On September 13

On this day in ...
... 1865 (145 years ago today), a daughter, Maud, was born into an Anglican clerical family in England. Active on social welfare issues, as a teenager she helped organized a branch of the Salvation Army in Paris, France. Efforts to do the same in Switzerland met with imprisonment before success. Known as the "Little Mother of the Prisons," Maud performed social work in London's slums and campaigned for prison reform. Maud Ballington Booth (right) and her husband, a son of the Salvation Army's founder, attained U.S. citizenship and established the Volunteers of America. (photo credit) She died on August 26, 1948, in New York.

(Prior September 13 posts are here, here, and here.)

Pitching in for Pakistan

The floods in Pakistan have rendered a reported 20 million homeless, destroyed an estimated 1.7 million acres of crops leading to the threat of famine, and given rise to an epidemic of diseases such as cholera, dengue, and malaria. Yet like the water itself, the crisis seems to have snuck up on the international community.

The Pakistan Initial Floods Emergency Response Plan, prepared immediately after the flood, requested $459 million primarily for food, water, sanitation and hygiene, health, shelter and other non-food items. The Financial Tracking Service (FTS) reports that $274 million has been raised, thus reaching a coverage of 59.6%. Despite an outcry that the international community is leaving Pakistan in the lurch, this is actually a fairly high number. The FTS also reports that other disasters this year, such as the civil unrest in Kyrgyzstan or tropical storm that hit Guatemala, have only been covered to the tune of 36% and 33% respectively. But there's no denying that the international community seems less concerned with Pakistan than it was with say, Haiti. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that while twenty-two U.S. aid groups have raised a total of $9.9-million for Pakistan, within two-and-a-half weeks of the earthquake, 40 aid groups had brought in a total of $560-million for Haiti. (photo credit, above).

Why? Well, in the UK it is being blamed on persistent negative images of Pakistan in the media and elsewhere. In India, the history of poor neighborly behavior has led to India's refusal to provide aid. And in the U.S., the low death toll, "summer vacation doldrums," and donor fatigue after the Haiti disaster are thought to contribute to the lack of interest in the crisis.

But the stakes are high. As an editorial in the New York Times last week put it:

The world, especially the United States, must not blow this one.

The editorial reminds us that Pakistan is armed with nuclear weapons, after all, and its destabilization could spell disaster. Moreover, the United States has put an awful lot of effort into suppressing Al Qaeda in the region, particularly along the border with Afghanistan. That work is easily undermined when radical Islamic charities are able to provide shelter and food ahead of the authorities or foreign aid organizations. The Pakistani Taliban has inserted itself, urging the Pakistani government not to accept aid at all, citing a need to maintain sovereignty and independence. The strategic implications (read: politics) of it all are hard to avoid. (photo credit, above left; photo credit below right)
While the rhetoric that this is a "battle for hearts and minds" strikes me as overly dramatic, maintaining peace and security in Pakistan through the crisis is an unquestionable must. And to the extent that it is a battle for hearts and minds, an outpouring of support from the international community ought to do the trick. Pakistan is facing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Angelina Jolie gets it. She recently donated $100,000 of her personal funds to help. You can too. But don't worry, the minimum amount is only $15.

Darfur, again

'The situation is grave.'

Those few words sum up matters at Kalma (left), whose more than 80,000 inhabitants make it the largest camp for persons displaced by years of conflict in Sudan's westernmost region, locus of the International Criminal Court's stalled Situation in Darfur. (prior posts)
The words were spoken yesterday by a U.N. spokesperson based in Khartoum. He told Agence France-Presse that the government of Sudan had barred all humanitarian aid workers -- whether from the United Nations or a nongovernmental organization -- from entering the Kalma camp or the nearby town of Bilal. For its part, the government denied the charge through a local official, even as it acknowledged that the situation "'remains explosive'" in the wake of:
► last week's internecine killings among rebels; and
►the refusal by the U.N./African Union hybrid peacekeeping operation, UNAMID, to turn over persons it has detained to Sudanese officials.
In short, the words serve to remind that conflict is far from over in Darfur.

On August 4

On this day in ...

... 1443, when the signing of the 1435 treaty ending the Hundred Years War failed to end massacre and pillage in Burgundy, a lay charity (rare for the time) was founded in a community whose people were destitute. Founding the Hospices de Beaune were Guigone de Salins (right) and her husband, Nicolas Rolin, who was chancellor to the duke of Burgundy. The 1st patient arrived in 1452, and treatment continues to this day. Expansion through donations also has rendered it "the best and oldest example of historical, philanthropic, and wine-producing heritage, and has become linked with the economic and cultural life of Burgundy."

(Prior August 4 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 2

On this day in ...
... 1990 (20 years ago today), Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova (left) died in Ottawa, Canada, following a decade's suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She'd been born 80 years earlier in Czechoslovakia, and earned diplomas in French, English, German, Spanish, and Czech from Prague University, from which received her Ph.D. After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris she returned to work as a journalist. Her anti-Nazi dispatches drew attention; consequent self-exile throughout Western Europe left her penniless. Refused a U.S. visa, she worked as for the Censorship Department in Canada. (Her parents perished in Nazi death camps.) In the mid-1940s she embarked on a lifelong career as the founder of Canada's Unitarian Service Committee, raising contributions for wartorn Europe and, eventually, for developing countries throughout the world -- an effort that garnered her many awards. (photo credit) "Reporters and editors called her "The Atomic Mosquito", for her persistence in getting good media coverage."

(Prior August 2 posts are here, here, and here.)

