http://media.theworld.org/audio/080420111.mp3

These Syrian refugees are desperate for their voices to be heard. But Turkey doesn’t want you to hear them. This protest after Friday prayers could only be recorded from outside the fence. Journalists are not allowed inside the camp, except during the occassional specially organized media event. The refugees’ chants demand the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The camp perimeter is patroled by Turkish police so I’m not able to speak to anyone through the fence. But one refugee snuck out of the camp to tell me his story – at the risk of being sent back to Syria if caught. He doesn’t want to use his name.

He speaks for an hour about the protests and increasing violence and chaos in his hometown Jisr al-Shughour. During a protest, he said, unarmed demonstrators were shot and killed by the Shabiha, a militia loyal to Assad. Thousands of demonstrators gathered for the funeral, angry at the deaths of their comrades.

“We all went to the graveyard to bury them,” the refugee said. “And when we were coming back, the Shabiha and military police started shooting at us with automatic rifles. The regular military didn’t want to shoot at us, so the soldiers started to fight against the Shabiha and the military police. Many civilians were killed in the battle.”

The Syrian government claims that 120 soldiers were killed by “armed gangs” in what it calls the “heinous massacre” at Jisr al-Shughour. This nameless refugee says the Turkish government doesnt want the world to know the truth about the slaughter of peaceful protestors in Syria. It’s not only journalists being denied access. Refugee and human rights organizations are having an equally hard time.

“The restrictions are quite unusually severe, they really are trying to keep whoever they can out of these camps,” says Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch.

Bouckaert says that under international law, which Turkey recognizes, refugees should be allowed to live wherever they want. “In my opinion, the Turkish authorities are afraid that if they allow the Syrian refugees to freely tell their stories, and be outside the camps, then information about atrocities committed inside Syria will be generated from Turkish soil, and they would have a serious problem with their neighbor.”

Relations across the 500-mile Syrian-Turkish border are tense already. In the past few weeks, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used strong words against the Syrian President. As recently as May – after protests had already started – the prime minister referred to Assad as “a good friend.”

Turkey is still trying to decide whether to back the Syrian regime or the Syrian nation, according to Syrian opposition activist Omar Al Muqdad.

“The Turkish government has a strong relations with the Syrian regime before and now they are trying to make a balance between the Syrian regime and the Syrian nation. So they are trying to stand in the middle of this mess,” says Al Muqdad.

At the Turkish Foreign Ministry, spokesman Selcuk Unal denies that Turkey is playing politics in the refugee camps. Turkey is concerned about the refugees’ safety, he says, many of whom don’t want to talk to the media because of well-founded fears of reprisals in Syria. “The security and the order of the camps and all the adjacent areas is also an important issue for us,” says Unal.

Unal says there is no reason to think Turkey wants to silence bad news coming from Syria. And he says the Prime Minister’s strong words against Assad are evidence of that. But despite what Unal says, it seems that at the Reyhanli camp residents are eager to talk. I give a small recorder to a refugee to smuggle inside and gather stories.

Yusuf Esmail, from Khirbet al-Joz says he was just talking with some relatives back home, and they said they found two corpses with their tongues cut out, so badly-beaten they couldn’t be identified.

Reyhanli recently held elections for camp-wide committees. Mahmud Moussa, an earnest schoolmaster from Jasr Al Shagur was elected to the Media council and finagled special permission to talk to a reporter. While camp personnel treat the Syrians with compassion, he says, its the Turkish government’s policy he finds confusing. He’s suprised by the tsimilarities between Syria and the “democracy” of Turkey.

“In Syria you can’t come in as a journalist and speak with the people and ask them what happend with you,” says Moussa. “And also in Turkey, in the camps, you cant come in and ask us: ‘what is happening with you?’ So now we are the same. So we are asking the Turkish government: ‘why you are like Bashar Assad?’”

Turkey still calls the Syrians in the camps “guests” and not “refugees.” And with protests in Syria expected to pick up now during the holy month of Ramadan, the fine line Turkey maintains between the two sides will get more precarious. The crackdown by the Assad government shows no sign of easing.

http://media.theworld.org/audio/080520116.mp3

The Syrian opposition is trying hard to get its do-it-yourself revolution cooking. It’s breakfast for 8 young revolutionaries living in this house. Most have never lived away from their mothers before. The setup here is pretty basic. Most of the guys sleep on the floor. And they are doing the cooking and cleaning for the first time in their lives.

