Breakfast Wine with Alex Poppe
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody. You are listening to the Authority Podcast here on the Be Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. Thrilled to bring you a conversation today where we are going to be speaking to someone who has been an educator and been an educator in different environments than many of you have worked in.
But we're gonna talk about some of the things that are the same, some of them that are different. But the book we're talking about is also a memoir, so it's a different kind of book. A lot of important stories in it that we're going to get to hear about. My guest is Alex Poppy. Alex has lived in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine.
She writes about fierce and funny women rebuilding their [00:01:00] lives in the wake of violence. She's the author of four works of literary fiction, and her books have won awards, including the 2024 American Legacy Book Award, 2023 International Book Award, and a 2023 Reader's Choice Book award. And in 2021, Alex was an artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where her memoir and essay Breakfast wine began.
And that is the new book that we're talking about today. It's called Breakfast Wine. Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex: Thank you so much for having me, Ross. I'm thrilled to be here.
Ross Romano: I actually, I would love to start I described it a little bit, but I'm sure insufficiently, but would love to just have you give. A description of the book a little bit to start us out here and we will talk about some of what you write about the stories, your experiences but I've introduced it as a memoir, but we'd just love to, as we have our conversation, give our listeners kind of that [00:02:00] context for for what the book's all about.
Alex: Sure. Thank you again for having me. The book is braids the Geopolitical and the Personal, it's Heart Broadening and Heartbreaking. It's about my 10 years working and living in Northern Iraq in the Kurdish region. Although I did go down to Baghdad a few times to speak at conferences or trained teachers and it's about my search for Fellowship and Adventure and Purpose and Agency at a time of life when people really settled down.
I went there when I was 44, so it's. Adventure, it's travel, it's memoir, it's meditations on displacement and what it means to call a place home. Gender-based violence and gender equity is threaded through almost all of my work. So it's definitely part of this, I think too most important, it really celebrates the resilience of young people and women post-conflict.
And I just remember always being [00:03:00] over and over again, being so amazed at the generosity and the capacity for joy and wonder from people who had lost a lot. And I was always just grateful and bewildered by the fact that they didn't hate Americans. You know, I had students that were 13, 14 during the invasion, the 2003 invasion, and they have all kinds of remembrances and stories.
You know, I have a kid who, his father spoke English, they were in the Ambar Province, and so. the 2003 invasion, some sometimes the soldiers would come in, they'd take off their gloves, they'd shake hands with my student's father. And then sometimes they'd beat the door down and they'd put all the men in the courtyard and they would beat them, including my student who was like 12, 13 at the time.
So I remember he very generously sat with me and let me interview him a few times so I could write about him long before I ever thought I would write a memoir of this, but just for like magazines and stuff. And he, I [00:04:00] was like, how do you not hate Americans? And he said Alex, they. That's not the reason for the fall of Iraq.
The fall of Iraq is because the people didn't stand together. And I think about that so much in our current reality, especially post January 6th. And now as we see this hyperpolarization complete breakdown of social cohesion. We're not sharing the same information. We're living in two information ecospheres.
And never the tween shall meet. And I worry if there is a destabilizing shock. And that can be a pandemic, it could be a terror attack, it could be financial crisis. Are we healthy enough as a society? Are we healthy enough as a nation to not descend into violent conflict? And I am, I'm not quite sure about that anymore.
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Ross Romano: I'm gonna skip basically to the end of the book, I think, and then we're gonna come back. But I just wanna ask you where the title comes from and so that you can get an idea of that and then and then certainly we'll talk about what's between the [00:05:00] covers.
Alex: thanks. Well, breakfast wine is a riff from one of my favorite true crime comedy podcasts, my favorite murder. They had an episode where they were making jokes about the kind of wine they would drink, and it was like a nice chardonnay in the morning, a breakfast wine. So that's, I wanted to pay homage to that in a way because I love that podcast because it really works to highlight gender-based violence and works against some of the stereotypes that women are brought up with that actually put us in danger.
This idea that we're conditioned to be polite to the extent that we will not speak up to defend ourselves when we need to. Like I can remember sitting in a cinema in Chicago in my twenties, and this guy came in at the last minute. He sat down right next to me, and he had the worst smelling breath ever.
And I, I mean, I could smell it. Without necessarily looking in his direction. And I [00:06:00] wanted to get up and move over his seat, but he was black and I'm white and I didn't wanna be I didn't wanna be perceived as being racist, and I didn't want him to think, I didn't wanna sit next to him because he was black.
So I'm sitting there in the thi in the film, and he, like, he touches me inappropriately. And so the first time I move his hand away, but I'm still like sitting there being polite. And it wasn't until like the second or third time it happened that I said very loudly, please stop touching me. I don't know.
You. And the man got up and ran outta the theater. I should have moved when I didn't wanna smell his breath anymore, but I'm in my twenties. Women are raised to like, not make waves, be polite, always be that social buffer zone. And my favorite murder is very famous for saying f politeness. You know, if someone is being inappropriate or you just think they are, you have every right to f politeness and apologize later if you're wrong.[00:07:00]
And so, that's one reason because gender themes are so strong throughout breakfast wine the memoir, especially because I worked at a school that unwittingly had hired one of Sweden's most notorious sex offenders at the time. So this idea of f politeness really resonates. I mean, we had to deal with so much gender-based violence in Northern Iraq.
