On Thursday Oct. 11th the CGO16s welcomed their first visitor of the academic year when Lorina McAdam from Mercy Corps International.

Ms. McAdam has spent the last 14 years working in international relief and development with considerable experience in a number of different countries, most recently as Country Director for Mercy Corps in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has also worked for the United Nations Development Program in Honduras and Kenya. She joined the class for our Thursday night class and talked about some of the ethical issues that she has encountered in her work. Amongst the issues she discussed were how to best deal with corruption among Aid workers, how to balance the wishes of financial donors with the realities on the ground and how to deal with burn-out amongst staff who often work in very stressful situations.

Ms. Mc Adam then joined us for dinner in the Reagan Room where we engaged in a more informal discussion and introduced her to our new parlor game.  Weekly 2 students volunteer to choose  2 ethical dilemmas from the book Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything, written by Randy Cohen, the ethicist for the New York Times  from 1999 to 2011. The author lists ethical dilemmas that he received from readers during his time at the Times then delivers his advice. Our volunteers pose these dilemmas to the group and ask what would you do or advise in this situation? After a short discussion we compare our reactions to the author’s, this has sparked interesting and at times amusing debate.

Ms.McAdam also volunteered to meet with students individually during her stay on campus and a number of students took her up on that offer and they were able to discuss careers in International Development. It was an interesting evening and a good start to the year.