The beauty of interruptions

Note: I wrote this post a few weeks back, but didn't get around to publishing it till now.

------

I am startled awake sometime around 5:30 because its started to rain. Its not a hard rain, but enough that I'm feeling it (I've taken to sleeping outside on an army cot—everyone else snores too loudly). Its still dark so I decide not to get up. I doze off again, but about 20 minutes later it appears as though the sky has opened up on me. Not true: the housekeeper is filling the cistern on the roof and it's overflowing into the courtyard like a waterfall. I jump out of my mosquito net and look around scratching my head: why don't they just put a bobbing cut-off switch on it? I realize its not stopping and start running to tell someone before the volunteer medical teams, now rustling around in their tents, are swept away by a tsunami. The housekeeper and I round a blind corner in the kitchen at the same moment and run smack into each other. No coffee yet, but I'm certainly awake.

Back at my cot I catch some of the falling water in my hands and wash my face. From the kitchen I grab a mug of espresso and stir in some non-dairy creamer (still slowly coming to terms with it). I pause and am reminded to smile by the sun, now rising over a distant mountain and peering through the kitchen window. Its a beautiful sight, but I can't help resent it; soon it'll be over 30 degrees and I'll be sweating like a... well, like a blan en Ayiti.

I read some emails for a bit—then I realize I am supposed to be putting together a spreadsheet of our distribution sites—I've left a little yellow sticky note on my chair (didn't work, I simply sat on it). My desk isn't really a desk, its a side table you'd put next to a sofa. It fits exactly two laptops—my mac and a PC I stole because I needed to run GIS software (yes, I know I could just run it on Parallels but I don't have time to whatever-whatever). It takes me 35 minutes to put together the spreadsheet because people keep coming in to talk. Plus, one of the new vehicles has a car alarm and its been going off for 5 minutes as they try to figure out how to turn it off. Suddenly I'm enraged (its about 30 feet from my office window) and storm out there intending to pop the hood and disconnect the battery. But, I get interrupted by another question. Actually, come to think of it, a lot of aidwork is just one successive interruption after another. You rarely accomplish what you intend—at least not in a linear order. And though I haven't quite pieced the theory together yet, I think there's something strangely beautiful and beneficial about interruptions.

Anyways, at 7:15 we have a formal team meeting which I am invariably late to even though it occurs just down in the courtyard. I always have an excuse, but the truth is that my ego dislikes meetings when I'm not in control of them.

I intend to leave the office by 7:45 to make an 8:30 meeting but am held up by more questions about this and that. There's always so much confusion in the morning, its staggering. The trick is to just remove yourself from most decisions—the important ones will still find you. Otherwise, people will always defer to you and no one will take a risk and grow from it. Another trick I use is to always go in three ways at once, intentionally. Its a way to hedge your bets against stalling when you run into a hurdle or two (or ten). This way, you should be able to accomplish at least one major thing out of the three you attempted.

Finally I get a chance to change into long pants and a collared shirt (they're the same I wore the day before—will anyone notice?) and I'm out the door. Oh... I did eat a boiled egg somewhere along the way—a little salt and pepper, marvelous.

Traffic is horrible. I sit in gridlock for an hour, spending most of the time reading a lesson's learned document by ALNAP on post-earthquake relief and recovery. It fascinates me mostly because its so clearly written and immensely informative and yet no one seems to know about it (I didn't either till a colleague handed it to me). I am on the one hand annoyed that I'll be late—I should have known, its my stupid mistake for not leaving earlier. But on the other hand I enjoy just sitting there, helpless to do anything about it, and totally content to just sit and be still. I take and make a few phone calls, but other than that I zone everything out.

I arrive at the UN base for the last half of the cluster meeting. The tent is crammed full of people. A few are aidworkers actually doing aidwork. But the majority are people who for some reason felt it right and proper to fly themselves into Haiti and attend these meetings. They have all sorts of important sounding titles composed of various combinations of the words Disaster, Emergency, Crisis, Rapid, Response, Relief, Humanitarian, Team, Unit, Group. And they always have witty NGO names abusing the proper use of numbers, like Right2Life and Unite4Life. After the meetings they're outside scratching their heads, frustrated at the UN, frustrated at the big NGOs, frustrated at the system,. The real reason they are frustrated is because they are—to speak bluntly—useless. They're disaster tourists, performing the penultimate rubber-neck of all: an earthquake. (Editors note: four fingers pointing back at me; we're all disaster tourists to some extent.) Let me end this tirade with the only three reasons to be in-country as an aidworker following a major disaster: 1. You were working in that country prior to the earthquake—or have significant experience there; 2. You (or your agency) have oodles of money; 3. You have significant experience in post-disaster response (ie., you know what you're doing). Enough about that.

