From the seat of a bicycle one can get a unique view of the world. You stop in places others might quickly bypass or miss.

I’ve been reminded I was still a strange curiosity by the dozen people in south India that watched me change a flat tire – or by groups of kids in Africa that watched our strange Tour D’Afrique circus come past their homes. One of my favorite images was the one below where several riders in Ethiopia were watching “The Lion King” on a portable player while kids from the neighborhood were observing these strange characters that came to their village.

At the same time, a bicycle is close enough to be approachable, to share a smile and revel that we are all human.

While cycling one can also see results of some humanitarian efforts from US and developing countries. Some of them are accompanied by large signs describing the sponsor – often an NGO, a government or religious organization.

Sometimes there isn’t a sponsor, but something is pretty out of place like these foosball tables that you are sure it came from elsewhere.

The western countries are not the only sponsors. In Africa at least, there were multiple signs of Chinese infrastructure such as this road building camp complete with Chinese/Ethiopian flags and preparations for the Chinese new year.

Occasionally these can seem misguided like these painted crosswalks in a few Ethiopian towns. Which just seems strange when people are going to walk everywhere anyways.

The amount and presence of these projects seems to vary a lot from country to country. There were a few like Ethiopia and Cambodia that stood out with a huge presence. Sometimes seems to distort things since people you meet often assume “you must be one of these foreigners coming here to do projects”, similar to what I experienced in Timor Leste.

From my reading, a larger focus of US areas have been in areas such as safe water, disease prevention, disaster assistance and programs such as the “Food for Peace” program.

Occasionally areas such as crosswalks can seem strange/wasteful. However, despite that I believe on balance, providing this assistance is better than not doing so. In particular, I am supportive of having US policy (and current law) to fund and provide assistance via US AID and other governmental organizations. The total budget is large on an overall basis (~$60B) but also relatively small compared to other areas we fund such as defense or even border security costs. Hence, I think it is on balance money well spent in part because it helps people and builds ties.

So I am rather dismayed at recent events where abrupt changes were made to assistance programs and US AID. Now some of my concern is a “process issue”. In particular, it appears to me (and my untrained legal). That there is something simply wrong about taking money/organization that Congress has created and funded and simply deciding to disobey the law. Below is a copy of the Inspector General report that was created about impacts of the freeze/disruption. Shortly thereafter, that Inspector General was fired. So I think from a process/legal perspective if the administration wants to make these changes, the should be brought before Congress and new legislation be passed. I believe lawmakers should be on record on how they vote for such a bill.

USAID-OIG-Oversight-of-USAID-Funded-Humanitarian-Assistance-Programming-021025

Though truth be told, even if such a bill were brought before Congress, I still wouldn’t be supportive of it. The reasons is mostly that from my observation, aid and these sorts of programs do a lot of good and is money well spent.