I mean, it never felt in danger, but it certainly was annoying. And it's part of it is, patriarchy and the apologists of patriarchy, part of it's the export of our own culture. And so when you're abroad, people like to conveniently think all foreign women are prostitutes and anything goes.
So I just, I love that breakfast wine. Sorry that my favorite murder of the podcast really is always sending home this female empowerment message while they're making jokes about true crime. So that's where it came from.
Ross Romano: excellent. So you referenced that you were educating, you had students who teaching I'd love to, put that into some context for our [00:08:00] listeners, how you came to be an educator, what you taught, what you know, what you did in those roles, and then how you came to teach where you did in the different countries, different settings.
Alex: Okay. Well, I, when I left university, I graduated with a degree in marketing and economics and I had had great internships through my university years, and I hated business. I only ever wanted to be an actor, so I was, by the way, I'd never been in a play, but I was convinced I wanted to be an actor. So. I was working at Mobile Oil Corporation and they, it was like in the early nineties, and they would do that corporate downsizing.
And so I applied for a separation package. I had no right to apply for it nor get it. I had been there about two years, but I got it and I thought, I'm gonna be an actor. And I auditioned, I'd started to do community plays and started to take classes at the Walnut Street Theater. And then I got this touring contract.
So I was touring with a [00:09:00] group where the artistic director was also a masters of social work. And she had plays about good touch versus bad touch self-esteem and wellness, living with a substance abuse parent. And we would go out in five states in the mid Atlantic and we would perform the play where we were like high schoolers or junior high school characters.
And the idea was. That the students who were watching the plays would connect to the characters, and then we would run like programs after the shows to talk about feelings. And the ideas were that students would disclose and we would hook them up with someone in their immediate surroundings so they could start getting help and healing. So I, that was like a nine month contract and I did dinner theater on the weekends in the old city. And I was surviving as an actor. I was like, oh, this is easy. You know, like such beginner's luck. And I went to a circle in the square in New York to get actual [00:10:00] actor training and became an actor and realized how difficult it was.
About 10 years into my career, I was doing a film for Larissa Kki, who later wrote the whistleblower with Vanessa Redgrave and Rachel Wise. And we were working on a 30 minute film and she's like, Hey, read this. Tell me what you think of it. And I was, you know. Just enamored by the script. It's about real life.
Ka Kovi, who was I think a Kansas City police officer, and she went to Bosnia after the Balkan war for peacekeeping and was a whistleblower on this big scandal of people in the un trafficking women. You know, there's and Larissa's screenplays based on Victor Malik's book called The Natashas. And there's a line like Bosnia had its occasional brothel, but after the Balkan War and all the peacekeeping forces came in, they like brothels dotted the hillside and there was complicity of some UN people and buying and selling of girls. [00:11:00] And so I, it just, I read, I mean, I just was reading a lot of books like Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures was really instrumental woman in Berlin. And I wanted to do aid work. I just got this idea in my head and I wanted to do it, and I had no idea how to do it. And so I used to go to this actor group in New York called Naked Angels, where playwrights would bring in work in progress and there'd be a pool of actors and they would just cast it there so they could hear it out loud.
And I would go in the nineties when like he, LA Lare was there, who wrote Gang of New York and Jay Cameron Smith, like the Vero Group Theater. It was like those folks, like Tracy Letts, those folks that, that would, that's who would go. And I met this guy who wanted to be a director and his fiance was the best friend of Coon's fiance.
Who he was. Sorry, he was Coon's Press secretary. Coon's Press secretary. Fiance was the fiance of this guy from Naked Angels. He's like, do you wanna meet [00:12:00] Nick? And I was like, yeah. And so I met Nick and he is like, did you check the credits of emergency sex? And it turned out that Andrew, one of the writers had thanked him because I think they had been in Irrit retreat together somewhere.
And he said like, if you wanna get a job in aid, go get a master's in ir. Go volunteer, go over there, find, go find out where the aid folks drink, go drink in a bar with them and offer to volunteer and get your food in the door. Or apply to like a UN or something. I didn't have any transferable skill sets and I didn't wanna acquire a bunch of debt.
I still had my undergrad debt.
Ross Romano: Yeah.
Alex: So I decided to certify, to teach and I thought, okay, I'll teach and I can go abroad and I can volunteer. And so that's what I did. I. I first was in Poland and then Turkey and then Ukraine. And then I came back to New York for about a year and that's when I started taking writing classes at the writer's studio in New York, which is where I learned everything I know about writing.
I highly recommend it. And they have online programs. And then I met Jerry Van [00:13:00] Dyke, one of his book signings, and he became a defacto mentor. And at that time he still is, he's like the Afghanistan, Pakistan guru, because he had been kidnapped by the Taliban and held for 45 days and wrote a book about it, called Captive.
And he gave me the encouragement I needed. So I applied. I had seen this job in Iraq and I ap, I applied for it then. And it was great. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I'd ever made. I mean, it just, I could afford to keep taking writing classes. So I'd log on at three in the morning, take my class, and then luckily it was Thursday to Friday, which was our weekend, and I would write and teach and.
