Stop Sending Food!
Robert Gersony was a consultant for the U.S. State Department and other international organizations who was known for his methodical, deeply researched reports on humanitarian crises, including conflicts in Mozambique, Kosovo, and East Timor.
In The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian, Robert Kaplan describes Gersony as “the ultimate fieldworker,” a researcher who was “in continuous, tactile contact with the evidence” who “would let the evidence—rather than theories, of which he knew nothing—always drive his conclusions.”
Gersony’s method to interview witnesses and survivors in-depth, often under dangerous and difficult conditions. His fact-laden reports influenced policy because they were more convincing than the theorizing by far-away diplomats, bureaucrats, and academics.
Gersony began his career abroad in Guatemala as the co-founder of a chain of Spanish schools for expatriates. One of his influences was the journalist and historian Bernard Fall, who predicted the humiliation of France and the United States in Vietnam because of their leaders to understand Vietnam’s people and culture:
Fall’s message was that nations lose wars because of incomplete ground-level intelligence of the most profound cultural variety, making them unable to grasp the mentality of the people they are trying to help or change or conquer, a mentality accumulated from thousands of years of history in a specific landscape. The Americans would lose in Vietnam just as the French had lost, Fall predicted, because the Americans were given to abstractions that obscured the cultural reality on the ground in Vietnam.
Kaplan quotes Gersony on Fall:
“Reading Bernard Fall began my journey towards an understanding of what America could do in the world and what it could not do, based not on some lofty ideal of history, but on knowledge and empathy of the human terrain itself, about places and people as they actually were.
It is all about collecting information and insights from the field, so that we don’t operate with one eye closed. It is about searching out that vital insight about a place that any journalist or relief worker has, but which wonks and highbrow policymakers often don’t.”
Gersony’s career as a humanitarian began when a terrible earthquake struck Guatemala and he volunteered to help. As donatons flooded into the country, Gersony experienced an epiphany when he encountered Roland Bunch, an aid worker for an Oklahoma-based charity, World Neighbors:
Bunch was completely covered in adobe dust. He hadn’t changed his clothes in a week and smelled awful. “Roland was a real sight, a showstopper,” Gersony remembers. Bunch said he had walked into San Martin and some of the other, worst-affected areas and just started interviewing people, for seven days. “We need to respond to what the people think!” he exclaimed. “And what they think is, ‘Stop sending food!’” Bunch observed that Guatemala had just experienced one of its biggest maize harvests. Thus, food donations were only making things worse. “The free maize being distributed all over the place has blown away the price,” he said. This simple fact was a revelation to all of them, especially to Gersony, because, in the spirit of Bernard Fall, someone had emerged from the field with news that altered the analysis of elites in Guatemala City and foreign capitals. And he had done this by speaking with the affected people themselves.