Given what's in the news, about DOGE going after USAID, among other agencies, I've taken to bringing up here in my blogs, and conversationally, that we were a USAID family in the Philippines for some years. Of course that identity has entirely to do with my dad's work, which paid the bills. My mom played her counterpoint to dad-the-technocrat (lowercase): she was a pretty serious human rights advocate, standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples vs the colonizing Christian lowlanders. I was proud of them both.
However we got to the Philippines care of UNDP, an agency of the United Nations. We even had UN passports at that point, which as I recall gave us special privileges going through airline security checks. In any case, I was proud of that identity as well.
However, I believe dad was somewhat uncomfortable being a part of a high end serve the wealthy kind of project involving filling in Manila Bay even more, to add room for fancy hotels and / or that Cultural Center of the Philippines they built while we were there.
He was more into teaching the techniques of grassroots planning, like he'd developed in Libya, wherein local administrations and ministries are empowered to develop their own land use plans, armed with their own locally undertaken demographic and other statistical studies. He knew about how you put a cable-like sensor across a road, to count vehicles, get a sense of the traffic. It's not like I followed him around work all that often, just that I'd pick up dribs and drabs.
So I think his arranging to switch to a USAID job was in line with his wanting to practice planning in a more decentralized, advisory-only capacity. He got to fly around the islands a lot and meet with counterparts. He loved doing stuff like that. I think the USAID job really suited him, probably because he helped design it. Certainly it outlasted my own stay, as I was off to Princeton a year or two before they left Makati.
As an expat 3rd culture kid, I do have empathy for families suddenly finding their future plans canceled because of tumultuous changes back in the imperial capital. I checked a few websites in the Philippines to see what might be going on with some of the families there.
Dad was a freelancer, meaning he was not career USG by a long shot. He'd work for whatever governments, for whatever private firms, and he'd work for the UN. I'm pretty sure his work with Libya followed a similar trajectory to the one he followed vs-a-vs the Philippines: he got started with that EUR-based job (EUR is outside of Rome, Italy) but then shifted over to Whiting and Associates, a Nebraska-based planning firm, and it's with them that he had an office in the Paroli area, right near the South Korean ambassador's residence (I was good friends with the ambassador's youngest son).
Dad spent many years helping Libyans plan for a bright future, looking at least 50 years ahead. He didn't live long enough to see NATO ganging up on Gaddafi and bombing the place, with operatives moving Libyan weapons stashes to Syria as Seymour Hersh would later write about.
I never had much respect for US foreign policy towards Libya. It seemed mostly based on revenge for his having shut down Wheelus AFB and nationalized the oil. Who is sucking up Libya's oil reserves today I wonder? I'll ask a chatbot. BP and Shell, among others. Figures. When does NATO plan on bombing Venezuela on behalf of BP?
My Facebook comment on Natasha's Youtube says this, somewhat summarizing the above:
Natasha is one of my favorite YouTubers. Don't be misled by the thumbnail, she's being sarcastic, sassing her critics.
People who dislike her anti-Z messages (Z being code for special military operation) think she must be secretly getting money under the table from the USG. She reassures us she's just another everyday YouTuber of the type that depends on the channel itself for revenue, and on Patreon.
I've been following Natasha since she started her channel, already back from the USA student exchange program, which she has always been open about and proud of. Not a secret.
By the way, my own family was USAID for awhile. I could claim USAID put me through high school (although it was the UNDP that got us there -- to the Philippines -- in the first place). Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya put me through 4th - 8th grade in Italy, if you wanna drum up even more scandal.