And they’ve certainly never worked in politics before. Political activity in Syria, for the last 40 years, has meant supporting the ruling Baath party or jail. These men came here just a few weeks ago from the refugee camps inside Turkey, after an opposition supporter agreed to pay the rent.

Nazir Al-Abdo is one of the leaders. He was studying sports at the university in Latakia before he fled. Al-Abdo and the others don’t have documents so their movements are limited.

“We don’t go outside at all so that nobody sees us,” Al-Abdo says. “We always hiding. We don’t have the right be here. We don’t have passports. Al-Abdo didnt have much time to think before he fled. He was involved in protests and still went to classes like a normal student. But then ten minutes before his exam, his phone rang.

“My brother called me and said don’t enter, the security forces will come to your university and take you,” Al-Abdo says. “I said ‘it’s not possible. I will just go to the exam.’ He said, ‘they will come and take you.’ I didnt go to the exam.

The television in the living room shows grainy cell phone images of corpses and chaos in Syria. Its the opposition Syrian Al Shaab satellite channel.

The activists here prepare videos like these to get the message out about what they call “crimes” against civilians by Syrian security forces. Digital imagery is perhaps the perhaps the most powerful tool available to the inexperienced, unorganized and underfunded opposition. Al-Abdo shows me a video he says is from the town of Idlib

“You see a lot of people running from the shooting,” Al-Abdo says. “You see another guy get shot in his leg. You see the blood, there’s a lot of blood. And they didn’t have an ambulance. You can hear the shooting, tick tick tick. This guy is dying now because no one takes him to the hospital. you see the blood.”

The men in this house may not go out but they do get visitors. Young men show up with more videos, smuggled out on flash drives. One of them is a 20 year old who wants to be called Ahmed. He snuck out of his refugee camp. Ahmed says that if he’s caught outside the camp, Turkish authorities could send him back to Syria.

“Of course its dangerous,’ Ahmed says. “But I will do it for my homeland Syria, because I have to help. The world needs to hear our stories.” The oldest revolutionary here, at 35, is Jamil Saeb.

“When the protest started in Syria we had to create a new strategy,” says Saeb. “We had no organization. People just came out and said whatever they felt like saying. Now we are on the next level.”

Saeb says the opposition wants Syria to be like Egypt, not Libya. In other words, to topple the regime through peaceful people power and international pressure. He says violence simply wont work in Syria. His priority, he says, is to create a small unified organization and present clear ideas to the world. By doing things such as translating its Arabic webpages into English.

Saeb says: “It’s a serious problem because we don’t have money. And these opposition groups who just met in Antalya, in Turkey, they spent a lot of money for a 5 star hotel, for talking and meetings and accomplishing nothing. We should be using this money for technology, logistics, translations, and communications.”

Al-Abdo is watching another video of protests in Syria. “You see they shot just on innocent people,” Al-Abdo says. “You see how they run, they will die for freedom.” Nazir Al-Abdo is frustrated.

No foreign reporters are allowed in Syria, so independent verifications of activists’ accounts are not possible. And he’s tired of having to prove that the Syrian government is brutalizing its people. But clearly the message is getting out. The United Nations has condemned the Assad regime in Syria. But Al-Abdo and others wonder why America and Europe aren’t doing more.

http://media.theworld.org/audio/080220118.mp3

If there’s any one place which encapsulates Albania’s rocky ride from communist hermit state to anything-goes “wild, wild east,” its probably the pyramid. The bizarre monument-museum is something like eight stories tall. Its housed an international cultural center, a café and the US Agency for international development. One of Albania’s first independent TV stations is still operating here. Skerdi Drenova from Top Channel is showing me around.

“This is another control room,” says Drenova. “It’s called ‘disco’ and was built for a nightclub in 1991 but it never opened so we took it and transformed it into production studio. “We produce our investigative program here…. ”

In the café at the base of the pyramid, Albanian journalists enjoy macchiatos and cigarettes while they discuss the issues of the day. A parliamentary committee has voted to tear down the pyramid and to build a new parliament building in its place. But the decision is still not final. Top Channel employees clearly have a good reason to want to save the building. But many here oppose destroying it for philosophical reasons.

