Candy for Africa

At first, the village children were bashful. They avoided eye contact and, when caught in a visitors’ gaze, twisted their shoulders away as they reluctantly surrendered a smile.

Everything changed when the sailors brought out the blow pops.

Suddenly, the six-foot-tall Navy men were mobbed by bodies half their size. The children shrieked and shoved and greedily reached up their hands.

The U.S. Navy had certainly not trained the sailors for this. Somehow they managed to keep their footing and continue dropping candy from above. But that was the limit of their influence. The children surged around them. In the crush, some of the shorter kids were pushed to the ground.

It wasn’t long before one of the sailors threw up his hands in disgust and backed out of the crowd. He had been trying to give the smaller children candy. But every time he reached down to give it to them, eager fingers would snatch it all away. If he hadn’t stopped, he said, “I would’ve lost my wedding band.”

Volunteers from a U.S. Navy ship were visiting this rural African village on a goodwill mission. They handed out treats everywhere they went; the program was dubbed “Candy for Africa.” Each time, the intended gesture of generosity spiraled out of control.

An American in camouflage tried to instill some military discipline into the crowd. “No line, no candy!” he barked at the kids. “Get in line!”

A few listened, but more pushed forward, disrupting the attempt at order. During their last candy mission, someone told me, one of their hosts beat the children away with a belt.

I came to Ghana with development on my mind. I knew the debates that dominated the press in the U.S. More aid, people like Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76 argued. No, their critics responded: look at how little aid has accomplished proportional to the money spent. The critics blamed the corruption of African leaders or aid agencies’ bureaucratic bloat.

Here in a Ghanaian village, though, it wasn’t the “how much” that captured my attention, but the “how.” If it’s this difficult to hand out candy to children, what happens when millions of aid dollars are at stake?

In many ways, it’s not a fair comparison. The sailors had literally just stepped off the boat. They had no language skills, no detailed plan of action, no degrees in candy distribution. And they were working with third graders, not experienced local leaders and businesspeople. Development groups don’t simply come to a village and start tossing money out of a sack.

But even with training and consultation, it’s not always easy for foreign aid workers to distinguish legitimate local groups from the corrupt or the merely incompetent. It’s as much of an issue for big government aid programs as it is for the sailors to hand out blow pops.

The village kids who got the most candy were the biggest, pushiest ones. The sailors tried to hand out the candy fairly; they wanted the small kids to get their share. But in the chaos, their attempts failed. By the end, they weren’t even trying to hand out the candy. They just opened the bags and shook them indiscriminately over the crowd.

The sailors could have given the candy to the children’s parents. They might have been able to hand it out in an orderly fashion, one piece per child. But that would have spoiled the fun for the sailors, damped the glow of beneficence.

This is the root of one of the problems with foreign aid, an expatriate told me: too many donors focus on what they want to give, how they want to give it. The act of generosity obscures what the people here really need.

“They ask for shoes and we give them shirts,” a development worker said. “They ask for shirts and we give them shoes.”

In the village of Mafi Anfoe, I saw a microcosm of foreign aid failure. But I also saw what it takes to build success. While the visiting sailors made themselves into piñatas, the long-term development workers were meeting with the village headman. Over Guinness and Ghana’s local Star beer, they had a leisurely conversation about the village’s needs. They floated a few proposals, listened to his feedback. It was one of their many visits to the village.

This is a way foreign aid can really work: in small amounts, carefully administered, fostered by relationships of trust. It seems obvious. But only one sailor visiting the village understood.

He moved away from the crowd of children, as if he had run out of candy. The smaller kids were standing on the outskirts of the riot; they had given up. When he passed a tiny girl, the sailor slipped one last blow pop into her hand. He did it so quietly that none of the other children noticed. He kept walking. The girl’s face broke into a smile.



Lois E. Beckett ’09, a Crimson news editor, is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House. She is blogging this summer at http://ghana.theworldblog.org.