A large portion of what I spend my time doing overseas is engaging with abuses of human rights and their practical implications- or working to ensure that peoples’ basic rights are met, either through direct action, or advocacy. Coming home to my family in Australia, I have the privilege of knowing they will never face the sorts of rights deprivations that many of the displaced people I habitually work with do.

With that in mind, it makes Australia’s decision yesterday to excise its mainland from the migration zone all the more shocking.

The migration zone, simply put, is the geographical boundary within which an incoming asylum-seeker can legally lodge an appeal for asylum. Under normal circumstances, an asylum-seeker can set foot anywhere on Australian sovereign territory and, from that point, appeal to the government to recognize his or her claim for refugee status under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

In 2001, following the Tampa affair in which a foreign vessel that had rescued would-be asylum-seekers from a sinking vessel subsequently lodged (against Australian wishes) on Christmas Island, the Howard government excised a number of offshore Australian territories from the migration zone. That meant that anybody arriving at those places would not have any legal recourse to claim asylum, giving the Australian government the right to move them offshore or process them in situ without recourse to legal appeal, representation, or the Australian court system.

Yesterday, the Gillard government took this to the extreme, and made the entirety of the Australian landmass, all 7,692,000 square kilometres of the place, legally fall outside the migration zone. Now, nobody arriving without a visa anywhere on the Australian mainland has any rights in regards to claiming asylum from the Australian government.

Australia has, in essence, ceased to legally exist from the perspective of a would-be asylum-seeker.

This move ensures that Australia now has full legal right to deport anybody found arriving in Australia without a visa to one of its offshore processing facilities on Christmas Island or Manus Island (the latter in Papua New Guinea). While in these processing facilities- which even the government labels ‘detention centres’- inmates are outside the Australian legal system. They cannot get representation from a lawyer. Do not have any right to appeal. The Australian government can manage them any way it sees fit.

As if this wasn’t a classy enough move, the Australian government has also rejected a proposal from the Greens that would have seen children banned from being detained in these facilities; and have upheld access restrictions for both media and, disturbingly, human rights observers.

And in an equally classy move, in this week’s 2013 Budget, the government has announced that it is upholding plans to divert $375 million from the overseas aid budget into paying for the costs of detaining asylum-seekers- which is a domestic policy initiative.

All up, I am completely sickened by the government’s actions, and disappointed that more international condemnation of their approach is not forthcoming.

Let’s backtrack a little to really grasp the implications of what’s happening here.

First off, refugees. The 1951 UN Convention (and subsequent 1967 Protocol- Australia is signatory to both) recognizes a refugee as the following:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN- 1948), Article 14, states:

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

A person who is an asylum-seeker, therefore, is one who has lodged an appeal with a sovereign nation to be recognized as a refugee, persuant to the definition above and, critically, the risk of real harm happening to them if they return to their country of origin. (Returning a refugee to their country of origin when it has been deemed they may face harm is known as ‘refoulement’ and is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law). It is then up to the sovereign host nation to which the asylum-seeker has applied to determine whether this person’s individual case meets the definition of refugee, and if it does, that nation has a responsibility under international agreement to grant that individual refugee status, and refuge in that country.

Asylum-seeking and refugee issues are strongly debated in Australia, both in politics and the public space. There is a perception among a particular (and vocal) segment of Australian society that asylum-seekers are a problem. This minority, unfortunately, seem to have disproportional ability to sway domestic policy.

At the crux of the debate are those asylum-seekers who arrive by boat. There are various perceptions that these people somehow pose a national security threat; that they are ‘jumping the queue’; or that they are engaged in criminal activity simply by dint of their arrival method.

Now, the arrival of asylum-seekers by boat is a problem, specifically because they tend to arrive in dangerous, unseaworthy boats that cost many their lives (since the year 2000, 1,731 asylum-seekers destined for Australia have been lost at sea). In addition, they frequently use illegal people-smugglers to transport them, opening them up to abuse and manipulation at the hands of both smugglers and the countries from which they depart (frequently Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, all of which have questionable human rights policies when it relates to illegal migrants), and encouraging illegal activity.

It is not, however, a concern for Australia’s sovereignty.

Let’s see some figures.

First off, arriving in Australia (or any other country) without a visa for the purpose of claiming asylum is not illegal. It is a fundamental human right to which Australia and most other nations on earth have agreed and signed up to (see above). If these people arrive in Australia, try to avoid authorities, then simply melt into the community and hide away (more on this below), then they would be illegal. But this is not the case. This is even specifically recognized with respect to arrivals by boat in Australian law under the 1958 Migration Act.

Second, 94% of those who claim asylum from Australia are found to be legitimate refugees and subsequently granted refugee status and rights to live in Australia accordingly. 94%. Fearmongerers claim that these people are simply queue-jumpers with no real claims to back them up except a desire to enjoy Australia’s higher standard of living. But the government’s own statistics toss this out of the window. A mere 6% of those who arrive are being deported with non-legitimate claims.

Put in perspective, in February 2013, there were 5,750 people in immigration detention across Australia. 5,405 of these people will be recognized as legitimate refugees. Just 345 will eventually be rejected.

There’s not exactly a tidal-wave of people illegitimately seeking refugee status in Australia.

Let’s use this as a jumping-off point for an entertaining aside. On the other hand, there are around 60,000 illegal immigrants in Australia. Most of these are people who have arrived on a legal short-term or tourist visa and have come by plane, have let their visa lapse, and stayed on. Government figures say at least 50,000 people are illegally working in Australia- that is, earning money under the table but not paying tax (among other problems). This means roughly ten times more illegal immigrants than legal asylum-seekers in detention. Of these people, more than half have been in Australia illegally for more than five years, and 20,000 for more than ten. The figure of around 60,000 is up from around 50,000 in 2005, so the problem is increasing. In 2011, around 5,000 of these illegals were from the US, around 3,600 from the UK, 8,000 from China and 4,000 from Malaysia (see this link for full story). Needless to say, none of these countries has a significant refugee outflux problem.

Strangely, nobody makes much of a fuss about them.

By contrast, the debate around asylum-seekers arriving by boat has been raging for over a decade, and for most of that time, the arrival numbers have been tiny. Australia’s overall migration program looks to take in 190,000 people in 2012-13. This makes up roughly 0.8% of Australia’s overall population, and is slightly above the natural increase rate of around 0.6%. While there have been spikes in asylum-seekers arriving by boat, particularly in 1999-2002 and since 2009, when annual figures have been 4-5,000 people arriving, most of the rest of the years since the early 1980s have seen no more than a few dozen arrivals and less per year. Geopolitical factors (the Afghan & Sri Lankan wars specifically) have had an obvious impact on arrival spikes. The impact of domestic policy is less clear. The 2010-11 year saw higher figures, of around 8,000 asylum-seekers coming by boat, disagreeing with these figures that suggest 4,500 came in 2011 and 17,000 in 2012. The number of asylum-seekers in detention has been steadier, at between 4-8,000 people per year since 1999.

In the last 2 years, therefore, there’s clearly been an increase in asylum-seekers arriving by boat, problematic for the reasons listed above but not from the perspective of being a threat to Australia. The following infographic, using the slightly-outdated 2009 figures, still places it all very nicely in perspective. Even in 20,000 asylum-seekers arrive, they remain a) legal, b) far fewer in number than true illegal immigrants, and c) still a tiny proportion of Australia’s overall refugee program (70,000 annual intake), immigration program (190,000 annual intake),overall growth rate, and population (23 million).

This one also has a point:

And this one:

Oh, and this one too, showing how people without visas enter Australia:

Okay, I’ll stop now.

Why does this really matter? Well, simply put, the rights of these 5-10,000 asylum-seekers being placed in detention are being trampled upon.

First off, as we’ve already ascertained, around 94% of those making claims have legitimate claims. They’re fleeing for their own safety. Most are coming from conflict zones. Many will have already been through distressing, potentially traumatizing events. Many have also paid huge sums of money- possibly their life-savings- to smugglers and will have nothing left. They have mostly undertaken a very dangerous journey to get as far as Australia. In short, as well as being legitimate refugees, they’ve already been through very unpleasant circumstances.

And they get here and Australia puts them in prison.

Try and imagine the distress of being locked away unjustly. Not for doing something wrong. Just because you were perceived as an inconvenience to your government. Start easy. Imagine 3 months. 3 months, where you were restricted to a low-security prison. Surrounded by barbed wire, in a foreign country, not understanding why you were there, with no guarantees of what was going to happen to you, and limited or no contact with friends, families and loved ones. No rights. No lawyers. And a chance that you might be sent back after the journey you’ve just taken. All because you tried to exercise your right- your internationally-recognized right- to seek asylum in another country.

Detention times are a major cause of suffering to asylum-seekers. The government acknowledges there are no targets for releasing detainees, but 2008 figures show that just over a third of asylum seekers were in detention for less than 3 months, more than half were in detention for more than 6 months, almost a third for more than a year, and 13% for more than 2 years (stats here). During this time, asylum-seekers have no guarantees of successful application, no indication of how long they will be detained for, and their mental health rapidly deteriorates. After 6 months in detention, people (including children) begin exhibiting signs of poor mental health, and detainees who spend  15 to 18 months or more in detention exhibit psychiatric morbidity. The average stay in detention for an asylum-seeker is 224 days.

The mental health implications of this are becoming well-established. Suicide is attempted and achieved. Over 1,100 incidents of self-harm or threatened self-harm were reported among the 6,000 or so asylum-seekers in detention between mid-2010 and mid-11- up to 50 in one week. Five suicides occurred in detention during the same period, with one attempted hanging a night, on average, across the system. On Christmas Island, according to an ABC report, the problem is so widespread that staff are instructed to carry a knife on them at all times so they can cut down people attempting to hang themselves. The situation continues to this day.

The video embedded in this link tells a powerful story of the mental health situation in Australian detention centres and I highly recommend it if you can spare the time. The full episode is 45 minutes long, but it is powerful, comprehensive and makes a compelling case of just how badly detainees suffer in Australia’s asylum-seeker program.

This, people, is all wrong.

It’s also the subject of both Amnesty International and UNHCR condemnation.

It’s also expensive. Depending on the figures you read, Australia’s asylum-seeker program has cost around $1 billion for the 5 years from 2002 to 2007 and $1 billion per year over the last four years. The current budget is anticipating a spend in 2012-13 alone of around $2.2 billion. The bulk of this cost goes to running and maintaining detention facilities (the Christmas Island facility, for example, apparently cost $400 million for the 800-bed detention centre), and running aerial and maritime patrols (it costs $36,000 per day to run a maritime patrol-boat, up to $568,000 per day for a frigate- link).

If we use the figure of $2.2 billion for the management of the 5,700 asylum seekers currently in detention as of February 2013, this means we’re spending $380,000 per detainee to run this program each year.

Sorry what?

Even if we’re generous and spread this over an estimated 20,000 asylum-seekers arriving by boat this year, that still gives us $110,000 per asylum seeker per year.

Quite frankly I’d prefer we spent the money setting up a robust community-based support and monitoring system which let the state keep an eye on them if necessary for national security reasons (…) but let them live like human beings.

And think about these figures for a moment. In fact, let’s break it down. Let’s just look at the $375 million that Australia is diverting from its overseas aid budget to contribute to this massive bill.

First off, that makes Australia the third largest recipient of its own foreign aid budget, after Indonesia ($540m) and PNG ($493m)- and significantly ahead of its contribution to the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa ($319m)- but then what did they ever need aid money for? This is out of a total aid budget of $5.7bn- so roughly 6.6% of Australia’s foreign aid budget is going straight into managing the up-to 20,000 asylum-seekers arriving by boat.

As this infographic neatly points out, this $375 million could prevent the deaths of 185,000 people, or education 750,000. It is the largest diversion of foreign aid in Australia’s history, and also more than double the average for developed nations- even though Australia’s refugee burden, estimated at 0.06% asylum seekers per population, is lower than the developed nation average of 0.1%.

I don’t really want to go much more into this, as I think you get the big picture (and quite a lot of the details, too). The decision by the Australian government to excise mainland Australia from the migration zone essentially reinforces a horrible, horrible policy of enforced detention for legal (I stress, again and again and again, people, LEGAL, good grief do I need to paint it neon and string it with lights?) asylum-seekers. A policy that stomps over international law and human rights, which has terrible mental-health and freedom implications for the individuals involved, which panders to a vocal, ignorant and ill-informed minority, and which costs both the Australian taxpayer and the potential recipients of aid a very significant amount of money.

We are paying vast sums to make people suffer against the collective conscience of the global community.

Perhaps the saddest irony of all is that Australia is itself an immigrant nation. The government’s own immigration website points out that a quarter of Australian nationals today were born outside of the country and that each decade for the last 6 decades has seen around a million migrants. Since the Second World War, seven and a half million migrants have come to Australia. Yet we kick up a fuss because of a measly 17,000 (last year- far fewer in previous years), we talk about queue-jumpers and place ignorant expectations on them and lock them up and deny them their rights.

It points to the underlying racism in Australian society- something not unique to Australia, but certainly prevelant. From the days of a ‘White Australia’ until now, there is a quiet discomfort with notions of the foreign ‘other’- whether the Greek and Italian migrants of the first half of the 20^th Century, or the Vietnamese who arrived in the 1960s and 70s, or the Sudanese, Somalis and Afghans arriving today. This is a diverse- a mind-bogglingly, ignorance-blowingly diverse- nation. And yet I still see utes driving around with the bumper sticker “Fuck off, we’re full.” As if white European-Australians have some right to claim ownership of this place anyway.

What arrogance.

What absolute tragedy.

What a complete, utter disgrace.

Shame on you, Government of Australia and all who support this immigration policy.

Or: Have You Ever Actually Been to a UN Coordination Meeting?

Or: How the UN Would Struggle to Consensus-Manage its Way out of a Paper Bag with a Map and an Oxyacetylene Torch

Ah this old egg.

Every now and again, I see comments pop up from certain friends or connections of mine, or in slivers of mainstream media, to the tune of “The United Nations is preparing to take over the United States of America”, or “The UN is slowly eroding United States sovereignty.”

It’s not a new thing. As far as I can tell, there’s been conspiracy theories (and yes, they are conspiracy theories- please read on) about the UN quietly establishing a New World Order and preparing to Take Over All Teh Countreez, for at least a couple of decades now. There’s some interpretations of the Book of Revelations in the Bible that indicate a world leader will arise and become the Anti-Christ, and people think the UN is that mechanism. This was drilled home by the improbably-popular ‘Left Behind’ series of apocalyptic fiction, in which a charismatic UN Secretary General becomes the powerful leader of a one-world army leading the forces of evil and hypnotising people. And stuff.

And other coherent arguments.

Needless to say, anybody with a knowledge of the UN and how it works can see that this is a foundless fear to the point of ludicrousy.

Those of us who have had the joy of sitting through UN-led meetings can attest to this with a degree of acute suffering set aside for people for whom karma must have a deep debt to settle.

Now, before I go any further, I need to say that while I may have some snarky things to say about UN systems and institutions individually, I have the utmost respect for the institution of the United Nations overall, in spite of its flaws. I also have deep respect for many of the professionals who work within the various UN agencies around the world, many of whom are consumate professionals passionate about trying to make the world a better place, and many of whom are close colleagues and friends of mine of whom I am very fond. This post is not meant to disparage any of them, or their work.

Also, a big shout-out to the lovely folks who run the Humanitarian Response Fund, the Central Emergency Response Fund, and our partners in the contracts divisions of UNICEF, UNHCR and WFP. Did I mention lately how much we like you guys? Also, about that quarterly report…

1.       The UN is Not a Para-State Actor

The structure of the United Nations is not that of a para-state actor. What does that mean? It means the UN isn’t a separate country, with an economy and a military and a judiciary and an executive branch and territory and so forth. It is not a system of government.