“It’s part of our country, we can not destory everyting that we had,” says journalist Alisa Mysliu. “It’s part of us. Even communism, even the good things. It’s a part of our country. It’s part of our history. Have you destroyed everything in your country that brings you bad memories?”

Mysliu’s colleage Helidon Tahiraj writes for one of the current affairs programs and used to be a prosecutor. He says its hard for Albanians to deal with the communist past because the old system still lives inside people’s heads.

Tahiraj says: “Many people in Albania have strong links with communism, some of them have been spies for the secret police, like the Stasi or KGB, but here it was the Sigurimi Shtetit. They’ve got nostalgia, they have links with the past. Albania is changing, but not in the right direction. It’s going to take a long time, probably a generation or two.”

From the outside, the pyramid looks abandoned and decayed. The marble surface is gone and the concrete shell is broken and covered with graffiti. The passersby spoken with all wanted it fixed – not erased. People like Hajrije Vito who works in a shoe factory.

“Well, now it’s ruined,” says Vito. “When the building was new, it was beautiful. We used to visit inside to see the exhibits, but now look at the state it’s in. What’s there to like about it?  If they fix it and put some money into repairs and renovation it could be something useful and nice for the young people.

One might be tempted to view the difficulties Albanians have in deciding the pyramid’s future as symbolic of the country’s difficult post-communist transition. But the Albanians talked to see the inaction and bickering about the monument as a symbol of their leaders’ corruption and incompetence.

Eralda Murataj, a student of finance, says “I think its been used to avoid people noticing other probems which are more important than the pyramid itself. that’s what I think. I think it should stay where it is.”

If the new parliament is built here, it is supposed to open for business in November 2012 – in time to celebrate the Centenial of Albania’s indepedence. This makes Albanians think of their future parliament building much like their democracy: they’re not expecting a great job.

SKOPJE, Macedonia — In the view of many here, the neighbors have been bullying this little Balkan country for a long time.

Bulgarians see its people as Bulgarians with accents. Serbia used to consider the land Southern Serbia and refuses to recognize its church. Greece accuses the country of nothing less than stealing its name, history and national symbols.

This week, Macedonia pushed back.

In a precisely calibrated display of political and civil engineering, workers lifted a 14.5-meter, or 47-foot, bronze statue of Alexander the Great, weighing 30 tons, and placed it on a 15-meter-high pedestal in the central square of Skopje, the capital.

(Photo: Georgi Licovski/European Pressphoto Agency)

“This is a way for Macedonia to affirm its national existence,” said Vasiliki Neofotistos, an anthropologist from the State University of New York at Buffalo studying identity politics in Macedonia. “Macedonia wants to advance the thesis that it is a cornerstone of Western civilization.”

This is no mere philosophical dilemma. Macedonia has been stuck in one of the most intractable disputes of the post-communist world: Greece has held international relations hostage for 20 years because it considers the name Macedonia an appropriation of its own Hellenic identity and its northern province of the same name.

If it can’t have riches, Macedonia, a country of two million with 31 percent unemployment, wants recognition. Playing up ties to an ancient global celebrity resonates with people who believe that they have been marginalized for centuries.

“We are proud of Alexander,” said Petko Bozhinovski, 48, who wore a black T-shirt with the Macedonian flag as the statue was raised Tuesday to the applause of several hundred bystanders.

“Finally, our Alexander has come back to his homeland,” he said.

The project is controversial — it cost €9.4 million, or $13 million. But some things, say statue fans, are priceless. “If you lose your identity, you are a nobody,” said Alexandar Ristevski, 32, an ethnographer.

Macedonia was promised an invitation to join NATO in 2008, but this was vetoed by Greece because the name issue was unresolved. In 2005, Macedonia also became a candidate for the European Union, but still has no date to start accession talks because of Greek resistance.

“Why should we change our name because of Greece?” said Alex Trajanovski, a retired diplomat, who said Macedonia had been recognized under that name by 135 countries. Zoran Iliev, a border policeman, said, “No European Union is worth changing the name.”