I was just amazed at there's just a sweetness to the students in that part of the world. I don't know what it is. I mean, I really think students are great everywhere. I see institutions around them that succeed or fail, but there's just a sweetness in that part of the world. And I mean, I was, [00:14:00] I the 10 sp class definitely tried my patience more than once, but overall, I had so much fulfillment from that job.
I, I would be that person that would be on holiday talking about their students and always calling them my kids, my kids. And people are like, how many kids do you have? And it's like, I don't have any kids who you talking about? You know, I just, it was incredible. They're so, I love that age. I love like 13, 14 to basically mid to late twenties, but even like 13, 14 to 1819. They they'll be sky high, they'll be, I just sl their wrist. And I know that as we get older and we mature, our emotions tamp down. But I love that they're not afraid to be exuberant in that moment and find the joy of a moment. And I just love the way that they look at the world and call you on your inconsistencies and they're just very kind.
I don't know. It was such a I am [00:15:00] so indebted to that experience.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, it strikes me in the way what you just described as far as what was presented to you as how to get into aid work, getting an advanced degree, kind of needing to find a way to be around the right people. And then the path you took as well to getting there, which was different, but also required by risk, aspiration, hard work doing things that most people would not really be interested in or I think would be afraid to do.
It would be outside of their comfort zone that it feels like it provides some color to the understanding of who undertakes that type of work. That it's really, I. Hard work and that it's something, it's not like, I don't know, like, and it relates to [00:16:00] probably all different types of government work or any other type of service oriented profession, but to an extreme level in some ways, when you're going abroad, you're going into a place that you don't have a background.
You're not from there. You know, it's a totally different culture and totally new place to be that it's important to sort of stop there and stop on that point and understand how much is given to, to go into roles where that it really is about making a difference.
Alex: I, this is not false modesty. I was never, I never felt like I was in danger. Yeah, there was a lot of harassment because we were white foreign women and it looked like again, that idea like ji all like it's a Turkish word for a foreigner like aliya. Bji are Natasha. It's their slang because a lot of the women that are trafficked and are sex workers are Slavic ethnicities. So there, I mean, it's just [00:17:00] basically an excuse to behave badly, you know what I mean? So you'd get grabbed in public, you'd get grabbed coming in out of a taxi. That stuff is annoying. And no one likes it. But other than that, I mean, I never, I would never feel unsafe. You know, sometimes a car would follow you.
I have screamed fire, which is like such a ridiculous thing to recount because you're screaming fire in English and no one around you understands English. But that's the only time I never felt in danger. And from a security standpoint, and I mean, there are far more times where feel a little more uneasy in the United States.
Like if I'm on public transportation in Chicago, like at almost any time now, some of those train lines are just have high levels of violence and crime. Or even in, I live in Tulsa now, and there's a big homelessness problem and. I have a lot of empathy for someone's who's unhoused, but when someone stops in the middle of the intersection, this just happened yesterday [00:18:00] and looks at me like I'm their next bite of hamburger, as I have to cross that intersection and then makes a comment, my, the hair on, on the back of my neck is up.
My, my guard is up. So I haven't, I don't, I didn't really feel those levels of threat in northern Iraq, but I do feel them in my own country. So for me, it, it wasn't, it was never, I feel like our men and women in, in the military put themselves at great risk, not just physical, but emotional with moral injury as well. I've never had to do that, and I wanna be really clear about that. Honest I don't feel like. Like I said, I learned so much from my experiences and I'm so grateful for them. I don't feel like I get to be covered in my good girl glow, you know what I mean? For me, it was a choice to go there. I was curious.
My life was stuck. I say in the book, it's [00:19:00] curiosity and desperation and equal measure. I, that's very accurate for where I was in my life, and I'm just really grateful because it opened up so many opportunities for me and I had just great memories. I've got, being an actor was a great time in my life, and when I was done with being an actor, I was done and working internationally in, in international education, in conflict, post-conflict or developing context and then later segueing into humanitarian aid has been so gratifying and I love this section of my life too.
Ross Romano: No, what I'm interested in like, some of the s small things that would be surprising to people. Like they're, that just are so familiar that it would be, I, one of the things was reading about C and teaching on Zoom and it's like, oh everybody here probably has done that. Right?
They're familiar with that. Like those little things that [00:20:00] maybe you didn't know or realize now or you talk to somebody or somebody reads your book or you're just having conversation and they're like, oh, I didn't know that the same stuff was happening in northern Iraq or all kinds of places.
Right. And then after that maybe we could talk about some of the bigger things, but to just hear about some of those little things that people might be surprised to hear. Oh yeah, we like. We do that too. It's it's kind of the same way it is here.
Alex: I think it's, I, so people have a lot of preconceived ideas I think that come from our media and whether it's commercial news or fictionalization on film. That it's going to be I always get the question of like, what did you wear? And it's like, I just cover my, you have to cover to your shoulders and cover to your knees.
You know, I wasn't, you didn't have to wear, and they don't know the word for like hijab or [00:21:00] burka or a cab or what's the difference? And so there's like, no, it's not like that. Or you know, there were nightclubs. So in the Christian city of ANCA especially, where were the, a lot of places to go out.
