Where Soldiers Fear to Tread: A Relief Worker's Tale of Survival Book

Burnett went to Somalia as a relief worker with the World Food Program (a part of the UN) in the late 90s. He hadn't done humanitarian work before, but he was at loose ends and wanted something different, and, well, the WFP needed people capable of handling boats.

It's a complicated situation on many levels: Nobody asked the UN to come in, but then, Somalia's government wasn't in a shape to do so. Where the relief workers could go was dictated largely by where they could form local agreements for protection, but there was the added factor of in-fighting not between subclans but between relief organisations: Burnett finds himself, as a man with a boat, miles away from the river that will get him to people in need of help -- because if he and his boat go elsewhere, he'd have to be under somebody else's jurisdiction. It's messy.

It must have been frustrating, and frightening. Burnett has barely touched down in Somalia before he has to duck and cover, as there's a gunfight at the aeroport. Over the weeks he spends in Kismayo (it's not clear quite how long), he does no formal relief work: he doesn't have supplies, and it's not safe, and every time safety is negotiated the agreements break down days, or hours, or minutes later. Instead they spend much of their time crafting escape plans in case they have to pull out in a hurry...although approval for such a pull-out seems a long time coming. It's 200 pages before he finds himself somewhere he can actually get supplies out, and even then it seems like a drop in the bucket. (There are, of course, other teams at work in other areas; also, I'm not suggesting that Burnett is responsible for any of this. But it's frustrating how much of it ends up being waiting.)

I am exasperated by some of Burnett's generalisations (usually about Somalis) and by his patronising treatment (in writing) of Amelia, but he does ask some very hard questions about aid work, politics, effectiveness. Didn't love the book, but it made me think.

Assorted bits from the book:

Is this not serious enough to get the hell out before someone gets hurt? I catch myself in mid-thought, for already I am dismissing the dead Somali woman and dying child. "Someone" means one of us, not one of them. (76)

They, we, have so little in common with anyone not here. It is not unlike returning to the mainstream after crossing an ocean on a small boat; the eyes of friends glaze over when I try to tell them of my adventures, as do mine when they tell me of their day-to-day lives. How can you tell your partner about Somalia? A soldier goes to war, gets shot at, suffers the traumas of combat, goes home. Who is he going to talk to? (109)

It is universal; in the West, schoolchildren creatively deface their schoolbooks, desks, school bags, walls, and even subway trains with personal totems, brands, and markings. Here in Somalia they disfigure their guns. (135)

I saw in the boy's eyes at the barricade that he could pull the trigger for reasons that I am too old to understand. Age gives us the ability to reason, to communicate, and these children behind the guns, who have no fear, prove to be well beyond our ability to do either. (140)

He turns to me with a look of desperation I hope never to see again from anyone else who is in command, a look of desperation that demands some solution. (160)

Those who are actually delivering food, rescuing people--I would presume they feel some inner satisfaction. I wouldn't know. I haven't saved a life or handed a moldy biscuit to a starving child. I know there are people dying out there--I practically saw it happen. I remember the desperate pleas for rescue when we flew over the makeshift shanties on the dikes, families on their rooftops. In Kismayo, we are satisfied to know that we are hanging on, that we have survived another day. We are being paid, and that for now is one reason we are here, to buy that dream machine to vanish into the heavens--money for a yacht to sail around the world, for a party business in Nairobi. I need it because I have sailed the world and I am broke. The job offered money. It did not guarantee satisfaction. It did not guarantee survival. (183)

I have nothing to gain from anyone here, and it is a relief to put a lid on the ego. (247)