Trump Cannot Shut Down my USAID Console Table

Author’s Note: Nine months ago, my mother passed away. Two other family members followed her death within a few months. My siblings and I went from one funeral to another. “Funeral-hopping,” we joked, to dispel the sadness and the disbelief. I experienced an intense grief --- sadness, guilt, remorse, emptiness, anger, self-flagellation, discombobulation, depression in simultaneity. I stopped writing. I couldn't summon any words, verbs, or nouns. My life was a litany of unspoken adjectives. All the emotions accompanying love and loss flooded my hours, days, and months. But I knew that I could not continue to languish. So early this year, I enrolled in a master's course in Literary Studies at the University of Chicago. I’ve begun reading again. Weekly short essays kick-started my writing. Online discussions are exhilarating. I will fly to Chicago for a face-to-face live classroom experience in the coming months. And I will awaken to the world again, afresh. So here I am, a fragile writer resurrecting her voice amidst an even more troubled world than when my mother had the privilege of life to witness the deluge. As I write this, I listen to Robert Lamm of the famed Chicago band. “Monday clouds, Tuesday rain, I’m picking up of what love remains.” Music helps my sorrow dissipate. As my online professor said a few weeks ago, how do we find/create magic in our world despite its turbulences and disturbances? He hurled the question in the spirit of the Socratic teaching method. I heard a humanistic challenge: how do we share our human journey and craft a new world? Spread hope, dispel the darkness, participate in this higher purpose through writing --- one blog piece at a time. (Apologies for the numerous adverbs!)

It was a nasty divorce. I got two towels, ten teacups, a gaudy red plastic bucket with a matching scoop, and three light bulbs. The shrieking parrots and whining chow chow faded as his overloaded SUV drove away, minus my measly stash of post-marital giveaways. I stuck my middle finger in the air. Perhaps this was how Parisians felt when the Nazis were finally booted out in 1944. A full-on freedom fest!

I took tricycles and walked to my new home, stopped by the corner store to buy a limp fried pork chop for dinner. My teaching job paid the bills, but often, it was a choice between an extra can of Coke or toothpaste. This was the price of liberty --- a shallow pocket and limited shopping choices. Okay, I wasn’t living below the poverty line, but I wasn’t queueing outside Bulgari shops either. For vicarious pleasures, I watched Audrey Hepburn, wearing long black gloves, munching on a croissant while browsing Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue.

Then came a very handsome USAID contract that rescued my penurious existence and pushed me further up and away from the poverty line. Working with the Department of Agriculture in the Philippines, my assignment involved facilitating dialogues with farmers and fishermen whose inputs fed into the agency's policy- and decision-making structures. I backstopped the department secretary --- a highly motivated and committed professional with a background in export agriculture. His ministry was the recipient of USAID’s Public Law 480 (PL480) grant, more popularly known as the Food for Peace Program. The program would support market efficiency-enhancing reforms to spur long-term economic growth with specific contributions by the agricultural sector. Available figures indicate that the USAID dispensed approximately US$6 billion since it began operations in the Philippines in 1961. (The USAID website has shut down, so these figures are approximations).

I accompanied him in every dialogue with NGOs and community organizations. I helped draft an executive order for the agriculture secretary’s signature that would impose a moratorium on fish trawling at Laguna de Bay, the largest water body in the Philippines. This administrative move would allow fish stocks to regenerate and support the livelihoods of small fishermen. I also helped set up the NGO Desk in two other agencies to emulate the experiment at participatory decision-making structures. And I graduated from a floor mattress to a bed with three additional fluffy pillows and a thin Balinese quilt as a bed cover. I discarded the gaudy red plastic bucket, burnt out the three lightbulbs, purchased basket lamps, and slept to the nocturnal serenade of garden crickets after a long and fruitful dialogue day.

One late afternoon, on my return trip to Manila from a policy dialogue in Quezon province, I chanced upon a nondescript furniture shop with a rickety signpost: “Furniture sold here,” the signpost read.

When we finished hearing their proposals for supporting rice price policies, a successful dialogue with a farmer's organization left me energized. The farmer leaders and representatives endorsed the idea of creating an advisory council, with the department secretary acting as chair. USAID’s PL480 grant institutionalized democratic decision-making from the grassroots. I was proud of this trip’s accomplishment. I requested the driver to turn into the dirt road.

A humble off-the-beaten-track dwelling didn’t speak of grandiose dreams like Passerini at UK’s Chelsea Harbour or Herman Miller showrooms in Chicago. No, not even IKEA at Bangkok’s newly constructed Emsphere. Instead, it was more of a shack that resembled an outhouse in the middle of a sugar cane field.

