This post is coming a bit late as I have had no internet access over the past few days. Luckily, I’ve had the good sense to take copious notes to help remember all of the amazing things that I have been up to. With some more luck, I will catch up on my trip so far tonight. Although  I’m only on the third day of my visit to the Water Resource Center at the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation (shown in the picture above),  I am already sure that this will be a life-changing experience for me.

On Monday morning, we had a wonderful breakfast at the Ahuja Residency. Joining us at the table was a man staying overnight on his way home from a trip to Germany. He is a teacher at a school nearby. We discussed his plan to integrate German into the curriculum, and how difficult it is to do so given their limited resources and technology. His school still only has access to typewriters, and as he works on creating a text any mistakes would require him to start over again on that page of his manuscript. Few of us stateside remember what this was like, and it is a difficulty that I never encountered myself. We also tried to explain to him the concept of a liberal arts education. It amazes me how specializing schooling is here and in many other parts of the world. The concept of a diverse curriculum based on building skills rather than accumulating specific knowledge was difficult for him to grasp.

After we walked through the Defense Colony into a nearby market. Our main task, to get money from an ATM, was successful thanks to a Citi Bank branch. Mostly, we just walked around and took in the sights. People  sold fruit and chai in the streets, an unfathomable number of insects hovered around us (it’s no wonder that vector borne diseases are so prevalent), and there was a considerable lack of proper sanitation based on the amount of trash we saw everywhere.

In order to catch a 1:05 flight, our time in the market was limited and we soon left for the airport and flew to Jodhpur. The ride to Indira Gandhi International was quite an adventure. Traffic rules seem not to apply or maybe even exist in India. There are no lanes, and our vehicle maneuvered around a sea of other cars, rickshaws, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians and even livestock taking up space in the road. The speed in which they drive through the chaos is nerve-wracking, yet accidents are rare. At about 2:30, we arrived in Jodhpur. In this short flight, one could see the transition from miles and miles of houses stretching out into the sunset in the dense metropolis of Delhi, to smaller, very compact cities, and eventually miles of nothing but desert with a house here and there, before we reached the blue city, Jodhpur. The population of the city proper is about one million, but unlike the airports of comparably sized cities in the United States, there were no gates and space for only on airplane at a time to park behind the terminal. At the airport, Ganpat Singh was there to greet us, and he and a driver took us to the JBF’s Water Resource Center, about a half hour ride.

The Center is a converted palace, a donation to the center from its founder, the Maharaja (aka “king”) of the Jodhpur region and we were greeted like dignified guests before meeting a cast of characters that you will get to know well in my future writings. Slowly, I began to encounter the Northwestern Students and got to know them a bit better over dinner and through our conversation after on the veranda next to one of the palace’s courtyards. Before this, myself, Morgan and Sunanada, the other Grinnell students, as well as Lesley Delmenico, the professor who orchestrated our involvement, got a crash course in the Marwar Region of the Thar Desert, the problems its people face, and also in the history of the JBF and what it is doing to combat these problems. Look forward to me sharing their perspective with you, along with the knowledge that I have gained through my own research, in a series of columns that will appear on this site in the coming days.

I arrived safely last night, India time of course, after travelling for twenty-two hours straight plus a ten and a half hour time difference. There are many occasions where I’ve travelled before and found it hard to reconcile where I actually am based on sight alone. There is no question I’m in India right now. It’s an entirely different world here, and I haven’t even left the modern, sophisticated city of Delhi yet. Currently, I’m at my accomodations, the Ahuja Guest House located in the Defense Colony. I have already brushed my teeth using a bottle of water, a first, due to advisories about the poor quality, and took a very short shower, heeding to a sign on the mirror reminding me that water is life and I need to conserve the precious resource. There are tropical birds flying around outside, a man just came by to deliver fresh bananas, and the weather is gorgeous. Yet there is another side of the city that I started to see when I arrived. The air quality is terrible. You can see the pollution in the air, and it’s quite apparent when breathing. On the ride here, I saw busses crammed with people, hundreds more along the streets, and roads packed with Autorickshaws, cars and motorcycles. It’s also curious to start to question to what extent this city is still influenced by British colonization. Old Delhi was, of course, the center of imperial rule in India. Certainly English is pervasive in the signs, even if most of the people I have encountered have a barely conversational grasp of the language (which is more than I can say about Hindi, of course). It’s odd to see people laying around the streets, living in shacks and then ads for Pepsi and Vodaphone.

