less trips down the valley

I want to preface this by saying that I, more than your average guy, am a direct product of my surroundings (both in time and place). If I watch someone build greenhouses and grow tomatoes for a living, I think that I should do so to; if I play Civilization III a lot, I tend to think as if I were Abraham Lincoln in control of the Americans; if I read a book, I tend to think in the style of the writer and judge the world through his eyes. Having said that, I have been reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (like it or not) and have found it extremely relevant to Moldova.

The past few weeks I have removed myself from the day to day work related to the irrigation water project. The water users’ association which exists is headed by a fellow with a rather unpleasant personality who I expect will soon get kicked out as president. I used to head down the hill and check on people using water after it was pumped, talk and help out moving pipes or fixing leakes, checking water meters at the station, etc. The last two times I was there, I got into two different arguments with two different fellows. They centered around the unjustness of the fact that water costs .60 lei (9 cents) per ton, how the payment was calculated, and in general the fact that someone is “checking” on how much water they are using. I’m not going to take issue with their arguments, because they are complicated and I understand where they are coming from. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion, but it wouldn’t make sense to write about it here.

In any case, my attitude as a Peace Corps volunteer is that whatever I can do, however much I can do to help, I will do. Help is defined as forward movement towards better long term solutions to problems than the ones that exist today (this can include implementing short term solutions as well). And so I thought I was helping by spending my days down there trying to get everyone to agree on how much water was used, and how much everyone should pay. Maybe this is a redundant position, maybe it doesn’t even need to exist… in that case, the association itself is redundant in it’s goal of regulating water use under the current conditions. That is a distinct possibility.

Well, I’ve gotten off track. After being yelled at, argued with, and told to basically go back where I came from, I realized that help is no good where it is not wanted. The main problem with these couple of fellas is not that they are fundamentally self-interested (this fact has made them rather wealthy), but that they don’t see the world in terms of clear social contracts, but instead as a nebulous cloud of negative no-talent corruption. You can’t sit down and talk with a nebulous cloud. You can’t change a nebulous cloud’s mind. You can’t even wring a nebulous cloud’s neck. About all you can do to a nebulous cloud is blow at it with a bunch of hot air to make yourself fell like at least your moving it, even if you’re not really getting rid of it. That’s what these guys do. They do it because most of Moldova is a nebulous cloud and has been for a long time. They don’t even know what to do when they meet a real person, a person who’s come to try to make a contract beneficial to both parties. All they know how to do is holler and blow hot air, but that doesn’t do anything except get real people angry, frustrated, and finally, fed up.

I’m not even sure if I’m not a nebulous cloud. I don’t think I am, I try hard not to be. I find it funny how amazingly similar some of the things that Ayn Rand says in Atlas Shrugged are to Moldova, mostly the pass the buck, who the hell cares (who is John Galt?) attitude and the resulting economic breakdown based on flight and theft. I know it’s not exactly the same: in her book, a sort of social responsibility/ennui on steriods comes out of an entrepreneurial capitalist economy and results in the state of economic destruction, whereas here, people were tought the social responsibility/ennui on steriods for generations and then someone threw an entrepreneurial capitalist economy in their laps. In any case, it resulted in a similar state of economic destruction.

My point? You can’t convince people to work together in a normal contractual way if they don’t really know what that means. You can’t make people like their jobs. You can’t force people to work hard. You can’t (almost ever) change people’s basic personalities, and you sure as hell can’t if they don’t want them to be changed. You can’t help people that don’t want to be helped. In fact, you can’t even call it help if they indeed don’t want it!

But you know what you can do? You can work hard (for yourself, or for someone who actually wants what you’re doing). You can work together in a clear contractual way and make progress. You can like your job. Why? Because, that’s why. The rest of them can go fuck themselves (I apologize for that comment for those members of my family who might come across this page).