“Westerners want to save developing countries from the problems that they might encounter in the future, rather than help them to deal with the problems that they are actually facing today. There have actually been seat-belt campaigns in parts of Africa where the only vehicles for a hundred miles are aid-agency Land Rovers,” report Lorraine Mooney and Roger Bate. (1) In East Pakistan, one agency distributed heavy woolen blankets, apparently not realizing that this location was in the tropics with a median annual temperature in the high seventies. Another handed out cans of pork and beans to the hungry, unaware that the refugees had no way of opening the cans, no way of heating the cans, and that neither Muslins nor Hindus ate pork. (2)
J. Maarten Troost talks about his experiences on Tarawa, an atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, “To this day, I remain baffled by the UN. I could never figure out what they did. Every few months, Air Nauru would deposit another batch of fashionably dressed UN staffers, who would then spend most of their time on the atoll bitching about the I-Kiribati.