Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid,and Sideways on a Scooter
I decided to review these two books together because I've read them both recently, and I see that they represent a trend in my reading.
I read a review of Chasing Chaos, by Jessica Alexander, and decided to get my hands on it because being an aid worker is a sort of "no, never" fantasy of mine - like, if I were a somewhat different person, less timid and reliant on routine, humanitarian aid would be a career in line with my values and ambitions.
Alexander began her career in humanitarian aid for some reason connected, but inexplicably so, to her mother's death. After her initial job, she realized that you have to have a master's degree to get a good position, so she came back to the States and did that. In her career, she has worked in Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Haiti - the worst crises, the worst suffering, the most chaos. But what comes through in her narrative is not those places, but the life of the aid worker. You are always arriving in the moment when people are having the worst time of their whole, already straitened, lives. You are always working with too much disruption, too few materials, insufficient communication, and whatever you do is inadequate to the needs in front of you. Alexander did not get jaded or cynical - a lot of aid workers do - but she did get concerningly accustomed to excitement and to temporary relationships. There is a lot of drinking and casual sex in humanitarian aid.
I got some insight into what doesn't work in aid. Material donations are actually problematical in many ways; they are not what is needed, they require a lot of time to deal with (she cites a large box of Santa costumes that arrived after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist country); and often, distributing materials for free puts local small vendors out of business just when it is most important to rebuild the extant distribution network.
And I got my look into the more adventurous, adrenaline-soaked, alternate life that I didn't have.
Sideways on a Scooter is Miranda Kennedy's memoir of living in Delhi as a freelance foreign correspondent in the early 2000s. Since India another fantasy life of mine - maybe someday I really will live there, though! - I was interested in her experiences as a foreigner in the rapidly expanding and globalizing India.
She tells the story of the "new India" in conflict with the 3000-year-old, traditional culture through that of her two best Indian women friends and their struggles with the importance of marriage and family, of the subsuming of individual women's identities in the maintenance of tradition.
Her friend Geeta lives without her parents in Delhi - although she was only allowed this because she lives with and takes care of the grandmother of family friends. Women living alone in India are regarded as possibly damaged goods - they may have been "boyfriended" and therefore fail to represent the chaste, pious and submissive model of an Indian wife - and have difficulty passing muster with the families who must agree to have them in an arranged marriage. Geeta wants a Bollywood love story, but she finds that it is not so easy to bring this about while maintaining the necessary image. During Kennedy's tenure, she finally finds her man on an Indian dating site and, breath-held, meets him, brings the necessary agreements about with both families (this is the arranged-cum-love marriage she has decided to pursue) and has the wedding. Then she is filed with doubt - the boy comes from South India while she comes from North India and she is unhappy living with his family - but in the end she and her lovely new husband break with tradition again and move to their own home, and she is happy.
Parvati is Kennedy's other friend and a complete rebel against the role expectations she faces. She has a "friend" but she cannot live with him, and in fact, he has a wife he has separated from elsewhere, and his wife has a baby by yet another man. But divorce would be so shameful that none of them even considers it. Parvati gets bitter before she finally turns it around and begins looking for land near the rural village of her childhood, with hopes that she, her lover and his wife can live there in peace.
Kennedy views herself and her own resistance to commitment through the lens of these women and their struggles. When she arrives in India, she has a boyfriend back in New York; to avoid censure, she tells people that she is waiting for this ersatz husband to join her. In fact, they have an open relationship and Kennedy pursues a number of short term affairs as she travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan on reporting jaunts and hangs out with other reporters in the boozy clubs they frequent. But of course, all of this must be hidden from her Brahmin maid and the Dalit woman who collects her trash! Kennedy explores the lasting practice of caste prejudice through these two women who work for her and either cling to their caste status or attempt to exceed it.
I gobbled this book up and felt as if I was having my own years in India. Of course, at times I wondered how Kennedy could remember these conversations and events of years ago, but who knows? Maybe she kept a diary.
