Coalition of the Compassionate

It’s not going to be easy: As a salty Marine Corps sergeant reminded me in a recent training exercise, “Sir, how the hell am I going to make liaison with some long-haired, holier-than-thou hippie in Birkenstocks?”

The sergeant, a veteran of both Iraq wars, is preparing to return to Baghdad this summer. He doesn’t speak Arabic but is learning the language of the nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, that drive international development.

In a world where peacekeeping has become as crucial a military function as fighting wars, military personnel are having to learn a new vocabulary. And, in the end, that may be a good thing for both the “do-gooders” and the armed forces.

For the last three years, I’ve had a foot in both worlds as an active duty Marine officer and head of an NGO that serves Kibera, East Africa’s largest slum, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. When I’m deployed in far-off Bosnia or nearby Djibouti, I carry the lessons learned in a place that still calls me to duty on my annual leaves from the military.

By some estimates, more than a million people live in Kibera, an area about the size of Los Angeles International Airport. Hunger, disease, illiteracy, violence and sexual abuse abound. About 20% of the residents are HIV-positive, and more than 80% of those ages 15 to 30 are unemployed.

Carolina for Kibera, the NGO I founded as a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offers small-scale solutions to these overwhelming problems, including a medical clinic, reproductive health center and youth sports association with more than 6,000 members. It all runs on an annual budget of $60,000, roughly the salary of a mid-level military officer.

There are certain things from the Marine Corps I take with me, and certain things I leave behind when I travel to Kibera. I take basic leadership principles instilled since my first days in training: Judge people by their actions, reward loyalty and achievement, focus on mission accomplishment and build relationships based on integrity. But I leave my unquestioning faith in a chain of command, a demand for precision and a considerable amount of pride and self-assurance.

A new wave of training in “security and stabilization operations” is teaching us to cope with such trade-offs. Today’s U.S. military stands at the intersection of hard and soft power. That means “capacity building” with local leaders one minute and “sighting in” with your M-16 the next. Security and stabilization training is aimed at bridging this divide, and an important part of it involves developing relationships with NGOs, whose group cultures often clash with the Marine Corps structure.

Some Marines explain their distrust by pointing to insurgent and terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, which has used NGOs as fronts to smuggle weapons, recruit operatives and conduct surveillance.

Similarly, legitimate NGOs often fear that any kind of partnership with a military or government will compromise their work. But we’re going to have to learn to get along, because the military is emerging as a front-line provider of aid.

U.S. Special Forces and military civil affairs units are involved in work traditionally reserved for NGOs, such as World Vision and CARE. Provincial Reconstruction Teams, led largely by U.S. Special Forces, build trust with local communities in Afghanistan by drilling wells, constructing schools and medical clinics and resurfacing roads. The Marine Corps conducted dozens of humanitarian assistance missions in Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq and throughout the Horn of Africa last month alone.

My colleagues are often surprised by how much can be accomplished with a relatively minuscule investment. In Kibera, a $26 grant helped a widowed and unemployed nurse with three children establish our medical clinic several years ago. Her clinic treated 5,422 patients in 2003.

Regardless of the size of the investment, military units are learning that development is an art that has the greatest returns when communities themselves embrace and lead it. When aid is directed in a top-down fashion, it becomes a source of conflict in the community, especially when residents feel excluded from the planning and decision-making process.

Military leaders speak of aid as a counterterrorist strategy, helping people whose poverty and isolation makes them “vulnerable to terrorist groups seeking to exploit the situation,” as one retired general said. Community consent can make or break what military planners call the “war of ideas.”

I did not create Carolina for Kibera to influence Kenyans’ image of America. The organization exists to serve Kibera, where people are living in some of the most wretched conditions imaginable.

But I’ve always been interested in how its residents view the United States, and I’m surprised at how few anti-Western sentiments I hear.

After all, our country concentrates nearly half the world’s wealth in the hands of less than 5% of the world’s population, and Kibera’s residents are constantly exposed to a reflection of this reality through ever-present American popular culture.

When visitors come to Kibera, I send them on their first tour with Hussein, a charismatic Muslim youth leader with an imposing physical stature, a hard-boiled reputation and a slick (ganja) ghetto gait -- long, slow steps, exaggerated arm swings, unbridled confidence.

Hussein knows almost every thug in Kibera, and many residents respect him as a former hell-raiser turned community organizer. I send visitors out with Hussein because I think he has something to teach them. He has picked up some things from us too.

A few years ago, Hussein visited me in a small shack I had rented in Kibera. He borrowed one of the books I had brought with me, “The Marine Officer’s Guide,” which he read cover to cover and then quoted enthusiastically at random moments.

One chilly night over hot chai and mandazi, I asked why he liked the book and if he made any connections to Kibera. He smiled and rocked backward, gripping his knee with both hands.

“ ‘Always faithful,’ ” he recited. “I like that, because imagine a world where everybody’s always faithful, everybody’s devoted.... One of the strangest things here is that under these adverse circumstances, people are living. They can still say ‘How are you?’ while they are standing in sewage.”

I asked him if he made any connections between the Marine homilies and development work in Kibera. “What drives Carolina for Kibera?” he asked rhetorically. “I think it is to make this place more humane, and I don’t just mean Kibera. If that is the driving force, then we still have a lot of horsepower. Together we can push this thing to the end of the world.”