A Not-Boring, Quite Different Aid Worker Reading List

Let's start with a caveat, or better an admission - there are no development books on this list. Nothing against whither-aid books; I just don't think they have much to do with the way aid workers live, and work. Just a wee bit removed. Sort of like trying to learn about sex by reading a treatise on evolutionary biology.

So, nothing about bottom billions. No sweeping indictments of how aid is destroying Africa.

Instead, a more down and dirty  approach. As the man once explained: "Not to share in the passion and activity of your time is to count as not having lived.  I don't claim virtue.  I claim a low level of boredom."

To that end, five books that speak to what it's actually like to live and work in very bad places far overseas.

Dispatches, by Michael Herr - for lines like these: "So there we all were, no real villains and only a few heroes, a lot of adventurers and a lot of drudges, a lot of beautiful lunatics and a lot of normals...and somehow, out of all that, a great number of us managed to find and recognize each other." Aid workers and journalists sharing much of the same DNA, even if both groups are often loathe to admit it.

Opium Season, by Joel Hafvenstein - the best aid worker memoire I've read, about a year in southern Afghanistan. About what it's like to feel overwhelmed and overworked, about that incredible sense of doing a difficult job well, and how easily everything falls apart. (In the interests of full disclosure, Joel is a good friend. But it's still a hell of a book.)

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges - because eventually the crisis-conflict-catastrophe becomes its own attraction:

"Yet all she and her friends did that day was lament the days when they lived in fear and hunger...I knew them when they were being stonked by hundreds of shells a day, when they had no water to bathe in or to wash their clothes, when they huddled in unheated darkened apartments with plastic sheeting for windows.  But what they expressed was real.  It was the disillusionment with a sterile, futile, empty present. Peace had again exposed the void that the rush of war, of battle, had filled.  Once again they were, alone, as we all are, no longer bound by the common sense of struggle, no longer given the opportunity to be noble, heroic, no longer sure what life was about or what it meant."

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway - more a thematic choice, really; because, if nothing else, it's about the brutal truth that sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes things don't get better. We might wish differently, but wishing doesn't make it so. Also, in a similar vein, The God of Small Things.

The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot: My friend, blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed / Which is not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider / Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor / In our empty rooms.

[Photo from Dawn Endico's photostream on flickr - Creative Commons, Attribution]