Greece is equally stubborn. On Tuesday, as the Greek Parliament debated a crucial vote of confidence in the government, Stavros Lambrinidis, the foreign minister, told deputies that the statue was a major point of foreign policy, “a provocation” that fanned “irredentism, the greatest threat to the Balkans.”

Mr. Lambrinidis said Greece had proposed a name with a geographical qualifier to settle the dispute. The Macedonian Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

When Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, Greece immediately protested the name and flag — accusing the new country of staking claims to Greek territory and of trying to separate ancient Macedonian civilization from Hellenic culture.

Athens refused to recognize its northern neighbor and organized an embargo. The two countries signed an interim accord in 1995 under which Macedonia would be referred to internationally as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In exchange, Greece lifted its embargo, recognized this provisional name and agreed not to block membership in international institutions.

Almost 16 years later, both sides are still negotiating a new name. They have indicated they might consider a geographical modifier of Macedonia, such as Northern Macedonia — favored by Greece — or Macedonia (Skopje), which the Macedonians like.

Meanwhile, Macedonia has filed suit with the International Court of Justice in The Hague against Greece, accusing it of violating the 1995 agreement. A decision is expected in September.

The statue is part of a controversial face lift for Skopje — a city whose old center was flattened in an earthquake in 1963 — including 15 new buildings, the renovation of old ones and a triumphal arch.

The government estimated the bill for renovation at €80 million in 2009, but the opposition says costs have already risen to €200 million. No official figures are available.

The government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has also given Alexander’s name to the airport in Skopje, a highway and a stadium. The inauguration of the Alexander statue is expected on independence day, Sept. 8.

“This attempt to rebuild the Macedonian nation is definitely destroying the chances for compromise” with Greece, said Vladimir Milcin, executive director of the Open Society Foundation Macedonia. Mr. Milcin noted that the European Union’s enlargement commissioner, Stefan Fule, called the statue a “provocation” and suggested for the first time that Macedonia’s move toward Europe was going backward.

But neither Mr. Milcin nor a Western diplomat who insisted on anonymity thought this would deter the prime minister. “It’s just adding fuel to his power and image that he is the final and only defender of Macedonian name, identity and culture,” Mr. Milcin said.

Macedonia’s identity politics are further complicated by the restive 25 percent of its population who are ethnic Albanians. In 2001, the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army fought a six-month war against the majority.

Rafis Aliti, a former fighter with the Albanian rebels, and now deputy speaker of Parliament, said the name dispute worried Albanians because “there will be no prospects for the future, no security and foreign investment.”

The lure of Macedonian lore has grown in recent years. Alexander has helped buttress the nation against the trauma of the free market, political strife and independence, said Pasko Kuzman, an archaeologist with the Ministry of Culture.

“Alexander conquered the world,” he added. “Would you ever give up something like that? I don’t think so.”

(Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

Thousands of protestors marched down Istikal Cadesi, Istanbul’s main pedestrian street. They chanted and waved signs. One poster put a Turkish twist on Barack Obama’s campaign slogan. It read “Yes we ban.”

The protestors were demanding that the Turkish government take its hands off the Internet.

The demonstrators considered the proposed new filters as just the latest step to tighten the government’s control over the Internet. Turkish officials say the filters are not about censorship. They are meant to protect children and families from harmful content on the Internet. But protestor Melike Ozbek says the authorities can’t be trusted.

“The thing is that people do not know,” said Ozbek. “That’s the problem with the government; they are lying all the time, to their own voters, to their own people. They are lying all the time. It’s a lie that they are not censoring. This is to show people they are being fooled, to be able to create some sort of spark in their head, to check what’s going on so that maybe then they will understand.”

Not all of the protestors were Internet savvy youngsters. Gul Albay, 56, said this was her first protest in more than 30 years. She only uses the Internet for work but feels the filters proposal is scary.

“This is really very very bad, it’s really a big damage for freedom because the Internet is so big and so deep,” Albay said.

Choosing a Filter

The new regulations are set to come into force on August 22. Users will have to choose one of four filters. One is called the family filter and another is for children. The domestic filter blocks all foreign sites. And the standard package will be the default. Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Bilgi University, worries that Turkish authorities will use these filters to step up control of the Internet.

“They are not telling us whether there will be monitoring of everyone’s habits and usage, since everyone will have a user name and password under this system,” said Azdeniz.