Afterward outside the tent the meeting chair cuts me off to inform me in an overly curt manner that he is leaving the country and would rather not field my question—that I should find the Red Cross who are taking over as the new cluster lead. Its not what he said, its how he said it. I can't stand self-important people like him. Good for you, buddy, go home and show your pictures to your friends.

I check my email on my iPhone to make sure the spreadsheet was received—the UN provides free wifi so long as you know which exact spot on the base to stand in order to receive the signal. My driver's been kicked out of the base cause there's not enough parking. It takes me 5 minutes just to get him on the phone and find out where he is. Then we're back in traffic for the trip home. I'm tempted to say the meeting was a complete waste of time, but I did get a tiny piece of info that may prove significant down the road. Its too soon to tell, so why bother getting all upset?

Back at our office I sit down with a newly hired administrative assistant to train her in our voucher system. Prior to distributions we educate community leaders on how to create beneficiary lists based on need & vulnerability. Then we distribute vouchers to those people based on the lists the community leaders have provided. Its not a perfect check and balance but it works for now. The next morning the beneficiaries redeem the voucher at a pre-selected distribution point. Each family receives a tarp, hygiene kit and jerry can.

I made the vouchers on my laptop and printed them out on a tiny little travel printer—all 1500 of them. (No, no, it was not fun at all actually. But yes, I am proud of them.) They look like business cards actually, with our logo minus the contact info, and bar code that is useless. I just put it there to make the card look more official, and deter photocopied fakes (we also switch card colours every few days for this reason). Underneath the barcode is the phrase (in Creole): “let's work together to build back a better Haiti”--a nice little touch I think.

Anyways, going through the returned cards I discover there's a problem. Some people have written their names on them, which means they are spoiled and I have to rip them up into tiny little pieces (I don't trust anyone) and make new ones to replace them. Its an interruption in the system I hadn't counted on, and I'm annoyed at the wasted time. With each spoiled voucher I get more and more irritated, and I'm certain she senses my mounting annoyance. Perhaps that's why she spoke up: “Pour eux, ces cartes sont précieuses.” I'm stopped in my tracks; she's right, this card I hold in my hand is a precious thing if you've just survived an earthquake and are sleeping in the street. Suddenly I feel overcome with emotion. I swallow hard and take a moment to read some of the names: Dorien Renaud Laflippe. Marie-Martine Bernadette. Variola Redaline Milca. The names scream at me to be known more than just a number on a list. The careful penmanship, the full, complete spelling—its a cry for dignity. And here I was cursing them for interrupting my system, here I was tearing their dignity to pieces.

I bite my lip while she carries on sifting through the pile. I don't know yet how this attitude has negatively affected my relief work, but I'm certain it has, be it ever so subtly. It is a lesson I already knew, but sometimes need reminding: aidwork is first and foremost about the life of each survivor, as an individual. Allow them to become a faceless mass and you're soon drifting into an world of cynicism. I will have accomplished very little—perhaps even nothing to me—if after so many months here all I've done is simply give stuff out.

I take a few deep breaths (I hate to cry in front of staff), silently repent, and carefully slide a couple of the spoiled cards into my wallet.


PS – Its 2005 and I'm back in Darfur during a very long dry season. Through blood and sweat (and diarrhea), colleagues and I have built up a food security program that is feeding literally tens of thousands of people, in villages and camps spread across hundreds of kilometers. For all that effort, I feel numb; I need to go home. One night during my last week in Nayala a local tailor approaches me outside our compound. Its dark, but I can see he's as poor as the dirt I pee on. He asks me for my petzl headlamp because (quite rightly) he reasons it will allow him to work later into the evening. I lose it and proceed to lecture him for 10 minutes on the economics of entitlement: “nothing in life comes free” I finally end with. I'm sweating now and stiff-lipped, while he digs around in his pocket. I roll my eyes in frustration—what next? Then, out of these leathery hands the man produces the oldest, dirtiest piece of paper I've ever seen. I hold it up to the light, and my heart is pierced. I slide off the headlamp and hand it to him, along with his ripped and tattered five dollar bill, each tear carefully sewn back together with needle and thread.