The UN is, at its core, a coordinating organization. In crude terms, it provides a forum for all the countries of the world to come together and agree on stuff, in order to limit how often they get into fights with each other.

It has sub-organizations that then provide sub-forums to facilitate and support action in particular sectors. For example, the Worl d Health Organization facilitates research into aspects of public health, promotes strategies and courses of action to manage health issues, and works to strengthen individual nations’ Ministries of Health to improve the health of those nations. Individual nations choose to opt into the various programs that WHO (pronounced ‘double-you ayche oh’, not ‘The Who’, which is a rock band from the sixties, for the love of all that is holy please get this right) puts together, on an entirely voluntary basis, each working bilaterally with WHO on those aspects of health management which are relevant and for which there is budget.

Not this.

The same is true of countless other UN programs. UNESCO works to support nations in protecting their cultural heritage. The International Court of Justice provides a forum for trying to resolve certain aspects of international law that exceed the jurisdiction of individual nations and where those nations’ laws might be at odds. The International Labour Office creates guidelines around what fair labour practices should look like around the world in discussion with state representatives, and then encourages nations to adopt them, or provides advice on how best to reform their labour sector.

None of these organizations dictates policy to any sovereign nation. They have no power to do-so, nor a mandate. They simply provide the forum for common agreements to be reached between member states, then encourage the implementation of these agreements. The World Health Organization has no authority over any Ministry of Health. It cannot implement a single national-level policy or decision in a single state anywhere in the world. It is completely up to the individual member state to choose to implement (or not) a policy recommendation from the UN.

Understand that each of these organizations that make up the UN are staffed not by some shadowy cadre of placeless, stateless minions operating in some bubble of UN territory deep underground to create policies by which the world might be run. Every UN staff member is recruited from various member states of the UN, based on a policy that aims to ensure a representation of the various countries of the world based on their contributions to the overall UN system. The UN is staffed by people from Germany and India and Swaziland and Britain and Papua New Guinea and 188 other sovereign states. And because the US gives more to the UN than anybody else (debt notwithstanding), it is particularly heavily represented in UN staffing cadres. These people are professionals, technical experts, politicians- many of them formerly civil servants from their own governments before working for the UN.

Who did you think was really drafting all those policies?

In addition, each member state appoints representatives to the UN General Assembly. These people- unlike many people employed in UN agencies, who are paid employees- are appointed representatives of their government to the UN. For major decisions in coordinating between member states, the people who are making these decisions are not, again, the sinister elite of some huge organization that is quietly sucking all the power out of the world. They are employees of the separate and disparate state governments who make up the UN, paid by their respective governments and held accountable not to any UN policy or edict or the UN Secretary General, but to the policies of their own executive branch and foreign affairs line ministry.

So if the UN is up to anything, it’s doing it with the full support and engagement not of some ficticious United Nations leadership committee, but with the knowledge and participation of member states in line with their government policies reflected accordingly. And that includes US State Department diplomats accountable to the usual systems, checks, balances and accountabilities of the US Government’s judiciary, legislature and executive.

Oh the intrigue.

2.       The UN has No Power At All to Enforce Anything

Let’s really drill this home. The UN has pretty much no power. It has no authority or line-management with a single state institution. It cannot, cannot, did I mention cannot make a single nation or head of state do anything.

Let’s take a treaty. For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It’s a broad document that captures a set of statements and ideals that reflect how the various member states feel children should be protected under their individual nations’ laws. For example, it influences the age at which a child should be considered an adult, the age at which a child is allowed to vote, the age at which a child can serve in the military or be tried as an adult, or the laws that protect a child from being forced to work. It enshrines the rights of children to play, to have an education, to be with their families, and so forth.

All nations in the world save one (South Sudan, which has been a nation for less than 2 years) have signed up to it. People like kids, and most good people feel kids should be protected. It’s a good thing.

Of course, when a nation signs a treaty, they then need to ratify it. Ratifying is writing the principles of the treaty into the legislation of their own country. So, for example, they have written into law that a child must be 18 years old before they can work at a particular level, and that there are penalties for employers breaking this law.

And of course, even once a treaty has been ratified into law, the country must then enforce those laws. There are a number of countries that have signed the convention on the rights of the child, written into law that children cannot marry before the age of 16, but do nothing to prevent child marriage or convict those who practice it.

The UN cannot make any member state sign a treaty.

The UN cannot make any member state that has signed a treaty ratify that treaty into law.

And the UN cannot make any country enforce those laws even if they have been written into legislation.

Do you really think that most UN representatives (or global governments, for that matter) think it’s a good thing that a 40-year-old man can marry and have sex with an eight-year-old girl in Yemen? Pretty much every country would have that man in prison on charges of paedophilia. But does the UN do anything to Yemen on this front, even though such activity is against the UN-backed convention on the rights of the child, and Yemen has not just signed but also ratified that treaty? It does not, because it has no such power or authority. And recall that Yemen is one of the weaker member states of the UN.

I was going to put a photo of a child bride and a wisecrack here, but opted for this fluffy bunny instead.

Note that the US is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child but has not ratified it- one of only two nations globally. This is because in the US, minors can serve in the armed forces from the age of 16 (if you include military training), and because the US allows some minors to be tried as and face the same sentences as an adult. The US government is not willing to change its practices in this regards, and claims that it has adequate protections already written into law around other aspects of the convention to protect children, so ratifying the treaty is not necessry.

Whatever the perspective on this position, one thing is very clear. The US has never faced any fallout in terms of its sovereignty with regards to this treaty. It has suffered no repurcussions. The UN cannot force the US government to do a thing.

And then this happens.

3.       The UN can take No Unilateral Action without Agreement from Member States

The UN has no direct control over any member state. The UN does have a few options up its sleeve to encourage, influence or impress decisions however. If diplomacy on a critical issue fails, it can apply economic sanctions on a country, in a variety of fashions that may limit certain kinds of imports and exports (see Iraqi oil under Saddam Hussein), or target certain members of national leadership by freezing international assets or disallowing international travel. It can also mandate an international intervention force which will go in with a range of possible responses under it (more on this below).

Regardless of the effectiveness of some of these measures (also see below), the UN cannot implement any of these measures without the approval of the majority of member states.

In fact, just getting to this stage takes weeks, months, sometimes years of diplomacy, conversation, meetings, working groups, recommendations, redrafts and general bureaucratic hamsterwheeling.

I’m not going to explain the sanctions approval process here, because I don’t know it in any depth myself. I do know there are committees, that many (all?) UN sanctions have to go through a security council sanctions committee of some description, and that some (all?) sanctions or actions also go through the UN General Assembly.

In short, there are checks and balances. Horrible, horribly bureaucracy. Bureaucracy that would bore a sloth. And, like everything else the UN does, decisions are not necessarily enforceable. For example, the UN can place sanctions on a particular country, but it is then up to the other member states of the UN to actually put that into action. The UN Security Council can decide to place export sanctions on Iran, for example, but other nations, if they choose to, can still trade with Iran. Travel restrictions were placed on Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir after the ICC issued a war-crimes arrest warrant for him, but he still travelled to Kenya (ostensibly a nation signatory to the ICC, although that’s another topic of conversation after its recent elections), and Kenya allowed the visit to continue without any fallout.

This is even truer for any military action the UN sanctions. For military action to go ahead, it must first be agreed upon by the UN Security Council, which has 5 permanent members and 10 temporary members drawn on a rotation basis from the other 188 member states. The 5 permanent members- the US, Britain, France, Russia and China- all have veto power, which means if just one of them disagrees with a recommended action to the security council (including sanctions, diplomatic action, military intervention) then they can simply vote ‘no’ and the action cannot proceed.

So again, with the US government being permanently represented on the UN Security Council, there is no way the UN as an organization can do anything major that the US isn’t prepared to tolerate.

4.       The UN has No Standing Army

This is where the talk of ‘UN forces’ gets a little silly. A bit like the whole Black Helicopter discussion. Only, you know, stealth helicopters and black paint both exist, so I’m sure somebody somewhere is using them. But probably not to keep tabs on what you buy at the local 7-11.

Let me say this clearly. The UN has no standing army. Zip. Nada. Aside from a few armed security guards who keep an eye on UN headquarters and the relatively small UN Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) which provides security assistance for UN programs, Ban Ki-Moon couldn’t rustle up a bouncer with a butter knife without the support of the member states.

Only if France says yes.

The UN doesn’t ‘deploy’ forces. The UN ‘sanctions’ them. That means, it gives them its blessing. It lets them use the Blue Helmets and take on the title of whichever UN-approved mission this happens to be.

Once the UN Security Council has approved a UN intervention force (not a common thing), it is then entirely reliant on various soveriegn states to provide the necessary personnel, vehicles, weapons systems, logistics support, funding- everything required to field a military force on the ground. This can take weeks, months, sometimes years to scale-up. It’s a labouriously slow process.

Once member states have chosen to allocate resources (usually quite patchwork and piecemeal), there is then a system of command and control that the UN coordinates via the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). However even within this, military units that have been ‘seconded’ into a peacekeeping operation still report primarily to their own government and military structure, and only after that to the DPKO. The giving nation can withdraw those forces at any time or countermand orders, and the contingent commander is under no ‘obligation’ to obey the DPKO command structure or Force Commander if their own state hierarchy deems it against their interest.

If you want to read about just how unwieldy a process UN peacekeeping interventions are, read Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. It will have you alternatively weeping, screaming at the technocrats involved, or wanting to hurl your book/Kindle across the room in frustration. Sheri Fink’s War Hospital is similarly heart-wrenching.

5.       UN Peacekeeping Forces are Not Staffed with Crack Military Operators

Or black helicopters.

For the most part, western government commit relatively little to actual peacekeeping operations these days. The bulk of front-line troops in forces such as MONUC (in the DRC) or UNAMID (Darfur) are from developing countries. This is because the UN essentially leases troops from state governments for a fee, and for some developing countries, this means their soldiers get paid more than the government could afford to pay them (or at least offsets the costs), and it is therefore profitable both financially and from the experience gained by these troops. Major contributers to peacekeeping forces include Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria, as examples.

Meanwhile the UK, the US and other western nations generally find it against their political interests to send troops to the front lines. No western politician wants to be responsible for troops dying in some war that isn’t directly related to them. They will provide logistics support, some equipment, maybe some technical expertise or high-level staffing. But usually to a limited budget, and often reluctantly. UN Peacekeeping missions typically take from months to well over a year to reach full force, and are often poorly equipped even at that time.

Most UN peacekeeping forces, for example, use old equipment. Cold-war era helicopters (Mi-8s are a mainstay)and armoured personnel carriers (M113s, which date back to the Vietnam War, and BTR-60s, a 1960s Soviet APC) are commonplace. Personnel deploy in soft-skinned Toyota Land Cruisers. Their hardware is light. As Dallaire notes, troops may deploy without even the basics, such as good uniforms or proper logistical support for things like food (at least as was the case in Rwanda in 1994- post Desert Storm when western nations had the capacity to field highly sophisticated military forces). More advanced systems may be deployed at times today, but not in large numbers. What’s certainly key to note is that no UN-mandated force is deploying with M1A2 main battle tanks, Stryker LAVs (for better or for worse), Apache Longbows and MLRS. The only time a UN-mandated force did deploy like this was Operation Desert Storm in 1991, during the campaign to liberate Kuwait, and the bulk of its force was provided by the US military.

Compared to the modern armies of most western nations, UN forces are undertrained, underprovisioned, with a light logistics tail, outdated equipment, and a fragile command and control element- not to mention lacking the sophisticated communications and intelligence services that also accompany modern military incursions.

Take for example the UN force in the DRC (MONUC). It was first sanctioned nearly 14 years ago in 1999, with one of the most robust peacekeeping mandates of any UN operation. It’s still there. It hasn’t defeated the various rebel militias operating in east DRC. Civilians are still at major risk. I don’t want to denegrate the soldiers who risk their lives as part of that operation. But, due in part to the experience of the troops, the quality of their weapons and support, the funding, the management, and their Rules of Engagement, this is not a shining example of a highly effective fighting force.

A more damning report again comes from a reading of Shake Hands, in which General Dallaire’s request for a relatively small force increment was assessed as sufficient to prevent the genocide that claimed 800,000 lives in Rwanda 19 years ago, but was never approved.

In relation to the concerns this article responds to, the UN lacks first the organizational ability to carry out any operations against the US (because a US government representative sits on the UN Security Council and only needs to say ‘no’ to stop the UN bureaucracy from allowing it to happen), and second the military capability to take on a powerful western military force like that of the United States.

Sure, you could conceive of a future scenario whereby certain world powers conspired an alliance to attack the US. Why not? Go for it. China, Russia, India, maybe even the French, right? All band together to form a global super-army and have a crack at it? I [used to] read Clancy [before he got crap *cough*RainbowSix*cough*] too. But, see, that has nothing to do with the UN. That’s just a bunch of countries agreeing something together. Different story altogether.

The UN? Never going to happen.

6.       The United Nations Secretary General is not a Warlord

Let’s ignore, for a moment, the pragmatic reality that the only reason the current UNSG’s own home nation is not overrun by a horde of crazy-eyed and very confused North Korean soldiers each month is due to the strong US military support to South Korea. Ban Ki-Moon has no plans for world domination. Nor did Kofi Annan before him (Ghana has never really positioned itself on the stage of world superpowers like that), and nor did Boutros-Boutros Ghali before him.

In fact, in more than 65 years of its existence, no UN Secretary General has attempted- or even exhibited behaviour towards- world domination. There has been no significant changes in the level of power or authority that the UN has. The UN’s various charters, treaties, edicts and so forth have grown deeper and more complex, like a colony of spiders on speed, but they haven’t actually increased the UN’s pragmatic power at all.

The UN Secretary General is a technocrat who operates within the confines of a massive bureaucracy. One so complex and unwieldy it makes France’s look like a trip to the box office to buy a cinema ticket. There are rules, regulations, policies. It’s about as sinister as a stale sandwich.

Why- why- would the UN want to take over the United States? And do you really think a figurehead of a diplomat like Mr. Ban could actually run it?

I have nothing against the UNSG. Nothing particular to say in favour of the man, either. I’m sure he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances. But the reality is that the UNSG’s job is, I imagine, pretty frustrating. He’s a deal-broker, perhaps- somebody who works to find a compromise between disagreeing parties that generally leaves both parties accepting an outcome that neither are fully satisfied with. He has his eyes on a relatively small portfolio of high-level international affairs, gives the occasional speech, smiles for the photo opportunities. Behind the scenes, he may be (I presume is) a skilled negotiator, schmoozer and general agent for keeping things calm and friendly between nations who’d like to park a few warhead on each others’ front lawns. But a power-hungry closet-commy Anti-Christ with designs on the White House? Umm, no.

Although…

7.       The UN has Checks and Balances- like any other Government

In fact, more checks than you would believe. So much red tape it can be almost impossible to get anything done. And trust me, at times I’ve tried- admittedly from outside the system, but colleagues who work inside it profess the same thing. Every country office of every UN agency has its own way of doing things. An agreement with UNICEF in DRC may be won in a completely different manner to one in Chad due to the personalities involved and the way systems are applied. What WFP might agree to, UNHCR won’t.

There are councils, steering committees, working groups. Administration out the wazoo. You have seriously not see bureaucracy until you have worked closely with the UN. I know contractors who have waited a year and a half for their payslip to come through. Some of the most nonsensical policies and approaches you’ll ever come across. If the UN is out to destroy the world, it’s not through any malicious design, but through the sheer weight of administrative burden that will collapse in on itself like a black hole and consume creation.

