Nicholas Boke is a freelance writer and international educational consultant.
CHESTER-It took less than a week to do so much damage. Less than a week for me to receive André's email with the subject line "Le pire est arrivé" - the worst has arrived.
Less than a week to, among other things, shut down America's longstanding commitment to help impoverished people around the world try to improve their lives thanks to people like André and Belai and George Ali who worked with U.S. foreign aid programs.
This happened because now all these efforts had to be approved as promoting "America First."
That wasn't all, of course. This rollback of foreign aid came along just as the videos of frightened refugees climbing into military transport planes showed up - refugees who had hoped that there might be someplace safe for them and their families.
And when the planes were turned away from Colombia, a punitive 25% tariff was leveled on that country. Of course.
It was just after all those government agencies - and private agencies that feared irritating the new administration - fired everyone who'd been working on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Just after Vice President JD Vance began to realize that he couldn't hold onto a sliver of decency in the Trump administration, having to explain on Meet the Press that pardoning even those who had done violence to capitol police officers was correct, saying something about how all the Jan. 6 convictions had somehow violated the rioters' Constitutional rights.
It was while Elon Musk was over in Germany the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day telling extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany folks to forget about the "past guilt" that it had taken that country decades to face.
And just when we were beginning to see exactly how bad it was going to get so quickly, the email from André showed up in my inbox.
He, and everybody else who was working on radio programs to broadcast lessons into school-less rural parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been told to stop their work. All the workers, interns, and volunteers, the email told him, must stop all their activities and clear out their desks, as all adult literacy activities would stop on Monday. That's as I write this, Jan. 27, a week after Trump and Vance were inaugurated.
The order from newly-confirmed Secretary Marco Rubio's Department of State was clear and total. No new programs should be started, and stop-work orders should be issued for all existing foreign assistance programs "until such time as the Secretary shall determine, following a review."
So André, whom I have worked with since 2015, is out of a job. This committed, hardworking young man can't use all that he has learned about helping the illiterate become literate, about training facilitators to work with villagers who've never before seen a book.
André, along with the hundreds of dedicated educators in the almost dozen African and Middle Eastern countries I have worked in for a couple of decades, will have to sit and wait until political decisions have been made about each of their programs.
* * *
America's foreign aid program, USAID, was the outgrowth of the fourth point President Harry Truman made about international activities in his 1949 inaugural address. It would offer "technical assistance and economic aid" to developing countries - essentially, a Marshall Plan for the "more than half the people of the world [...] living in conditions approaching misery." That misery has lessened over the decades, but it still remains.
That's what America's 33rd president explained to Americans about our relationship with the rest of the world on Jan. 20, 1949.
A far cry from what our 47th president said, when he insisted that all our foreign aid programs had to put "America First."
André and I and Belai and I and George Ali and I made sure the trainers we worked with in their various countries had something to eat during our training, when we made sure that we were providing barely literate mothers and fathers with the books they needed to learn to read and help their children learn to read.
Of course, everything we gave away had stamped on it somewhere "A gift from the American people," but we weren't worrying about who came first. We believed we were just trying to help people who just needed a little help. So did everyone I worked with in all those countries over all those years.
André and the rest of my colleagues will probably find a way to take care of themselves. And maybe some of the programs will be found to have enough America-First-ness in them that they'll be reopened.
But all I can say to Donald Trump and all those who have followed his bidding - all of his biddings so far - is that they should be ashamed of themselves.
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