Dr. Abdelilah Bouasria

We all reminisce (and those among us that did not “win” scholarships during their education remember it even more!) those long speeches of graduation ceremonies that were gifted to us by Keynote speakers-that we had to endure under no shade- rallying the cheering graduating crowds behind the flag of "you have made it oh Special ones" and although I have never attended any of MY graduation ceremonies, I was tempted, in the few times in which I came to pay my polite dues to a graduating friend or family member, to ask the all-expenses-paid-for speaker to convert this “Special status” into job offers. More so in an American context where Special Education parallels some kind of assistance. I came to learn that we, graduating species, are all Special in our own way, a claim that my intercultural diversity "religion" adamantly and uncorroboratingly accepts, and I only wished that we were also all employed in our own way (or in the government's way or in any other way) or, if STD comes to condom (I have a lot of time in my hands so why not play with words), introduce a new concept where we tell the landlord or the supermarket that we will all pay in our own way (which we kinda do if you look into taxation). As Senior students, we are socialized into believing that life starts with graduation but as a postmodern deconstruction lover I feel drawn to the era B.G (Before Graduation) and upon digging into the sacred chambers of my, probably-by-now, reconstructed (I call it resilient) memory, I stumbled across those innocent moments when we were allowed as children to dream about our future professions. My dream was to serve in international institutions, hence my current interest in the troubling, yet somehow legitimate, question: How does one (I do not even dare ask How do I?) JOIN the UN, the World Bank, the IDB, the OAS, the BRICS Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic bank, the Francophonie organization, the anti-Francophonie shelter or any other organization that combines bureaucratic lethargy with very hefty tax-proof salaries and relatively wined long lunches?

As a good boy willingly surrendering to the whipping Cravache of the academic Dominatrix, I learned to shut up and observe natural occurrences that I oddly call phenomena and my mind jumps right away to their dreadful hypothesis ope-rationalization. From the get go, I construct my ethical legal shield and I announce that all what follows, below in this note, is the pure product of my imagination, and if by any hazardous contortionist chance, the prototypes or archetypes described in the aftermath of math (meaning my most recent word) match a certain reality out there and piss off any bureaucrat, meritocratic or meritocratic (for there is only meritocracy!), it would be pure coincidence, or in Einstein's terms, mere godly dice played with the universe. Five categories (and the taxonomy is by no means exhaustive) seem to win it seeker the job offer lottery in international organizations where the sex appeal helps in the race to the hefty check of helping the poor and the needy, where hardships often (not always but time and again) come with a driver, a maid and subterranean array of pots de vin that Corporate responsibility avatars, or loophole-driven lawyers, have not yet spotted as such.

First, we have former Government officials, such as ministers and ambassadors, whose safe haven from erratic skin-changing autocracies is the safety net of these international organization on whose board those skin changing tyrannies come to take a pew. This category makes some kind of sense since countries vouch for their nationals to figure at these organizations-in a normal agenda-setting manoeuvers- even for positions that do not revolve around their permanent missions. Sometimes, we have this odd venture (or adventure) where a government lobbies against its own people in order NOT TO GET positions in the organization. Such was the example of Jamal Benomar, the current UN envoy to Yemen, who was a tortured political prisoner and a refugee originally from Morocco who chose the road of exile until he was spotted in Sudan by the respectable former US president Jimmy Carter who took him under his wings. The Moroccan delegation, according to even Moroccan media, was constantly “blocking” the ascent of Jamal Benomar in the UN despite his British citizenship (They even called it “Le Dossier Benomar” which kind of gives you a taste of why we, Moroccans, prefer the vinegar of abroad over the honey of Home). You might call it unfair but in the UN they just call it apolitical. I cannot check this categorical box because I chose to leave behind a nation that gives primacy to foreigners over its own progeny, on top of the obvious fact that I was never sworn into office in my breastfeeding country.

Second, there is the "native" UN/World Bank…recruit that wears his/her national dress (Sari, Djellaba, African dresses...I wonder why no one wears Ukrainian or New Zealand traditional dresses there) to work and there is nothing wrong with flaunting one's own identity in multicultural mazes as long as the cultural Dance does not happen in a trope or a narrative of cultural appropriation where we, Leftist whitish Gent, feel good about defending the rights/rites of the marginal and the underrepresented, either by representing them and speaking for them or by outsourcing the task to a native whose lack of skills make us competitive (in other words, we, Westerners, pick to freeze our "survival of the fittest" motto in favor of a more interventionist (socialist??) all-but-one bad choices Kissinger strategy) in the nativity “business”. The native voice finds herself in these organizations either through a country quota system (I have been trying hard to get the citizenship of Dominica but to no avail) or through an "invitation" by a semi-retired white connoisseur who sees in the native the betting horse that has Manpower and sex appeal to get funding, or simply remove guilt without the on/off button and, most importantly, who does not dare leave any trace in her passage (at least the horse betting leaders are highly concerned about reducing emissions and mainly southern emissions and this is to their credit!). I do not seem to be attracted to this role play (I prefer that of the executive in Fifty shades of Grey) although I do not resist it or boycott it if my only way to the hefty salary and free booze (well the cover up is of course to help eradicate extreme poverty and authoritarianism) is to drop my western pants along with the many languages that I speak and repeat to Darth Vader “Wacca Wacca, Master.”

