JOPLIN, Mo. — Two weeks after a mile-wide tornado
tore through this city, killing 161 people and rendering a landscape of
apocalyptic devastation, the public school system here received a telephone
call from a man working for the United Arab Emirates Embassy in Washington.
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| United Arab Emirates |
“Tell me what you need,” the embassy staffer said.
Six schools, including the city’s sole high school,
were destroyed in the May 2011 disaster. Insurance would cover the construction
of new buildings, but administrators were scrambling to replace all of the
books that had blown away.
Instead of focusing on books, the staffer wanted “to
think big.” So the school system’s development director pitched the most
ambitious plan that came to mind, a proposal to obviate the need for high
school textbooks that had been shelved two years earlier because nobody — not
the cash-strapped school system, not the state of Missouri, not even local
charities — had the money for it: Give every student a computer.
Today, the nearly 2,200 high school students in
Joplin each have their own UAE-funded MacBook laptop, which they use to absorb
lessons, perform homework and take tests. Across the city, the UAE is spending
$5 million to build a neonatal intensive-care unit at Mercy Hospital,
which also was ripped apart by the tornado.
The gifts are part of an ambitious campaign by the
UAE government to assist needy communities in the United States. Motivated by
the same principal reasons that the U.S. government distributes foreign
assistance — to help those less fortunate and to influence perceptions among
the recipients — the handouts mark a small but remarkable shift in global
economic power.
For decades, the United States has been the world’s
largest provider of foreign aid, paying for the construction of schools, health
clinics and vaccine programs in impoverished countries. It still is, but the
level of donations has been increasing among nations with new financial clout,
including China, India and oil-rich Persian Gulf states. And at least one of
them now sees poor parts of the United States as worthy recipients for that
same sort of assistance.
“We spot needs and we try to help,” said Yousef al
Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States.
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