We will head to a flea market after breakfast and then fly to Jodhpur where the real work will begin. The next ten days or so of my trip will be spent at and around the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation’s Water Resource Center located in a converted fortress outside of Jodhpur. The next chance I have to write, I will post about the problem, in depth. I really want to convey, based on my knowledge from the literature, how dire the situation is, how bad it will get due to climate change, and how this impacts the lives of individuals, specifically women and children throughout the region. I am also looking forward to giving the story of the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation and the amazing work it is doing. Quite fascinating.

I had posted a version of this on March 20th, promising to journal my first-hand experience with the issues I love to write about. Well, time and a lack of high speed internet access prevented me from doing so in real time, and the realities of being a second semester senior caused me to need to put off writing about my experience in-depth until now. Don’t fret though, I drafted out each of the posts I will be putting up daily for the next two weeks (in addition to my usual commentary) two months ago. They will be going into a special category on the blog, so you can look for them there.

If you have not gotten a chance to read what is below, I suggest you take a look. Re-read it if you’d like as well. It’s largely left unchanged to reflect my feelings at the time before I left, but I did go back and make a few edits…

——————-

In just a few short hours, I will embark on my journey to the historic Land of Kings, Rajasthan. As my trip is extremely relevant to the purpose of this blog, I hope to use the opportunity as a forum to give first hand accounts of what I am seeing and hearing and then start a discussion based on your reactions to my observations. While I don’t know what the situation will be in terms of internet access, I will write a short update as often as I possibly can.

So I’d guess that you’re probably wondering how I was able become involved in such an endeavor. Well, it’s no secret that I care very deeply about international development and also global environmental issues. Despite this interest, I’ve never had an opportunity to see with my own eyes what the situation looks like on the ground. Certainly as a Westerner raised in a middle-class family (middle-call by our standards, at least), I am privileged and I am quite cognizant of this. Yet I’m not sure if I can ever fully grasp what life is like on a dollar a day, a phrase that many media sources and academics just toss out there, without experiencing it for myself. So when I heard that my college, Grinnell, was taking three students to Rajasthan, India, I jumped at the opportunity and was lucky enough to be selected to go.

The purpose of the trip is for myself and my two peers from Grinnell, as well as seven students from Northwestern University, our partner in this project, to design independent research projects, gather information while in Rajasthan, and analyze our results upon returning to the states. As a second component, we are working with the highly regarded Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, an NGO that deals with water scarcity issues in the region. The first few days will be devoted to working with the Foundation’s scholars and hearing their perspective on the problem.

Much of the Indian state of Rajasthan is located in the Thar Desert. In fact, it is the most populous desert region in the world and not coincidentally the second poorest state in all of India. In such a water rich nation as the United States, we really have no idea of the extent of the water crisis gripping much of the world. Farmers in Rajasthan have rioted because they lack the necessary water to irrigate their crops. Further, the quality is extremely low, as the water they do have is often brackish, saline and has unsafe concentrations of substances such as fluorine that make it unsafe to drink. The state and federal governments in India have been at a loss in finding a solution, despite the fact that up until fairly recently, these people lived on this same land sustainably and successfully for over a millennium. Research suggests a large part of the reason these people might be so poor and undeveloped compared to surrounding states is their lack of access to resources such as water. In the coming years, climate disruption due to increased carbon in the atmosphere will only make the situation worse. Droughts will become more frequent as the monsoons continually fail. Aside from Africa, South Asia will be hit harder by climate change than any other place in the world (although things look pretty bad in Australia too).