As I mentioned above, the UN has no real power. There are layers and layers of permissions and protocols to go through before any action is approved and sanctioned, and at every step, buy-in from member states is needed to actually achieve anything, and then those member-states must do the implementing. These checks and balances mean that, far from being a threat to society, the UN’s biggest threat is becoming useless and irrelevant. The UN Security Council is an anachronistic hangover from the end of the Second World War, when the five nuclear powers responsible for carving up what was left of Eurasia needed a forum to ensure that nuclear war didn’t start through some unfortunate misunderstanding among themselves. A reform of the UNSC has been discussed for years, but understandably, none of the permanent member states really want to give up their seat of control- even though there are now another half-dozen nuclear powers (at least) kicking around the table.

Getting the US, the UK, France, Russia and China to agree on anything is such a daunting task that if there’s anything to be gleaned here, it’s that the fact the UN can make even the smallest task happen is in itself a miracle worth celebrating.

These checks and balances tend the UN not towards a radical sweep to global power and evil mayhem, but towards overwhelming inertia. This is no dark organization poised to take over the world. This is a bumbling bureaucracy that shuffles forward towards a distant goal with dogged, if painstaking, determination.

*

A quick aside for Christians. There’s a prevailing mythology propagated in many churches that the UN is the Anti-Christ- or at least its precursor. This is based on certain readings of the book of Revelation which symbolically suggest a powerful supernatural ruler rising up to dominate many nations. This is unfortunate, because the book of Revelation is, for the Christian, a fascinating and exciting book whose value should be read first as a critique of the contemporary church (contemporary to John, who wrote it, with many applications to the church contemporary to us that should be addressed) and not a roadmap to the future. The Bible is very clear when it comes to the notion of the ‘end times’, that “no one shall know the day”. The modern church seems to have missed the lesson learned from the Old Testament, in which countless prophecies related to the Messiah, and yet none of the established teachers at the time accurately interpreted what the Messiah would look like when he finally came- to the point that contemporary religious leaders rejected Jesus almost completely.

If that’s the case, why on earth would we put our confidence in mainstream hack theology, propounded via New York Times bestseller lists, that the most accurate interpretation of the future and the coming end-times is that the UN is the Anti-Christ?

Plus those Left Behind books were horribly and unimaginatively written. Trust me. I read the first seven before giving up.

What if it was on the NYT Bestsellers list AND Oprah endorsed it?

If scripture tells us anything, it tells us not to focus on interpreting the future, but to look at the present. Be vigilant. Don’t be silly.

It’s also a shame, because the work the UN and its subsiduary agencies do, while flawed and frequently manipulated, is often very much in line with the teachings of Jesus and other parts of scripture- reaching out on a global scale to feed the hungry, provide material assistance to the poor, resolve injustice, and encourage peaceful dialogue instead of war. Essentially, the United Nations creates the ability for various nation states with disagreements to meet together on neutral ground and resolve their differences, and come up with ways of improving things for the future.

It’s far from perfect; trust me, I’ve watched the UN system at work for much of my life. But in as much as the world is a pretty messy place, it’s doing okay considering.

*

It’s not the UN that’s out to control people. It’s fear. Fear is acknowledged as the strongest motivator in the human psyche. It’s irrational (see all of the above) and because it’s linked to the survival instinct, if it can be manipulated, it’s highly lucrative. The NRA has a powerful platform that sells billions of dollars worth of guns by making people feel afraid of what’s around them. Diet, exercise and health fads channel huge amounts of money into the pockets of their advocates, making people frightened of ill health and early death. Governments justify international wars by painting their enemies as an imminent threat, and therefore bringing their populations onside.

When listening to messages that invoke fear, try and look at them critically. Who’s bringing this message? What do they have to gain by bringing it? Is it really founded on an empirical reality, or is it just words that are easy to put out there? If I viewed the same issue from somebody else’s perspective, would it still look the same?

With a knowledge of UN systems and bureaucracy, the suggestion that the United Nations poses a threat to the sovereignty of the United States is just laughable. The UN has no such mandate. Its checks and balances, which are many, have input from representatives of the US government. It has no authority or power to actually enforce any of its treaties, edicts or policies, on any state. Any punitive action it does take can only be carried out with the compliance of other UN member states, and implemented by those states. It has no standing army, and when it does coordinate a military operation via the DPKO, those military units are still in final obeisance to their own state governments, not the UN. Those military units tend to be poorly trained, understaffed and undersupplied, and would be no match for the US military. Ultimately, though, the UN is not a nation state. It controls no territory and has no government. It doesn’t work in the same way a government does, and therefore the idea that the UN would be trying to seize control of the world doesn’t have any merit whatsoever.

The United Nations is simply a coordinating body that exists to capture and facilitate the collective will of its 193 member states, imperfectly and skewed in favour of the wealthier and more powerful nations, and specifically, the five permanent security-council members.

America, you can sleep soundly in your beds tonight.

“10: In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified humans, not hopeless objects.

Respect for the disaster victim as an equal partner in action should never be lost. In our public information we shall portray an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their vulnerabilities and fears. While we will cooperate with the media in order to enhance public response, we will not allow external or internal demands for publicity to take precedence over the principle of maximising overall relief assistance. We will avoid competing with other disaster response agencies for media coverage in situations where such coverage may be to the detriment of the service provided to the beneficiaries or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries.”

-The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief (taken from the Sphere Handbook, 2011 Edition, p.370; Emphasis mine)

It takes a lot to floor me. I’ve seen a lot of dumb stuff in the humanitarian industry. I’m moderately immune to dumbassery these days, and tend to keep my righteous indignation in pretty good check too.

However, a document came to me via a colleague in a partner NGO recently. Said colleague works in a specific emergency context involving refugees and refugee camps, and a fundraising office of said NGO had approached them with a request to bring in a TV crew and do some filming of the refugees and their crisis situation.

Not an unusual request, and under the circumstances of trying to raise both awareness and funds, generally a good idea.

As long as your fundraising office has at least half a clue about international standards of humanitarian fundraising guidelines, as outlined in the Red Cross Code of Conduct excerpt quoted above.

I won’t say much more. Instead, I’m going to lift excerpts directly from the media brief that the fundraising office provided, which instructed the country program exactly what stories they wanted to source for the commercial TV crew they were going to send.

Call me mean-spirited, but I have left the grammatical errors in the original request in place, because I think it adds to the flavour.

Detailed Story Request:

Children under 12 are suggested for the story case main character. If the child is too old, we lose the effectiveness.

Case Examples:

1. Disease/Injury

- AIDS infected, parasite, virus infection and so on. Because of these infections, the child is severely suffering. Please look for disease case that can be seen visually [in the original document, this word is in bold and in red text- MA] such as Elephantiasis, sand flea, one’s arm or leg amputated to protect from further virus infection, severe skin disease and so on. Disease that is so heart-breaking just by looking. Diarrhea and fever are dangerous for children under five but in filming, it is difficult to catch the seriousness of the symptoms because we cannot see from outside. [in the original, underlined and also in red- MA]

With me so far? They talk a little more about emergency medical cases and ‘serious injuries or burns’, and then:

2. Early Marriage

- Because of early marriage… she is not at school getting education but in household to live as young wife.

- She is originally from very poor family and that is why she has to accept early marriage. However she is suffering from disease and her babies are malnutrition and have other diseases.

Are you sure that you want to bother sending a TV crew all the way over here, or shall we just send you some shots of a sad looking kid and you can put your own voice-over onto it, because it seems like you already have the story figured out…

Onwards, and under the section on “Child Headed Family”

- A very young child who is in an age to receive full love and care from parents, but unfortunately the child has no parents (or parents who are very sick) and has to live as the head of the family…

- This child really wants to go to school as her friends in the village but could not go even near to the school. She really desire to get education and better life for the future.

- The child is very young but very loving and attractive child.

Obviously poor kids need to be visually appealing. Cuz, fundraising.

The list goes on. Then towards the end, the fundraising office explains that they want to ensure that “our potential donors can feel the same pain and sadness as if they witness the situation.”

I can think of some ways that could be arranged.

However, to avoid any potential misunderstanding (because it may not have been clear in the run-up), they conclude with a summary of exactly what they’re looking for:

-Children or households in serious poverty

-Children and family suffered by disease, water contamination, inflammation, aids, malaria, malnutrition, etc.

- Situation which was born by extreme poverty

- Sad, abysmal, inhumane scenes and stories that happened by local issues such as conflict, disaster, early marriage, etc.

Final emphasis mine.

So that you don’t damage anything, I am told that the TV crew visit did not go ahead. And I sincerely hope that somebody’s head of fundraising got a firm shoeing.

As the language in the brief suggests, there is a cultural element in play here. Different nations and cultures do have different expectations and standards around what is and is not acceptable in the public domain. Anybody who’s seen an Al Jazeera (Arabic) news report following an Israeli incursion into the West Bank knows that the Middle East has different thresholds for violence on the evening news than you’d expect to find on the BBC.

None the less, the issue of human dignity should be a universal one. The Red Cross Code of Conduct- and other guidelines more specific to humanitarian media and fundraising- are signed by international organizations- I stress that word international- recognizing that we are a global community, and it is simply not appropriate to exploit human suffering simply because our cultural norms say it is okay to do so. Not if we want to remain a part of that same international community, and be treated with any respect whatsoever.

I really wish this was an April Fools Day post. Unfortunately, this level of ignorance still thrives, even within the international aid community.

You’ve being exiled to a private island, and your captors will only supply you with five foods. What do you pick?

I guess in my travels I’ve had a chance to figure out what I do and don’t like, and what my body does and does not cope well with and without. I’ve certainly gone through stints where I’ve had to get by on pretty poor diet- certain deployments, for example, where both food choice and food quality were pretty low. They were good times to go through from a learning perspective- but certainly not fun. I don’t enjoy being hungry- especially not when you’ve got a demanding job to do, under difficult circumstances.

I can’t pretend to be the world’s healthiest eater. MIO and I are constantly fasting things from our diet (generally, sugar and alcohol) in order to kick-start some healthier habits- and general fitness. So I suppose if I’m going to be marooned on a desert island, this is also going to play a part.

Of course, the real question is, what type of island is this? Does it have coconut palms? Can I catch fish? I should be able to get salt from the sea, and maybe some other goodies as well. And what herbs might be growing to add a little flavour, and could I talk my captors into bringing me a few seeds from time to time…? But maybe that’s all cheating.

I reckon my five foods would be as follows:

1. Bread. And I’m going to request fresh bread. Every culture has a staple. I can’t deny my northern European genetic heritage. So it’s either going to be bread, or potatoes. But I do love my daily bread. Growing up in France, I got spoiled having boulangeries on every corner, and cheap, warm, soft bread pretty much on tap. Of course, over the years I’ve found I love breads from most parts of the world- so long as it’s fresh, usually soft, and ideally warm. Flat-breads from the Middle East, or naan from south Asia, or a nice Turkish bread, really, I’m open to variety. In fact, while you’re at it, by all means vary said bread on a daily basis, just to keep in interesting. I don’t mind a weekly rotation.

From a dietary perspective, of course, bread is a nice source of carbohydrates, an appetite-killer and a stomach-filler. If I’m stuck on a private island someplace, then I don’t want to be thinking about my hungry stomach all the time. I thought about rice, but rice can be a bit starchy, and doesn’t have the variety that bread does. So, bread it is.

2. Beans. When I lived in northern Papua New Guinea, my housemate and I would shop for all our food needs at the local market. It was a grubby but vibrant place, with a beautiful range of fresh- and I mean fresh- fruit and vegetables. We’d stock up once a week for about $20, and would generally cook curries for ourselves, with lashings of hot sauce, curry powder and other spices and flavours in there. I’m no vegetarian, but we’d generally only have meat once a week, sometimes less, and I’d say that that period was one of the healthiest, from a dietary perspective, I’ve ever enjoyed.

I’ve never really been a fan of beans. But in PNG we’d buy great bunches of snake beans for a pittance, and they’d become a mainstay of the curry. Beans are greens (again, never been big on greens) so chocked full of nutritional goodness, and I reckon they’d be a good option in terms of maintaining the healthy side of things. Not my favourite foodstuff, but if I’m stuck on an island, I don’t want to be getting sick or scurvied.

3. Lentils. I love Indian food. Again, I enjoy a blend of international cuisine, and done well, Thai blows me away for the subtle aromatic nature of it. But the sheer variety and tastiness of Indian cuisine delights me non-stop. Hence I’ve garnered a love for lentils (encouraged by my wife, who also loves them and cooks some very tasty lentil dishes). As a pulse, lentils are full of protein (seeing as I’m not asking for meat)- and another good one for filling you up, but filling you up with stuff that’s really healthy. While I realise that my captors may not be providing me with a spice rack (if they did, we’re home and dry), at least if I’ve got to eat blandly, let’s get the right building-blocks into the system.

4. Tomatoes. Another mainstay of stews and curries, tomatoes in cooking add so much flavour. As a fruit they’ve got some good nutritional value (sure, I want to limit my risk of prostate cancer). But I reckon, cooked with beans and lentils, you’ve actually started to get yourself a stew with some flavour and nutritional goodness. Now, I’m not about to tell you that’s all I want to eat for the next 50 years. But, look, I reckon if I did, I wouldn’t come away too unhealthy. At least that’d be my hope.

5. Cheese. I nearly put Vegemite here. After all, I have to stay true to my Kiwi roots (okay, fine, Sanitarium Marmite, but Vegemite would still be my choice). It’s a little spread of home, that nice salty blast really wakes up the mouth, and you could even use it as a food additive to bring some additional flavour. To this day I travel with a tub of Vegemite on longer assignments- one of my comfort foods. And it helps make even stale bread taste a little better (yes, learned from experience). I also tossed around peanut butter for similar reasons- and also because it would help the sugar cravings.

However. Cheese. There are few things I enjoy more than cheese, in pretty much any of its forms. I love the variety (again, I hope my captors will be acquiescent here)- from nice bitey mature hard cheeses to rich soft stinky gooey ones, I’m pretty open to a gamut of them things. Dairy’s a nice balance to the above smattering of food groups- gotta keep my bones strong. It’s a total comfort food for me. And, it’s one of those universal savoury foods- meaning, it goes with pretty much anything.

Also, if I played my cards right, with bread and cheese I’ve got the starting of a cheese fondue. Just got to bargain my way to a little garlic and a sloosh of kirsch. And that is something I could eat from here to eternity.

Photos:

1. Island in Madang Harbour, PNG

2. Sweetlips, aka Lunch, also PNG

I’ve taken to checking the Daily Prompt on the WordPress Daily Post blog. I rarely have the time to be able to spontaneously write to the topic on a given day, but one that came up this week was the prompt: Idyllic.

“What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?”

I’m not always aware of it, but community is a powerful theme in my life. I guess it’s a powerful theme in everybody’s life. But I think it’s something that we often take for granted- by which I mean we don’t necessarily look at it that closely, stop to think about it, consider how we relate to it and how it relates to us.

You hear a lot in Western countries about the ‘breakdown’ of community. There’s some truth in the concern. Also some misconceptions. What it reflects, though, is that people have the perception that they are less connected to other people, at least on some level.

In the humanitarian industry, you hear a lot about community. Here, the community is some assumed state in which people live, by which they are connected, and hence becomes a vehicle through which assistance can be delivered. Hence ‘community development’. Again, there is truth, and there are misconceptions.

It’s a critical concept when it comes to understanding society, and how society changes (or, if you believe in such things, how society can be intentionally changed). There is a monolith of literature out there on the subject- entire tertiary education courses- and I’m not about to hack a review of it here. But spending part of my life living in the west, and part of my time living in ‘developing’ nations where community is assumed to be happening, I get to see both sides of the story. And in addition, the notion of community has very personal implications for me.

