War breeds poverty. Poverty breeds war. They are like blood and bullet. One spills the other. Some people think that bullet and bomb can smash down the Chinese wall between poverty and affluence and bring about a level playing field. Others who are born with fish in mouth talk of teaching those denied of it about how to fish so that they can catch the haul. And, if they begin to harvest the haul the war again leaps out at them and stares at their faces.

Since I would leap at any offer up for grabs coming out of development business, those that fell to me (take it or leave it) were nine times out of ten put me in for the evaluation job – a job that has several stings in its tail like contention, acrimony, dispute, disagreements, grudges, and all that no matter how deeply and sincerely I put my head and heart to it. I had no choice; it never came to me that I should go begging for a job that were less taxing on mind and body, though. I was the likes who’d love to be saddled with task like a donkey and then eat like a king or may be the one who make hay while the sun shines and lay back chewing the cud when the sun hides behind the clouds.

In a small community of international development agencies (this included all types, foreign governments funded, charities-funded, and church-funded and sponsorship based), I was thought of as someone (crazy buddy) who could go risking his life and limb doing the lung-bursting climb traversing the mountains (overrun by armed rebels) and get to the outer reaches (in the time of raging armed conflict) and then walk back to them with a brutally honest report in hand, of course, filled with thorns and roses. In those terrifying days, when you could drop dead any moment (hacked or shot) without ever knowing which way the death crept up on you, you are nothing if not a rebel or a soldier once you kick the bucket because in the eyes of the authorities and the rebels, “innocent people were seldom if ever harmed, as if the bullets fired from their gun had eyes that could see who were enemies and who were innocents. It depends on whose eyes were looking at the dead. The dead could be a rebel, a soldier, or someone somehow linked to them, closely or distantly.

But as the saying goes every cloud has silver lining, not everything been that hopelessly bleak about it. Job Offers came at me thick and fast as if a bevy of consultants have dug hole and gone into hiding so much so that I had to decline many a offers, several plum jobs, opportunity to make a real killing. But soon they became a thing of the past after the Maoists and the Government smoked peace pipe. I didn’t need to rack my brain to figure it out which way they went.

Like they say, fool rush in where wise men fears to tread, the jobs took me to the places which were simply no-go to men in uninforms who were meant to stamp out the insurgency. But the trouble would dog you your way back if some bad omen guided your path and you ran into soldiers armed to teeth moving in formation on combing operation and search and destroy mission. How could you possibly march into the heart of rebel’s territory the very thought of what make our hair stand on end? Any fool walking on two feet without speech impaired could answer it with little effort on part of his brain. But it would take an exceptionally gifted talker with every trick up his sleeve to get the answer go down well with the questioner. Nothing is written across your forehead to testify your claim that you are this and not that, an innocuous trekker and not someone whose mind dyed in red. The questioner has all the right reason to doubt your alibi and reject any of your claims. That is how it was.

If my memory serves me well, at least two development agencies headed by big-headed and big-hearted men offered to buy me a seat in the navy-green helicopter owned by the military and drop me at some safe distance from where I trudge up the hill and downhill and plod my way across the ravines to my destination and then talk my way out of gun-slinging rebels in case I got waylaid by them. My little wisdom, size of a mustard seed I should say, came in the way of my thought process and what came out of my mouth was an emphatic no.

But then, it was all the same with the rebels who took control of me as many as half a dozen times and let go after grilling me about an hour or two. I didn’t have an iota of doubt about it that if they talk to me, they can’t kill me. There was not even the remotest possibility of me figuring in the hit list the rebels had drawn up. I had absolutely no doubt about it that if words came out of their mouth no matter how sour or sweet before bullet from the barrel of their gun, I would still be walking the planet earth.

Now, before I drift into things other than what I sat down to write for Linked-in post, Let me tell you the truth of the matter that an evaluator in a land where I breathe and eat has nothing but to pull his socks and put his boot on to go to the places where bullets fly and landmines go off, with nothing but a pen in shirt pocket and a folded pad tucked in hip pocket to write down things on, or else, you are not any good. Where even an image of Buddha could sow doubt in the mind of a questioner and land you in trouble in those rugged terrains and you are interrogated over it to ascertain whether the image was the picture of rebel leader and the questioner likely to turn hostile against the person holding the image. You may not believe it but the truth is that I was put through an hour long ordeal struggling to prove the image printed on the book that I carried was of Buddha – the Messiah of Peace.

In this post, I am going to talk about two such evaluations at some length (if you just can bear with me) that I carried out all by myself just the time when armed conflict had reached the stage in which unprecedented killing and destruction took place with no holds barred. The war had broken all rules to play by.

The evaluation exercise involved arduous trekking across two mountainous districts, one in the Mid-west and the other in the far-west region. Either of them had been the rebel’s’ stronghold where they wrote the rules, heard cases, and passed the judgment. Going deep into the territory of these districts was a long, grueling uphill and downhill trek and required visa/permit from the rebels, a breach of it will mean you may not walk back on two feet in one piece.

Making it to the community that lived in solitary hamlets deep down at the hollow bottom of mountains where the development agencies chose to implement the project took 2/3 days of trek from the point the road ends.