So my task, and that of the other students, is to come up with a solution to this problem. It’s pretty hard to believe that this is what they actually expect of us. Finding even a partial solution might prove elusive. Knowing comparatively little about the region and the problem, it’s pretty arrogant to expect us Westerners to come in and make a positive difference. I view the purpose of my trip as a chance to listen. My project deals with determining the effectiveness of NGOs focus on water education or teaching self-help principles. A great deal of my research will be based on interviews and quantitative metrics I record while talking to people living in rural desert villages (with the help of a translator) and also through the NGOs themselves. The general idea is that I will analyze the two and find out whether what these organizations are doing meets the needs of the people. I will explain this in further detail as time goes on. As Rajasthan was heavily influenced by British colonization, the second part of my study will be looking at what I can draw from interactions with Native Americans, Westerners and similar NGOs in the American Southwest and also in Australia with the Aborigines. With some luck, I will come up with an epiphany that might provide useful insights based on the information I gathered and as a relatively unbiased outsider.

This should be exciting. I am also stopping in Delhi twice (on the front and back end), which will be just another view of the great country of India and I hope to write about that as well. Please do offer feedback along the way. I’d really like to hear your perspective.

~Jordan

So I began by giving you an idea of what the picture of extreme poverty is like in places such as sub-Saharan Africa. Next I gave a brief history of our (largely futile) foreign assistance efforts, followed by a succinct explanation of why we must continue to come to the aid of those nations that are in need. There are two things preventing us from being successful in our attempts to do so: a lack of a clear mission for our foreign assistance agencies, and their lack of clout within government. Only by dealing with both problems effectively can foreign assistance be successful in achieving its desired goal.

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the foundational bill that merged together many different agencies and created USAID, is outdated and operates under the assumptions of the Cold War. Not surprisingly USAID lacks a clear mission and role in the 21^st century as it has not shown the ability to adapt on its own. There is no clear focus, goal or priority driving the agency; by one count, the Foreign Assistance Acts actually list over 150 policy directives and goals. When an organization prioritizes everything, then nothing is a priority. Due to its broad mandate, the United States has been known to to fund a program to solve an issue every time one arises in a developing country.

Further, because Congress directs where funds should be spent, including earmarks tied to contractors in the US, very little money reaches the local people in greatest need of support. Pressure for short-term success in long-term missions has led to criticism, reductions in staff, funding and influence, as well as an increased role for competing programs and agencies such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation, President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and even the Department of Defense. The Agency’s decreased stature and its subordinance to the State Department has left it with virtually zero ability to create and modify policy nor defend its budget requests.

Last year, Congress was introduced to H.R. 2139 and S. 1524. The former was introduced in the House in late 2009 and the latter was awaiting a floor vote in the Senate as of February, 2010. They amend, but do not replace, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Their primary components are:

*Adding a second Deputy Administrator to model the State Department

*Adding an Assistant Administrator for Policy and Strategic Planning to direct U.S. government policy on development issues, provide long-term planning and budget management, and conduct research, monitoring and evaluation (in a new office of Learning, Evaluation and Analysis in Development).

*Creating an independent Council on Research and Evaluation (CORE) in the executive branch to objectively evaluate the impact of all (multilateral and bilateral) foreign aid programs funded by the U.S.

*Mandating a strategic review of USAID human resources needs at headquarters and in the field, with help from a public-private task-force.

The primary issue with the bills before the House and the Senate is they do not legislatively re-define the 1961 Act but rather primarily order a task force to offer recommendations. Certainly they do create another Deputy for the Director, and it task both individuals with reorganizing their resources but it does not actually provide the resources that are necessary to solve the problems of ambiguity and clout. Marginally, the increased focus on research, learning and analysis would make USAID more influential in policy circles, based on the empirical studies and the sharing of information with other governments and organizations. In an ideal situation, the bills would lead to more effective policy, and thus more clout. Yet this is by no means a guarantee, and earmarks would still be a problem. The bill also includes provisions to rotate Foreign Service employees to increase interconnectedness. Both of these cause the bills to be strong under the “strengthen and coordinate criterion.” Their incremental nature, however, leaves me doubtful that they can ever solve both of the problems that I identified in a meaningful way.

Currently the Obama administration has a task force looking into this policy dilemma. It will be interesting to see what they come up with, as it seems that despite bipartisan support, a passing a comprehensive and smart bill originating in the House and Senate is asking for too much.