Inside the makeshift woodworker’s shop, I saw her standing there. (Thank you, John Lennon). The fading afternoon light set her ablaze. The last rays of the afternoon sun were a torchlight, a vision aflame like Moses’ burning bush at Mount Horeb, ready to receive the word of God. She stood proudly at 73 centimeters high. Her lines were clean and straight, with no unnecessary ornamentation. At 150 centimeters long, hers was a finely chiseled body. A tabletop sanded smooth, an unbroken plane in deep ochre made from Philippine acacia wood, a color reminiscent of overaged mustard grains.

The sun dropped swiftly into the mountains. I took a quick look at the broad borders of the console table. The woodcarvers chose Narra, the strongest, sturdiest Philippine hardwood. It flaunted a most luxurious shade of chocolate. The three drawers beneath were the only embellishment. I pulled them open, and they glided effortlessly on their waxed runners. The bottoms were robust and severe. They could carry the weight of a thousand photographs, bundles of cloth and fabric, coloring pens and paintbrushes, sketching paper, multicolored embroidery threads, and knick-knacks aplenty. I pushed the drawers close; the runners held steady.

The very last red rays of the setting sun showed a burst of reddish-yellow-brown on the tabletop, like the color of pregnant earth, when seeds planted deep below sprout into life. And then the sun was gone, and the room descended into a dull gray. The console table seemed like a forlorn piece, desolate unto itself. Mang Tasyo, the shop owner and chief woodcarver, held a half-smoked stump of local tobacco. His long fingers started wrinkling from many years of pounding and chiseling heavy wood. And I was mesmerized by his gentle eyes, not an ounce of cutthroat capitalist profit-making. The table would have been his last (perhaps the first) purchase of the day.

Darkness filled the room. I lost all desire for bargaining. I wanted the table in my home, produced by Mang Tasyo’s labor and inspired by a long tradition of woodcarving in his province. The vision of Moses and the burning bush returned. I was receiving instructions from the divine.

My first purchase ever since the post-marital split. An exquisite piece of handcrafted furniture completed my liberation bash.

The USAID assignment ended that year. We completed the creation of the NGO desk at the Department of Agriculture. Farmer leaders perennially gathered from all over the country to discuss their policy and program proposals. Each round of deliberations brought the agricultural sector forward, however slow and small.

My boss, the department secretary, finished his tenure and stepped down after the election of a new president. He gave the newly appointed secretary a copy of the administrative order at the turnover ceremonies. He was proud of the legacy he was leaving behind—a fully functioning grassroots advisory council that would enshrine democratic governance at the Department of Agriculture.

Shortly after, the farmer leaders and representatives held a private ceremony to award him an appreciation plaque in recognition of his genuine commitment to participatory decision-making. He muttered a hard-to-hear “thank you” and sipped his Coke. After numerous rounds of dialogues on policy compromises with the farmer representatives in the room, he was speechless. He wouldn’t hold his emotions if he said anything more.

That was thirty-two years ago.

My console table still stands in our ancestral home, which my mother designed and built. Soon, however, the house will be gone, as my mother has gone. All things must pass (thank you, George Harrison).

Over three decades, the table hosted thousands of what-nots: Christmas wrapping paper, masking tapes, midnight snacks, soda cans, carry-on luggage occasionally hoisted onto the top flat plane for easier packing. Now middle-aged, she looks a bit worn, with some of the wood scraped from overuse and small bits of wood chipped off at the corners. She will need a makeover.

Lately, I have been scouting for family inheritors. The console table must be bequeathed to someone in our lineage, but only after a final forward journey with me. There is an abundance of human goodness embedded in that table: the woodworkers who built her, the transporters who carried her with utmost care up two flights of stairs in our ancestral home, the helpers who meticulously dusted and waxed her over thirty years, the movers who will wrap and encase her so that she can complete her odyssey to our dwelling place in the mountains of northern Thailand. Embedded in the fine-grain wood are the imprints of farmer-leaders who gave us a chance to achieve something worthwhile, perhaps to outlast us all. I intend for the console table to outlive me too.

Trump dissolved USAID a few weeks ago, but he cannot erase the hard work of an organization that has delivered a multitude of good work in USAID’s long, reputable history. The legacy of USAID’s efforts will show up in the millions of educated girls around the world who have a fighting chance to escape the strictures of crippling traditionalism; the free lunch programs to stave off starvation and food insecurity in poorer countries; public health care programs like free vaccination, HIV prevention, and global health surveillance for disease control that extended life spans and kept populations free and safe from illness. Any number of executive orders cannot obliterate USAID’s accumulated legacies. Their enduring presence has been one of the cornerstones of American soft power.

In time, USAID will be forgotten if it remains a shuttered agency. Let it be (thank you Paul McCartney). However, the tireless human endeavors to achieve progress will always be remembered somehow because I believe in the power of memory. With each remembering, the stories of our shared journey will expand. They will be traded between and among the thousands of men and women who served at USAID offices worldwide. I have contributed mine. And I have already engraved and encased them in the console table’s drawers, with many more to be collected, shared, archived, and preserved.