One aid worker’s fight to honor USAID’s legacy

For decades, a memorial has stood inside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the U.S Agency for International Development. There are dozens of tiles with dozens of names — each representing someone who died while working for what was once the largest aid agency in the world. There is a tile for Edward Hines, who died in a plane crash over Vietnam in 1972. Albert Votaw, who died in the 1983 bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut. And Andrew Tombe, who was executed in Sudan in 1992. For years, all three aid workers — and 96 others — were memorialized at USAID. But when the Trump administration began to gut the agency, many were worried that the memorial wall would be the next to fall. “It’s only a matter of time,” said Shawn Siochain, who has worked on USAID-funded projects through implementing partners for more than two decades. Siochain, like so many in the aid sector, lost his job earlier this year. Now, he’s using his downtime to make sure the agency is not forgotten — by trying to find a new, more permanent home for the memorial in Washington, D.C. “USAID is being erased, in many ways as if it never existed,” said one USAID staffer who had worked with Siochain and requested to remain anonymous because he is still employed at the agency. “[Creating a mural means] bringing USAID back to a physicality, and there’s some level of poetry to that.” U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office on Jan. 20 — and within hours, the dismantling of USAID began. First, Trump issued a funding freeze on all U.S. foreign assistance. Then, the president mandated a stop-work order for projects across the world. In the weeks that followed, thousands of staff lost their jobs, and thousands of programs were cut from the agency. And throughout it all, those in Trump’s orbit made their reasoning clear. “USAID is a criminal organization,” stated Elon Musk, the head of the budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, on X, the social media platform he owns. “Time for it to die.” “The desecration of USAID, the vilification of everybody, of all our work and what we do, and the blatant disregard for those sacrifices. … It just struck me.” --— Shawn Siochain After the USAID letters were scraped from the front of their former headquarters, rumors began to swirl that the memorial was being broken down. That post turned out to be inaccurate — and today, the memorial wall still stands in what is now the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office. But even so, its future is still in question, and both former and current USAID staff haven’t received information on where the wall will go and whether it will be placed somewhere else. “USAID truly was from the American people,” said Siochain — who had worked on USAID-funded projects with implementers such as University Research Company, EngenderHealth, and GSK — earlier this month. “It was our country, being the country we wanted it to be.” So Siochain decided he’d make things — at least for himself — feel a bit more permanent. The 43-year-old aid worker got the memorial wall tattooed on his forearm, the small black squares shaded in with USAID’s logo: two shaking hands. It was something Siochain had been thinking about doing since he first saw the memorial wall nearly 20 years earlier. At the time, Siochain was in his mid-20s — and after establishing a USAID-funded health program in Afghanistan, he was back at the agency to report on its progress. That trip was the first time Siochain felt like he could lose his life while working, and as he looked up at the memorial wall, he felt connected to those he saw there. “The wall is still up, but that is not the important thing for me,” Siochain said. “The desecration of USAID, the vilification of everybody, of all our work and what we do, and the blatant disregard for those sacrifices. … It just struck me.” Now, Siochain is trying to take the memorial one step further. Between his job search and his interviews, Siochain has been driving across Washington, D.C., to scope out empty walls — hoping to find a place to memorialize not just those who’ve died but USAID itself. “All of our information: our websites, the development experience clearinghouse — which is 50 plus years of USAID work reports — is gone,” said Siochain’s USAID counterpart, speaking to Devex earlier this month. “Having a mural prevents USAID and its work from being completely erased.” Siochain has painted murals in the past. The first step, he said, was creating the draft. And in a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., he describes his early ideas. There will be color, he said, and a feeling of celebration. Instead of just a grid of names, Siochain is thinking of incorporating people too. His early draft shows a child holding her mouth open for an oral polio vaccine and a doctor smiling with her arms crossed. In the center, a man and a woman are shaking hands, with the latter wearing a USAID vest. “What I want to do is make people see that that was the impact of USAID,” Siochain said. “And at the same time, I want to incorporate what it cost to do all of that — not just in dollars, but in lives.” Of course, the mural will require time, people, and money. Siochain is recruiting for all three, having already assembled 20-some former USAID staffers, contractors, friends, and family to help with the effort. To raise awareness for the idea, he’s begun performing several songs inspired by current events at bars and restaurants around the city, written by Siochain himself. One of those songs is titled “Terminate for Convenience,” a reference to the cancellation notices that went out to USAID partners — including his own former employer — over the last few months. “[As humanitarian workers] we knew the risks,” said Siochain, sitting at a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. “But fast forward to now, and we never knew that the risk would be our own government abandoning us.”