Community. Co- together. Unity- a state of oneness. The notion that many individuals are some how joined or connected, maintaining their unique status as individuals (to varying extents), but also creating some larger unit through a set of social or interpersonal interactions.

Central to the notion of community is a shared commonality. In its most traditional sense, community tends to relate to people who share a common set of physical resources- space, fundamentally, because until very recently, meaningful and regular interaction over any distance greater than the voice could carry was not possible. Hunter-gatherer ‘communities’ would have shared food resources, labour, care functions. As time went on, traditional notions of community are centred on the shared space of a sedentary settlement, with the sharing of resources varying between communal and individualistic, depending on social structures in place.

Urbanization confronted the limitations of community- that there are only so many social contacts that humans can continue to maintain with any sense of meaning (the number is generally thought to be around 150, give or take). Thus the fragmentation of community into sub-units. Communities could be formed around geographical neighbourhoods or communes. But they could also be formed around other things, such as professions (a new development under urbanization and the higher levels of regimentation of resources and labour division that are required to make it function), or social status, or, as things such as leisure time increased with the creation of excess resources, interest-groups.

The notion of community is now accepted to mean a wide range of things today. We have ‘communities of practice’- professional bodies who occupy a certain academic or professional niche within an industry. The ‘online community’ via which you may well have connected to this article. The ‘international community’, of which I claim citizenship, and whose members are joined by the very notion of their placelessness- or, more accurately, their routine orbiting around a certain set of geographical hubs and professional millieus.

In the west, this increase in the placelessness of community appears to be correlated, whether causally or not, with a decline in place-based community, particularly urban environments. People in suburbs complain they don’t even know the names of their next-door neighbours. In apartments, people don’t necessarily know who is on their block. We live behind closed doors, behind fences.

This isn’t universal. There are some very vibrant urban and even suburban communities. But this is the perceived trend.

There is also a certain nostalgia for the perception of the community that once was. This might be harking back to the ‘golden era’ of the fifties and sixties, when suburbanization was a new trend, and at its heart was the notion of being good neighbours, where people on the street might have known each other fairly intimately. Or it might be reflective of some idealized utopia of the village of the medieval times, when people lived in close connection with the land, shared labour, common problems, and were in constant social interaction with people who lived close to them, who they saw regularly, and with whom interactions therefore took on a higher level of meaning.

This hunger isn’t misplaced at its source. People crave interaction with one another, as a rule, and mental or social disorders notwithstanding. Enough studies have demonstrated a close correlation between morbidity and mortality and social connectivity, and even net happiness and social connectivity. It is hardwired into us, whether by a relational creator God, or the eons of social interdependence that gave our species an edge in natural selection, or some combination of the two.

And when my day to day routine- collecting food for the family, for example- involves interacting with somebody who I know intimately as a neighbour, rather than somebody I might recognize but whose name I don’t even know, these daily routines take on a different value. They serve not just the purpose of meeting physical need, but also meeting that embedded need for social connectivity.

Because in our social interactions, we need meaning. And when our day is devoid of meaningful social interaction, but simply involves tasks, it loses meaning.

The virtualization of community, then, means that more and more social interactions are seperated by either spatial or temporal distance- either we have remote forms of communication (phone, Twitter, Facebook), or we link up with those people in the communities we identify with on a less frequent basis (such as going to church on a Sunday, when we might get the bulk of our meaningful social interaction). Which I believe contributes to this sense of dissatisfaction.

Although I am of the Western European model of decreasing emphasis on spatially-oriented community, I feel I have been lucky enough to be part of some beautiful communities. As an adult, most of those communities have been faith-based, although not necessarily church-based. At university, I had a close group of friends who I would see most weeks, usually several times a week, all brought together by our Christian faith and certain practical outworkings of that faith. We shared very close personal interactions, supported one another, and genuinely loved spending time together, and I recall those times very fondly. They kept me sane through my university years, and I missed them deeply when I left the UK.

More recently, in my late 20s I was part of another faith-based, non-church community, this time quite a small and intimate group of friends who were seperated by a bit more distance than we were at university, but still saw each other on a nearly weekly basis. With my constant travel schedule, it was the first time since I’d left university where I truly felt connected to a group of people, and they provided a safe and warm place to connect to others.

Just a few years back, I transitioned into a third faith-based community, this one characterized more by people who felt a hunger to explore their faith and ask difficult questions they did not feel they could ask in the established church. Of the three communities, this was by far the most structured, in that we met regularly, and our meetings had some sort of order to them, but by the same token, in its own way was also the most sprawling, in that the community took on quite a robust nature for a time, providing practical assistance at various points for one another, and with very intentional efforts to see that community managed, to see struggling members encouraged, and even, at one stage, an attempt to establish a leadership structure to better help it grow and continue.

Throughout all of this, I have been part of another community that I’m very fond of, which can alternatively be given the label ‘international community’ or ‘humanitarian community’, although in practice it’s a very small subset of those that I have any right to call ‘my’ community. They are the people who I interact with in different parts of the world on my professional assignments, who share common humanitarian values, with whom I share often intense experiences, common worldviews (for the most part) in politics and leisure (see: adrenaline junkie), many of whom I see repeatedly in different locations time and time again, some of whom I’ve never met face-to-face but know just from virtual communication that I would get on very well with, but with whom I feel none the less very connected in a meaningful way. They are people I can meet in almost any pub in any expat-occupied city in the world and, even if I haven’t seen them in five years, can instantly strike up a rapport with and pick up like we were never apart. And I know many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.

Of the three faith-based communities I have mentioned, the first essentially came to a close when university ended and we all went our separate ways, to keep in intermittent touch, but now spread all over the globe- in China, the UK, South Africa, and wherever the heck I am these days. The second, I still see the members of regularly and am very fond of them, but my long-term assignment in PNG saw my engagement with that community transition out, and during my absence, the nature of that community also changed as circumstances changed.

To some extent, the third community was linked to the changing of that second. And in many ways, the story of that community is the most interesting, because it was the closest to an ‘intentional’ community, but also walked that challenging line of having some structure that enabled it to function, while remaining flexible and meeting the needs of a group of people who were very suspicious of structure in the first place- that being the reason they wanted to be in the group. It was a paradox, and for the first while, it flourished. Then circumstances changed, the needs of community members shifted, and the community ultimately ended. MIO and I met through that community, and are still in touch with most of the members of that group regularly, and we even meet up regularly, although the nature of interactions has changed very much over the last 2 years.

The fourth community, of course, is in many ways the most unsustainable, in that at any given time, I am interacting with a  very small portion of that community directly, and however stimulating I find engaging with it, it can only ever contribute a small portion to my social needs.

In short, although virtual community can be a good and supportive thing, I strongly believe that most people require some degree of meaningful interaction in a shared physical and temporal space.

Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for everybody. It does seem to apply to most people I know. But I know I speak for both MIO and I, because we talk about it regularly: We crave that.

So perhaps, if I start trying to answer the question posed at the start of this piece, the first thing I would look for in an idyllic community would be a community that shares time and space. That is in close enough proximity to be able to enjoy regular face-to-face activities and interactions together.

Being at a bit of a life-crossroads at the moment (a story for another place and time), MIO and I have been exploring what practical steps we can take to increase our social connectiveness- to actively seek out community. To that end, we visited an ‘intentional community’ on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Moora Moora has existed on a forested hilltop between Healesville and Warburton since the early 1970s- almost 40 years. It would be easy to dismiss the place as a hippy commune. In fact, while it shared a vision for shared resources and communal living, the community’s values, charter and approach to intentionality were very much the brainchild of a highly academic sociologist, who helped found the settlement, who lives there to this day, and who plans to die there.

The story of Moora Moora is long and fascinating, and I won’t go into any detail here. The community is spread out over a few hundred hectares of hilltop bush, with half a dozen clusters of homes, each cluster made up of four or five households, that cluster then becoming the basic unit of interaction and management within the community. Each individual is expected to contribute one day of labour to community tasks each month, but is otherwise free to live according to their own needs.

The community has gone through ups and downs- nearly becoming extinct on a couple of occasions, while thriving at others. Relationship- and conflict- management has clearly been central to the success and otherwise of aspects of community life. Meetings and administration are a necessary component.

There is a real beauty to the lifestyle that’s been established there, however. The houses are mostly non-traditional- some wooden, others adobe-mud, all of them quirky and built by the community members. Trees encroach close to the properties, and there is a strong sense of closeness to nature. A small communal vegetable garden contributes to each household’s monthly food basket. Water is piped from a natural spring, so pure it requires no treatment, and the community is off the grid and largely self-sufficient in energy needs.

Moora Moora is currently facing a crisis as many of the long-standing members are now well into their sixties and older, and are beginning to struggle to meet the physical demands of the lifestyle, but there are no guidelines in place to regulate their transition, nor has there been an influx of younger people to support the elders.

Sadly, another challenge- one that floored MIO and I, who both love the idea of spending more time working the land, and are quite open to the idea of sharing some labour and resources- is that some members of the community refuse to contribute their one day a month of labour. We couldn’t believe that people could be selfish enough to verbally commit to supporting a community (which provides a low cost of living in a beautiful environment, and a unique opportunity that many people would love to take up) and then refuse to play their part, when expectations are so low. A day a month contributing to common needs really isn’t that much, and instead people are just taking. A real shame, and one that made us wonder how much longer Moora Moora will remain viable.

Moora Moora isn’t for us. But it gave us a lot of food for thought, and forced us to consider what we actually wanted from a community- a conversation we’re still having.

One thing I realised up there, among the trees, is that I need to see the sky. It’s not that I don’t like trees- on the contrary, I love being in forest, and thick jungle, and trees are gorgeous. The more the merrier. But I love being somewhere I can see great expanses of sky, too, and I think to live, this inspires me more than a hilltop forest. It’s also why I don’t really like urban and suburban environments- because there’s all that clutter of rooftops and cables and buildings crowding the horizon. Perhaps it’s the photographer in me. But I’ve always loved big open spaces- the prairies, the mountains, the desert. MIO loves the sea. I love the sky.

Which makes me reflect. If the first thing I’m looking for in a community is the sharing of physical space and time, then somewhere in there, the nature of that physical space needs to play a part. Many of my best memories of shared experience and community have occurred outside urban environments. There is definitely a part of me that would prefer my ideal community to be rural, not urban.

MIO and I both value nature. We’re greenies at heart. We’re not perfect, but we’d like to get better at reducing the environmental impact of our lifestyle. MIO talks a lot about the notion of being ‘connected to the land’- recognizing that everything we have and everything we consume comes, on some level, from nature, and has an impact on nature, and that therefore, we should seek to live in a way that minimizes negative impact and maximises sustainability. She’d love to grow more of our own food, and rely less on vertically-integrated mega-corporations. I’m 100% on board with that. So another aspect of my ideal community would be a community that is closely connected to nature and the environment.

All of the communities that I’ve been intimately involved with and that have affected my life have involved a shared set of values- and important values at that. Either the shared values of the Christian faith, or the humanitarian values that most aid workers I am close to connect with. I think for community to thrive, it needs to share a set of meaningful values. An ideal community for me would share faith-based, humanitarian and ecological values.

The most engaged communities of people are, in my experience, communities that depend on one another. They help each other out, offering support for practical tasks or emotional needs. They share resources on some level- although a lesson we took from Moora Moora was that a level of individuality and independence is also critical in communities, just as it is within a family group. They are also vulnerable to one another- needs are expressed, and trust reciprocated. An ideal community for me would involve some level of interdependence, and a high level of trust. It would also allow family groups and individuals to remain somewhat independent at the same time.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but if the ideal community shares space and time, then it also shares certain activities. Spending time on shared activities- whether pleasurable or functional- creates shared experience, which in turn creates bonds between people, building relationship and building community. So an ideal community for me would engage in shared recreational activities, and would also labour together on shared tasks for the benefit of one another.

Ultimately, though, I suppose what I would be looking for from the idyllic community would be a community that adds value and meaning to life. It creates enjoyable, peaceful and grace-filled interactions. It contributes to making our physical environment better and reducing social injustice. It celebrates spiritually. It adds satisfaction and fulfillment to the completion of the daily tasks of survival. It creates a millieu in which children are loved, supported, encouraged and enabled. It shares tasks and resources in a sustainable way that facilitates the creation of free space and time to be able to watch the sky, to pursue dreams, and simply to dream.

I think this is what my idyllic community would look like. So if you find it, could you send us the address please.

All photos my own.

“Tibeb has been trying to call you,” Teme tells me. She’s one of my Monitoring and Evaluation officers and is running a mission about two days south of the capital, checking on an emergency food program. “She is wanting to stay in the field to complete her work until the 31^st. But the driver has only been authorized to be out until the 29^th.”

Teme explains that when the request was put to fleet management, a mistake was made on the driver request form and the earlier date entered. So I guess there’s some issue with fleet management wanting the vehicle and driver back. It wouldn’t be the first time that there are hiccups between what my field staff want, and getting the resources from the shared services guys.

I go down the two flights of stairs to have a chat to Girma, the fleet manager. I’ve never seen anyone so consistently smiley as Girma, and he greets me warmly. Although we’ve had issues in mobilizing vehicles at times, I know he’s dedicated to finding fixes and he has always been reasonable when I’ve discussed with him.

“The problem,” he tells me, “Is that on the form, she only asked for the driver until the 29^th. So now she wants the driver until the 31^st. But the driver only took out per diem until the 29^th, not the 31^st, so he won’t stay longer.”

I frown. “So have him stay out, and he can be reimbursed for the two extra days.”

The per diem rate clocks in at a little under ten bucks a day for that location. I’m confident that between them, the team are going to ensure that the driver doesn’t starve.

“I know. I said that to finance. But they say it’s against policy. It creates all kinds of problems. They say if he comes back and tries to claim per diem after the fact that he can’t be reimbursed.”

I raise an eyebrow. Creates all kinds of problems? We’re an organization that measures its in-country budget in multiples of ten million dollars annually. I don’t see how $17 constitutes all kinds of problems.

“He’s out doing work,” I say. “Of course we’re going to reimburse him. There’s no question about that. If finance are going to push the matter I’ll pay the per diem out of my own pocket.”

Girma grins his habitual smile. “I know. But finance.”

Girma and I walk down the hallway to finance. He shows me to the desk of the particular finance officer responsible for this edict. He starts to re-hash the conversation the to of them had earlier. I don’t let him get all the way through.

“We will reimburse him,” I say to the finance officer, directly, in a voice that indicates I’m not asking for his permission.

He doesn’t put up any real resistance. “Well, you’ll need to sign his acquittal form.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be around next week to sign it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

And that’s quite literally all it took.

It’s troubleshooting little things like this (as well as much bigger things) that fills time out here. It’s not difficult. But in an organizational culture where the drive for compliance and the tyranny of petty systems takes precednence over ensuring our project work goes ahead, it’s a constant tussle. Without my intervention (and in a society like this where rank trumps protocol, all I really need to do is show up and give my verbal instruction), a systems-compliant finance officer would have cut short the work being done by my field-team actually engaging at the community level and trying to improve the quality of the work we do. By simply standing at his desk and saying that I’d approve an exception to policy- what ridiculous policy I’m excepting I’m not entirely clear- the problem is solved.

This little story- which took place this morning- is a microcosm for many of the challenges we face trying to ensure our field operations keep rolling. Without constant- constant- attention, the procedural requirements, paperwork and red-tape rapidly grind activities to a halt. In many ways, I have no particular skillset that isn’t greatly outweighed by the experience and ability of my field teams, in terms of actually providing assistance to the communities we work with. I see my main role here as making sure that the systems work to support my staff, not get in their way. And then I get out of their way as well.