So there were like dance clubs. There was this sky bar for a while at the rooftop of a fancy hotel at Ankawa. And you know, it's like. It's like this collision of Western and Middle Eastern culture. 'cause you've got the fully stocked bar with a lot of counterfeit alcohol. You know, like the labels around bottles crooked.
Or it gives you the worst hangover you've ever had because it's counterfeit alcohol. There used to be a lot of counterfeit alcohol factories and most Mosul until ISIS came and destroyed them. And then you have people with the hookah pipes, the shisha pipes, the water pipes, and then you're like, you could be sitting at a table very western, or you could be sitting among cushions very Middle Eastern so you have Kurdish ba music in the background in some [00:22:00] places, or you have like, outdated dance music, western dance music and other places.
So it, it was a lot of fun. It wasn't it Arab bill wants to be the next Dubai and it feels like it's gonna get there by. Alcohol, drugs and prostitution, I think, and gambling. It wasn't, it's not like it's a, I hate the word backwards, but it's not like it's a backwards, undeveloped place. It's just a different place with different rules.
Social rules and also political rules. And the way that people are organized, like wasta is this huge thing. It's this, the value of your last name, like the network of people that you know and you're connected to is as important, if not more important than your education and your skills. I'll say something that I think people are always like a little surprised by now, just to them many ask.
So when I was in our bill from 11 to 13 and I went to Germany from 13 to 15 and I went to sole mania on the other side of northern Iraq near the Iranian border from 15 to 21. [00:23:00] And there were so many protests then because. Of things that I go into in the book. Oil profit sharing mu hasa agreement between the two major political parties in Kurdistan Sonia or the Kurdish region wasn't getting its full budget payouts from Baghdad and a profit sharing about oil because Kurdistan had been illegally or against the agreements pumping and selling oil.
And so when the central government stopped giving the budget allocation, it really hurt Soleimani where 60% of people are public service sector, public sector employees. And you would have protests, teachers would stop teaching. Sometimes the police went on strike and there's no looting. Think about that.
Think about when we have a blackout in any American city, how much looting there is never happen there. When you have blackouts and the police are on strike, it'll never happen [00:24:00] because. The power of your last name, if you were caught, the shame that would come to your family would be couldn't insurmountable.
Insurmountable. So you don't do it. And it makes it a really safe place to live. And that's great. And now the underbelly of that is if there's a whiff of impropriety, that's justification for an honor killing and that's not great. So I'm not saying one system is better than the other. I'm saying that our, how we portray folks over there, I'm using our quotes in our media and in our cinema, is really misguided. It lacks any of the depth and definition that give a culture its identity. I.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned also having in Germany I mentioned. You know, you had been at West Bank and [00:25:00] Ukraine in my introduction. How, and how many of these things or not, maybe not even the same exact things, but that's a lot of different places. But I think it certainly gives you additional perspectives on what a lot of a lot of parts of the world are like, that aren't all the typical tourist destination I guess you'd say.
So a lot of people haven't just traveled there, been there, seen it for themselves. They've maybe seen it on TV or in the media or maybe haven't thought about it at all. But it's even and some of the things that could be. It could have the same amount of variance, I guess, as what we might see across this country.
You know, how's the wifi signal, right. That it, it's, it's in some ways like a small world, but but yeah. Are there kind [00:26:00] of things that stand out, like having gone through all the different places that you learned are the same and then the same problems too, I guess, right? Like you, you referenced some of those through lines that people that are trying to overcome some of the same issues that we might be familiar with.
Alex: I think people are pretty great everywhere and that's my experience in life and I I've been mugged and robbed in countries, but they're like Western European democracy countries where you maybe don't think that's gonna happen. But my, in my experience, people are pretty great everywhere. I mean, not everyone, but most people are.
I think instill in ourselves and our advertising and our governments and instill a sense of fear. So it's a way to control, and when you get down to it, people are pretty [00:27:00] great. They can be anyway. So things that stick out, let me, it's it's really when you come back to the United, when I came back to the United States to visit the dumbest things would like put me into like a, almost like a paralysis.
And one of them is going to the supermarket. When you're like, overwhelmed by the number and choices of cereal boxes and toothpaste, like, that's always the first time. That's like too much. I can't decide. and then when I think about how I used to be before I went abroad and if the electricity went out or the water went out, it was like a big deal.
Ross Romano: Yeah.
Alex: I mean, it's not a big deal. Iraq always had issues with electricity the power goes out all the time, and when the power goes, the water goes and so you can't flush either or you get the one flush and just, you learn that to really I am, for me, I'm just grateful when I'm back in the [00:28:00] states that so much works the way it's supposed to.
And you know, that I recently was a layoff or furlough for the Doge cuts. I was working with U-S-A-I-D and people are like, oh, I'm so sorry. And it's like, I am sorry too. Trust me. I feel like I was very lucky to get that job. I only had it for 10 months and I spent most of that time feeling like I was really bad at it, and it was just kind of finding my groove.
But I think about all the people who depend on the work that USAID does and who are really suffering. And I just can't even, I can't give myself the chance to like, feel sorry for myself. And I don't mean to be cavalier about it. I am very worried, I know more people out of work now than I did during COVID because it has imploded the development sector.
