and would like to abandon both as quickly as possible. John cannot bear all the constant excuses for cultural differences and unique problems all of which are specially designed, he thinks, to postpone every action and progress.
All that John wants to say is: Listen, I am fed up with your cultural uniqueness which is nothing else than physical and mental laziness and incapacity to divide a pile of grass between two donkeys (Bulgarian expression).
All that Ivan want to say is: Listen I am fed up with all your silly statements about most obvious things. If everybody there is like you I cannot understand not only why you are richer than us but how you could survive at all.
Both John and Ivan are disappointed by each other. However they are not completely unhappy with their joint venture. John does some travelling, puts one more paragraph on his CV and gets his consultancy fee and daily allowances. Ivan visits a Western country, buys a video and gets copy machine, fax and PC for his office. In the end John and Ivan produce a beautiful report where they put all the key points from the mission statement of the respective aid organisation. And they start to write new proposals for new joint activities.
The above described story presents a problem which is multiplied on different levels. It could be formulated as a breakdown of the link between the mission, political decision, identified needs on the one side, and implementation on the other side. Maybe as a result of the very rapid changes in the Eastern and Central Europe, maybe because of lack of experience in international activities in the East, or maybe because of the confusion about whose money is being spent on these projects and, respectively, who has the right to pressurise participants and to demand results, very often the different parties in these activities are disconnected.
There is a need for these problems to be identified and clearly named and to be constantly fought in order to achieve final results which correspond to the initial purposes of the aid programmes.
Ukraine
The Ukrainian equivalent for this was told me as an anecdote (as always):
There was a Englishman, a Frenchman and a Ukrainian who were travelling together in darkest Africa. They were captured by some cannibals who decided to eat them one by one. However they were all allowed one last request before they were to be popped into the cauldron.
The Englishman asked for a cigar so he could have a good smoke before being eaten. His request was granted and he awaited his fate.
The Frenchman asked for a good dinner (Aside: this doesn't make sense among cannibals, so I must have got it wrong). The Frenchman asked to make love to a beautiful woman. His request was granted and he awaited his fate.
The Ukrainian asked for a good beating. His request was granted. Then he took a pair of pistols from his pocket and shot all the cannibals.
When the Frenchman and the Englishman saw this, they were amazed. If you had the guns why didn't you use them before?
Punchline: You can never get a Ukrainian to do anything without a beating first.
This story was told after I complained that officials hadn't been very active in a seminar. But it wasn't ever clear how I could have beaten them, even psychologically, if they didn't want to change.
Change has already happened
10 or maybe 15 years later, there is resistance but not as much. Former communist countries can become successful in their own right and join the EU. There is not such a big credibility gap or a sense of such a monstrous amount of change needed that it could never be done. There is still an incredible amount of suspicion that west just wants to buy up east, but experience in thriving countries shows that this is generally good rather than bad.
Or am I just getting complacent about jobs lost in restructuring, education and health services ruined because teachers and doctors go abroad to earn money, and pensioners living in poverty because their savings were lost by devaluations or inflation. And in the Balkans there are old and new hatreds, and war damage to cope with.
It's not really getting any easier.