The head of the telecommunications regulatory agency, Tayfun Acarer appeared on television and denied that any filters would be mandatory. He said that the measures are meant only to enforce Turkish law.

“Turkey is more transparent than many other countries regarding this issue,” Acarer said. “I want to emphasize this. When you go to a banned site in a European country, you see only a flag or a stop sign. But if a web site is blocked in Turkey, it is always clearly stated when, why and by which institution the page was banned.

Eksi Sozluk

Turkey has closed thousands of websites. One was Eksi Sozluk, or Sour Dictionary, one of Turkey’s first, biggest and freest online communities.

The founder of Eksi Sozluk, Sedat Kapanoglu, says the authorities shut down the site because one user said he liked marijuana.

“They closed the whole website because of one single entry under single topic,” said Kapanoglu. “The ban took two months. We didn’t know about the ban actually because we thought it was a technical problem.”

Kapanoglu said his website has two software developers and five lawyers. He’s bracing for the financial impact of the filters.

“Eksi Sozluk contains adult content, so I don’t think we will make it to family packet or children’s packet,” Kapanoglu said. “I don’t think that will happen. It will impact our revenue as well.”

A non-profit press freedom group has filed a lawsuit. It’s seeking an injunction against the filters, based on administrative and constitutional violations. A court decision is expected by the end of June.

(Photo: Jodi Hilton)

The jagged mountains of northern Albania have kept the locals relatively free from state control for centuries. The mountains have also helped preserve ancient traditions like the kanun. We’re traveling with mediator Pashk Lleshi from the National Reconciliation Committee.

“The kanun is not enforced properly,” Lleshi says. “The kanun was the constitution and the penal code of its time. It was the main legal instrument which prevented people from killing each other. The kanun doesn’t say you can kill a woman or a child. It doesn’t say you can kill for a piece of land or an offensive word. To the contrary, it contains the foundation for reconciliation between families in conflict.”

The kanun was a set of traditional rules about all aspects of daily life adopted in the 15th century. But Lleshi says these days people often misuse the kanun to justify all kinds of criminal revenge. Today he’s trying to unravel a complex conflict involving the 1997 shooting deaths of two innocent bystanders.

The mediation process seems mainly made up of chatting over coffee and cigarettes. We stop in a café to meet Mark Zeff Llesh, the cousin of one of the victims.

“The families of the victims have adopted a very humane attitude toward the family of the killer,” Llesh says. “We haven’t been stalking them or pursing them. We have showed an exceptionally high level of endurance and patience in the face of the violence and disgrace that befell our family on the street.”

Our next stop is the house of the killer Ndue Gjonkolaj, currently serving 25 years in prison. We’re let into the front yard by one of Gjonkolaj’s sons. According to Albanian tradition, the oldest man of the house should greet us before we enter. So we wait with mediator Lleshi for the oldest son to return.

“We have been to the victim’s family’s house before but this is our first time here,” Lleshi says. “This back and forth communication is going to continue for some time, until we can have them all sit down together, shake hands and have a coffee together.”

When the son returns, we are welcomed into the house. Inside, the family greets us formally, standing in a line. Wife Dila Gjonkolaj is dressed in black out of respect for those killed by her husband. She says the tragedy all started because of a dispute over the sale of some lumber.

Curses and Insults

“They started to argue,” she says. “They offended each other with curses and insults. And then in the end, three men grabbed my husband by the throat. They got out of the car and reached for their guns and started shooting at each other. Both sides were spared their own bullets and two bystanders were killed unintentionally.”

13 years later, she feels the time has come for reconciliation. Her family has spent years asking for forgiveness through envoys and respecting the honor of the victims families by mourning and avoiding any possible contact.

“For two years after the killing, I didn’t leave the house except for very rare occasions when I was escorted,” Gjonkolaj says. “It’s not because I was threatened, but out of respect for the victims’ families. My eldest son at the time was 13, he didn’t set foot off the family compound for four years. He quit going to school in the eighth grade.”

Killed at Anytime

While Gjonkolaj says her family still hasn’t been threatened all these years later, they are still afraid. They still haven’t gotten a besa, or reprieve from the victims’ relatives. So it’s understood that a male member of her family could be killed anytime he steps out of the house.