The far-west district happened to be the one hard hit by HIV/AIDS catastrophe that had spiraled out of control, the virus had traveled all the way from India. Men went to India to make money in hope of finding answer to grinding poverty and on return brought Hiv/Aids VIRUS in their blood which they passed on to their sppouses, and not long after the epidemic blew to catastrophic proportion.

In some selected clusters based on some sort of socio-economic ranking surfaced from a pre-intervention exercise, the Development Agency (One that didn’t run on foreign government fund) had launched micro-lending scheme – sort of rural banking. Under the scheme, 20-25 households (women member) get organized into group, do monthly saving, hold monthly meeting, acquire entrepreneurship skill and the Development Agency through local partner avail 50,000 rupees to set up a revolving fund in each group. This five-figure sum was meant to be the pivot of the wheel of the chariot that poor women would jump onto to fight poverty.

It goes without saying that the strategy was to turn poverty into a thing of the past by building the women’s capacity arming them with entrepreneurial skill and accessing them resource which put together would empower them to engage in some sort of entrepreneurship and thus bail them out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Low interest micro-lending to group members would help them start up farm-based entrepreneurship and create sustained and stable source for family income.

I had only narrowly avoided bumping into a band of armed rebels who had only left the house that I was to stay overnight by couple of minutes.

The NGO functionary (local partner) accompanying me made all the good words he was capable of that could keep my heart from sinking or spirit from dwindling. He’d say that there was nothing to worry about and that the program was going good and everything was perfectly in place and under control. And, they enjoyed the support of rebels. So, there was nothing to worry about. The community facilitator (the local staff) , however, expressed his inability to bring all the community group members together at one place for focused group discussion citing the rebel’s displeasure at any public assembly. As there was little I could do to alter the situation to my favor and gather what I traveled this far looking for, I had no choice but to meet and talk to little more than half a dozen women who they produced and introduced to me as member of the group. Every one of them responded to my inquisitiveness in language which sounded to me nothing if not mechanical, contrived, and artificial. All of them spoke one and the same thing as if they were bunch of robots with chips planted in their head and someone holding the remote and them saying words that were put into their mouth. The responses they made went like, “the program helped us immensely, member have taken loan and invested in business, they are reaping good profits, market for produce, poultry and goat and sheep is not a problem, livelihood challenges are significantly eased, and women have access and control over resources, only too good to be true in far off, remote villages under control of rebels. Upon asked if they could take me around to see some examples as a way of validating their claim, they said they couldn’t do that as rebels had warned them against taking outsiders around.

A thing to be told here is that no member of the development agencies had monitored their program by visiting the community in person over the last 5 years. They relied on report sent to them and made it basis for releasing funds.

The lady of the house where I was to dine and sleep had been member of one the 80 groups (altogether) supported by this intervention, although she wasn’t an ideal choice to be the part of discussion, or, may be, she was asked to fight down her emotions and rein back her feelings and keep her mouth shut. She attended the meeting but didn’t utter a word all through the two hour long meeting. However, Her frequent casting of furtive glances over shoulder, disapproving look at fellow woman responding to my query, curling up lips, discontent writ large on her face, looking the other way and perhaps speaking her thoughts in low whisper, gabbling away words resting her chin on palm of her hand with face partly veiled, muttering under breath, those gestures said it all that there was something funny that they were keeping under wraps.

……Timid and shy and at the same time modest and solicitous is how she may be depicted in words serving me dinner at her place in the evening. She would talk tersely and sparingly and would give evasive replies. I tried to dig into things that I was looking for in hope that I could bring her round to cough up some important information about the actual state of affairs or perhaps she unwittingly spill the beans but that was not to be.

Of sudden my eyes fell on her wrist watch with yellow metal strap. None other women I conversed with in the afternoon had owned one. I asked her if she borrowed money from the group to buy the ornament. It must have cost a fortune, I quipped. She burst into sarcastic laughter revealing a perfect row of teeth. Group money is gone to rebels to buy bullet, words came out of her mouth just like that. I gaped at her, ate supper and slept.

Her story turned out to be true. Ngo functionary confirmed it. They didn’t report it to the partner holding purse in the center because that way they would risk their life and lose their job. I did it because I would lose none. The Ngo functionary lost their job and left the village before harm could come to them. Wherever they went they remembered me as someone who kills a project whenever he goes to evaluate it.

In other evaluation which I did in the Midwest, NGO functionary taken to hiding to evade the arrest warrant issued against them by the rebel’s court. In the court there was slew of complaints against them of which the key complaints included smuggle of contraband goods and human trafficking (girls) under the guise of cultural troupes.

In course of evaluation I held talks with the rebel commander, authorities in the district, and other stakeholders. None refuted the charges against them. The community said they had fled the village and not been around over past five years. Interestingly, the local partner continued to receive annual release of funds based on reports they forwarded to the resourceful partner at the center.

I came back, wrote what I gathered from different sources. They stopped funding the project aimed at poverty alleviation and it was killed.

Again, I was a project killer.

(Anyone interested to read project evaluation report post-conflict Peace building, please write to me)