This compliance culture is nobody’s fault, per se. It’s a culture common to many INGOs and, I don’t doubt, a plethora of other organizations as well. In fact, I understand that government offices generally have it much worse. And to be honest, I’m lucky enough to be working in an organization where I have a Country Director who backs me up, so I can be confident of stepping into a situation like this one (or, more importantly, one where we’re trying to push through high-level organizational change to improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and impact of our field operations on a much larger scale), and when I tell staff to move the red tape out of the way, I know it’ll happen.

Sometimes after some negotiation…

It is, of course, a fine balance. On the one hand, administrative systems were designed to increase transparency and limit corruption. Driven first by donors, it is now increasingly pushed by the risk-averse inertia of organizations themselves, who are terrified of being publically caught out with inadequate systemic controls, fearful of the loss of donor funding that would presumably follow. Large government donors, with increasing layers of demands, don’t make this any easier either. Sadly, what we end up with is a wag-the-dog scenario where we end up putting so much emphasis on the controls that it becomes unwieldy to operate.

Aid organizations have a responsibility to seek a balance- ensuring appropriate accountability while maximising the speed and quality of field work. Donors, too, need to recognize that the more demands they place on implementing agencies- heavy reporting and fiscal requirements and micromanagement of tasks and activities- the more this can be detrimental to the communities we all exist to serve.

My heart is in operations. Helping stuff happen. Which is why I love this job. I get to push things out of the way, try to ensure a reasonable measure of accountability, but free up my teams to go do what they’re supposed to do and deliver our programs on the ground.

Of course, it’s also why I hate this industry sometimes. Because I watch, first hand, as administrative procedures delay funding and operations, occupy time and effort, and ultimately bog down our work until it becomes less efficient. And communities don’t get the services they’re owed.

Today, though, I’m just pleased I won’t be seeing Tibeb back until after the weekend.

I don’t post much fiction. As in, any. So this is definitely a stray from the path for me. But I thought, what the heck: I like aid, and I like zombies, and I kind of like writing too. And although I had lots of better things to be doing with my time, I did it anyway. So here ya go.

This little story is dedicated to @daggyvamp, aka Narrelle Harris, because it’s her birthday today, and because I don’t personally know any author who relishes the undead- and musing on the grisly transition towards deadness- quite so much as Narrelle does. Also, because once upon a time, Narrelle had a toe firmly dipped in the aid world, and I’m still waiting for her to write that sitcom… You can find Narrelle’s excellent and darkly humorous vampire novels The Opposite of Life and Walking Shadows linked right there, and I highly recommend them. You can also find one of her zombie-themed short stories in this compilation. Happy Birthday Narrelle!

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

From the roof of the white Land Cruiser, Jarrod watches the treeline for the first of them to appear.

It’s eerie in the late morning stillness. The boreal forest towers above them, cold and alien. Shafts of light catch in the drifting mist that’s burning off. The twittering of birds is at once familiar, but oddly disconcerting in the furtive, restless way the chimes bounce off one another.

The UN flag hangs limp. It’s as blue and pale as the cloudless sky.

Olivia touches his arm and Jarrod flinches. Looking down, he sees the rich hues of her fingers against the pale, almost translucent skin of his arm.

“Try to relax,” she intones quietly. “I know we’re a long way from home, but we’ve all done this before.”

The armoured vehicles are stationed in a broad ring about the distribution site. Jarrod can see the gunner atop the nearest. He’s looking out into the forest beyond the cleared circle. His head is swinging, side to side beneath the blue helmet, his thumbs twitching on the cannon grip. Jarrod can see a trail of sweat dampening the man’s dark temples. Mesh wire is clamped over the thick reinforced windows in the forward doors, and the white of the side panels is startling in the diffuse sunlight. The initials U.N. are stenciled in thick black lettering on the flanks.

Everyone’s either on a vehicle or in one, except Francois. The crusty old Malagasay, Head of Mission, stands with his arms folded in the middle of the ring, just at the foot of the flag. Crates of relief food pile behind him. He’s a picture of defiance, snowy whiskers against skin as dark as the forest soil, veined eyes behind narrow shades. Always the shades. Hiding those eyes that say he’s seen it all. The old-timer cut his teeth thirty-some years ago as a self-professed young-gun, first in Darfur, then later in responses like Haiti, Somalia, Azerbaijan, Mexico. Places that mean so little now, but he wears them like they’re badges, like military medals of honour. The staff still speak of him in revered tones, like he’s some kind of guru. He’s been in this since the start.

He’s wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved button-down. His nod to the locals. Jarrod feels a warmth at the old aid worker’s presence. It’s reassuring to have someone familiar in this foreign landscape, a figure so confident facing something that sends stronger men loose at the bowels. Someone from home. Yet even the thought of home startles Jarrod in a way he’s not anticipating.

This might have been my home, another time.

“They’re coming,” Olivia says quietly. She was Ugandan, once. She’s a stout, athletic woman who’s taken a motherly affection to Jarrod since he arrived at the fort a few weeks back. She’s speaking English to him, and he can’t tell if it’s because she’s just used to being out here, or whether she actually thinks Jarrod speaks better English than Kiswahili. Truth is, until he was deployed a few weeks back, Jarrod’s barely spoken English since he enrolled in Kofi Annan University six years ago.

They’re a long way from Antananarivo now.

“How can you tell?” he asks her.

“Listen.”

Jarrod listens. All he can hear is the blood throbbing in his ears. The birds overhead. Odd, needle-shaped leaves on the tall trees- firs, he’s heard them called- seem to swallow sound. He’s never seen trees so tall, so straight, so close together. So dark. Like anything could be hiding in them. Staggeringly different to the bulbous baobabs back home that are now sparse, but for all that scarcity, fiercely guarded in their spreading glory.

Home.

That word again.

Then a flash of movement.

A gunner spins. The mounted turret makes an oiled hiss, and the man’s shoulders bunch beneath the blotches of camouflage. But the figure coming out of the trees moves slowly, and as Jarrod watches, the gunner’s grip relaxes. The gun stays trained.

“They’re jumpy,” Jarrod observes, to nobody in particular, but quietly hoping for some sense of comfort from Olivia.

“They should be,” she murmurs, then adds, as if realising his intent a mouthful too late, “But they’re good. The Haitians and the Dominicans, they’re some of the best troops we have in DPKO. They work well together. You know, Dominica held out for a long time. Nearly became a refuge as well. It was…” she hesitated, her voice tailing off like the fading mist. “Unfortunate.”

But Jarrod’s attention is now on the figure emerging from the treeline. No, not one figure. Several. Moving slowly. Stiffly. Something uncomfortable about the gait. Not the easy lope of a youth in sandals beneath a tropical sun, or the scurry of children as they tumble over one another in the dust. These figures are stumbling into the clearing. Hesitating before the outposts of gleaming white half-tracks. Even at a distance, Jarrod reads the flickering of an emotion: Fear? Relief? Or perhaps it’s simply the acknowledgement of constant insecurity, and the echoes of the question ‘why’ growing quieter with each passing year.

The first into the kill-zone is a woman. She’s emaciated, pale, her t-shirt hanging loosely off a body that might be considered tough under circumstances of diet and healthy labour, but which overwork and undernutrition has left brittle and unforgiving. Sharp angles. Stubborn.

There are three children with her. One is an infant, hanging wide-eyed from a makeshift carriage on the woman’s back- metal poles tied together with threadbare canvas. The others are young, though it’s hard to tell how much-so, as they’re equitably underfed. One has a crop of orange-blonde curls, a little girl who could be six. She’s in a tattered dress with holes worn into the fabric. Her little brother has a mop of startlingly black hair against fair skin, a swollen belly, and limps where his sister leads him.

“How far did you say the forward delivery point is from the refuge?” Jarrod asks.

“About six miles,” Olivia replies, dropping back into Kiswahili with him.

“Damn.”

“Mmm. We do our best. But you know what Sphere says about standoff distance and noise protection. They don’t want any chance they might lead-”

She tails off as Francois steps forward and begins jabbing his hands decisively. He signals the guards to open up the perimeter fencing. It isn’t much to hold anything off, just a ring of coiled razor wire, but it might prove to be enough of a delay for the gunners to get a bead on, and that has to count for something.

The ballet is orchestrated in an odd, otherworldly silence, all hand-gestures and furtive movement. Jarrod listens to the birds, knowing from his security training that when they fall silent, it’s time to pay attention.

*

Olivia hops down off the roof.

“Coming?”

They’re pouring through the opening now. Jarrod’s amazed at how many are arriving. Like a hot-season storm, what starts as a few drops becomes a patter, then a stream, then a torrent. In just a few minutes he reckons there’s a couple of hundred of them in here, all survivors, all haggard. He follows Olivia into the clearing, exhilerated, more alive than he’s ever felt even though he knows he’s never been more vulnerable.

He keeps his distance. He recalls what Francois warned him about.

“Remember, they’re desperate. Some of them won’t have seen anything but bush food in several weeks. Rabbits, rats, even boiled leaves. There’s not a lot left in the forests these days, between the survivors, and, well…”

“They get that we’re here to help, right?” Jarrod had interrupted.

Francois had spread his hands and shrugged. “People are fearful. We come in, we go out again. This is their reality. You know, there’s a lot of resentment. But mostly, desperation. You never know what people in that situation might do. And they’ll be armed, remember. They know not to bring their weapons in sight of the distribution. But the men’ll be out there, just a couple of hundred paces out, watching for their wives and children, their old men to come back. I’d hate to think what would happen if they thought they weren’t getting what they were entitled to.”

Jarrod could see them now. It was a fair overview. Wives and children, old men. A few able-bodied males- young men who looked close to Jarrod’s own age- had come in to help with the distribution itself, to haul the pallets around and assist some of the elderly or the slow with their burdens.

“I don’t understand,” he’d asked Olivia after their first distribution, back at the fort a couple of weeks back. “Why don’t they all gather here? There’s protection. We can get supplies and services to them, and they never need to leave the perimeter.”

He’d cast his eyes around the scene even as he’d said the words. The concrete walls. The squalid courtyards at the feet of those overcrowded condos. Nightsoil stains from glassless windows. Smoke eminating from cracks and holes where people burned refuse to keep their shelters warm. The smell. The constant clamour. In the far distance, the Bitterroot Mountains rising sharp and jagged and snowcapped into the sky.

“And you could ask why these ones don’t come to us,” Olivia had responded, looking up from where she squatted over a child’s scrawny pink arm, the measuring tape showing that he was just on the healthy side of malnourished. “There are always those who try. But for so many of them, this is home. And no matter how hard it gets, they won’t leave.”

Jarrod had made some noise indicating his lack of understanding.

“I don’t expect you to get it,” she had gone on in her melodic Kiswahili. “You’re one of the placeless. You were born in the camps, weren’t you?”

Jarrod had nodded. His father had been a surgeon, which had pushed the man to the top of the waiting lists. That had been before Jarrod, when his parents were newly wed, then thrust into the chaos, that destruction and terror that had seen a world torn down. Madagascar had taken them, an ark that even then had only so many places, and the foresight to ration them. At terrible cost to those unable to board. But for Jarrod’s family, it had been a beginning, of sorts. A fragile salvation.

Working in the survivor camps, Jarrod’s father had earned UN, and later government, contracts, eventually enough to rent them the small flat they shared with another family set back on the new developments among the lower hills, and later buy it freehold. The jagged skyline of Antananarivo today was a far cry from the coloured jumble of two- and three-story houses along the ridgeline that stills from the turn of the century showed. The towering slums of condominiums- frequently unpowered and unwatered, that swayed sickeningly when the cyclones barrelled through- were no paradise. But neither were they the camps, those ramshackle neighbourhoods that nearly thirty years on were still hives for desperation and disease of every kind but that one, overlooked by the tower-blocks like passers-by ignoring a dying derelict on the street.

“I don’t think they were as bad at first. Not when we were there,” Jarrod could recall his mother telling him one afternoon, as he stared from forty-three stories through shafts between the concrete trunks, down at the mess. It hung with brown smoke even on a day like it had been that day, wispy clouds against a burning heat-haze. His mother’s Kiswahili was affected, a little drawled, like her mouth was never quite willing to accept that it had to speak it. “Back then there was hope. Perhaps it was only temporary. And there was a sense of, oh I don’t know, it was almost paradise, back then, before the towers, when there were forests, and the elation of having survived. But now, the quarantine, the waiting lists, the wire and the guards and the watchtowers…”

She had tailed off, but something had lit inside Jarrod. A curiosity, at first. Nothing more. But it grew, at first into a hunger to know what it was like inside the camps and finally, when he saw firsthand the quarantine zones and the struggle to survive that so many failed, a passion to help.

Now, Jarrod drops into a crouch and pauses, getting his bearings in this growing maelstrom of humanity. He’s seen the camps. Seen the survivors in Fort Bitterroot, and over on the Eastern AirHead where the camps still feel a little like actual settlements, like the chaos of life in Antananarivo, only colder, more frantic. But this is different. He can sense the hunger. The fear is tangible, like a sweat, pervasive and inspiring and almost dizzying. There is something basic, primal, utterly desperate about the people as they come in. Grown women in bare feet, some of them in dresses so ragged they fail to protect their dignity. Children as filthy as any he’s seen playing in the gutters in the poorest of Madagascan slums. Young girls, teenagers, with lifeless eyes, slack jaws, the signs of a lifetime of poor diet and terrors unspoken.

Everything here is different. Even the soil, dark and loamy and moist, so unlike the red crumbly dirt at home. He had wondered. Wondered whether, coming here, he would feel a connection to the place. After all, he’s white, just like these people. He wants to feel something, some connection, some kinship. Wants the smell of the earth that he grinds between his fingers to awaken some sense of familiarity, a little voice that says You’re here, you’ve made it. But he remembers the first time he saw an American out here, one of the survivors at the fort. They locked eyes, and Jarrod gave what he hoped was a smile, though it felt uncertain. The man, a little older than him, just stared back. It wasn’t hostily. Just a blankness. No recognition.

You’re not one of us. You’ve not survived like we have. Just an outsider, scrammed in here, and you’ll scram out again when your shift’s over.

He breathes the cool highland air and tastes the acrid scent of the pines. Flavours of wood settle on his tongue like a grit. He hears birds he’s never heard before singing. Sees the pale skin of the troop of survivors stumbling towards the food stash. He wonders, if it all ended tomorrow, and the world righted itself, would he have a place in this land.

Could I die here?

*

It all goes ahead in silence. Words are spoken with heads leant in. Children are subdued. Babies muted. Jarrod wonders whether it’s because they’re malnourished, or if they sense the same terror that hangs like a blanket over the quietly milling knot of dulled colour.

He sees Juarez, the force commander, pacing the circle, checking with his men, eyeing up posture and readiness. His eyes are never still. He soaks in everything, that man. Never misses a detail. He pauses for just a moment, to ruffle the head of one of the sniffer dogs- a black lab- the first line of defense. Then he’s striding again, one eye on the survivors, another on his men, and somehow, both of them on the forest at the same time, on those dark trunks behind which anything could be lurking. Behind which, somewhere, something surely is.

He climbs a stack of pallets and watches the distribution for a few moments. Each pallet is pre-packed with tins of vegetables, condensed milk, cans of cooking oil, salt. It’s a monthly ration, to be shared among households of a predetermined size and number which is stamped on the base of the pallet. A short distance away, sacks of dried corn in 110-lb sacks are being handed out. Distribution staff with hand units read the ID chips of each sack and pallet as its passed over, then scan the wrist-band of the receiving survivor. Once, Jarrod understands, there would have been networks that such information could have traveled along, same as the data towers that dot Madagascar’s spine like a porcupine’s quills. But any such infrastructure would have fallen derelict some twenty-odd years ago out here. They’ll upload it when they get back to the fort and it’ll be transmitted, then collated centrally and checked for discrepencies. But the World Food Program runs a tight ship. They’ve been doing this stuff for about eighty years now. The systems are waterproof.

