How USAID changed my life
Guest column from Civic Media’s Todd Allbaugh.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
There’s a framed photo from the late ‘90’s that hangs above my desk, and the thing about it that always makes people laugh is my prominent Tom Selleck-style mustache I wore at the time. I mean, I was a big Magnum P.I. fan.
But there I am standing alongside my buddy Silas, originally from El Salvador, and between us the then-U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Anne Patterson. We’re all doing the Garden of Eden “fig leaf pose” – you know, where everyone in the photo crosses their hands in front of their crotch? Anyway, it’s a cheesy pic, but as they say, “a picture’s worth a thousand words,” so allow me to share why I keep this one up on the wall. As Magnum was fond of saying in the hit CBS show, “Now, I know what you’re thinking…this dude just keeps the photo up to show off.” But hear me out.
It’s easy for all of us, myself included, to get caught up and overwhelmed simply by the volume of news coming out of Washington, D.C., right now. We all have ways to keep ourselves grounded. We all have that North star that guides us, and many times it’s centered around that which we know to be true — life experiences.
I grew up in Richland Center, a city of 5,000 people in rural southwest Wisconsin which, at the time, was about 99% white. There was one Black family in our school district. While it was right out of The Andy Griffith Show in terms of a great place to grow up — picket fences, Main Street, and Sunday church services — it was not so much a place to learn about people different from yourself.
Allbaugh talks more about the story in this column during the Monday edition of “The Todd Allbaugh Show.” Listen as a podcast here and find more from his show here.
That changed in the mid-1980’s when then-U.S. Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, a Republican, helped author and champion a bipartisan bill signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, which took a portion of the federal money being spent on a faux war with the then-Soviet Union in Central America and directed it to education.
The Central American Scholarship Program (CASP) sought out recent high school graduates from throughout the region who excelled academically but who came from impoverished families and would otherwise most likely never have a shot at a higher education. The program awarded two-year, full-ride scholarships to attend universities for Associate Degrees in Business and/or Computer Science with the requirement they return to their home countries for at least two years.
The simple-but-important mission was to lift from within. The argument was, accurately, if the United States could help further educate academically brilliant Central Americans with applicable skills, they would go home and make their countries better, establish democratic (small d) ideals, and long term, decrease migration to the U.S. — because more folks would rather stay there if it was safe and they could make a basic living. It was a great success.
The program was run through and administered by a little known federal agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Georgetown University oversaw the program, with Wisconsin as one of the key participating states through the University of Wisconsin System. The host campuses included many of the then two-year “Center Campuses” in the more rural parts of the state including what was then the University of Wisconsin Center-Richland in Richland Center.
Every late summer, for several years, about 20 students from Central America would arrive on a campus with an enrollment of 350 to 400 students. Our family hosted three CASP students over the years — Miguel from Belize, and Rolando and Silas from El Salvador.
Every one of those students enriched our campus and community and made our lives better. They taught us more about ourselves than we could ever teach them.
Silas and I eventually transferred to UW-Platteville together, his two-year home stay requirement deferred until after he earned his Bachelor's Degree. He invited me to travel back to El Salvador to spend Christmas with his family in 1991.
The trip would — and I don’t use this phrase casually — change my life. I fell in love with the country, its can-do spirit, and above all, its people. It gave me a life-long context of how I look at things: If you’re surrounded by people who love and accept you for who you are, with simple but good food and drink and music that lifts the soul, then you are truly rich.
I am rich with family as a result of this place including my two godsons.
I’ve returned to the country 39 times over the last 25-plus years. It’s become a second home.
One of those trips was when I worked as District Director for then-U.S. Congressman Scott Klug. Tommy Thompson, the governor at the time, had made foreign trade a priority for the state. He set up Wisconsin trade offices through the Wisconsin Economic Development Council in Germany, Mexico, and other nations. My boss represented a lot of Ag folks, including dairy and cheese producers, who knew Central America was a ripe market if they could just get their products introduced. One of those was Sargento Cheese of Plymouth, Wisconsin.
While Sargento had been able to dip a toe in the market, they, along with other Wisconsin cheese producers, were being held back by government bureaucracy and red tape. So, I combined a vacation with a little work and met with Ambassador Patterson along with my buddy, Silas, who by this time was living back in El Salvador and helping run the finances for a major textile company.
The ambassador was intrigued by the story of how the two of us had come to meet — through the success of a bipartisan USAID program. Long story short, she helped facilitate another bipartisan effort (she was appointed by President Bill Clinton), and again, working in part with USAID, even more Wisconsin agriculture opportunities were opened in El Salvador and throughout Latin America. In particular, USAID worked with Salvadoran coffee farmers to address and adapt to coffee rust (a fungus made worse by climate change), which resulted in some coffee farms being saved and others having the economic impact softened. Years later, I, along with other Wisconsin based coffee businesses, would purchase coffee from some of these same farmers.
At the end of our meeting, we asked if we could take a quick photo; Tom Selleck mustache and all.
As goofy as it is, the mustached photo hangs where I can see it because it’s a good reminder of how much we’re all connected and of the ripple effect that touches each of our lives whether in Wisconsin, El Salvador, or across the globe.
It’s easy to fall into partisan sound bites and political tribalism. I’ve been guilty. But if we just apply what we know to be true, we can often bring an understandable context to an otherwise overwhelming news cycle.
What really has me worried these days is the future of Wisconsin companies and the good folks who work for them, who rely on international trade. What if the purge of federal agencies like USAID by President Trump and his unelected, unvetted, non-security cleared buddy Elon Musk, continues?
As Magnum once said, “I know what you’re thinking. I was thinking it, too.”
Todd Allbaugh is the host of “The Todd Allbaugh Show,” broadcasting from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. every weekday on the Civic Media network. Find more about the show and find a podcast from every broadcast here.
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How many bel Salvadoran kids did Todd rape?