For Profit Social Work

My organization canceled their last Tuesday of the month meeting for the second month in a row this morning. The cancellation came an hour after the meeting was scheduled to begin, because a member of the team who was scheduled to be gone for two weeks was not here, just as we knew she would not be.

Whenever I am in the office one of our social workers is present. He wears a nice suit usually, nicer than anything I own in this country. Like most Ugandans he is polite and happy to see me, and whenever a guest arrives he goes out of his way to introduce me and compliment me, telling them how nice I am. If you've started to scratch your head then you picked up on the giveaway. I am not a nice person. I push people; I'm straight forward; I have very little tolerance for small talk. I put up with cultural norms to a degree but won't bother myself to humor the locals. So why is the social worker telling everyone how nice I am?

It is the same reason they wanted a Peace Corps volunteer, the same reason we have now not had a monthly meeting since April, the same reason my counterpart probably quit. We are a for profit non profit. We don't have investors and we don't distribute our revenue to them, but we exist to pay the salaries of our organization not to conduct the programs we conduct. We know all the buzz words and we use them skillfully. Being a friend of the US Peace Corps is a good business decision.

The situation reminds me of a priest we used to have at our church in Blythewood. We were a small church and couldn't support a diocesan priest at the time so we were assigned a foreign priest on loan from India. He discussed how he got into the priesthood one Sunday. His reasons had nothing to do with spiritual interest or events in his life. The Church had money and he could get a good education and good job through the Church. He was a good man, and a good priest; I liked him. But there was something bothersome about the situation and there is something much more bothersome here.

When being a social worker is a good job, a better job than the competitive marketplace can produce, then you will get for profit social workers and for profit non profit organizations. Not only has it left me without any job responsibilities, but it is also making me hesitant to implement projects, like my biogas digester, which will benefit my organization. If you give a mouse a cookie he will ask for milk, if you give a Ugandan child candy he will come back for more, and if you give an organization a $10,000 grant to build a biogas digester they will be back for a new dormitory when the next Peace Corps volunteer comes around.

I'm going to go finish my Tom Clancy book.