This vain portrait above shows me on a fairly typical day in
Bamiyan travelling between bases. The photo was taken on a pass outside Panjâb
where we stopped to check out the impressive rock formations. They are a
striking red colour and the climbing potential is wonderful. However, there was
no time to explore further or seriously bother with the unlikely organisational
approvals that would be required to have an outing. Local community permissions
would be straightforward enough and the chance of a fall would be the biggest
risk not any turbaned men looking on with guns and a glint in their eyes.
It’s all very glamorous or so it seems (and you tell yourself) is
the impression of those you meet between contracts or on R&R from some
war-torn or other disaster zone. Back home, if you still have one after a few
years of aid work, you often become some kind of irrelevant misfit hero or
simply misunderstood depending on how well you have stayed in touch or how well
you are known. Joyful moments amid the reality of field life are more like
occasional diamonds hidden within seams of coal rather than reefs of gold.
Mostly it is all about enduring simple hardships and trying to achieve the most
basic service provision or project implementation and not go completely mental
in the process. For example, there is no firewood so we’ll all be cold because
the guy responsible has no sense of planning ahead but instead spent most of
the day, and previous weeks as the pile decreased, sitting in the early winter
sunshine keeping warm and then using up the fuel supply at night while we were
in project locations. Meanwhile we were monitoring water points, three of which
were never completed even though they had been reported as functioning prior to
last winter, which means that for a whole year families have gone without when
they should have benefitted from plentiful, clean water and thereby reduced the
incidence of waterborne diseases and improved health because they weren’t
losing nourishment to diarrhoea. Rather than tell the truth about both
circumstances there were ‘complex cultural reasons’ why they lied and didn’t do
their job properly. What this actually means is that the shame they would feel
would be too much and so to retain their “honour” they blamed others or denied
knowledge completely. And that pile of horseshit is what an aid worker deals
with every other day.
Still, in these ‘richly textured cross-cultural experiences’ there
is in fact a complexity as to the reasons why and the same guy who will lie to
your face will keep you from an offence causing faux pas ensure you are
welcomed to hang out with his mates and play cards, joke and share his social
time and space instead of retreating to a single cell room to watch a trashy TV
series you’ve seen before or stare blankly at the wall trying forlornly to
comprehend what was actually going on when you realised once again that you
were lied to and there was a massive cover up going on. And so when the scene
is stop-the-car-stunning or warm comradery embraces you in the lonely mountains,
you remember again what a massive privilege it is to be in a place like
Afghanistan and are grateful for any companionship on this journey. Yet, the
dominant themes of dislocation, frustration and isolation remain while aid
workers tend to pitch these experiences as something to be envied even as they
criticise their work, just as I do as in this attempt at disclosure. So much of
this is vanity and our deepest motivations are equally opaque.
C’est la vie humanitaire.
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