When I meet humanitarians, I usually ask them how they got there. What happened? So, when a volunteer at the Bangkok Literature Festival, an Egyptian pharmacist, told me that he was with the Red Cross, it was inevitable that I would ask the Arab why. The objective of a question might be an answer, but a question also invokes the spirits hidden in a person.
The humanitarians we usually hear from are bosses and not field workers. Mustafa Marwan is a worker, who may be found in an ambulance or aid truck in some strife-torn place. He has the look of a man who perceives the world with all his senses, who is very alert for no special reason, or maybe it is just his large eyes. He has seen death from very close. Once in Libya, a man walking in front of him was shot dead by a sniper. He has been to Gaza before, and might go again.
On his way to meet me in a cafe, Marwan got wet in the rain. By wet I mean wet in a tropical way, completely drenched, clothes clinging to him and water dripping from arms. He has a lot of hair, so there was that problem too. He walks in this way, sits across the table casually and reads the menu. As though on Wednesdays, he shows up this way at cafes. I wait to see if he is only hiding his embarrassment behind the menu, but he actually orders a dish.
The Red Cross is looking for Arabic-speakers to go into Gaza and Marwan is thinking of applying. Why would an educated Arab who can make a decent living selling aspirin and Viagra in Cairo choose to get so close to death, and other realities?
“People who join the Red Cross are either running away from something, or running towards something," he says. He is a poetic Arab; assuming there is another kind. There is an emptiness in the core of people, he says, they need to fill it with meaning. There is boredom. “Boredom is a dangerous thing." And once you have seen war, it is terrifying, horrible, “but it’s also adrenaline."
When you are inside a war, he says, you live in the present, only in the present. Many East Asian men in maroon robes have told us that we must live “in the present." This state has names like “mindfulness." Yet, the modern world is a consequence of ancient humans fleeing from that terrible state, from all that boredom. We glorify living in the present when we do not know what it is or when it’s a weekend luxury in a charlatan retreat. But in a war, Marwan says, there is no other way to be, but to live in the present. You acquire an acute focus on survival. Something about his tone suggests it is exciting, but exciting in a way that makes ‘exciting’ an inappropriate word for it. In that state, happiness comes in unexpected ways. Once in a war-torn place, “we found some mineral water bottles. We were running short of water. And the bottles made us ecstatic. I still remember how they made feel. They were just bottles of water."
So far, Marwan has described humanitarianism without once referring to it as something noble. Doesn’t he think he is better than most people? Better than me? He risks his life to take medication to people whose curse not many wish to share. Yet, Marwan frames his calling as a compulsion more than an act of goodness.
Many people are drawn to professional humanitarian activities, but most of them quit soon. What makes some people endure as humanitarians?
Marwan is reminded of what one of his bosses once said. Something about how idealism is like oil, and practicality is like water. They don’t mix and you must accept that, instead of shaking the bottle all the time. Most people who wish to be humanitarians are idealists, but like all useful things, professional humanitarianism is a practical thing and the idealists cannot take that. There is a moral force in organized empathy, but it is mostly about getting things done. The Red Cross, for instance, does not try to end wars; that is not its business.
So, humanitarians who endure are probably practical people, who may have some ethical convictions but do not ail from religion-grade ideology, who see human nature not as a problem that needs to resolved but as evidence of what the world is.
I tell Marwan that I find humanitarianism a magnet for people with poor mental health. This could be true of writing too; depressed writers are likely to consider themselves humanitarians. If you walk into a conference of real-estate developers and then a gathering of humanitarians, your chances of finding people who rate their own mental health as poor would be higher among the latter. Marwan does not dismiss it, but then he does not dismiss anything.
Is it another thing they are running away from? Their own issues? Or, I wonder, is it what they are running towards? It is not just the adrenaline that makes them seek the trauma of conflict. Maybe they seek people who suffer more than them.
Marwan says there is a more banal reason why people become humanitarians, especially for Western organizations. The money. The West needs to hire locals. And a modest Western salary can help a person lead a comfortable life in most Asian and African countries. “It is also tax-free."
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What makes people risk their lives for the sake of others?
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09.11.2023
When I meet humanitarians, I usually ask them how they got there. What happened? So, when a volunteer at the Bangkok Literature Festival, an Egyptian pharmacist, told me that he was with the Red Cross, it was inevitable that I would ask the Arab why. The objective of a question might be an answer, but a question also invokes the spirits hidden in a person.
The humanitarians we usually hear from are bosses and not field workers. Mustafa Marwan is a worker, who may be found in an ambulance or aid truck in some strife-torn place. He has the look of a man who perceives the world with all his senses, who is very alert for no special reason, or maybe it is just his large eyes. He has seen death from very close. Once in Libya, a man walking in front of him was shot dead by a sniper. He has been to Gaza before, and might go again.
On his way to meet me in a cafe, Marwan got wet in the rain. By wet I mean wet in a tropical way, completely drenched, clothes clinging to him and water dripping from arms. He has a lot of hair, so there was that problem too. He walks in this way, sits across the table casually and reads the menu. As though on Wednesdays, he shows up this way at cafes. I wait to see if he is only hiding his embarrassment behind the menu, but he actually orders a dish.
The Red Cross........
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