It’s Good to Be Back: A Journalist Returns to His Talbot County Roots

Publisher’s Note. The Spy is pleased to announce that Zack Taylor will be joining the Spy team beginning with this first article. Zack will focus on public affairs on the Mid-Shore, particularly in Talbot County. Since this contribution is biographic, we’ll leave it to Zack to introduce himself. 

The other day, as I was sitting in my car waiting for a dozen geese to dawdle across the road, I thought to myself it’s good to be back. 

I grew up in Easton. Lugged that ridiculously huge bookbag to the Country School every day, snuck off to Burger King at lunch in high school, biked to Doc’s Quick Shop for smokes, and even rolled the bowl once or twice. 

But after college, I flitted off to seek my fortune afield, reappearing with declining frequency on obligatory holidays and to check on the old folks. After I became a news reporter across the Bay, it dawned on me that this is what I want to do. This is who I am. 

Eventually, opportunity knocked, and provided me work at various American embassies overseas, in Asia but mostly Africa. There I continued as a communications writer with USAID, the government’s development arm, knocking out speeches and press releases and for ambassadors and agency directors to be delivered at events like handovers of mosquito nets, launches of projects supporting HIV orphans, or sent to local newspapers and the agency’s website. 

The best part of the job, by far, was the many field trips I took to see and report on the results of USAID assistance in real time. Sometimes they involved hours of driving through the middle of nowhere, when a village would suddenly randomly appear and giddy locals cheer our arrival, delighted that something was breaking the monotony of their often-bleak lives, and that someone actually cared about them.

Onsite, we would watch as our partners would counsel pregnant girls, measure babies’ biceps to check for malnutrition, or distribute oral rehydration salts to prevent diarrhea, one of the leading causes of preventable death in Africa, or a fortified paste called Plumpy’nut, which restores malnourished children to health. 

I’d love to share links to some of these stories, but they are all gone. The USAID website went dark days after the new administration’s DOGE dismantled the entire agency on the altar of savings. With a budget of about $40 billion a year, funding USAID was a drop in the bucket to the government, but I can tell you firsthand its value was immeasurable. 

As agency communicators, we touted USAID as the “premier development agency in the world.” And it was. We significantly reduced global poverty, provided emergency shelter to victims of natural disasters, and saved millions of lives from preventable diseases. More important though, was the soft power our international leadership brought the United States. 

After the second Iraq war, perceptions of the United States needed a re-set and USAID communications began in earnest. We started promoting our assistance as partnerships with host country governments to help improve their standing with skeptical constituencies and build goodwill. When results showed decreases in rates of maternal and child mortality, death from preventable diseases, and increased agricultural production, it was always a team effort.    

What did that get us? A lot. In Senegal, where I did my longest tour, our development relationship was a factor in the country agreeing to host the U.S. military’s annual Flintlock exercise, a huge regional training to curb the spread of extremism and terrorism in West Africa. 

When the Ebola crisis struck in 2015, Senegal allowed the U.S. to use part of its international airport in Dakar as a staging base to store supplies, would later be channeled to the affected countries based on specific need, containing the epidemic to Africa and keeping American lives safe. 

When USAID was shuttered over the course of just two weeks – without any review of potential reforms that would improve its efficiency (effectiveness was never in doubt), thousands of American staff found themselves overseas and in D.C. out of work, their programs decapitated without any sort of plan to draw-down and neatly close the projects in hopes of the work somehow continuing. 

But for me, the saddest part was the impact on local staff we left behind, many of whom are some of the best and brightest public health specialists, agronomists, and environmentalists their country has to offer, who lost not only their good jobs, but their platform to help improve the lives of their compatriots. I think back on these colleagues as some of the finest people I’ve ever encountered. I am in touch with dozens of them, from doctors and lawyers to chauffeurs I spent hours with on those long, dusty roads. 

The last of the Americans, all dedicated professionals and many with master’s degrees in International Relations and stellar performance evaluations, will be unceremoniously shipped back home by July 15. Their chances of finding new development are slight in a development industry that’s lost 40 percent of its financing with the U.S. withdrawal. Organizations still holding on, including the United Nations agencies we worked closely with, are reeling, and hardly hiring mode.    

Virtually all of us, some just a few years shy of eligibility for pensions we planned our future around, are charged with re-inventing ourselves. When I see so many of my former colleagues at the height of successful careers obliged to add that ominous green “Open for Work” border on their profile photo, my heart breaks, even though I’m in the same boat. I am sure these highly skilled and smart people will be OK, and we all collectively cheer for those who announce new positions. Still, there are stories of despair, depression, even suicide. 

As for me, I’m OK too, despite being a bit long in the tooth for today’s job market. My experience as a development communicator, promoting an idea – that the United States is a benevolent global friend helping forlorn nations improve their lot through consequential assistance in health, economic development, education, and yes, promoting the American ideal of freedom, good governance, and civil rights – doesn’t track well in today’s stateside economy. Here, comms is about marketing, flashing shining objects and making noise to sell commercial products.

So, what’s this poor boy to do?  Go back to what I love. Telling stories and informing people about happenings in their communities that affect their lives. It’s exciting for me to be able to come full circle and really dig into what makes my longtime spiritual center, and now again my actual home, tick. I feel a great responsibility with my new opportunity to ply my trade in a place that I love, and hope I can entertain as well as inform the Spy’s readers as I do. 

If you notice a guy on the street who looks vaguely familiar save for a few wrinkles and a touch of grey, yeah, it’s me. Nice to see you again. Drop me a line at [email protected]