The Aid Worker

She’d never known herself to react like this before. Her mother used to say that there was no force on Earth that would disrupt her daughter’s placid temperament. She’d always had a calm, sane view of things, faced uncertainty and adversity with resolute calm. It was instinctive to her, inherent in her demeanour, something that made people in distress just naturally sense that, and turn to her for comfort and direction.

Where others panicked, she drew on her resources to overcome irrationality and face whatever would come. Simply put, she was rarely fazed by circumstances she felt she could control, and she couldn’t imagine circumstances occurring that she might not perhaps be able to control, but at the very least try to circumvent, or step aside from.

But here, suddenly, she presented to herself as a lump of cringing fear. She was able to keep her fear at a controllable level during the day. No one, looking at her serene visage, particularly in view of her legendary past performance under less-than-ideal conditions, and her well-known ability to step aside from disaster, and deal with it, might imagine her inner turmoil.

According to her fraternal twin, she was just the kind of person who couldn’t say “no”, even - especially - to her own misconceived notions of offering herself as a mediator, a moderator, an interlocutor in places, at times, throughout events that more thoughtful heads would consider twice about involving themselves in.

She was a victim of her own lack of introspection, her inability to view situations in the round, to conclude that her intervention would be useless. In short, he said directly to her, with his cynical voice making no attempt to conceal his contempt for his hapless sister, she was endowed with too little practical sense and too much unwarranted pride.

She was gradually coming around to his perception. But not entirely. Yes, she had her pride, but she had earned the right to be proud of what she had accomplished. But he, never prepared to allow her a sense of satisfaction, would challenge that. Accomplish? What do you fantasize that you’ve accomplished?

“I’ve given people without hope reason to have hope for their futures”, she defended herself.

“Did you, did you now?” His dark face glaring at her, he turned her premise right around, and convicted her, personally, of damaging peoples’ psyches by offering them the kind of hope she had no right to deliver.

“Who do you think you are, Mother Teresa? You give people a nice little speech, handily interpreted by someone paid to do that, and how do you know they’re getting the essence of what you’re saying? You give them a little bit of food, water, pat them on the shoulder, tell them things will get better. And they won’t, not for those people. You do that, and then you withdraw, tell yourself you’ve done something positively spectacular. You can return from where you came, but those people live with the incessant fear of death through starvation or medical neglect or wars they want no part of. What’ve you done in a really practical sense? They have no reason to hope, reality surrounds them, drains them of everything, including hope, and here you come with your Western ideals and ideas, drop by for tea they cannot afford, and promise what you’ve no right to promise.”

“No, it isn’t like that at all! You don’t understand, you’ve never been out there, you don’t know what it’s like, how a little bit of empathy can help people survive impossible situations!”

“Empathy is it? You’re the least likely candidate for delivering compassion to others. Your empathy is a cold contrivance, you’re utterly devoid of feeling for others. Your personality is cold, detached, removed from feelings for other human beings. Do you have any close emotional ties to anyone, anyone at all? You can fool the outside world, even yourself, but not me. I know you too well. You’re the very model of human fallibility.”

“But at least I try! I don’t pack myself into a shrivelled little ball of self-pity. I go out there in difficult places, dangerous places, and try to ease the lives of other people! That’s making use of my inheritance as a human being. I feel responsible for others, not just for myself. I do what I can!”

Finally, recognizing how distraught she’d become as a result of his prodding, he gave way to sympathy, hugged her, and told her that if that was the way she derived pleasure and satisfaction from life, by deluding herself, that was her business. Just get on with your life, if that’s what you want, he’d said, as they parted.

And she did, she’d done just that. And regretted their estrangement, for after that she no longer had any wish to contact him, to see him, to discuss anything further with him. He just did not understand; a lost cause.

She even, when their mother finally died after a long illness, begged off the funeral, since she was so deeply involved in her charitable humanitarian workload and her distance and inability to secure passage at that particular time made it unlikely she could, even in such an extreme emergency as that, attend. She knew she wouldn’t be missed, in any event.

It wouldn’t be the first, nor the last time that she would have provided material her relatives, near and far, relished to be scandalized about. As far as they were concerned, she was merely being true to form. True to form, what was that, exactly? Mapping out a scheme for her life-work and carefully tending to it? Her reputation, where it mattered to her, in the humanitarian-relief community, was intact.

She had faith in herself, in her mission. She knew she wasn’t the smug, self-righteous, superior creature her brother labelled her. Her colleagues knew that, it was made amply clear by their interaction with her, their respect for the quality of her work, her dedication to their common cause. Her superiors knew that, it was why she was entrusted with work requiring a high degree of personal care for one’s safety, along with exquisite timing, an ability to interact with those unfortunates whose need they represented. She had nothing, nothing whatever, to apologize for. She had her reputation, hard won, and meant to keep it intact.

She tried to be as resilient as possible when attempting to view the work of others, less skilled, less devoted than she was, and to view their little failures not with contempt but with a detached critique which she kept to herself. Their mistakes were her lessons. She would proceed with caution and delicacy where they had failed through brash assurance.