A girl reaches the front of the line. He can’t tell how old she is, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She’s got long white-blonde hair which she’s clearly brushed through and tied back in a tail before setting out, but the walk’s left renegade strands smeared down her cheeks. Her grey eyes meet Jarrod’s for just a moment. He can see dirt streaked on her sallow face. A figure clings to her leg, and he sees a toddler with the same colouring, naked except for a t-shirt. A little brother perhaps. Or her child. Her eyes fall away. There’s no flicker of connection. Just a hollow resentment.

This is my life. What do you know of it? Go back to your island.

*

Olivia’s overseeing the health tent, which is an insulated inflatable, double walls and an airlock, to keep the sound in. Jarrod zips up the outer layer, unzips the inner and steps through. In here he can hear the soft grumble of a supressed pump, and the bawling of infants.

Out in the open,they’d just be bait, he thinks to himself.

The makeshift clinic is insulated, but people still talk in quiet murmurs. Force of habit. A mistrust of the technology, perhaps. Olivia’s at the bloodwork desk. A male nurse who’s been brought in from Bitterroot pricks each child’s index finger as they’re presented. Some know what’s coming and start howling even before the tiny needle has had a chance to penetrate. The smear gets read on a handset.

“Clear,” Olivia says in English with a smile. “You have a healthy child, ma’am.”

The woman gives her a hunted look, as though the pronouncement is some kind of curse, or perhaps its Olivia’s dark skin that unsettles her so. She waits near the exit lock for her child’s crying to settle down and stares out, as though summoning the courage to pass through.

The next in line is a young teenager, not more than fifteen. She has loose dark hair that hangs in strands over a narrow face. Hazel eyes. Dirty, greyed-out skin that needs more washing, more care. Her infant is listless and doesn’t cry with the finger-prick.

“How old is he?” Olivia asks, as the nurse runs the sample.

“Seven months.”

“She yours?”

The girl’s eyes shift unhappily and she looks at the floor as she nods. Jarrod looks at the child’s skeletal arms and thinks he can practically see the bone through the pale wrap of skin.

The handset chimes, a tiny whistling noise.

“Oedema,” Olivia says softly, switching back to Kiswahili. “We’ll need to evacuate this one.” She straightens up and fixes the girl with a smile, speaking soothingly in English. “We need to get some more help for your child. You can both come with us to Bitterroot. Do you have a husband? Do you need to ask permission to come?”

The girl shakes her head but looks anxious.

“I tried to feed her,” she protests, and gestures unconsciously towards her flat, limp chest. “I try, but nothing… nothing comes.”

Her voice is thick, slow, her accent strange to Jarrod’s ears. Nothing like the clipped sing-song language he’s used to hearing from his colleagues, from his friends in Antananarivo when they speak English.

“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Olivia gives her best motherly smile and touches the girl’s face. “It’s not your fault. We’ll get you fed and your little one sorted out. Just come with us.”

*

They leave as the afternoon is lengthening. The light is taking on yellow hues, and catching in the beads of the damp air. Jarrod is starting to feel like he’s never spent so long without a clear view to the sky. Even though the clearing itself is broad, and ringed by an open stretch giving line of sight and fire to the treeline, the imposing firs hem them in, shrinking the circle of crisp blue overhead.

“We’ll take two half-tracks and the two thin-skins,” Francois says as he steps away from Juarez. “We’re better off getting back to Bitterroot early. I don’t want to get caught in the dark in these Land Cruisers.”

They’re old vehicles, but trusty. Patched together from a thousand cannibalized husks. Scavenged from the African mainland, then shipped on over on the salvation barges. Nobody knew what states the vehicles would be in over here. They’re around. Abandoned everywhere. But rusting. No one in Madagascar knows how to repair an old GM. But every tinker in the slum can do up a Cruiser.

They leave the rest of the convoy- five half-tracks and half a dozen flatbeds- packing up the distribution site as the recipients melt back into the forest. The survivors have a couple of critical hours of light left to get back to the refuge. To make sure they’re not followed.

There’s a peacekeeper for each of the truck cabs, and firepower in the half-tracks too. They’ll be okay if they have to be out after dark, Jarrod tells himself. Though truth be told, he’d rather be riding in one of the armoured vehicles than in the bouncing thin-skins. The four-by-fours are an old legacy, Olivia tells him. Francois is a traditionalist.

The engines are muffled. They run quiet. Windows cracked, eyes open. Jarrod sits in the back of the second Cruiser. There’s a half-track behind him. The other fronts the convoy. Flags taken down. No need to attract undue attention with colour and movement. Apparently the white is harder to see in the daylight. Something about their eyes. Something about processing bright tones.

For the first hour or so, the track is pitted, just a set of old depressions carved into the forest. The trunks are close, and foliage scratches against the flanks. The gunners in the half-tracks duck into their hulls to avoid being swept off their perches, and Jarrod feels exposed. He tries not to stare out of the windows, to see something that isn’t really there.

Don’t be really there.

They hit asphalt. It’s a relief, of sorts. The road widens and a thin strip of light-leaching sky appears between the crowns. The shadows are deepening with the rolling of the miles. The gunners are out of their hatches, back on the mounted weapons, by parts bored and anxious.

The road’s in terrible repair. Roots jut up from underneath and it heaves like waves frozen in a storm. The bush grows thick to its very edge, gnawing at the artificial stone, enclosing the way like a corridor. Like a tunnel. Nobody speaks. With the windows slightly open, they can sometimes hear the birds over the sound of the murmuring engines and the hiss of rubber rolling on tarmac, the crackle of the treads of the armour.

Once, the roadway opens out a little. A natural clearing where a vast tree has slammed across the road. The leading halftrack slows to a halt. Francois’ Land Cruiser draws up alongside. He gets out. Stretches himself nonchalantly. As though this were just a jungle laneway in the Madagascar that once was. He talks with a soldier in the forward vehicle, gesturing with his hands, the only clue to the nature of the conversation.

“What’s going on? Why have we stopped?” Jarrod asks.

Olivia shrugs. She reaches forward, taps the driver- a fair-haired local- on his shoulder and signals for the handset. The teenaged mother watches on, wide-eyed and wordless. The infant is limp in her cradled arms.

“What’s happening?” Olivia asks in English- another protocol hangover.

“Just some disagreement about the route,” drawls the driver from the thin-skin up front.

“Disagreement- are we lost?” asks Jarrod.

“I didn’t see any turn-offs to disagree about. They’re just men. Disagreeing because they like to.”

Olivia casts a glance around them, at the still bush, at the lengthening shadows merging into one.

“Don’t worry,” she says, just a little too cheerfully. “We’re still on track.”

*

The forest is darker the next time they stop. The sun’s gone behind some hills. The conversation is briefer. Francois is visibly wary when he dismounts.

The third time, he doesn’t get out at all. Just speaks to the soldier through the cracked window. That’s when they turn around.

Back when they could still send things into space, there used to be some global location system. Jarrod’s learnt about it. Like so much of what went on, before. They still have the old HF radio kits for communication. But they won’t get a signal through the trees.

The headlights show the back of the first Cruiser, dirty grey in the wan light. Ahead, the half-track rolls forward, retracing their steps. Above them, the sky is now just a lighter strip between the jagged black tips of the firs. Every now and again, Jarrod can see the passenger in the back seat of the Cruiser- a Malawian named Cecil- turn around and stare back at them. His face reads little expression, but his eyes are oddly round in the artificial light.

Jarrod can feel his heartbeat.

The sensation is a frustrating one. He wants to be back at the Fort. Wants to be off the road, away from the trunks that hem them in, wants to be safe. Their wellbeing now lies in the hands of other people. Entirely. Somebody else’s decisions and somebody else’s mistakes. He’s trusted Francois, but now the old aid veteran seems to have let them down. They’re rolling through the forest in the dark, somewhere they shouldn’t be, and the brittle silence tells him that everybody knows it. His mouth is dry and he can feel the perspiration making his back clammy where he rests against the seat. He’s twitchy.

The birdsong is a clamour of ecstasy outside, the dying chorus before nightfall. Right now, it’s so loud it masks even the passage of the four vehicles. When it fades, there will be quiet. They will lose one more sense, one more early warning. And in the crisp forest air, the sound of their passing will carry.

*

The avian chatter fades with the last of the light. The indigo of the sky, now barely discernable from the black trees, shows there’s no moon out tonight.

“Shut the windows,” Olivia says. Her voice is soft, a deep bass rumble all but lost in the hum of the suppressed motor. She doesn’t look around as she says it. In the rear seat, Jarrod snaps his windows shut.

Nothing to hear now anyway.

An eye on the road, the driver reaches forward and pops open the glove box. When his hand returns, it’s gripping a pistol which he lays on the consul behind the gear stick.

“Where did you get that?” Olivia chides him. “You’re not supposed to have a weapon!”

The driver snorts. “You people don’t carry guns, that’s your choice. Me, I figure y’all’re stupid.”

“We never carry guns,” Olivia tells him, tells the world in general. “It’s not how we do things. We’re here to help.”

“Them Lyssa-ites, whatever you call ‘em, they don’t care if you carry guns or not. Y’all taste the same to them. But tell you what, ma’am, I ever get done with mine, you’re welcome to pick it up and use it yourself, no hard feelings, ‘k?”

Olivia sniffs and the driver focuses his attention on the road outside.

A loud smack echoes through the cabin and Jarrod jumps, but it’s just a branch bouncing off the roof. He gets that they don’t carry guns. Gets that they’re humanitarians, that they don’t want to frighten the survivors, don’t want to risk starting a fight. He gets that killing isn’t what they do.

But right now, with the darkness outside and the light from the last half-track illuminating him through the windows of the thin-skin like he’s in some shop-front display, and a crushing sense that they’ve lost the Fort which makes it hard to breathe, Jarrod really, really wants a gun.

“Olivia,” he says, “What exactly is it that-”

Something flashes out of the forest and they hear the metal clang as it slams into the flank of the first thin-skin, an impact so fierce that they see the lights rock from side to side. There’s time for the driver to stamp the brake. Olivia gives a squeak as she catches her breath. Jarrod feels a disorientating prickling sensation down his head as the blood flees from the skin of his face.

The vehicles stop. There’s a brief moment of silence. Nobody moves. Shadows crawl as the foremost half-track continues to roll ahead.

“Dear Jesus,” the young mother whispers, clutching her arms around her starved child.

Then Olivia screams “Go! Go! Go!” and suddenly the forest is moving, pouring in on them, and like magnets to a chunk of iron they can see shapes tumbling, tearing out of the treeline, slamming into the Land Cruiser in front of them, five, six, seven, eight of them, at full tilt and still coming. The driver kills the lights and throws the engine into reverse with a grinding of gears and a scrambling of tires on the rough asphalt, and Jarrod sees the fading image of the creatures hanging off Francois’ vehicle, scrabbling at the metal, pounding at the glass, imprinted on the soft tissue of his retina.

Their flight is short-lived as they slam with a jolt into the half-track behind them. The mother wails. The driver is cursing, swearing, fumbling for his gun. Something barrels into the vehicle and rocks it hard on its suspension. They hear the faint sound of shattering glass. The engine stalls. They’re struck again, and then again. Then with a pop, a window bursts inwards and cold night floods in.

“GET OUT!” Olivia howls.

They’re shrieking as they come now, like the wail of a kettle boiling on a gas stove, and the snarl of a cornered hound, and the screams of a cat slowly being crushed in heavy machinery. It’s ear-splitting. Paralyzing. Jarrod wants to be sick.

The gun on the half-track opens up. Jarrod sees lines of tracer walking off into the forest, and by the flash of the muzzle can see more of the distortions pouring forward, arms flailing, fingers hooked and nails clawing. The driver has his gun, fires two rounds through his window before hands seize him and haul him screaming into the darkness, pistol and all. In the blinking strobe of the machine-gun, Jarrod can see the rear doors of the Land Cruiser in front of them have been sheared off, and the dark shapes are crawling over one another in a frenzy to fit inside, crammed like meat in a sausage press. The vehicle is rocking from side to side, but if the occupants within are crying out, their voices are drowned by the howl of the once-were-humans.

They’re crawling in through the shattered front window. Olivia kicks out with her boots. In the headlights of the half-track, Jarrod catches a glimpse of grey flesh, raw putrecense, of a gnarled hand with broken, clawing digits and darkened with fresh fluids. Then he can feel rounds punching into the seething mob outside, the visceral sound of soft meat giving before fast, hot metal. A bullet smashes through the back window, and he’s shaken from his stunned trance, coiled as he’s been on the back bench.

“Come on,” he urges, looking behind him. The mindless creatures are still pawing at the front window. The back is clear. He reaches for the frail infant. “Give her to me.”

The young girl stares at him, eyes already blurry with tears, and hesitates.

“Now!” Jarrod yells. Olivia’s grunting, lashing out with her feet as fingers scrabble for a prise on her legs from the front seat. The girl passes the child over, and Jarrod tucks her under one arm, reaches for the back door, and shoves it open.

“Follow me!” he yells, not turning to see if the young mother is with him. For the briefest moment, he knows he’s done something terribly, terribly stupid. He’s alone. It’s dark. They’re everywhere. The thunder of the machine-gun is ear-splitting, and the little girl in his arms, light and spindly as she is, begins to cackle an ugly cry. Then he’s reaching for the railing on the side of the half-track, just a few paces behind, and yelling to be heard above the roar of the weapon as he realises he has only one hand to climb.

Something seizes him out of the darkness. He spins, crying out, but it’s the young mother. She’s tumbled out behind him and is trying to rip the child out of his arms.

“No! Climb! I’ll pass her up to you.”

He looks. Olivia is crawling frantically over the back seats of the Land Cruiser, reaching for the exit. Jarrod can see shadows behind her, a writhing bush of limbs in the splintered light. He can see her face, twisted with more terror than he’s ever seen in human expression before. Then a silhouette darts between them, and in that moment, they both know.

“My baby!” the girl cries out. She’s scrambled onto the hood of the half-track, ducking beneath the lance of flame as the gunner puts out burst after burst into the horde of creatures. Jarrod reaches the child up, and as he does so hears a scream from Olivia. It’s defiant, a war-cry as she fights back, kicking and scratching, and for the briefest moment, Jarrod’s filled with the sense that he can cross back to her, fight them off with her, seize her and drag her to safety. But he doesn’t move. Because he knows its a sick fantasy. And then her screams change, and grow gutteral, animal, and he can hear the snap and tear of shredding flesh beneath her shrieks.

The roar of automatic fire splits into his mind, deafening, agonizing, and his first thought is to scream at the thoughtless gunner who’s fired so close to his head. When he stumbles out of his flinch he sees one of the shapes staggering away just paces from him, head cleaved open by a well-placed round.

“Get up here you stupid mzungu!” yells a voice. He leaps at the railing and hauls himself up onto the armoured vehicle, and feels clawed hands slapping at the metal his body had been in contact with just an instant before. The yowling is all around them. The young mother is still crouched on the hood, cowering beneath the spear of fire put out by the machine-gun.

Jarrod clambers up to the hatch in the roof and sees a dim light glowing from the hull within. He wants to weep. Wants to throw himself down. But he turns instead, reaching out a hand to the young mother. As he does, a shape hurtles out of the night behind him, and he hears a grunt from the gunner, and then a howl of pain. A sea of darkness surges around the vehicle’s nose.

“MOVE!” he yells, reaching again for the child.

The girl looks at him from where she cowers. She hesitates. Her eyes are pale and round, lips trembling, body rigid. Jarrod can hear the struggle taking place just behind him on the roof but he doesn’t take his eyes from hers.