In search of Miss McGeachy

The search started due to an offhand comment in the memoir of a mid-20th C. U.S. diplomat, respecting a then-much-talked-about report co-authored by Miss McGeachy at the British Embassy. A certain snark in the comment, coupled with its reference to a woman in the Foreign Office at that time, sparked curiosity.
No online biographical info on Mary Craig McGeachy (left) immediately available, the search required resort to books.
Most interesting was the entry at pp. 430-32 of Current Biography Yearbook 1944. That year, with the Allies still locked in global battle against the Axis Powers, McGeachy had been appointed Director of the Welfare Division of the United Nations' Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She bore a dual responsibility: 1st, to assure that "'specially dependent groups such as the aged, children, and nursing and pregnant women'" received necessary aid as soon as Allied troops freed the territories in which they lived; and 2d, to rebuild the "'welfare organizations'" in those territories so that they could resume providing care, to displaced and returning persons, as soon as possible.
As would be expected, the unnamed author of the 1944 entry detailed McGeachy's background:
► Born in Ontario, Canada, she'd earned degrees in history and philosophy at the University of Toronto, and then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Graduate School of Higher International Studies at the University of Geneva.
► In 1930 she'd joined the Permanent Secretariat of the League of Nations, working in its section on public health, social welfare, and economic studies, and serving as the League's liaison with British dominions and with women's groups.
► In 1940 she'd moved to Britain's Ministry of Economic Warfare, beginning in London, and then transferring to Washington, D.C.
► On October 1, 1942, she was appointed the 1st Secretary of the British Embassy in the United States, the 1st woman diplomat so to represent Britain (as the entry put it, the "first woman to receive an appoinment as a full-fledged British diplomat to a major power"). The only other woman said to have held even "a comparable post in the British diplomatic corps" had been Gertude Bell, in Iraq.
Clearly, at the time of her UNRRA appoinment, McGeachy was up to the task. Interesting, then, the extent to which the unnamed author focused on the fact that McGeachy was not a man.
Of McGeachy, who, it said, turned 40 in 1944, the entry made references to "the blond Canadian," "the young diplomat," and "'that competent young woman'" (twice, the 1st time quoting New York's Herald Tribune). And then there was this paragraph:

The young executive who will administer this great work is not only capable but attractive. A woman interviewer described her as 'disarming,' and a man wrote that she is 'remarkably pretty.' Her eyes are piquantly slanted under strong, arched brows, and her firm-jawed face has an expression of quite humor. Her skin is fair, as befits the copper-blond hair ...

It went on, praising her clothes, her cooking, and her hostessing, then ended with a wee mention that, as of December 1944, Miss McGeachy was married.
Little surprise that a recent profile reads rather differently.
Vol. 35, pp. 393-94 of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), indicates without further comment that McGeachy -- birthday November 7 as stated in the 1944 entry -- was in fact born in 1901, and thus was a few years older than the author of that entry had thought. In this new profile, entry author Mary Kinnear (right) remarks not at all on appearances. Kinnear begins by giving McGeachy the worthy title "international civil servant," then reports that she continued as UNRRA's welfare director till the agency shut down in 1946. Thereafter McGeachy devoted her time to the International Council of Women. A nongovernmental organization founded in 1888 by suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and May Wright Sewall, the ICW now holds U.N. consultative status; McGeachy served as its President from 1963 to 1973. McGeachy endured a private life that, in Kinnear's words, "was not smooth," and died on November 2, 1991, in Keene, New Hampshire.
In her entry Kinnear -- a University of Manitoba historian and the author of Woman of the World: Mary McGeachy and International Cooperation, the 2004 biography depicted above left -- concludes:

McGeachy's life sheds light upon the contrasting twentieth-century conventions affecting men and women. ... At a time when married women were expected to retire from paid work she saw voluntary work as a way for women to serve society as citizens.

The life story of this pathbreaking diplomat is well worth contemplating in our new century.

(A very deep tip of the hat to Peg Durkin, Head of Public Services at the Mabie Law Library, the University of California, Davis, School of Law, whose research helped make this post possible.)

Humanitarian motives?

Yesterday's NY Times featured CARE's refusal of almost $50 million in federal funding in protest against American food aid policy. One of the world's largest providers of humanitarian relief, CARE's decision stemmed from its disapproval of U.S.-funded aid groups' sale of tons of subsidized American crops in African countries whose farmers are struggling to compete in their own domestic markets. This move has divided the humanitarian community, with some NGOs who receive federal funds arguing that the current system works just fine, thank you. Jimmy Carter warned of the political power of this position, noting that charities "speak from the standpoint of angels" and are thus difficult for politicos to dismiss. As the UN peacekeeper scandals have demonstrated most vividly, we need to be asking harder questions about the motivation and practices of humanitarian groups. A good start can be found in Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, a recent book by Guglielmo Verdirame and Barbara Harrell-Bond that investigates international organizations responsible for refugee protection, finding extensive and avoidable violations of the rights of the migrants in their care. While we should of course support the vital work that these groups perform, we should not be blinded to their shortcomings because of their humanitarian nature.
On a related note, a study recently reported in the Economist argues that "[c]harity is just as 'selfish' as self-indulgence." Dr. Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico theorizes that because men look for self-sacrifice in their partner, women demonstrate blatant benevolence as a mating strategy (while men demonstrate their ability to provide through conspicuous consumption). I wasn't entirely convinced by this hypothesis; perhaps it was the gender stereotyping or the obliviousness to sexual orientation (at least as reported). But I'm interested in your thoughts, reader, as to whether the predominance of women in the international human rights field (discussed here) might stem in part from this impulse . . .