But at the same time, I'm living in a place where electricity and water work and are there all the time. And I think about, you know. The people who depended on our food aid, water hygiene, sanitation. I think about [00:29:00] all the work we did around gender equality, reproductive care that's gonna just spike up gender-based violence in a lot of developing contexts.
You know, just in the medical field, we left devices in people. We said, please trust us to try and experiment on your body and we promise we will take care of your body to the best of our ability through this clinical trial. And we left them high and dry with devices in their bodies that aren't easily removed.
In places where there's no health infrastructure, like we did not do a good thing here, we have put very vulnerable people in more vulnerable places where it really means life or death for them. So I'm, I constantly think about those things, more than I think about it's sucks that I don't have my job or. How much eggs cost? I mean, I don't know. It's context I guess. And I think from living in so many different places, it's really kind of changed my [00:30:00] context. we had students during COVID it, I mean, it was hard for students everywhere, but it was really hard in some contexts where you don't have the infrastructure for it.
So if you don't have a generator in your home and the electricity goes out and you can't afford a data pack, you're not, you can't get online. You can't do what you need to do in the time you need to do it. I had students that were taking university classes from tents because they were in refugee camps.
That's some serious commitment, you know what I mean? And then it's a culture. It's not a culture of self-directed learning like our culture is. You know what I mean? We were talking about public education before. We teach critical thinking here, we start teaching it in like first grade. Some of the context I've taught in, they come from dictatorships.
It's memorize and repeat. You don't want a population with critical thinking skills. And so I've taught in those contexts for a long [00:31:00] time. And I look at the attack on education right now and free speech in the public space and the attack on media journalists and civil society. And I'm again, very scared for the future of the United States. But there are challenges, there are challenges for everyone during COVID. It's not a comparison, but the challenges were different I think, in different contexts. So in Northern Iraq, you don't have a culture of self-directed learning. So if you're not assessing in real time, students won't do it. They don't know how to like, they're not good at.
Watching a video, taking notes and doing assignments. You know what I mean? Like you have to assess it and watch them do it. I built a lot of project-based learning into my curriculum at that point, just so I, and I made everything long form production, which was much more for me to grade, but it was the only one I could guarantee that they weren't completely cheating off of anything, you know?
And then I made a lot of group projects so they could do them online, but feel like they were connected. 'cause the isolation was really hard for them too. [00:32:00] Especially American culture is really individualistic. I think it was easier in some ways for Americans to be locked down just because our homes are bigger, we have more space.
We're not high density unless you're lower income living multi-generationally. We had space that's not the context in most of the world. And then because we're individualistic, like you have people in one family sitting in different rooms watching television all at the same time. That's not how other cultures are.
They're always together. And so to not be able to be together. Was super hard for them. So the psychosocial supports necessary were different and then there wasn't the availability, 'cause they don't have like a developed healthcare system. And there was really not a lot of mental psychosocial support because a lot of the doctors left when the 2003 invasion and dissolution of the Bathurst regime. So there were just other challenges. And then at first the WHO commended the Kurdistan [00:33:00] Regional Government's response 'cause they locked down very quickly and we didn't have a lot of cases. But then the cases, Iran was exploding in cases that borders porous. We were like 80 kilometers from it. And then the cases in the south, when we talk about the south, it's anything south of the Kurdish region.
So Baghdad, the center and the so Baghdad is like SUNY and Bar Province and the Shia South. So the whole thing is the south, their caseloads started to really spike and I had kids running around there trying to find oxygen tanks 'cause their parents are in hospital. We didn't have that problem here, you know?
So they were just different challenges. And I'm not saying it wasn't hard here. I mean, both my parents got COVID and my dad didn't make it. And by some grace of God, he did not die alone. My mom was in with him and one of my siblings, and she wasn't vaccinated. She hadn't had COVID. There's no rhyme or reason why they got in to be able to hold his [00:34:00] hands.
Like so many people didn't have that comfort. So I'm not saying it was harder in one place or another. I'm saying we had this universal experience, but we all experienced it differently.
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Ross Romano: Certainly the context around the individualism versus the collectivism or the connectedness and what the resistance was to those who were resistant during COVID and how it relates to the views on everything.
I think you talked about around foreign aid and US aid and you know, that having a hard time wrapping one's mind around why should I feel like I'm inconvenienced in any way to benefit someone else? And I. Some of those ways being more tangible, I think it's uncomfortable to wear a mask, so I don't [00:35:00] want to, even if it makes it safe for others or some very intangible and abstract, like I have some concept that some money that I paid in taxes is going to something that I don't care about.
So I, I just don't think that it matters. And I'm wondering if you have a, and I'm sure you've heard a lot or seen a lot, you wrote a, an essay recently about the furlough or reductions in force at usaid. And so whether in response to that or just through your life, if you have a perspective on some of the like fundamental things that.
Are not well understood, and if there's a good way to explain it to someone who just doesn't like, have the base [00:36:00] knowledge of what are these programs, why do they matter? Why is it not a, I guess zero sum game, or I mean between, some of the arguments are that we should spend the money here or fix the roads or whatever, which we can do that as well.