“Come on,” he urges through clenched teeth, as much to himself as to her. “Come on.”

Gingerly, almost timidly, she stretches her arms and passes the child to Jarrod. Jarrod seizes the little girl and pulls her tightly to him. He half-turns to slide into the hatch, and the girl straightens where she stands, finally finding her determination to move, and claws seize her ankles from below. She gives a prolonged wail and plunges backwards into the void. When Jarrod turns back, he’s in time to see her pale form disappear beneath a mob of writhing shadows on the asphalt, frenetic in their excitement as they mob over the quivering flesh.

He leaps down the hatch and lands heavily, rolling.

There’s a loud clang as the hatch is bolted shut, competing with the whine of dancing stars that fills his head. When he sits up, he’s aware that he managed to shield the infant in his arms as he rolled, and that he’s staring into the muzzle of a large handgun.

“Where are you cut? Where are you cut?”

The massive Haitian peacekeeper holding the pistol is bellowing at him, and Jarrod balls up around the infant. He’s aware of a second uniform struggling with a bulky shape down the gunner’s well, of moaning, of the hammering of flesh and bone against the armoured hull.

“I…” Jarrod stammers. The second hatch slams shut, and the sounds of howling diminish slightly. He can feel the vehicle rocking in the frenzy of the physical assault, tipping on its suspension. He glances inadvertantly over at the second soldier, crouched over the gunner and shaking him.

“Are you bleeding?” the Haitian roars, and Jarrod’s focus is back on the ring of darkness that is the muzzle of the gun.

“I’m not hurt. I’m not hurt!”

He holds up one hand to show his extremities, then shifts the infant and waves the other. He lifts the little girl. Her oversized head, more skull than face, lolls, but she is unblooded.

The Haitian spins from Jarrod and looks to his comrades. The gunner who has been dragged back inside the half-track is lying curled and twitching, his face and torso riven by tear-marks and gashes. He’s whimpering. When his hands come away from his face briefly, Jarrod can see one of his eyes has been gouged out.

The Haitian gives a tremulous sigh. The other soldier is a Dominican. He’s breathing hard, the exhileration of terror.

“Step back,” the Haitian says.

“Please,” his companion replies.

“It’s the only way. You know it is.”

The Dominican closes his eyes and turns his face away. The maimed gunner senses what’s going on and flinches. His blood is red, his palms are pink, but beyond that Jarrod has no idea what his background might be. The stricken soldier raises one hand to shield himself, and the Haitian squeezes the trigger. A roar pressurizes the tiny cabin, plugging ears already ringing from the thunder of the machine-gun. The contents of the gunner’s head splash thickly onto the metal hull and his arm drops, instantly limp. Wedged as he is in the corner, his body absorbs any ricocheting fragments. Red blood drains out of his skull, and the two peacekeepers avoid it superstitiously.

*

For a while they sit there in silence. The Haitian is sweating, beads standing out on his dark skin, his eyes wide and pale in the dim light cast by the instruments board. The Dominican is weeping softly, staring at his dead companion but not touching him, save to periodically pat at his booted ankle. Bodies continue to slam against the hull outside. The shrieking does not abate, but it’s somewhat muffled by the thick metal. The infant is putting up its frail, crackling mewl, and does not appear to be the least bit assauged by the rocking of the truck on its suspension.

“We’re not moving,” Jarrod says.

“Your driver punched a hole in the motor when he slammed back into us. The towbar was welded to the chassis.”

The Haitian falls silent, staring blankly at the interior flank. Something scrabbles at the slits at the front of the cab, hissing through the narrow gap at the prey it can sense inside. The air outside is cool, but it’s muggy in the claustrophobic half-track.

“So what do we do now?”

“We wait.”

A fresh wave of impacts slamms against one side, jolting Jarrod forward where he sits cross-legged on the floor. He counts five or six, hard, with purpose.

“They’ll come for us, right?”

The Haitian says nothing. Just stares. Jarrod turns to the grieving Dominican, who senses Jarrod’s stare.

“Right?”

“Sure. Of course.” The Dominican tries on a smile, but it comes out more as a grimace.

The creature on the hood is still hissing, a wet, gutteral sound that gurgles at points, growls at others. By the faint interior light, Jarrod can see it’s peering inside. An eyeball, distended and grey-green in colour, is staring back, rolling with fervour. A snapping, snarling sound renews as it recognizes what it cannot yet reach. Filthy digits reach in, two of them snapped, bone exposed, and scratch for purchase against the metal interior.

“Zonbi,” the Haitian mutters, then crosses himself and looks away. He takes the pistol and drops out the magazine, checking the rounds before slamming it home again. He glances back at the creature still trying to find a way through the impossibly narrow slits, and Jarrod can see the man thinking about it.

“How many do you have?”

The Haitian shrugs. “Not enough.” Then he shares a look with the Dominican and adds, “But enough.”

There’s a rattling outside. Something, maybe several somethings, pawing at the exterior handles.

“What are they doing?” Jarrod asks, rocking the young child awkwardly in an effort to keep her calm.

“Trying to find a way in, of course.”

“I thought they couldn’t think.”

Another shrug. “Lyssa desolates the cerebrum. Pieces of cerebellum and spinal column remain intact, enough to support life. Who knows what else?”

“I was told…”

“You were told what they thought you wanted to know in order to accept the assignment,” the Haitian says curtly, and doesn’t elaborate.

There’s a renewed scrabbling outside. A fierce shaking. The beast at the window has been joined by a second. This one has four fingers all chewed fleshless, the bones gnawed into sharpened points like a claw, like four tiny sculpted daggers. The fingers explore the slit. Then the creature retreats. A short while later, when Jarrod hears a tapping sound on the roof, he imagines those same jagged bone-tips exploring for weakness.

The Haitian crosses himself again. The front of his uniform is drenched in a deep ‘V’ of perspiration, although the air that seeps into the hull is cool. With each fresh hammering of bodies against the half-track his eyes widen and roll, and a pink tongue rolls out to lick his top lip of moisture.

He’s fiddling with the gun. He and the Dominican are sharing more glances. Jarrod tries to focus on the little girl.

“What about her?” the Haitian mutters. The other shakes his head.

“No way I’m going to God with that on my conscience.”

“It would be a mercy.”

“Will she even know about it? She’s so small. She looks half-dead anyway.”

“They wouldn’t care. They’d crunch her like a chicken. She still feels pain.”

Jarrod looks up. “What are you talking about?”

The two fall silent. After a while, Jarrod sees the Haitian is praying. He’s pulled out a crucifix that shares a chain with two dog-tags, kissing it then pressing it to his forehead. Then he looks up and says,

“My home has gone. I’ve always known I wasn’t going to die there. But I hoped I would at least be with my family. That’s my home now.”

Jarrod can feel the accusation. He listens to the howling, roaring mob outside. The metallic tang of blood mixed with the death-stench of spilt bowels. Feels the cold metal beneath him, shaking with the unrelenting impacts. Remembers the glaze of a tropical sun on the harbour, and the scent of spices and woodsmoke in the Old Quarter, and the spiralling eddies of hot wind worrying garbage ahead of a summer downpour.

This place was never my home, he wants to scream out.

Instead, he strokes the child’s head and says gently to her unknowing face, “But we’re not going to die here, are we.”

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

Aaand, if you read this far- congratulations! I haven’t titled this story, because I suck at titles, but if you’ve got any good suggestions, stick ‘em in the comments section below and if I like one, I’ll credit you with it!

Today’s theme, “No, Thanks”, asks the question “Is there a place in the world you never want to visit? Where, and why not?”

Couldn’t refuse…

As an aid worker, I generally get to see the worst of the worst. Nowhere’s really off-limits. In fact, the places I tend not to get to are the really nice ones. You know, the sort of spot you might take your family for a spot of skiing, or a two-week all-inclusive on the beach.

Refugee camps? Done ‘em in spades. War zones? Sure, why not? It’s been a few years since I was last shot at. Poverty and human misery? To be honest, I’m rarely out of arms’ reach of them.

So is there anywhere I wouldn’t go?

There are a few places I haven’t been, when it comes to the list of top trouble spots. I’ve not been to Baghdad, nor Afghanistan. My folks used to live in the A-stan, however, and I pretty much grew up on slide-shows of the place. In fact, along with watching re-runs of M*A*S*H, I’d credit a pretty fair percentage of my drive to get into aid work with those old washed-out positives. As for Iraq, well, there was a time when they were decapitating foreigners when it didn’t seem like such a great destination, but even then I had friends in Kurdistan telling me I was welcome for a visit, and with the right opportunity I wouldn’t hesitate today.

Another of the world’s aid hot-spots I’ve not managed to get to is Goma, in eastern DRC. Generally acknowledged as one of the very worst humanitarian crises- it’s prolonged, forgotten, and horrifically violent- Goma is also fearfully beautiful. Forested hills overlooking deep lakes and in turn overlooked by towering volcanoes, I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about the crisis, and nothing but awe about the landscape. It’s definitely on my to-do list when the right assignment comes up.

While I’ve travelled a little in the more peaceful portions of Somalia- and thoroughly enjoyed it- I haven’t been down to the Mog yet. A former colleague of mine was there a couple of weeks ago, and it was amusing to see pictures of her all dressed up in her ballistics vest standing next to the armored vehicle trucking her around. But to be honest, Mogadishu is stabilizing rapidly (for now), with Somali businessmen and their families returning in droves, and while I wouldn’t want to buy a summer home there just yet, I would certainly leap at the opportunity to pay a visit to what is one of the most fascinating pockets of east Africa at the moment.

Darfur, South Sudan, Sri Lanka (at the culmination of the civil war), even Turkana in northern Kenya make up the list of some of the more challenging and unstable places I’ve dropped in on- each of them deeply enriching and fascinating places, despite the conflict and the deeply entrenched physical poverty and even injustice. A year in Papua New Guinea had me dropping in and out of Port Moresby more often than I ever would have liked, but even PoM has beautiful hills and bays, and from what I hear, fantastic diving. And my time living in West Africa took me through some of the poorest nations on earth, and some of the poorest communities therein. I still remember Niger with deep fondness.

Chad remains the most unpleasant environment I’ve visited- and likewise for most of those I’ve met who’ve worked there. Physically harsh- beautiful in its own way- the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees sheltering in the desert was devastating, and the violence and hopelessness rivals anywhere I’ve visited on earth. It was a hard, hard place. I’d go back though- if for no other reason than to see what’s changed.

All up, I’ve been to around 60 countries, most of them poor and many of them pre- or post-disaster, and routinely listed on government ‘Do Not Travel’ lists.

So, is there anywhere I wouldn’t go?

Well, don’t tell my wife, but, probably not. I mean, maybe I’d pick my timing. I wouldn’t be so keen to visit Karachi today (I was there a few years ago), and there are certain slums in Nairobi I’d be steering clear of for the next few days, just as a precaution.

But sometimes people ask me is there anywhere I have no interest in going, and there is a place that typically comes in at the bottom of my wish-list. It’s even a place that I had the opportunity to visit, and actively chose not to (probably the only such time I’ve done-so in my life). And I realise in saying this, I’ll undoubtedly upset a lot of people. Not least because the residents of this nation make up one in seven Africans, and I don’t doubt some of them routinely read this blog.

Nigeria.

Let me tell you why. And then, before you lynch me, let me tell you why I recognize that this is unfair.

Why Nigeria? It’s not that I wouldn’t go there, or even that I can’t recognize that there would be some lovely things about it. It’s just that there are enough things stacked against it that don’t make it an attractive option.

Nigeria has sadly got a terrible reputation when it comes to crime. Friends and contacts who have travelled through Lagos speak of the scams and the urban crime, which traditionally starts before you leave the airport. Political corruption is rife, as is corruption in the police force. There’s extensive poverty and inequality (nothing unique to Nigeria given the places I visit), and simmering tension, both between north and south, and within communities.

Boko Haram, a militant Islamic group, along with other similar groups, are carrying out attacks on government infrastructure, churches, civilians, and foreigners (including, allegedly, the abduction of a French family from northern Cameroun ten days ago). Meanwhile, pirates operate off the southern coast, targeting shipping, and seperatist rebels operate in the Niger Delta, targeting foreign oil interests.

Even some Nigerians I know hesitate to go home. A former colleague, who was from the south of Nigeria, would travel by bus from the northern border to get home to see her family, and was routinely held up and robbed on the journey home. The organization I used to work for had opened an office there briefly, and was forced to close it due to the strong corruption in the place.

Now, let me be clear. No one of these things is unique to Nigeria. Nor do I want to suggest that Nigeria is a universally awful place. In fact it isn’t. For every person I know who’s had a negative experience in Nigeria, I know several others who have loved it- people who have travelled, who have been there for short missions or service trips, people who have lived there and brought up children, both Nigerians and foreigners.

There are some physically beautiful places, and many, many beautiful places.

I have recently finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran War of the 1960s. It is an achingly beautiful story, stunningly written, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me interested in visiting, that my attitude didn’t soften. It should also be required reading for any students of modern African history, given that it addresses one of the most important historical events in one of the most important nations in Africa, which still has echoes in today’s politics.

There are many, many fascinating places in the world, and I don’t doubt for a moment that with the right information, the right contacts, knowing where to go, a trip to Nigeria would be fascinating, beautiful, inspiring. But for me, with the long (long long) list of places I want to see, and go back to, balanced against the hassle of getting to and around those places, Nigeria just doesn’t yet make it into the positive balance. It remains somewhere around the bottom of my list.

When I was living in Maradi, a grubby town on the edge of the Sahara about 50km north of the Nigerian border, an Ivorian friend of mine suggested we take the weekend off and go down to visit Nigeria. I’ve never yet turned down an opportunity to stamp my passport. But my friend had shared just a few evenings before a long story about how as a young man he had been extensively robbed in Nigeria, and I remember looking at him and saying, “Why would I want to do that? No thanks!”

To this day it remains the only time I’ve turned down a chance to cross a border.

To my Nigerian readers, and anybody else who has a soft spot for that country, I welcome your feedback as to what you love about Nigeria, and how my appraisal is utterly unfair and misplaced. Let me know below!

All photography my own.

While trolling through my blog archives I found a bunch of posts which I wrote months (in some cases, like this one, years) ago, and never got around to publishing. So I might drop a few of them onto the site from time to time. This one was originally written in September 2010, when I was deployed managing an emergency response program in Niger, and had spent a few days with a TV news team filming a couple of pieces. I thought it would be good to share. Seeing as I wrote it and all.

-MA

If I were to want to tell you about my week filming with a foreign media team and wanted to use pseudonyms, I might flippantly call my reporter ‘Mike’ and my cameraman ‘Cam’.

In a twist of truth being at least as amusing as fiction (and frequently far weirder)’ these are actually their real names. ‘Mike’ is correspondent Mike McRoberts, and ‘Cam’ is news cameraman Cameron Williams, both of TVNZ in New Zealand. They’ve been here in Niger putting together some pieces about the current emergency, and about aid workers, and I’ve had the privilege of keeping them company for the last four days while we’ve bounced around the central Nigerien countryside.

(Here, of course, ‘bouncing’ is not simply a euphemistic reference to the extent to which we travelled across the far reaches of rural Maradi, but has a visceral tangibility best experienced in the back seat of our Land Cruiser troop carrier…)

Over the years I’ve found that the professions of aid work and international journalism (particularly war journalism) tend to attract similar personalities (albeit with certain key differences as well). The contexts and activities to which we’re drawn are similar, the situations we put ourselves into providing a similar kick to the system. They’re high-stress jobs on which driven people with an experientialist bent tend to thrive. They’re drawn by the opportunity to make unique contributions in unique locations, and the added risk factor is often an appeal.

