Islamabad

While change is easy for me, the first step is always the hardest. What to do? Stay or go?

I am of two minds...whatever is happening I am certainly struggling with this whole aid business. There is so much psychic grating I am not sure what to do. I arrived in Islamabad yesterday for a weekend off...so I arrive in ISB and it is NOT the Pakistan I know. I am in actual culture shock...it is not hot, not dirty, not dusty, not noisy, not donkey, not camel, not starving, not disgusting, not sewers.

So is started to talk - to try to convince myself - to myself saying that things are different here, the office is calmer and seems functional and the houses are chateaux so I say to my self THAT is what I need. A job in ISB or Jordan where I can have a car and a family and a life OR what about that gig with the UN? And I realize that is not right cuz I have never seen a functional NGO office, ya know? I am only unknowingly kidding myself, self flagellating myself; and why is that?

Then I say WHAT I REALLY need is a tiny far flung dung heap of a field base so far from the capital that the politicks and the AID-PIG HO wont touch me and I can do 'good' for the real! But wait again; I don't actually know what I want (WHAT is so friggin’ new about that?). And why is THAT?

I should just leave do something else...but it is quite a religion this aid work, and intoxicating, and I have swallowed whole the 24hrs working and sex sacrificing, unhealthy life, unhealthy food, unhealthy stress, lacking community and family and exercise in places deperate to be America but too corrupt to actually develop anything.

So there is a drugging effect of working like this… there must be because I do it over and over even though it kills me and I hate it the moment I start, so WHAT is the deal?

I am in Islamabad today and it is a different world. Got drunk last night (on real beer, not something to scoff at): We had kind of a CHEERS moment...we were sitting at the local Chinese resto...we stayed long enough that people came, and people left and other people came and other people left. Like a rolling party: NORM! Strange ya know. Because in Sukkur we work 24/7, it is a weird sick vibe, stress like I have never had; always under pressure, never enough time, angst for the stuff you know is going to come like an IED of work.

ISB is where people talk of parties and where to go and what to do, just like in the aid worker analogies but as I have never seen that, it is strange to me, but the most important strangeocity is that everyone was 24-27 years old. Maybe that is why it is not working for me- wrong time and space.

Email- is evil. We are now emailing and not working, emailing as a WAY to keep working or emailing to pass the buck for the work. And the donor reports I am doing now has NOTHING to do with saving lives or reducing suffering, which is in fact adding to my ball of stress and vomit induced mornings, these reports are detailed as any audit, and are so meaningless all to prove we did good work and aided so many people...who DID NOT GET SERVICED during this… flood … (input any emergency here!)

We pay higher salaries to have more bean counters. I have become a bean counter. All to count beans to ensure every penny is accounted for so that we can prove our overheads are under 10 percent to deliver to the beneficiaries. Donors want more with less, more proof more paper and yet they want us to empower local staff. So aid agencies are now recruiting celebs to get money, relying on public to give money...money that is not accountable to pay the high salaries and cover staff and equipment donors no longer do to continue the fabrication that our overheads are under 10 percent of the donor budget. This house of cards is going to blow down.

Emergencies are a twice a week thing now...earthquakes and tsunamis...and now we enter the third saga of warfare - Afghanistan, Iraq and now midnight bombing raids of Libya. It doesn't stop just becomes faster in arriving.

Below are some selected quotes from aid-worker blogs. Seems that there is a plethora of discontent out there and they often say the same thing. There is a bit of too much in the 15 min of fame- as everyone has something to say.

There is also a common and often repeated message, and yet or maybe they are all saying something...like saying TOO much is like a defensive response to something. Over working it, the over do. The whole ...'methinks she doth protest too much'

Yet there is a community in common expression of discontent…

http://www.aidworkers.net/?q=blogs

http://www.theroadtothehorizon.org/search/label/aid%20worker

http://talesfromethehood.com/2011/03/23/aidslut/

http://talesfromethehood.com/2011/03/25/random-friday-name-that-tune-and-the-aid-bloggers-drinking-game/

http://handrelief.blogspot.com/

Brown Babies are truly part of the culture and language of any HRI-affiliate worth the day-rate of its’ reasonably-paid consultants. Whenever some poor misguided soul (from, say, the finance department) gets frustrated in a meeting by an insignificant discrepancy (say, on a report that we’re overdue to submit to a donor representing the country just south of Canada) there will usually be someone who, with cat-like mental reflexes, calmly reminds him or her that it’s okay, really. Let’s lower our voices, take some deep breaths, and refocus. Let’s remind ourselves why we’re here. It’s all about the Brown Babies.

Or maybe it’s been a hard day of “negotiating” with HRI HR about whether that 72-hour layover in Singapore qualifies as “work” and so also counts toward “comp days” (already taken). In such an instance, one can always count on a sympathetic colleague to poke his or her head around the cubicle wall and in a voice laden with empathy, say something like: “Tough day? Yeah… just remember, it’s really all about the Brown Babies…”

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Next to Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood, we also have Aid-y-wood: the way that celebrities throw money at humanitarian causes.

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No matter how much we chuckle reading the previous post, in the end, it is not funny. Far from it. Many humanitarian workers have a problem to find 'a life after this'.. But it is even more sad to realize how few actually "have a life even now"... Even now, many forget, or at least compromise, their personal life because of their addiction. The addiction to the horizon, to the adrenaline.

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Why do we keep trying here? I am less and less sure that we achieve anything. I know, I know now that this work is not about us feeling good, or developing our CVs. And I am not an aid junkie, living on the high of the emergency, the thrill of saving lives. But I would like to see permanent progress here in some form, in my lifetime. I am less convinced that will happen, or at least less convinced that there is much I can do to expedite it.

It seems I follow a God of lost causes. I am not sure how I feel about that. As Nathan says, ‘I have joined the long defeat’.