On two occasions, her work put her in immediate danger. The first was at a small building in downtown Baghdad where Sheckler had attended a meeting of the Baghdad local city council. She had just left in an armored vehicle (the type commonly called an MRAP, for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected), heading for the nearby U.S. embassy, and had ridden only a few blocks when the driver was ordered to turn around because the city council had just been attacked. After parking a block away, in case of another attack, Sheckler and several other passengers walked the rest of the way back to the council building, where a suicide bomber driving a vehicle loaded with explosives had been stopped by a barricade in front of the building and had then smashed into a parked MRAP outside the wall, setting off his blast. The bomber was killed, along with the driver and a passenger in a taxi following his vehicle, but although the explosion shattered parts of the roof of the council building and blew out all its windows, showering the people inside with broken glass, "by some miracle," as Sheckler put it, there were no other casualties.
Some months later, she was riding in a vehicle immediately behind the Humvee (a military truck) at the head of a convoy, when a small white car coming from the opposite direction rolled to a stop a short way ahead. From her car, just 20 feet behind the lead vehicle, she saw a man get out with a phone in his hand, which he then used to set off an EFP (an explosively formed penetrator, a projectile carrying a superheated copper warhead that can be launched from a distance and punch through most protective armor). The blast blew the Humvee into the air, sending it flying into a pasture on the far side of the road, wounding the three soldiers and a civilian riding in it. The most seriously wounded was the driver, who lost his right leg below the knee and suffered a shattered lower left leg and massive internal and external burns. Sheckler knew him and all her convoy soldiers, since the same unit escorted her every day on her travels around the district.
A project she remembers with particular pride from her time in Iraq was the reconstruction of the University of Baghdad College of Agriculture, located in Abu Ghraib, which had been completely destroyed earlier in the war. With USAID help, the college was rebuilt, including a room with audiovisual equipment so students and instructors could communicate with other schools. When it reopened, the school offered local farmers training in improved methods of irrigation and water use, helping to revive dairy farming and grain harvests in a vital food-producing region.
It was an "important partnership," Sheckler said, which not only benefited Iraqi farmers but also significantly changed local feeling about the American presence, as one sheikh after another told her at a farewell meeting at the end of her tour. "When Christine came here two years ago, we hated America and we hated the American people," she remembers one of them saying as they sent her off with a gift. "But if Christine represents the American people, we love the American people."
Summing up her time in Iraq, Sheckler remembers not just the danger and her arduous daily schedule ("6 a.m. to after midnight, pretty much every day") but the immense satisfaction she drew from the work she did. "We spent a lot of money doing supergood things and I am superproud of that."
She's no less proud of her work in other countries, particularly during local council elections in the African country of Sierra Leone, where women hoped for more representation in a society in which, as one international think tank reported in 2009 during Sheckler's tour there, "Gender relations" are extremely unequal and Sierra Leonean women face high levels of exclusion, violence, and poverty." Gender inequality became a more visible issue in the aftermath of the 1990s civil war there, when huge numbers of women became victims of sexual violence or endured devastating hunger and poverty after their husbands were killed.
Working with a team from the National Democratic Institute, a nongovernmental organization, Sheckler helped bring female ministers and parliamentarians from all over Africa to find local women throughout Sierra Leone with leadership skills and meet, encourage, and mentor women candidates in the elections. The delegation traveled around the country, riding in old vehicles on rough roads, often crossing paths with Sheckler, who was also on the move to monitor and evaluate the results of the election strategy and leadership training. In the end, in a genuine breakthrough, women won 20% of the local council seats, up from 11% in the previous councils. That result left Sheckler feeling "superproud," not just about her own contribution but perhaps more importantly about "the strength, wisdom, determination, and resilience of the Sierra Leonean women" she had worked with.
Would Musk Listen?
Now, let's return to Elon Musk, and imagine the Tesla chief and DOGE warrior's conversation with Sheckler. Obviously, there's no way to know if hearing her reminiscences would have moderated any of his opinions or policy decisions when it came to the utter dismantling of AID. Possibly, perhaps probably, no one like her would change his thinking an iota. This is the guy, after all, who believes that empathy is "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization" because it can supposedly be, as he put it, "weaponized" by enemies to exploit our humane impulses for sinister purposes. And one wonders if Musk can even begin to comprehend a life built around helping other people, or any other purpose except personal gain.
He may think that American soldiers have no obligation to ease civilian suffering in war -- a view that President Trump's defense secretary Pete Hegseth apparently adopted as official policy when he moved to shut down the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and other Defense Department programs aimed at preventing civilian harm (or at least responding to it) during U.S. combat operations. Accordingly, rather than thanking Sheckler for her work in Iraq, he might argue that she should never have been sent there in the first place. Similarly, it would be no surprise if Musk believes that the U.S. has no business interfering with the oppression of women in Sierra Leone or anywhere else, and so sees Sheckler's project there and similar programs elsewhere not as steps toward greater fairness but as a pure waste of American taxpayer dollars (if, indeed, he accepts the idea that women's rights are a legitimate issue in the first place, which is by no means a certainty).
So, it's not unreasonable to imagine that talking to Musk would be a complete waste of Sheckler's time. As a possible alternative, she could tell her stories to Republican members of Congress, particularly those who loudly proclaim their Christian faith, which might suggest a different view from Musk's about empathy (though again I wouldn't count on it). In that scenario, if Sheckler manages to speak with any senators or representatives, perhaps she could see them together with Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times journalist whose eyewitness reporting in Sudan and Kenya documented the deaths of a number of children and adults directly attributed to the suspension of U.S. foreign aid programs -- conclusively refuting Musk's false claim that no one had died because of the USAID cutback.
Maybe listening to Sheckler and Kristof together would persuade at least a few Republican lawmakers to break their shameful silence. Perhaps they would not only speak out against Musk's and Trump's assault on USAID, but act to restore fired employees and reinstate discontinued aid programs. That would not save lives already lost or prevent many more unnecessary deaths caused by the interruptions in AID programs that have already occurred but could help limit the toll in future years. So far, regrettably, there's no sign that anything like that will happen.
When Musk, Trump, and their subordinates speak about USAID programs or government spending in general, they incessantly repeat the words "waste, fraud, and abuse." Waste is a legitimate issue, more so in some agencies than others. But by any realistic standard, fraud and abuse come overwhelmingly from the Trump-Musk side, not from federal employees. Fraud is the right word for their false reasoning and wildly exaggerated claims of dollars saved, and the record shows abuses too numerous to count -- false claims of poor performance by fired government workers, disrupting mental health services for veterans, attempting to intimidate judges whose rulings they don't like, and closing the door on refugees who had already been approved for admission to the United States (including many Afghans who fought alongside American troops in the failed war against the Taliban). And don't forget the once-preventable deaths of many thousands of people who would have lived if USAID had continued its work in their countries -- the work that people like Christine Sheckler and thousands of other staffers did all over the world, demonstrating a moral commitment that Americans today urgently need to preserve, not destroy.
Copyright 2025 Arnold Isaacs
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