I read a review of Chasing Chaos, by Jessica Alexander, and decided to get my hands on it because being an aid worker is a sort of "no, never" fantasy of mine - like, if I were a somewhat different person, less timid and reliant on routine, humanitarian aid would be a career in line with my values and ambitions.
Alexander began her career in humanitarian aid for some reason connected, but inexplicably so, to her mother's death. After her initial job, she realized that you have to have a master's degree to get a good position, so she came back to the States and did that. In her career, she has worked in Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Haiti - the worst crises, the worst suffering, the most chaos. But what comes through in her narrative is not those places, but the life of the aid worker. You are always arriving in the moment when people are having the worst time of their whole, already straitened, lives. You are always working with too much disruption, too few materials, insufficient communication, and whatever you do is inadequate to the needs in front of you. Alexander did not get jaded or cynical - a lot of aid workers do - but she did get concerningly accustomed to excitement and to temporary relationships. There is a lot of drinking and casual sex in humanitarian aid.
I got some insight into what doesn't work in aid. Material donations are actually problematical in many ways; they are not what is needed, they require a lot of time to deal with (she cites a large box of Santa costumes that arrived after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist country); and often, distributing materials for free puts local small vendors out of business just when it is most important to rebuild the extant distribution network.
And I got my look into the more adventurous, adrenaline-soaked, alternate life that I didn't have.
Sideways on a Scooter is Miranda Kennedy's memoir of living in Delhi as a freelance foreign correspondent in the early 2000s. Since India another fantasy life of mine - maybe someday I really will live there, though! - I was interested in her experiences as a foreigner in the rapidly expanding and globalizing India.
She tells the story of the "new India" in conflict with the 3000-year-old, traditional culture through that of her two best Indian women friends and their struggles with the importance of marriage and family, of the subsuming of individual women's identities in the maintenance of tradition.
Her friend Geeta lives without her parents in Delhi - although she was only allowed this because she lives with and takes care of the grandmother of family friends. Women living alone in India are regarded as possibly damaged goods - they may have been "boyfriended" and therefore fail to represent the chaste, pious and submissive model of an Indian wife - and have difficulty passing muster with the families who must agree to have them in an arranged marriage. Geeta wants a Bollywood love story, but she finds that it is not so easy to bring this about while maintaining the necessary image. During Kennedy's tenure, she finally finds her man on an Indian dating site and, breath-held, meets him, brings the necessary agreements about with both families (this is the arranged-cum-love marriage she has decided to pursue) and has the wedding. Then she is filed with doubt - the boy comes from South India while she comes from North India and she is unhappy living with his family - but in the end she and her lovely new husband break with tradition again and move to their own home, and she is happy.
Parvati is Kennedy's other friend and a complete rebel against the role expectations she faces. She has a "friend" but she cannot live with him, and in fact, he has a wife he has separated from elsewhere, and his wife has a baby by yet another man. But divorce would be so shameful that none of them even considers it. Parvati gets bitter before she finally turns it around and begins looking for land near the rural village of her childhood, with hopes that she, her lover and his wife can live there in peace.
Kennedy views herself and her own resistance to commitment through the lens of these women and their struggles. When she arrives in India, she has a boyfriend back in New York; to avoid censure, she tells people that she is waiting for this ersatz husband to join her. In fact, they have an open relationship and Kennedy pursues a number of short term affairs as she travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan on reporting jaunts and hangs out with other reporters in the boozy clubs they frequent. But of course, all of this must be hidden from her Brahmin maid and the Dalit woman who collects her trash! Kennedy explores the lasting practice of caste prejudice through these two women who work for her and either cling to their caste status or attempt to exceed it.
I gobbled this book up and felt as if I was having my own years in India. Of course, at times I wondered how Kennedy could remember these conversations and events of years ago, but who knows? Maybe she kept a diary.