862: Some Things We Don't Do Anymore
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From WVZ Chicago, it's his American life. Okay, let's see what we got in here. How are you? Good. This is huge. We're going to wear a house on Rhode Island whose four space is bigger than two full football fields, three stories tall, row after row after row of cardboard boxes stacked high stretching far into the distance. I feel like the only thing that I know to compare this to is like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's a pretty good comparison. Most of these cardboard boxes contain this nutritional peanut paste. It's kind of miracle food made to strict international standards officially called R-U-T-F, ready to use therapeutic food or pumping out each box has two months worth, enough to save the life of one severely malnourished child. There are 200,000 boxes that are sitting here in this warehouse. Each one represents one child's life. Nathan Salem runs this place making this stuff and Sarah Rumsey is one of her managers. They explained that we're looking at millions of dollars of aid that's already been paid for by the United States government. They manufactured it for the US Agency for International Development, USAID, for it was shut down by Elon Musk and Donald Trump. If you look at these boxes, the majority do not have a country destination or paperwork to leave the facility. It's been sitting here since February waiting for paperwork to be signed. The problem when you dismantle all of USAID, there are no people who can proceed with basic day-to-day jobs to process basic things like contracts. Where is this food supposed to go, do you know? So this would typically go to Mali, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan. Nearly a half billion dollars worth of food was stuck in warehouses like this one. It was in transit right after President Trump froze all foreign aid, so suddenly, his first day in office. It really wasn't clear what was going to happen to it. If it was going to be able to spoil, if it would get delivered, then the State Department said that life-saving food and medical aid could get permission to continue, but lots of it stayed stuck. Things were in a weird limbo while they were dismantling the agency that did that work, USAID, and transferring any of USAID's remaining functions over to the State Department. People like Nathan had to operate in that limbo. In her case, trying to get this product out of her warehouse to the people who need it. I feel like I'm in a movie that I don't want to be in. I don't sleep. I get about five o'clock in the morning every day. The money and the time that we're spending trying to get a single signature. Nathan founded this business. It's called Edizia. It's a non-profit. We sit on the concrete floor in the middle of all these boxes to do our interview, and every detail that she tells me about how she ended up starting this company sounds like
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