Third, there are these very slender, pretty, and almost-always blonde girls (I was gonna just write girls but you know that in rhetoric I cannot have all women on my back, hence I picked the Blonde ones not because they are dumb as the stereotype goes but simply because they are peaceful and do not make much of the HR pack that might actually read my post! And oh boy that was a long sentence) who frequently "lobby" in Happy Hour bars (I call them Venues) where international male bureaucrats (native or others but mainly native lol), escorted by their Viagra or Cialis or just a healthy dose of Scotch, with sexy grayish hair, come to "work" off-hours and, serendipitous enough, use their Eagle gaze to their advantage to spot the talent of a Phoenix online graduate whose internship as a nanny in the Baltic sea qualifies ingeniously as a previous experience for the bureaucracy's delicate mandate of "no men left behind". Since I have heretically ditched my moralistic principles as of my last long-term relationship with academia (before I found out that its chastity belt had holes and gaps that were priestly in their grandeur), I am in no way, shape, or form judging or lampooning this well-earned respectable gentry on both ends of the Supply/Demand spectrum. My qualm with the Madame Bovary factor is of a dual nature:
First, the only people that have the potential of being lured by my short tight dress (I call that deliverable) into listening to what I actually have to say are Scottish people who, the last time I checked, do not constitute a huge base of the bureaucracy's recruiting crowd until further redistricting. Moreover, because of the nature of the Macho-dominated climate of these organizations, even If I wanted to showcase my tiny hairy legs as a comparative advantage (or the "hidden leg" to abuse Adam Smith's market wisdom) to win the heart and mind of a manizer (equivalent of womanizer) executive, I would hardly find any ones that are not tainted by the three S curses: Statutory enough to fear lawsuits, Scandinavian enough to unmelt under the Sun or Sodomites (I am neither religious nor LGBT phobic but I just had to pick that word for the S sound). Second, for the sake of diversity, I would like to see the Happy hour backdoor to the international tax-heavens open up (it is a door after all right??) to other minorities like Little People, Zoophilic, cousins of the Zoophilic (some nepotism hurts no one), thugs, mercenaries, swindlers, swingers, Tea Party members, cougars, Campus Watch stars (I think I qualify here) or Minecraft 24-hour players. Give me a Liz Taylor as an IDB or IMF executive and man... I am in! Amen!

Fourth, these international bureaucracies always send envoys and Staff to hardship places like Haiti (and in Haiti there is only one Hotel that offers Comfort food) or Beirut (where hookah-bars are full of gentle soft men that look almost like our American Above-average Joe's minus the alimony) and because these ambassadors have so much experience in the political and social culture of these flora, they know that if thou cometh not under the umbrella of a local chief (under modern administrations they are called governors or ministers) Thy Southern Rain might flatten thy tires in a drumbeat. Once the genius idea of preaching to the local signing leaders is established, the lure of the Tuna (this is just a fish example. It could be Piranha) starts giving away its wormish (warmish) appeal, the "indecent proposal" goes something along these lines: You have a daughter who is graduating in Finnish anthropology from Columbia university and I see her well in our Equality of opportunity division in Geneva or at our headquarters in New York. Two days before the first day of "office" of the not-yet-graduated daughter, the UN local delegation is signing the treaty of building the toxic waste dam of the remote village in Country X (or let us say PG-13). Again, I do not want to be a pain in the Rear end when everybody is happy. The village dam beneficiaries, the UN head of mission, media consumers, the Chief of the Village, his anthropological daughter and us, clapping folks in the presentation of the final report of that local mission in a big dramatized conference in Geneva. Damn how we feel happiness infuse our cheeks with a reddish compost! A two minute YouTube video will do our testosterone: some languid Village sleepers next to a mud hut-and better if flies are choreographing around the open mouth of the villager- and the white not-so-senior local bureaucrat digging, shirtless, the dam (n?) hole under a scorching Sun and why not some statistical jargon that “proves to us” (not beyond reasonable doubt but doubt is a Western construct right?) how those people who lived on minus hundred dollars a day P.D (prior to Dam) came to appreciate The peanut butter and jelly distributed in Halloween. The only missing link in the video is the Columbia University daughter and her Hashish (I am Moroccan so I have got to insert the green somewhere were it only to lure the anti-narcotics HR department (HR only remember!)) experiences in an adult-only resort in Jamaica (well, a trip to Jamaica qualifies as previous experience in developing nations). When I put on the shoes, decades ago, of this category, I was dumb enough to turn down the offer on moral grounds. Then, I had no clue about the hard-headedness of morality regarding paying a mortgage or buying a Chicken Popeye's, and for the record I am still a Hashish-Virgin (I hear your Yeah right but instead give me a job).

Finally, there are the geeks that have the adequate mix of education and experience and whose merit gets them the job Finale after many many tortuous exams, not because the HR people want them IN, but because their star in a macro-cosmic divine universe ends up parachuting them in these international organizations because SOMEONE has to actually do THE work, not the photo op work, not the monkey exhibition work, not the work that involves jaw suction or pharmaceuticals, not the work that involves an exchange of favors. It is simply, and humbly, Work that allows all the other four components to BE without lifting a finger (occasionally there is some finger lifting by the male senior component of my sketch but it is often an in-lieu kind of finger lifting…and a limp one if I may “augment”). While I have constantly attempted to knock on this last door (without much faith in its lubricant), I noticed that it is the Road Less traveled, and for the sake of simplicity, I confess that prolonging pain or teasing a never-coming (COMING LOL) Hope is only my Second-Best option. For now, let me just humming-ly sing in the altar of your bureaucratic Excellences (Me one day?): "I am Sexy and I know IT" (it is not IT Stupid!)