I might be graduating tomorrow, so I’ll have to keep this post fairly short. Looking on the bright side, however, my commencement speaker is Jeffrey Sachs. I’m proud to have played a small part in selecting him. You can trust that I will be sure to write my reflections on whatever his advice is to the graduates of the Grinnell College class of 2010. That said, I’m going to succinctly lay out a case for why assisting foreign nations in development is smart policy, despite the myriad of problems we have at home.

While current efforts may exacerbate the problem and must be significantly modified, abandoning foreign assistance to the region is not an acceptable solution. Underdevelopment is a threat to national security. Deep poverty and injustice in states can alienate populations from their government, increase the risk of civil conflict and erode a weak state’s capacity to govern. This leads to domestic and transnational security threats as seen in Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and countless other nations. Furthermore, the USAID’s staff, when deployed effectively, has empirically been one of the most powerful instruments of soft power the U.S. government has at its disposal. Their success creates valuable allies and influence when crafting United States foreign policy. As Senator Kerry (D- MA), Chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations said:

“History teaches us that America is safest and strongest when we understand that our security will not be protected by military means alone. It must be protected as well by our generosity, by our example, by powerful outreach, and by instilling a palpable sense in the people of the world that we understand—and share their destiny. That has always inspired people, and it always will. It undercuts our enemies, it empowers our friends–and it keeps us safer.”

In many places, the US Agency for International Development is the most visible face of the U.S. government; its influence at the level of civil society is far greater than the State Department’s or the Pentagon’s, whose representatives tend to remain in capital cities. USAID officers have daily interactions with civil-society leaders, government officials, members of local legislative bodies, businesspeople, and ministries that deal with development issues.

Thus, development must be regarded as one of the three key pillars of foreign policy, equal importance to defense and diplomacy. Federal policy ought to reflect this.

Maybe I’m jumping ahead a bit by giving some background on past efforts and starting to build the foundations of a critique, but I think it’s important to have this grounding now before I delve deeper. In my next column, I will “take a step back” and explain just why foreign assistance is so important to our national interest. For now, however, take pleasure in a (not so) subtle trashing of a part of the Bush legacy that many regard to be one of its few positives. Truly, this is just another example of an extisting problem exacterbated by his administration.

“No objective supporter of foreign aid can be satisfied with the existing program – actually a multiplicity of programs. Bureaucratically fragmented, awkward and slow, its administration is diffused over a haphazard and irrational structure covering at least four departments and several other agencies. The program is based on a series of legislative measures and administrative procedures conceived at different times and for different purposes, many of them now obsolete, inconsistent and unduly rigid and thus unsuited for our present needs and purposes. Its weaknesses have begun to undermine confidence in our effort both here and abroad.”

Know who said that? John F. Kennedy in 1961. While this quote may be half a century old, if one did not know any better it would seem to be an effective critique of foreign assistance today. The problems Kennedy described have returned in a more acute form than ever before. His solution holds important lessons for today as well. It required personal commitment and political capital to fundamentally transform the system. The reform embodied bipartisan consensus and transformation aligned government structures to reflect new challenges at the time.

Through this effort, USAID’S presence abroad during the Cold War was far more significant than it is today. Leaders in the Kennedy administration and those following it realized that the agency’s staff was one of the most powerful instruments of soft power the U.S. government had at its disposal. In many places, USAID is the most visible face of the U.S. government; its influence at the level of civil society is far greater than the State Department’s or the Pentagon’s, whose representatives tend to remain in capital cities. USAID officers have daily interactions with civil-society leaders.

For much of its existence, USAID had substantial resources and autonomy, but in recent decades these have largely been stripped away. For example, the State Department was given responsibility for U.S. foreign assistance programs in central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the former Soviet Union in 1992, with USAID placed in a subordinate role. Eventually, in 2001, the State Department took over USAID’S account and its direct relationship with the Office of Management and Budget. As a result, USAID lost staff, programmatic flexibility, and influence with Congress, other government departments, other aid donors, and recipient nations.

