But since ninety-nine percent of the funding for IHAEO came from First World countries, mainly America, one had to accommodate their unprogressive ways. If they felt that a health organization actually had to have people running around in white coats doing things with microscopes and injecting bush people with medicines, even though those people never affected a Third World government in any way, well, then the committee members of IHAEO would put up with it. But only because their own press people said so.
But they didn't have to have those sorts of people around their plush-carpeted meeting rooms. They certainly wouldn't want to dine with them in Paris and London. None of those drones knew how to properly condemn imperialism, racism or Zionism. They were such backward boors that they did not understand the sophisticated intricacies of staff meetings, interorganizational conferences, grand international seminars. They thought health had something to do with giving babies injections, babies who weren't even the children of important people. Just babies. Just because they were going to die without medicine. These whites-they were always white-would go around giving medicine to tribes that didn't even matter.
It was just like the old colonialism with white doctors treating Africans. And everyone on the committee found that objectionable. And so when the young white woman suggested that white doctors go running into African countries, acting like the old colonialists, treating anyone they wished, the Corrimittee on Security and the Inalienable Rights of Struggling Oppressed Peoples not only voted to condemn the usual imperialism, racism and Zionism, but gave her a warning:
"Miss Worthington, we don't want to hear about rainy seasons in the bush again. Who do you think you are? If we were really in the bush, we would sell you for three goats and a jug of banana wine."
It came as a very great shock, therefore, when two hours later they were all informed that they were going to fly to central Africa to, of all things, fight bugs. The offices of Paris were informed. Cocktail parties were canceled. In rooms with fabulous carpets and furniture from Louis XIV, delegates listened in disbelief and sent telexes asking for confirmation of the message.
"Repeat message," they asked.
And it was repeated, "All IHAEO delegates to be ready for flight to Uwenda for pheromone treatment of Ung beetle menace."
"My Lord," gasped one coordinating executive director of IHAEO-there were forty-seven of them, all making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year because on less, no one could reasonably live in civilized life in a major city-"I came from Uwenda. I don't want to go back there ever. What sort of career move is that?"
In his palatial suite near the United Nations headquarters in New York, Amabasa Francois Ndo, director general of IHAEO, heard the chorus of complaints from delegates in all the major capitals of Europe and the Americas. Did he realize that his continued presence as director general of IHAEO depended on those delegates? If they actually had to leave Paris and Rome and New York and Beverly Hills and Las Vegas to go to central Africa, he could expect a revolt.
Was he ready to handle a massive delegate revolt? Was he ready to be stripped of his rank?
Was he himself ready to be returned to the bush as he so cavalierly had ordered all the delegates? "Yes," answered Amabasa Francois Ndo.
Yes to all the questions.
Because he would do anything never to have to see that kimono again.
Chapter 6
Dara Worthington had left the meeting crying. After years of losing scientists while struggling against what had to be the most resilient insect on the face of the earth, the IHAEO labs and poor Dr. Ravits had finally succeeded in isolating a single chemical substance that could conquer the plague of central Africa.
And now, she had blundered somehow in the intricacies of IHAEO politics. Perhaps she had just lost touch with the organization's administration while she was working with the scientists. Whatever. But somehow she had ruined the one chance the people of central Africa had to survive the rainy season. She had taken the lifelong work of Dr. Ravits and at a simple committee meeting thrown it all away.
She had done everything wrong. She cried all the way back to Washington: There was an IHAEO jet leaving but the executive director of the coordinating committee of Liberation Front Observers needed all the available space for his cases of Dom Perignon, so Dara had to take a Greyhound bus.
Back at the laboratory, she did not know how she could face the researchers, all of whom knew that Dr. Ravits had finally solved the unsolvable problem of the invincible Ung beetle. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, might live because of his work and now it wasn't even going to be tried out.
She thought briefly of taking Ravits' solution to an American or French health unit. But if word got out that she was subverting the IHAEO by going to a First World country, no self-respecting Third World country would let in any medical teams at all. She learned quickly, when she had gone to work for IHAEO, that in dealing with a Third Worlder one was always dealing with that great unmentionable: "inferiority complex."
It clouded everything. It even defined Third World. It was not a matter of being non-white because then Japan would be part of the Third World and it was not. In fact, nations that could be considered white were part of the Third World, whose membership requirement seemed to be that its populations were incapable of producing anything beneficial for the rest of mankind.
"Garbage countries," as one economist put it. "The only economic role they ever play is that they happen to breed over resources that industrial nations need. Then the industrial nations give them money which they spend back in the industrial nations because they don't produce anything worth buying themselves."
Dara Worthington could not agree with that cold assessment. People were not garbage even if their government showed no concern for their own populations. She had done missionary work with her parents in Africa and found the people kind and lovely. She loved the people and therefore would put up with anything to help them. She had seen those poor countries suffer the ravages of insect plagues. She had seen proud, decent African farmers facing fields, which they and their families had poured years of work into, that had turned into useless shreds of crops because insects had gotten to them first.
In more advanced countries, a disaster like that would mean that the farmers would lose money and, at worst, have to go on to another job. But in the Third World it meant what it had meant for thousands of years since man had come out of the caves. It meant death.
That was why Dara Worthington had gone to work for the IHAEO. That was why she could easily put up with the machinations and humiliations of being part of the scientific element of the IHAEO. She didn't care if hundreds of millions were spent on private planes, and if fortunes were spent on luxurious mansions. At least some money was going to help people who needed help and that was important to her. That was her department's responsibility and because she had lost her head and said outright to a committee of the IHAEO that they would have to do something now, before the rainy season, she had failed. If she had not been so desperate, so upset by Dr. Ravits' death, she never would have confronted them like that. Instead, she would have found a willing delegate, bought him an expensive dinner, and gotten him to make the proposal. He would then, of course, take all the credit for the work and present it as a Third World achievement. It didn't matter to her; it was the way things worked.