Ordinary Stories of (Un)Ordinary Lives

Imagine this: you’re a young boy, in your family’s kitchen, making coffee and realize you’re out of sugar. You step out the door to quickly borrow some from the neighboring family nextdoor…

You walk up to the front door, but it’s ajar so, knowing the family a little, you step in. You walk down the hall slowly, and hear rustling on the right, towards the living room. Looking inside, you see the husband fooling around with the piano teacher. You think, asshole. Walking inside you realize there’s an eerie silence, so you go to the kitchen, where you see the wife crumpled on the floor next to the garbage can. You run to her and realize she’s unconscious and not breathing. You remember CPR training from that summer camp so you begin CPR, thinking maybe you’ll save her. All of a sudden their young child walks in the kitchen, and stands there. You pause long enough to tell him to call an ambulance, and you see him do so using the kitchen phone.

Minutes go by, then more minutes. You grow tired. Your arms are in pain, your lips are completely slobbered, and there’s no change from the motionless body of the woman, although you at some point hear a couple of sharp cracks from her chest, signifying that you’ve broken her ribs. At this, her son, who’s been watching you all this time begins to cry and blubber, trying to push you away and impeding your attempts to keep her in life until the paramedics come.

You’re pissed off because you’re thinking what an asshole the husband is, what a retard the kid is, and where the hell that ambulance has gotten to.

Finally, your arms give in, and you have to stop trying. Fifteen or twenty minutes must have gone by, by now… You stand up, look around and realize you can hear sirens. Within a few seconds there’s two burly dudes who barge into the room, knock aside the child, break a chair, tread mud everywhere (it was raining, see?) and keep yelling at you ‘to get the fuck out of the way so they can do their job and why haven’t you done anything to help until now, anyway?’ They set up some fancy equipment, which you can’t even begin to comprehend, while you’re still in a painful, tired daze and one of them mumbles something about her maybe having cracked ribs.

At some point the father walks in zipping his pants, and looks around, having heard the commotion from when the paramedics came into the house from the back porch. He cuffs his son just to make the point, and asks what the hell is going on. Things go from bad to worse then, as you are studiously ignored, with no one bothering to ask you what happened, how you found the wife on the floor, where their son was, or what the father was doing. Seemingly forgotten, you get up and walk home, tasting nicotine on your mouth from the asshole’s wife’s lips.

At home, you realize you’ve missed dinner, don’t have time to do your homework, and, shocked from what’s just happened, don’t really want to hear about what your big brother’s favorite soccer team did that evening. So you go to bed and try to sleep but it’s a little hard and when you do, the dreams which you see seem to imply you’re at fault for not telling the father earlier that his wife was dying. Your sleep is unsettled and in the morning your arms ache. That morning you decide to become a paramedic, just so you can be nicer to the children you find in front of you keeping someone alive while you show up in faux-military boots and a crash-box. –The end.

Now replace the characters with the following and read the story again:
Unconscious Woman: Population in conflict/emergency
You: Humanitarian Aid
Child: International Community
Husband: Government
Paramedics: Development
Cracked ribs: Population dependence
1 CPR minute: 1 year of aid

I don’t think this is the perfect analogy but it was fun to write. I won’t explain it through again but I think you can get the main gist of it… I wrote it because I was skimming a book, which was yet another one of those who claim that humanitarian aid prolongs conflict and disasters by making them sustainable in some way. As a humanitarian (and I don’t mean in a professional sense) I believe that giving aid to those in need is a normal and logical part of the human condition. It is right and proper to give a hungry man a fish a day if you don’t have the means to teach him to fish. In my view, humanitarian support to a disaster or a conflict zone is only the in-between stage. What’s it between? It’s between the before: normalcy, peace, whatever you want to call it, and the after, when the government of the country, with support or not, begins to pick up its obligations to its citizens. When humanitarian aid seems to be sustaining a conflict, that’s only because the lack of political, financial or military means to end the situation makes the continuing provision of barely sustaining food, water, health, education services glaring in their ‘just-enoughness’ to sustain humanity in misery.

While at times this may be attributed to a congested political map or a difficult geopolitical question, other times it’s simply a matter of piping in money. The paramedics in this case, (ie: the development of a disaster-prone area, the paving of a road to create access to markets, the cleaning up of an oil spill, I don’t know, whatever) which, on its way to the scene stops to ask for directions, fuel the ambulance, make sure the house/family knows they are coming, call their mommas, etc. and when they finally get there, ask nothing from those who have been there years, act too quickly, or too slowly, or with hubris, vanity and a sort of dazed knee-jerk-ness. And yet they are angry that what? That there are still people left alive to benefit from the development? That there’s still a semblance of order, which the humanitarian aid coordination mechanisms have kept there? I don’t know and I am not sure.

What I am sure about, is that in most countries, the law protects a provider of first aid from lawsuits based on damage caused inadvertently to the victim they are trying to save/protect. If the law didn’t, no one would help. The neurosurgeon or paramedic which will see a victim 4th or 5th in line can make all the 20-20 hindsight judgments he/she wants. But the feeling of having been there first and made it alright for a bit, to the extent of your ability is humanitarian. That’s humanitarian. And that’s all right in my book. So sue me.