Free The Road to Hell by Michael Maren Page A

aid money pouring in. Staff was arriving from all over the world. And there was no infrastructure to handle it. The sleepy little embassy was buzzing with activity. Refugee programs and development programs were bursting file cabinets at USAID, forcing it to move to larger offices. Cassidy was hired to provide logistics to development workers, to figure out how USAID could support all of its staff that was marching into the field.
    Logistics is an important word in development. It’s half the battle. If doctors are coming to work in a village somewhere, it’s necessary to have someone handling logistics—making sure they get there, that supplies get there, that they can get out, that there’s fuel for the vehicles, or whatever. These activities take more time in Africa than actual development work.
    C assidy was sent to northern Somalia, to Hargeysa, two days’ drive from Mogadishu, where he was asked to look into the rehabilitation of Ogaden refugees. Do you settle them? Do you ship ’em back? And Cassidy was supposed to answer these questions even though he had no experience with refugees and knew little about Somalia.
    But he was also answering questions of more immediate importance to the U.S. government. For example, if USAID opens a guest house in Hargeysa, who is allowed to stay there? Should USAID contractors be allowed to stay or just direct the hiring of employees? Cassidy, only a contractor, was asked to express an opinion.
    He was also in charge of the field support unit, which meant clearing stuff at the port in Berbera. The only Americans who spent time with Somalis were people like Cassidy and other young former Peace Corps volunteers who were hired as personal service contractors (PCSs), to do the dirty work of going out into the bush and telling the career people what was going on.
    C hris Cassidy seems to have few memories about that time long ago in Somalia. He remembers hanging around with his friend Doug Grice, another PSC who had been there for a year already when Cassidy arrived. Grice had been making a stink about something that was obvious to most of the aid workers in Somalia. The refugee programs, he said, were unnecessary. Instead of finding better ways to get food more efficiently to the refugees, someone might be looking for ways to get them back to their lives in the Ogaden. Everyone agreed that that was a good idea, but no one ever didanything about it. Instead, they designed programs to deliver more food to more refugees.
    The Somali government wanted the refugees to stay. All the reasons for this weren’t immediately apparent to the young aid workers. They did know that some government officials were getting rich stealing refugee supplies, but it had to be more complicated than that. The American government’s motives were a little more transparent and could be summed up in one word: Berbera. If the Somali government insisted that 1.5 million hungry refugees needed relief food, why not give it to them? It was surplus anyway.
    When he thought too much about it, the situation bothered Cassidy. He had really come to Africa to help people. It was a need hammered into him by a strict Catholic upbringing. Africa felt like his calling, development work his priesthood. But when he found the temple full of scoundrels, he couldn’t find the courage to change it. So he did his job and drank his dutyfree beer, went to parties, and traveled as much as he could, complaining sometimes. It was at one of these parties he met a quiet, serious Norwegian woman anthropologist. Her name was Tone (pronounced
tuna
) and she had a real interest in Somalia and its people. There was nothing cynical about her. For Cassidy, desperately trying to restore some meaning to an increasingly ambiguous experience, she was a stretch of dry land in an endless ocean of uncertainty.

FIXERS
    â€”Winston Churchill,
The Malakand Field Force
    There are men in the world who derive as stern an