In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [18]
They called it a dental clinic, but it looked more like the window-less concrete shell of a would-be gas station that you might find in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The representative described the building as a former “municipal complex.” He said that FIRDOS had provided enough funds to cover the current renovations and the purchase of state-of-the-art dental equipment. Syria’s Ministry of Health would be responsible for providing the dentists.
In the next village, it was a different version of the same story. FIRDOS had purchased scores of computers and created a computer lab in a village municipal building. The eyes of smiling students sitting at every computer terminal greeted me as I entered the room. When I tried to make small talk and ask them what they were working on, I noticed that most had Microsoft Word documents open on-screen and were practicing their typing; a few were playing with blank Excel spreadsheets. The representative told me the center was one of twelve FIRDOS-sponsored labs throughout the country. The organization had a “mobile information center” (MIC)—a bus that had been turned into a sort of mobile computer lab.
In the next village, I interviewed a recipient of a FIRDOS scholarship, a bright girl named Amira who had scored particularly well on her high school exams. “I could never go to college without FIRDOS,” she told me nervously. “I want to study English literature and return to my village and teach.”
Late in the afternoon, while taking lunch with FIRDOS representatives, I started to have mixed feeling about what I had seen that day. On the one hand, I strongly identified with the stories of the Syrians we had visited. I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania, where my mother and father had bettered themselves through a combination of hard work and higher education. They often told me about the “chances” they had been given with the help of scholarships or benefactors. I had received similar help as well: more than one scholarship fund in my hometown had helped me pay college tuition, and a number of foundations had paid my way through MA study at the American University in Cairo, launching me on a career in journalism in the Middle East.
On the other hand, FIRDOS programs seemed tightly controlled and its beneficiaries’ stories too good to be true. At first I chalked it up to a language barrier: five years of English-language journalism and office work at OBG had eroded my Arabic language skills. Nevertheless, my journalistic experience in Cairo had taught me that development projects in the Arab world seldom went according to plan. For example, FIRDOS’s pilot microfinance program to support small business ventures had a payback rate of 100 percent—an unlikely percentage given the risks of starting thousands of microenterprises. After all, what were the chances that every business would succeed? The obstacles that beneficiaries had overcome sounded genuine and compelling, but the ending of each story was apparently always the same: FIRDOS was their ticket to paradise.
When I returned to Damascus, I stopped by to thank Rola for arranging what I felt was a very interesting trip. “Yes, I know,” she said knowingly. “The first lady would like to meet you for a ‘chat’ about what you saw.”
Asma al-Assad’s secretary called me a few days later to schedule an appointment. She told me to wait at 6 PM on the corner outside my apartment building, where a car and escort from the palace would meet me. When I tried to offer my address, the secretary politely cut me off midsentence. “We know where you live, Mr. Tabler,” she said.
At 6 PM sharp, a man with dark hair, bright-blue eyes, and ivory skin, dressed in a black wool trench coat, met me at the side of the curb and motioned me into the backseat of a black Honda Accord. I knew who I was going to meet, but I had no idea where I was going. As the car snaked up the road