Afghan Aid

A frustrated friend of mine wrote this, and I thought it was funny enough to pass along...

You're an Afghan farmer with 2 cows. You receive a $1.2 million technical assistance grant to feed the cows and buy non-Iranian farm equipment to support your dairy. The cows accidentally walk across the border to your cousin’s farm in Iran. It’s not your fault, you don’t know what happened.

You receive a $600,000 grant to buy enough Swiss cows to supply milk to your new dairy. You still complain and must continue farming poppies for 2 more years until the Swiss cows produce enough milk to make a profit.

Ooops that damned NGO forgot to tell you that YOU must buy feed for the cows – you receive a $500,000 grant to purchase a feed mill and enough raw materials for feed (flown in from Dubai because you cannot deal with Iran and Pakistanis will steal it). The NGO sets up the feed mill and integrated farm for you, but in the process the feed materials rot because you don’t have a suitable warehouse or dryers.

You receive a $2 million grant to build a complete storage facility imported from Iowa to properly store your feed for your Swiss cows. You are forced to form a cooperative to support the community. You gather your relatives and form a co-op to satisfy the requirements, but do not have an office to hold the board meetings.

You receive a $750,000 grant to buy land and build a 1200 sq.m. house for all the board members to meet and drink green tea. You convince the NGO after they allocate the money that foreign contractors cost too much to build your meeting place and build it with Afghan construction for half the price. You buy 10 new Land Cruisers to transport the Afghan workers to/from the building site. They complete the first floor, but a 2.3 earthquake destroys the construction and you’ve run out of money because the Land Cruisers consume more fuel than the NGO predicted.