The job of mediator Lleshi seems to be leading an endless series of informal chats. Reconciliation depends on men willing to talk and lots of coffee and rakia, a strong homemade grape brandy. The victims’ friends and relatives gathered here say the main holdout in this blood feud is Tonin, the brother of one of the victims.

“The kanun values more the one that forgives than the one who avenges with blood,” says Ndue Nikolli, a friend of one of the victims. “The rifle of he who forgives is more valuable than the rifle of one who has used it to kill.”

The talk becomes more Shakespearean, as the men drink more and discuss justice, forgiveness and the honor of the dead.

“Tonin for the moment doesn’t want to see anyone regarding this issue,” says Pjeter Frroku, a cousin of one of the victims. “Our job is to try, but the final word is his.”

The drama of the kanun and blood feuds has formed the plot of feature films and proves difficult to unravel. Albanians want to move beyond the cliché of a primitive people obsessed with blood and revenge. The Gjonkolajs hope their real world horror story comes to an end.

(Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam)

Operation Lifeline Sudan, launched by the United Nations in 1989, was one of the biggest humanitarian efforts ever seen. It brought together UN agencies and some 35 non-governmental organizations (NGO).

Decades of civil war ended in 2005, when a peace treaty gave the south defacto autonomy. The former rebel group — the SPLA — has been governing the south ever since. Vassar College Political Scientist Zachariah Mampilly says the situation created an unsustainable relationship between foreign NGOs and the SPLA.

“The SPLA focuses on legal and policing issues to provide a degree of stability in areas that they controlled, and they basically outsourced the rest of governance provision, health care, education, to international NGOs,” Mampilly said. “Inevitably, they are going to have to deal with this question of how do you get the NGOs to follow the directives of the new government of South Sudan?”

In the wake of January’s vote for independence, the SPLA will have to take full responsibility for all aspects of governing. That won’t be easy. Aaron Shapiro, from the Samaritan’s Purse, an American faith-based organization (FBO), or a religious NGO, says NGOs still provide basic services in maybe 90 percent of South Sudan.

“It’s a catch 22 in that if all the NGOs left, eventually something would have to give,” Shapiro said. “The government would have to be responsible, be held to account but if they all left, a lot of people would die without health care and clean water.”

Jok Madut Jok, an American-educated anthropologist who returned last year to become undersecretary of South Sudan’s Culture Ministry, says he’s well aware of the bind his government is in.

“If we dictate how we use help from outside, we will be accused of being too controlling; if we let the donor community tell us what to do with our nation, we won’t have a nation,” Jok said. “It would be a nation conceived and delivered by foreigners; it will not be raised from within our own philosophies; something that we own, that will fit in our traditions and our culture, something that will be symbolic of us being a sovereign state.”

The government in Juba is feeling pressure to provide more services itself. But it lacks what NGO types call “capacity.” There’s a short supply of educated, experienced and motivated administrators. And its institutions are far from solid. South Sudanese have only just begun to make their own.

And there’s another unforeseen consequence of having a country run by NGOs … armies of young, foreign do-gooders. There are so many 20-something Americans working at places like Save the Children that Juba can appear like a massive fraternity party.

At the Juba chapter of the Hash House Harriers, there’s a “drinking club with a running problem” that’s popular worldwide, especially with expats. This video of a charity fundraiser was posted online.

Marina Peter has worked as an advocate on peace and reconciliation issues in Sudan for 25 years. She says Sudanese have a lot of respect for their elders so young NGO staff can be hard to swallow.

“They see these young people coming in and telling them what they should do,” Peter said. “Very often with no experience in Africa, let alone in Sudan, and they are running these NGOs with thousands if not millions of dollars, and so people are saying but who are they, they don’t listen to us, they don’t ask what we really need. And they are just disconnected from our society.”

The large numbers of internationals and their international salaries create a separate economy as well. Juba has Thai, Indian and Chinese restaurants. There’s a Cuban place with a weekly salsa night. Locals say its one of the most expensive cities in the world. It’s normal to pay a hundred dollars a night to sleep in a tent.

With full South Sudanese independence expected in July, the threat from Khartoum is receding. So the public expects less money spent on the military and security and more for schools, hospitals and roads.

And that means the country must learn to take care of itself and stop depending on NGOs.