Policymakers began to look for other vehicles to implement their development initiatives. When the Millennium Challenge Corporation was set up in 2004, the Secretary of State–rather than the USAID administrator–was named to chair it. At first, the MCC was discouraged from even working with USAID; when the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was set up in 2003, it was placed in the State Department, with USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services given only supporting roles.

Many new players in the foreign assistance arena–the Centers for Disease Control, the MCC, and now even the Defense Department, through its new Africa Command–have created independent organizational structures to carry out their programs. Not surprisingly, this has led to policy incoherence, a lack of integration across programs and issue areas, inefficient and overlapping bureaucracies, and endless conflicts over roles and responsibilities–not to mention confusion among recipients and among other donors about who represents Washington on development issues. These new development players are now even using the same contractors as USAID. All of this organizational chaos has significantly increased the costs of implementing foreign aid programs, delayed their implementation, and reduced their impact. There is no evidence that this broad array of new development agencies has done any better than the old, more unified USAID, and much evidence that this organizational structure has done worse.

Large presidential initiatives and congressional earmarks for health care, HIV/AIDS, K-12 education, microfinance, and the environment have in recent years crowded out other development interventions, such as anticorruption measures, agricultural assistance, democracy-promotion programs, and infrastructure-enhancement measure. The narrower, more focused programs are politically appealing because they appear to have a direct, measurable impact on identifiable individuals. But such a concentration on the short-term delivery of goods and services comes at the expense of building sustainable institutions that promote long-term development.

The impact of this approach to development can best be understood at the country level. Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a largely agricultural economy and suffers from periodic famines. Yet in 2007, about 50 percent of U.S. assistance to Ethiopia went to HIV/AIDS prevention, 38 percent to emergency food relief, and 7 percent to child survival, family planning, and malaria prevention and treatment. Only 1.5 percent went to agriculture, 1.5 percent to economic growth, 1.5 percent to education, and 1 percent to improving governance. Such distorted profiles of development aid are unfortunately quite common. Strategic needs on the ground should dictate the nature of the programs, but currently, allocation decisions are determined by earmarks, presidential initiatives, or diplomatic pressures.

Dozens of studies on foreign aid show that aid programs rarely succeed when they are not customized to the poor countries they are designed to help and built on local ownership. The centralization of the U.S. government’s aid programs in Washington may satisfy the needs of key players in both the executive and the legislative branches for command and control, but it increases the risk of program failure and invites attacks from critics, who insist foreign aid is ineffective under all circumstances. Some assert that because Africa has been “fed” aid for the past sixty years, it has become addicted. Like any addict, it need and depends on its regular fix, finding it hard to contemplate an existence in an aid-less world. This is not true in all circumstances or for all countries, but it is a fair statement overall. Aid needs to be delivered in a way that helps the country become independent from aid and it must be sent to actors than can be trusted to dispense it to the places of greatest need.

With an election on the horizon and issues such as job creation, the national debt, immigration reform, and an energy and climate bill sucking up all the air in the current policy debate, the extensive debate over foreign assistance reform has been overshadowed. It is occurring, though, albeit under the radar. Soon enough we chart a new direction, but will it be the right one? Throughout the summer, I will passionately explore the issue and potential solutions. This is an issue that I plan to explore fully, thoughtfully and probably beat to death. That said, my first task is to convince you why global poverty and extreme underdevelopment are grave threats to our national interest. If you are already on our side, then consider this a call to action.

There are so many places I could start, but let’s focus in for a second on sub-Saharan Africa. This is the heart of the problem and the most befuddling region to policymakers. Today, I will focus on painting a very brief, but clear picture of just how bad the situation is there.

After several years of modest improvement, sub-Saharan Africa recently experienced significant setbacks in its progress toward good governance economic growth and human development. While many nations experienced rapid development during the second half of the twentieth century, sub-Saharan Africa was left behind due to debilitating conflict, disease, poverty, and corruption. With an average per capita income of roughly US$1 a day, Africa remains the poorest region in the world. Africa’s real per capita income today is lower than in the 1970’s, leaving many African countries at least as poor as they were forty years ago. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of poor people in the world – some fifty percent of the world’s poor.