I think you've referenced that there's a fair amount of wealth in this nation that there's an ability to do more than one thing and. Probably the will and the intent might be a little more important than the fact that it that it costs money. But I don't know, like, what is, have you found something that is a simple way or a, an element that can be described to someone who just doesn't have the understanding and isn't necessarily gonna have a grasp all the complexities right away, but that would at [00:37:00] least introduce the idea of here's why these programs matter here's why they're worth caring about and on on their own merits.
Alex: Sure. Thank you for that question. gonna get into an ontological, morality argument. Like you could say we should do it because we're the biggest nation and goodwill and blah, blah, blah. I'm not gonna dictate morality to anyone. When I first started at usaid, when I went out, I told you to get my computer and what's called a PIV card, which unlocks the computer and allows you to get on the USAID gmail system and stuff. And the internet. I sat down with someone from state and this person said very clearly, there's nothing USAID does that doesn't have a geostrategic component to it. We're not doing it just out of the good of our hearts. Everything has a geopolitical strategic reason. I was like, wow, okay. [00:38:00] That's pretty hardcore, but okay.
And so it's not about just building goodwill. I mean, I talk about it in that HuffPost essay, that it's that USAID United the best of our American values and also our power as a superpower. Like what is our, when it told what our American character is? So what is our American character?
Do we wanna be known as completely transactional? And that's appealing to people who like strong men, who like autocracies. that happens to not be appealing to me. I don't think they're useful in the long run for the following reasons, just on a purely economic reason. If you want to go into a country like rare earth minerals are a big debate right now, especially with the tariff war on China.
With China, and there's a lot of rare earth minerals in parts of Africa. But the private sector is reluctant to go in and invest because it's not just like going and investing. There's years and [00:39:00] billions of dollars in terms of exploration to find where all the minds are. When you're in a country that has an unstable political system that doesn't have strong democratic guardrails, that's rife with corruption.
And if I'm a private sector investor, I don't know if I'm gonna go in and I I find it and then it's seized. There's a military coup, it's Sudan War breaks out. I mean, Sudan's a great example. They're sitting on so much na, so many natural resources and rare earth minerals. How will you ever get them outta the ground with so much war and violence?
So the private sector needs the reassurance of democratic governance, anti-corruption measures a level of stability to make it worth their while to go in and extract and refine those materials so that we can use them. And I'm not even touching then another ontological debate about. Who really deserves the benefit of those [00:40:00] money?
Of those money? Is it the countries that go in and support investment or private sector investors? Or what about the people who actually live in those countries? 'cause they are their natural resources? That's an entirely different argument, but that's why we do it. If you're in a country, like, so I'll talk about some different NGOs that I happen to know a little bit about. Spirit of America works in very difficult contexts as well, and they, what they do is they're all privately funded and they take like the best of venture capitalism and funnel those resources to the military on the ground and the diplomats with the power of the USG.
And then working locally with partners to find out what people need and want. And then they harness. Private sector to make that happen so that there's relationship building and people have buy-in and the troops are safer and they can accomplish their security goals. So that's the kind of operation [00:41:00] where our security is dependent on the stability of the country.
And part of the reason the spirit of America does that is that if you're doing things that spur entrepreneurship, there's less poverty in the country which extremists then can't exploit for recruitment. And that's a big reason. If you wanna bring down terrorism and increase world security, if you wanna stop migration, make, eliminate the push factors for migration.
Help people in countries start businesses so that they can stay leaving as the last resort you an NGOI worked with before. USAID and before Search for Common Ground was this small NGO called preemptive love, and they were mostly privately funded, which made them very nimble and they could respond to humanitarian aid crisis right away.
And we did a lot of work at the border and it was like [00:42:00] someone's at the, they finally made it through the border. I mean, they've crossed seven, eight countries sometimes on foot through the dairy and Gap. Before it was this different beast that it is today, you are dirty. There's no sense of who you used to be in your own country.
Maybe you were a pharmacist, maybe you were a doctor. You know Venezuela. That migration is not, it's one of the largest mass migrations of a country, not at war. It's because people are starving. There's no economic opportunity. You get to the border, are not a shell of who you used to be. You just, and who, whoever's dealing with you is looking at you like you dirty, smelly. They don't see who you are, they couldn't possibly know. So when, how bad are things in your own country that you know that's what you're gonna face and you do it anyway. That's my point. So, to do programs that spur entrepreneurship, education, improve health outcomes, give people a reason to stay so they can live in [00:43:00] dignity, that makes all of us safer.
Poverty is a great is a great opportunity for extremists to recruit, especially when there is no other way. And we, I mean we saw that a lot in Iraq with isis. All the research that USAID was doing in terms of me medical research that benefits us, that's our next generation of cancer drugs, our next generation of asthma drugs.
I know President Trump made that joke in his address about. Wanna make mice transgender? I think it went, and that was a transmutation research that yielded asthma and cancer care wasn't making mice transgender. I have two aunts that have pretty severe cancer. I care about that next generation of drugs.
The work we do for democracy and governance, like in Moldova, it's not just so they can ascend to the EU so that they can turn their economic re reliance from [00:44:00] Russia toward the eu, but that's a security buffer. You know, it's very close to Ukraine and Romania. It's a country that feels a little less safe now.