Mike and Cam both fit that bill, and the rugged and frequently confronting context of Niger, the world’s poorest country and in the depths of a tragic nutrition crisis, seemed to excite rather than daunt them. I felt quickly comfortable with them. They were personalities I could identify with. The war-stories they shared were like those I’ve shared with dozens of relief colleagues in bars the world over. And to top it all off, they were consummate professionals.

I’ve dealt with the media a fair bit over the years now. Most of it has been more remote- phone interviews from garbage-strewn streets in central Niger and hotel rooms in Colombo jump to mind. Around the time of the Haiti earthquake I also did a few TV interviews with the Australian press, including a particularly daunting live appearance on a daytime chat show, which I have no desire to repeat. So the chance to watch a couple of experienced hands put together some foreign correspondent pieces was a chance to observe the process from both sides of the camera lens- something which as a photographer I found fascinating.

Mike and Cam were making a couple of news slots, as well as a longer in-depth piece about aid workers, and were in-country for about 5 days. I, with a couple of our media staff, accompanied them to the field, and took the opportunity to combine the story-gathering work with an assessment of how our emergency programs are functioning in the bush.

Reporting on these situations is always a challenge. Article 10 of the Red Cross Code of Conduct insists that in their communications material they present beneficiaries as survivors with dignity, not helpless victims. Media has its own internal guidelines- driven mostly by the integrity of the individual reporters and producers (and I’m happy to say that Mike defines himself as a Humanitarian first, a journalist second). Just like NGOs are wanting to have an emotional impact to encourage people to donate, the media wants to have an emotional impact to encourage people to watch the show or buy the edition. This can lend itself to a tendency to focus on the shocking, at the expense of balance and dignity.

It wasn’t hard to find shocking stories, of course. We were all particularly struck by the plight of a 9-month old boy who weighed roughly what Mike’s own son had weighed at birth, with skeletal limbs and a bulbous head. We spent time returning some women to their village who had walked more than 30km that morning to be at the distribution site. But so too they focused on the positive- the children whose weight can be seen improving over several weeks of treatment, the agricultural work helping farmers diversify their income and food intake, the schools offering children who have fallen through the cracks of the educational system a second chance at building a future for themselves.

I enjoyed watching Cam at work. Like me, he’s a student of light and form, and he’s at the top of his game (shortlisted as he’s been for a cameraman of the year award in New Zealand). He took great care not just composing his frames, but also ensuring that the light worked for the image he wanted to capture. I speak from personal experience when I say this is no mean feat in the Sahel. Sunlight during the middle of the day is harsh and washes out features, burns out backgrounds, and casts unsightly shadows. During the magic hours of dawn and dusk, when the light is soft and warm and beautiful, the angles change rapidly as the sun moves quicker in the tropics, presenting unique challenges for a documentary attempting to capture some stability in the light.

Like photography, putting together a piece for camera is a blend of science and art. We spent time finding locations and sometimes having to reshoot when circumstances undermined the quality of the work we were doing (one such instance involved a generator ten feet from where I sat giving an interview which, 20 minutes into the piece, decided to roar to life after the main power-grid failed; it took us an hour to find another location, and we had to restart the whole thing from scratch).

The visit captured yet another aspect of why aid work is a fascinating profession to be involved in. I doubt I could have had the experience of being so intimately involved with the creation of current affairs news in many other professions, but aid allows you to cross a lot of different paths. It was an enjoyable learning and fun to be a part of. But most of all, like so often happens in overseas postings, it was just a great opportunity to meet a couple of really good guys, share some fun, unique experiences, and more than one hearty belly-laugh with guys that get it.

Mike, Cam, thanks for good times on the road.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

A couple of months back now, I wrote a piece on Long Distance Relationships from the perspective of an aid worker, and the way that my family and I deal with the challenges that arise. It seemed to stimulate a fair amount of conversation- not least of all with my wife, MadamInsideOut. Because her experience of this is different to my own, I asked if she would share some of her thoughts and experiences on what it’s like to be in an LDR with an aid worker, when she has to stay home and look after our eight-year-old by herself.

M.I.O. wrote this as I was on my way back home for a visit. At the time of her writing this (Valentine’s Day), I had been out of Australia for 3 months- 96 consecutive days, during which time I had seen my wife just 10 of those days, and my eight-year-old stepdaughter precisely none. In fact, with our current schedule, I’d been at home less than 5 weeks in 5 months. We’re really getting a workout in the LDR stakes at the moment.

Without further ado, here’s what my brave and lovely wife has to say about this all.

Incidentally, it is very nice to be home for a bit.

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

I put my husband on a plane to Ethiopia over thirteen weeks ago. This is our longest stint apart yet, never ever to be repeated. He has missed our second wedding anniversary, Christmas, the new year, his birthday, the birthdays of most of his family and the Mayan End of the World. (This was the sort of event I would have really liked my husband around for, as you may have gathered, he is handy in a disaster.) He arrives back the day after Valentines Day. So we miss that too. Yes, there is a strong theme of missing here.

Sigh.

Mr Morealtitude asked me to write something on maintaining a relationship long distance from the perspective of the home-front. Ultimately, there isn’t anything unique about our general situation, as demonstrated by the 2000+ hits Mr Morealtitude’s last post generated in the first few days of its release. Long distance relationships are as ancient and common as our need to hunt, gather and go to war. Recently I read Charles Frazier’s, Cold Mountain; an achingly beautifully tale of two lonely hearts living through a separation during the American civil war. Phew. It hurt. The mutual throb of longing, the challenges for the vulnerable Ada, left to fend for herself with no food, no money, no knowledge on how to run her farm, waiting, watching the horizon. The struggles, snares and wistful yearning on the long road home from war for Inman. No way to connect. Hoping. Longing. Striving. Both finding a way, but not without significant struggle and grief. We are lightweights comparatively, but some of those feelings are universal. Despite the fact that we have more props than ever to manage separation from our loved ones, being apart is still fraught with challenges.

There is just nothing that can replace the physical presence of your dearest one.

In saying this, I actually really enjoy my own company. I’ve lived and traveled alone and my dad traveled extensively whilst I was growing up. And, while these experiences have helped in equipping me to survive our time apart, I love hanging out with my husband. I really really don’t like it when he’s gone.

As was mentioned, we find that any time apart under 2 weeks can be deemed as somewhat healthy and manageable. Beyond that, forget it. Five weeks out from sharing life with my numero uno compadre, love and life mate, we’re seriously stretched. Maintaining contact with Morealtitude at odd hours of day or writing lengthy emails gets difficult to fit in with the demands of doing everything. A disconnect sets in. My legs officially turn to jelly from exhaustion. All the meals in the freezer mysteriously disappear. My old friend, adrenaline abandons me and I crumple into a weary little shell of a person, rather than the otherwise required ‘Mama Extraordinaire’ persona.

I was a solo parent for 4.5 years, so I thought I would take slipping back into this over-functioning space on occasion in my stride. Not so. The issue being that as a family we establish a healthy rhythm and interdependence with each-other, and when MoreAltitude boards a plane, we wave goodbye to both him and our rhythm. I handle the initial shift with relative ease, however our daughter does not. Suffice to say, having children and needing to maintain a long distance relationship makes things much trickier to manage. Morealtitude and I never had the luxury of courting each other without the additional needs of a little person in the mix, so I can only speak from this perspective.

I must say, I have great admiration for my own mother, as she brought up four children, whilst my dad travelled regularly, loving (and hating) his various international adventures. My Mum was the stabilizing influence in our family. I credit her with any semblance of sanity or consistency I may possess as an adult. It has also become very clear to me that she played this irreplaceable supportive role to my dad’s travel at great cost to herself.

However, there was also a cost for my dad. In order to provide for us, he missed out on milestones and cuddles and the comfort of home cooked meals with his family around him. He slept poorly on lumpy pillows, in stark hotel rooms or with strangers and had to power on, despite a weekly scratchy phone call with his wife saying she had no money for groceries or that the children were sick. Not being able to physically be there for your family in a crisis is a very frustrating, even heartbreaking thing for a functioning loving adult to deal with. Dad always came through though. Always. He was ultimately motivated by his love for his family.

My husband also has such noble motivations- although there are some serious questions emerging around the reality of continuing this line of work with the, at times, conflicting needs of a family. He is an amazing person and a wonderful husband. He puts us at the centre of everything he does. He is generous and caring and wise beyond his years in knowing how to nurture a family. His advice around maintaining long distance relationships is fabulous. He has taught me a lot. He is a brilliant communicator and despite whatever stresses he may be experiencing whilst in the field, he has an excellent ability to be present and understanding of whatever issues are occurring for me a million miles across the oceans. He still manages to be right there in spirit. Many times, I have felt the challenges on my side of the world are petty or mundane compared to fighting poverty or implementing medicine and food distributions. But Morealtitude is always genuinely interested, appreciative and validating of my experiences and will indulge them more so than I will let myself. This is marvelously helpful. I imagine it would be very easy to get resentful or feel insignificant if he could not do this. After all, challenges are challenges, no matter where you experience them.

And there are genuine challenges with being the one left behind. It can be difficult not to feel as though you are missing out on the adventure. Difficult at times not to detect pangs of resentment, when your life resembles your own version of the set of Groundhog Day. Particularly between the hours of 5-9pm when dinner needs cooking, the kid gets whiney and wants entertaining and feeding and attention and washing and, and, and. And there’s just you with your two hands, one in the sink, the other manning the stove; probably an additional foot artfully applying a band-aid. It becomes exasperating when your kid refuses to sleep alone for the 95th night in a row, but you know they will immediately right themselves upon your partner’s return. Doing those evening stretches alone night after night can be overwhelming and a more than a little lonely. I’m talking specifically about a loneliness that can only be quieted with adult company. That variety of loneliness tends to surface during those marathon evenings, or when an important decision just has to be made without the consultation or inclusion of your humanitarian husband who is in a 6 hour meeting with the United Nations several continents away. A very real exhaustion can set in from doing everything solo, where you had a partnership before.

I try and offset this by using the opportunity to invest more into my family and friendships. I find it easier to do this in summer than in the hibernation months of winter. I’ve been asking myself to watch that I’m not completely holding together all of the relationships my husband is absent from and unable to fully invest in, although my being anchored at home inadvertently maintains a connection and may help his return home to be a little more seamless. That is okay with me, but I have seen this dynamic become unhealthy when the traveling partner loses meaningful connection socially at home. I think this is a strong reason for jobs requiring extensive travel to have an expiry date.

As time wears on, daily details can really get swallowed up by the miles between us. Details of which we would normally share or witness together can be vaporized by opposing schedules and time zones. We have to work hard to keep the intimacy from flailing – which we absolutely do.

So, you might ask, how exactly does one keep healthily connected to their crusading globe trotter and keep the home fires burning without getting resentful? A few thoughts…

• Empathy: I’ve covered this one a fair bit already. Empathising with what your significant other is experiencing is profoundly important in managing your relationship long-distance. Our communication centers around this. Honestly expressing, listening to, connecting with and validating each of the others experiences is vital. That is not to say that we don’t sometimes talk utter nonsense and laugh and joke. We just talk – or write. For the most part, words are really all we have. We keep building shared experiences this way. We do this on a daily basis. If I ever start feeling sorry for myself or resentful of the distance, I just think about the hard stuff my other half is experiencing and what he is sacrificing. And, if he is enjoying himself, I am grateful, because I like him and I want him to be happy. That usually sorts me out. We are in the same boat. We’re just at opposite ends of a very very large canoe. Oh and if you are the one away, try not to post your experiences on facebook before you have had a chance to tell your partner what has happened. I’m talking specifically about pictures and captions like this, Morealtitude:
  

  Facebook caption accompanying the original posting of this photo: “For those who noted my comments about flying in and out of Somalia on a jet with a shattered windshield, THIS is what I was referring to. Yes, at 22,000 feet. Thank you, UNHAS.”

• Be Mature: Own your reactions. Ultimately your responses to the separation are only in your control. Do what you need to do to look after yourself. This might mean seeking extra support from family, friends or professionals. In doing this, look after your partner as well. Express your feelings, but don’t hurl them at your loved one as something they need to fix. Try not to blame or punish your partner or freeze them out while they are miles away – or in the same room for that matter. That stuff is really unfair and destructive.

• Be Deliberately Active: Know what you need to get through, make plans, so you don’t slump into sad-feels and find it all too much. I like filling my house with people – our daughter is happiest when surrounded by energy, I also like to cook, so I try and hook up lots of dinners and visits in advance. We had a lovely friend staying with us this time and her company made a world of difference. Take the empty spaces and fill them with other things. Things you like. Get out. Exercise. See friends. Meet people. See a show. Do the art gallery. Be spontaneous. Take the kids to eat ice-cream on the beach. Then keep doing that stuff when your other half gets back, but include them. It’s a nice way to bust out of a rut and experience your hometown anew.

• Be Flexible: Go with the flow. Some days, connection may not be possible. It just is. Save up your stories for when it happens. Similarly many of the routines that we establish with Morealtitude home just don’t work when he is gone, so we shake them up, mix them around. Things are a lot more fluid, including meals and bedtime. Our daughter sleeps in with me at nights. It drives me crazy, but not as crazy as having her scream and whimper half the night for weeks on end because she is scared and she misses her step-dad. I pick my battles.

• Sleep: Obviously this is a corner stone of sanity. However, I have somehow found myself becoming a terrible sleeper when Morealtitude is away. When he is gone, I avoid bed because I am wired and anxious and struggle to wind down. I’ve found a few useful tools. These include completing a relaxation meditation – free from the internet- and, my most recent find, audio books. These are calming, they slow my thoughts down and stimulate my imagination in a healthy way. The more I sleep, the better I cope. It’s not rocket science, but it gets mixed up when you’re apart and you need strategies to help make it happen.

• Visit: If you can make it happen, it is incredibly useful to get out to the field and take part in your partner’s world. Obviously it is not possible on most trips. It has taken us over 3 years to make this happen with all the various pieces in play. Recently I visited Morealtitude in Ethiopia. The first hand insight I gleaned from this trip into his work and all of the various complexities he faces was invaluable. It has made a HUGE difference, as it has helped me gain a more balanced perspective of humanitarian work and our situation on the whole. I connected with my husband’s daily realities with all of my senses. In that 10 day trip, I witnessed the impact my husband was having on huge programs – which made the struggle of the previous 8 weeks worthwhile. I also saw the nuances of the aid industry. The questions. The two steps forward, three steps backward daily dance of humanitarian work. I ditched my first world guilt, as I realised that human suffering is human suffering, no matter where it occurs – this sounds obvious, but it was an important perspective shift for me. Just, if you can, DO IT!! 

What about when they get back?

Of course you are beside yourself with excitement and relief to have them back. But, it can be a bit weird and take a bit of adjusting to. You’ve just spent the last X amount of weeks figuring out your own systems and making it all hang together without your partner and suddenly they are back ready to slot into all those spaces you’ve managed to fill. The systems you had together have been remodeled. I have friends who need to spend a couple of days in a stand-off-ish space until they readjust, as they feel a sort of resentment at having been ‘abandoned’. I personally don’t experience this, but I think it’s very understandable. My parents used to have a ripper fight after every trip. That is not our style of re-entry, but it shows it can be turbulent.

It just takes a few days to reconnect properly, there is probably jet lag and fatigue in the mix. We just try and be gentle and patient with each-other. And, yep, you guessed it. We keep communicating. The shift to having more modes of communication other than words at our disposal, is um, advantageous. We can give gifts, we can do stuff for and with each-other, we can say how much we appreciate what the other has done for us whilst we’ve been apart (recommended) and we can touch (highly recommended).

Dagnabit. It is so much better to have the full suite of expression available; to physically share spaces, dreams, doldrums, laughter and life.

So tell me, why do we do this apart thing again?