Not surprisingly, human development is also significantly lagging behind. Africa is the only continent where life expectancy is less than sixty years; today it hovers around fifty years, and in some countries it has fallen back to what it was in the 1950’s. The decrease in life expectancy is mainly attributed to the rise of the HIV-AIDS pandemic and ongoing conflict. Adult literacy across most African countries has plummeted below pre-1980 levels. On the political side some fifty percent of the continent remains under non-democratic rule. Similarly, according to a recent survey, seven out of the top ten “failed states” hail from the continent.

As if this was not enough to overcome, a new challenge to African development is arising: climate disruption.  Even if emissions are relatively modest, climate impacts on Africa will still occur. Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to global climate change and climate vulnerability. Without effective adaptation to climate change, Africa will only see the contributors to hunger, disease, and conflict increase. Because of Africa’s heavy dependence on natural resources and agriculture, and because of limited capacity for action in many African communities, the repercussions of climate change are particularly ominous. This is a dire situation. Without swift action, the results could be catastrophic.

Stay tuned for future interations of this series. There will be many.

Okay. I know. You’re thinking that the tragic earthquake in Haiti is an extremely sensitive issue and this isn’t the right time to talk about it in any way other than by expressing sympathy and sorrow. Indeed, it is the worst natural and humanitarian disaster the Western Hemisphere has seen since at least Hurricane Katrina and possibly much longer. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, the media has reminded us time and time again it’s a “double-whammy” so to say. Few nations had less capacity to deal with such a tragedy than Haiti.

This is the point I want to focus on. Haiti is practically in the backyard of the richest nation in the world. The two former colonies, of France and England respectively, were the first two nations to gain independence in the Western Hemisphere, both over two hundred years ago. Yet their histories as independent nations couldn’t differ more. Haiti, along with Afghanistan and East Timor are the only nations outside of Africa on the United Nations Human Development Index list of least developed countries. Nearly eighty percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Haiti has had a consistently unstable government, has little social capital and is basically bankrupt of natural resources. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that they’ll need more than a little push from the outside world if they ever are to sustainably climb out of poverty.

America’s generous aid to Haiti has done little, and in fact its policy toward the nation is nothing short of a disaster in and of itself. Matt posted a link yesterday explaining this in further detail. Just think about the difference in terms of lives saved a Haiti with strong government institutions and without makeshift infrastructure could have made. By comparison, the quake is expected to claim 45,000 to 50,000 lives while one of the same magnitude in the Bay Area in 1989 took only 63 lives. The stories should not focus on how unfortunate this natural disaster is but rather the extreme poverty that caused it.

Everything happens for a reason. As cruel as the situation may seem, we must take it as an opportunity to rethink our approach to tackling global poverty if any real good is to come from it. The international effort currently going on to provide relief is one of admirable and unforeseen proportions. It is something we can all be proud of. Yet it is a microcosm of what is wrong with our past efforts. The President has pledged $100 million in aid, thousands of basic first aid kits were be dropped at the airport along with food and water, and hundreds of highly trained search and rescue workers have made their way to Haiti. But they’re all worthless if we don’t know how or maybe even can’t deploy them and all of the assistance is stuck at the airport. Both our macro and micro level efforts have failed. It’s time for some new ideas.

David Brooks in his column today suggests that we tackle the issue of culture as an impediment to growth, despite what our politically correct age tells us. Referencing “The Central Liberal Truth” by Lawrence E. Harrison, he explains that Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

Even if we cannot understand the sources of poverty in a befuddling country such as Haiti, we don’t have to care in order to bring about real change. Controversial as it may be, what Haiti might really need is for local leaders to bring about a highly intensive culture of achievement with tough and measurable demands. Cultural change is hard. But maybe this cultural catastrophe that destroyed what little Haiti had is enough of a space, and opening, to build something new with the help of a vigilant, thoughtful and creative outside world. Helping Haiti clean up and get back to where is was is not acceptable. We must take advantage of the worst of times in order to shake off our rigid and false assumptions, bringing out the best in humanity.

On a side note, USAID finally has a new chief. Despite the fact that he was only about a week into his new job before disaster struck, initial reports have the Clinton recruit performing admirably.