With, it looks like NATO funding being severely reduced. Will you Ukraine get continued to get support or will it not? Those measures keep us safe. It keeps certainly our friends in Europe safer. If you're looking at government of Guatemala, love President Ello, big democratic reformer, is doing a lot of things to improve life in his own country.
He has this program to eradicate all dirt floors and replace him with cement floors because of the parasites and just, and dirt floors have lead to malnourishment for kids. But he's also at the same time been partnering for anti-trafficking of narcotics and people through Guatemala, since it's just a transit country toward [00:45:00] the United States.
So he's helping us reduce illegal migration. So Democracy Delivers was the initiative I worked in. Guatemala was one of our newest countries, we're funneling resources and attention and support so he can. Concretizes Democratic opening. He can make reforms, he can deliver on citizen priority. So they, so his citizens keep enthusiastic about democracy.
That helps us. 'cause he's the one that's clamping down on trafficking of drugs and people. It all affects us. We are no longer an isolated world. We're so connected, not to mention pandemic diseases that don't recognize borders, that we all need to work together. If we believe that climate change is real and is an existential threat, we need to work together on security just for nuclear reasons.
I mean, there's so much that USAID does just in terms of soft diplomacy to, to make the US the partner of choice over the People's [00:46:00] Republic of China, the PRC and all these infrastructure projects that we were funding or roads in Nepal. Internet connectivity in Fiji, which are significant strategic places for the shipping lanes in the Pacific.
Those are important for American security. We're not in Fiji and Nepal because we're great people. There's a strategic reason to be there.
Ross Romano: Yeah. I mean, so many of those things you shared should be pretty familiar, right? Like, poverty, desperation, lack of opportunity being a breeding ground for crime, violence, like other things that the same thing happens here. When we take measures to change that by providing education, safety, economic opportunity it gives people options and the chance to see that [00:47:00] there are choices and there's different ways to have attainment and fulfillment in life.
But when those pathways are closed off, it's. You know, the it's desperate times, right? And so the same thing applies, certainly the research pharmaceuticals. I mean, some of the advances that have been made are like incredible, right? I mean, discoveries and achievements and just in the last handful of years that were decades in the making that seemed so out of reach or and unsolvable that suddenly, oh, look at this drug is proving really effective against cancer.
Certain vaccinations, even just the development of the speed of the development of the COVID vaccines. That was, I. Way beyond what estimates were at the time, [00:48:00] and then like as soon as it happens, right? The resilience of the human mind is powerful sometimes for good and for bad. Sometimes it's easy to forget, right?
When something is achieved much more successfully than what you thought. Or you write about the resilience that you've seen in the conflict and post-conflict zone. And I always have a complicated, complicated feelings about human resilience because like it's especially at an individual and a, and also like a community level, so impressive and admirable.
And yet it's also so. Devastating that such resilience is so often required that that the violence in communities everywhere in this country and beyond, right? The parents [00:49:00] who become advocates after their child is killed in a school shooting you can really admire those people and yet just can't, you can't accept why that has to be the case.
But I think that's a, in a lot of what you discussed as well, that maybe the assumption externally would be that there's a lot of, I. Above the surface baggage that people must be holding onto. They must be holding onto anger or hatred or and they aren't because they can't, you have to keep moving and
reflecting and developing perspective, determining what's going to be next for you. And that it always, I [00:50:00] mean, it, it doesn't matter how many times you see that, I think still stands out. I don't know. I don't know if it ever becomes something that you shrug off and say, well, of course they bounce back from that.
Because there's so many things and some people have been through, I. Multiple versions of traumas and personal heartbreaks and continue to recover
Alex: If you're a young person. In Palestine or Syria, you only have known conflict. I think about that. You've never known peace, and we don't have a vocabulary, and I would venture to say we don't have treatments for like, the types of trauma like ISIS and AKA after the fall of isis. You know, kids were kicking around severed [00:51:00] heads. There's no language to, we haven't had to confront that situation and I think that's, I'm venturing to say we don't have maybe treatments for it.
There's a whole generation that's lived under trauma. If you think about what's happened since the October 7th attacks, and we don't we're so busy fighting, blaming. Making development plans for our next Trump hotel and not starting stopping to say, these are real people, real lives. That violence will reverberate across this life.
It's intergenerational. What are we doing to make help, help healing begin? What are we doing to promote everyone living with dignity? We're not getting to even those questions in a time when most of any kind of money that's still left for foreign intervention goes to the aftermaths of conflict. So in 20 22, 20 23 was when I, [00:52:00] the statistic was, I think put out by the World Bank that of the entire like world agency and money that's available through all funding streams.
90% of it went to victims of violent conflict and only 10% was left. There was like the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey that devastated tons of people's lives in it was what? 2022? 2023. There's only 10% of that whole money pie goes to natural disasters. 90% is going to conflict. Post-conflict. We have natural disasters, a lot of them, and more coming with climate changing. Not to mention that some economies haven't recovered from pandemic, so they're not already economically resilient enough to withstand the next shock. And there's nothing left like in [00:53:00] the aid pods 'cause they've been severely cut by US funding being cut and the rest is like being spent post-conflict.
Ross Romano: What what, why do you want people to read the book, or what do you want them to, I mean, what do you most want people to get from reading the book? I.
