Interview with Christina Eley (unpublished interview conducted on March 11, 2009)-no link available
Summary: Christina Eley volunteered, helping impoverished orphans in Morocco during the summer of 2007. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions regarding how much and what kind of U.S. foreign aid she encountered during her time there.
Topic: Should the state department of the Obama Administration double foreign aid for Africa?
Category: Citizen Stakeholder
What Is It? A personal interview
Title: Interview with Christina Eley
Publication Information: Unpublished, Interview occurred on March 11, 2009
Author (Subject): Christina Eley, British exchange student at UO and Volunteer for Moroccan Children’s Trust
Location: Audio on a digital audio recorder
Accessed: March 13, 2009
Support:
• Personal Experience
Eley explained how she got involved with the Moroccan Children’s Trust, which is an organization that coordinates international development volunteer projects, and her experience working in Morocco. She said that the entire time she was there, she never once saw evidence of U.S. foreign aid, the only aid she did see was the volunteer group she was with, which was funded by private parties and government grants from the UK. She worked in an orphanage for underprivileged children that was extremely short-staffed and under-funded, but they had to make do with what they had without much help from outside sources.
Audienc and Agenda: I know Christina personally and I was her only audience. She performed this interview as a favor to me and didn’t have any reason to lie or mislead me. She answered my questions from first-hand experience in Africa, working with a developmental volunteer group. The interview wasn’t published so it wasn’t funded in any way. She just gave some of her views on the topic and talked about how U.S. foreign aid effected her time in Morocco, that is to say, it didn’t at all. She didn’t have any kind of agenda and is only living in the U.S. on exchange for one year, so she doesn’t even have a stake in how her tax dollars are spent, as she won’t be paying any.
Usefulness: This interview could be useful if I needed a first-hand account of an outsider’s perspective on the situation going on in Morocco (which admittedly, isn’t the whole of Africa, and the amount of foreign aid varies greatly from region-to-region). Since Christina didn’t see any evidence of foreign aid, and she was working in an area that would have greatly benefited from it, one can only assume that either Morocco doesn’t receive U.S. foreign aid or it was ineffectively handled somewhere along the way. If the latter were true, then this information is further evidence that the U.S. foreign policy needs intense reforming and streamlining before any doubling of foreign aid occurs.
Works Cited:
Moroccan Children’s Trust website
Morocco Wikipedia entry