There was a kind of prestige attached to her profession, she knew that well. Respect from the world at large for the cadre of professionals whose mission it was to alleviate the plight of those whose lives were unsecured through famine, war, political intrigue, totalitarian governments, oppressive regimes that neglected their people in the interests of furthering themselves financially. She knew the ins and outs of government malfeasance, the pocketing of funds meant to aid and assist a population, feathering the nests of conscienceless politicians.

She knew also that in some peoples’ minds the work of her profession was viewed as a business, a growing, and profitable business, holding the conscience of the world responsible for horrible events, both natural catastrophes and man-made disasters imperilling the lives of millions, to keep funding them and their indispensable humanitarian work.

She knew some of those with whom she worked weren’t quite dedicated to their profession as humanitarians first, employees of aid organizations second. For them it was the salary, the prestige, the travel, the feelings of superiority over those poor huddling masses of frightened, starving, ill people that drew them. She was of the other variety, those who truly cared, who did their best to alleviate that suffering. This was the way she comforted herself in her worst hours. And lately there was a surfeit of those hours.

She’d had her own share of frightening occurrences, had been abducted twice in the space of a decade, by those considering themselves to be political rebels, people who had, without thinking twice, dispatched her driver and her bodyguard - mercilessly killing them, while holding her for ransom. She hadn’t panicked, she had remained calm, even when she was shackled, allowed to walk outside the huts she was kept in for brief two-minute periods twice a day, given foul-tasting gruel to maintain herself, waiting for the ransom to be paid for her release. She had, in fact, empathized with her captors; their plight too was obvious. Later, it occurred to her that she had fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome.

But they hadn’t assaulted her physically, threatened her, simply kept her prisoner until they received the cash transfer they had demanded. She had to remind herself that they had cold-bloodedly murdered her driver, her interpreter. And when she did, she shuddered convulsively, newly fearful of their casual disregard of the value of human life. She could have been raped, repeatedly. She hadn’t been. She was too valuable for what she represented.

She knew though, what life was like for women there, the women of the clans and the tribes, and their children. Tormented by heritage and custom, they had no idea of what in other places would constitute their basic human rights. Within their normal society they had no rights; they were regarded as chattel and treated as such. Little girls underwent disfigurement and worse, with savage clitoral surgery. Whose results sometimes left them incontinent, distasteful in their plight to the men who might claim them.

But here, where she ministered during the day to women clustered in refugee camps, while the factional wars continued, and where she and others like her tried to help where and when they could, and to teach some basic methods of self-help and sanitation, it was like trying to count the individual grains of sand on a beach, an impossible task. How to adequately teach the importance of sanitation with scant water available? How to instruct women on how to protect themselves when their frail dissent meant nothing against brute force? Their basic ministrations of first aid when the professionalism of doctors, well-equipped hospitals, medications were unavailable spoke to the level of their patch-work humanitarian aid.

When they withdrew from the camps at night to the safety of their protected compounds on the outskirts of the city, they knew that the women and girls were vulnerable to repeated rapes. They, she and her colleagues, had eventually talked the mothers of young girls into permitting them to march for miles under the cover of early dusk, to sleep over on the ground of the protected compound, to ensure they weren’t victimized, over and over and over.

She tried to imagine how she might herself react if she had been born into that miserable, primitive social milieu, how she would manage, how she might protect herself, and from what she knew were real life experiences viewed from the outside, from her perch of safety, she knew she would be helpless. And she would be utterly without hope. She could only wonder, mystified, at the placid calm of the women when they were timorously attentive to the quiet instructions they heard. And she recoiled within every time she attempted to help, to instill confidence, when she had none herself. She knew their inner turmoil, despite their surface calm.

She found herself submitting at night, when she should be peacefully sleeping, to episodes of clinical depression. And fought against it, knowing that if she allowed depression and the suicidal tendencies that often accompanied it, that surrender would render her work there useless. She had, after all, fought to be dispatched into this hellhole. She had insisted. She had railed against the injustice of her supervisor claiming she had been involved in too many of these situations, leaving her less capable of coping.

Wrong! She had shrieked. She was strong, committed. Her knowledge and experience were indispensable, and she meant to continue going into those places that haunted her. And there she was, once again, in those places that haunted her. Where nightmares she suffered back home, safe in her own little apartment, enveloped and overwhelmed her, and dragged her into a purgatory she knew hardly even approximated what those women and children lived.

But those were merely nightmares. Figments of her overwrought imagination. Perhaps true to life for the indigent and homeless women and children she ministered to, but never personally had she ever come close to suffering as they had. And suddenly, in her night-time fantasies she was no longer herself. Transformed into a dark-skinned, fearful yet enduring female whose thought processes were unlike any she had herself entertained, she did not recognize what had become of her.

And, when, in the morning, a concerned colleague knocked at her door, finding no response, the door was almost destroyed in the attempt to reach her. Her family back home was advised that death had occurred due to natural causes. A heart attack, they said. A dreadful pity, they said, in one so young. So committed to others' well being.