Alex: oh gosh. I guess I want them to get the resilience of women and youth post-conflict, and I want them to understand that and that folks, quote unquote over there are just like us. Everybody wants their kids to grow up in safety and security. Everybody wants their kids to have opportunity and good healthcare and a good education.
We all want the same things. There's, there should be enough for everyone to get it. I thought this was always really remarkable when I taught at the university and Somnia in the United States when kids cheat, they usually cheat to get ahead. And this universities that I taught in [00:54:00] Kurdistan, kids cheat to keep the group together. So if I'm like a smart kid who's doing well, I'll try to take a test for the kid who's failing, who's my friend, give him my good grade, take his bad grade. 'cause I'm still gonna pass the class and we can all stay together. It's a fundamentally different mindset, that always stuck with me just always stuck with me.
Ross Romano: Yeah.
Alex: yeah, I mean, like I can remember in the first Trump administration with the Muslim ban, we were on a term break and I was traveling and my students were hitting me on Facebook going miss Alex, are you okay? Will you be able to get back into your country? Like, they were worried. They clearly didn't understand the immigration law, but they were worried for me.
Like their first thought is to worry about someone else. Like I. It's so beautiful. So I hope that after reading the book, it humanizes people who are often being villainized in our current [00:55:00] political discourse. I.
Ross Romano: Yeah. I agree with that. I think that's one of the most and probably the most important takeaway is not all the specifics and, but it's just thinking about it, thinking about people and people as humans and what their lives are and who their families are and what they care about and and their humanity and their role in their communities and and all these various issues.
Not that everybody has to immediately have, and then please don't immediately have strong feelings about everything, but just think and be informed and think critically and have humility and understand that there's nuance and complication and that there are. You know, a an array [00:56:00] of different perspectives and different parts of things that people may think one way or another about, but that if we're at least thinking about it and thinking about it based on having been curious and engaged and informed and understanding that it all affects people, that it's a, like, it's a pretty strong starting point for making good decisions, acting with care and conscientiousness and being mindful of what things you know, really mean and to whom, and, okay. And those are just good. And those are things that everybody listening to this is involved with education in some way. So everybody has a different relationship to some of these topics and different levels of prior [00:57:00] knowledge or not, or different opinions and perspectives, right?
But that there's space for all of that within a dialogue, within a conversation, within a you know, a an environment where we all are really interested in understanding what we're forming opinions on and making decisions about. And that there's opportunities for those things also to, to evolve over time.
Sometimes we realize we were wrong one way or the other. Sometimes we just. You know, learn better or try something, it doesn't work. But that, yeah, that certainly it's effective to be able to then think about how does this reflect and illustrate something else that I didn't know that much about or think that much about, or that seemed not foreign into me in the sense of a different country, but the foreign concept to me or abstract or kind of that I heard [00:58:00] these words about this thing or this place where something was happening.
And it didn't really permeate and penetrate into my brain because there it wasn't a place that I was familiar with. But yeah, I think there's so much to be gained from just reading these stories. Reading, all kinds of things. Not just this book, although this book is a good one, but all kinds of things that are about experiences that you don't have and in particular reading, I think about it versus other forms of media that there just is something that's very, it's just different about the way that we can expand our thinking and understanding about all kinds of topics by reading about them and
Alex: There's science behind that. There's a study done that reading literary fiction stimulates theory of mind because when you're reading literary fiction. Parts of your brain are stimulated as though you [00:59:00] were having the experience for yourself, which allows you to develop empathy for people who have different sets of experiences, which is my book.
Banning is such a scary idea when we're already kind of suffering from, so a breakdown in social cohesion and hyperpolarization, and we're getting more and more siloed and now we're not having books available that will enlarge in our perspective because it's stimulating parts of our brain that we can understand what that experience is like on a visceral level.
Ross Romano: Yeah, see we learned something. Yeah. Even a really good documentary film I think can certainly make you empathize. But reading can make you sympathize and just really puts you in a different mindset. And and I think we spend enough time
in all forms of media you know, maybe it's good to spend less time trying to, understand and empathize with bad actors and [01:00:00] villains and a little more with regular people in all places of the world. And maybe that would be a good endeavor and and in a way for us all to enrich ourselves.
Alex: True. Yeah.
Ross Romano: Well thank you Alex, for being here. I'm going to put the link to the book below at bookshop.org where you know, listeners can find the book, buy it from wherever you, you prefer to get your books. Anything else you'd like to share or direct people to?
Alex: No thank you. If you wanna learn more about me, I have a website, alex poppy.com. But yeah, if you would like to pick up an order, a copy of breakfast wine I'll just say please order from bookshop or from an independent bookstore so they can stay alive. And pre-ordering kicks the algorithm to recommend the books to people who might not necessarily be looking for it or know about it.
So that helps increase its reach. So thank you in advance if you're [01:01:00] inclined to do that.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, listeners, you can check that out. We'll put the link below. You can also read more about Alex down there and find ways to connect with her. Please also do if you have not already subscribed to the Authority for more author interviews coming your way weekly. Or you can visit the Podcast network to learn about all of our shows.
Thank you all for listening and. Thanks Alex for being my guest.
Alex: Thank you so much, Ross. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about my work.
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