This morning on Al Jazeera one of the journalists started a
story by saying, “A couple decades from now your job will likely be done by a
robot.” Yeah, good luck with that.
There would be a lot of advantages to being a robot in what
I do. Caring about the people around you would not figure into the equation.
That would make things a whole lot easier. As it is, I’ve needed to train
myself over the years to not think about certain things or at least not dwell
on them. I have seen so many people crumble or at least make horrible decisions
due to excessive emotional investment in certain aspects of their work. One example is that you would
end up keeping people on staff even if you don’t have the resources because
they so desperately need the income, and in this context it will likely impact
not only the immediate family but also the extended family as well, all living
off one person’s salary. It’s a brutal decision to make but sometimes you
simply need to.
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage
to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.
Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded,
sometimes destroyed.”
-Ernest
Hemingway
It’s not to say you should be devoid of empathy. By no
means. If I ever lose my compassion for the people we serve then I need to get
out. It happens a lot unfortunately. I see them in meetings from time to time.
You can tell rather quickly. They are often people that were filled with
compassion when they started and over the years the challenges we face in doing
this work just beat it out of them. From time to time I draw inspiration from a friend of ours in
Tanzania that is doing some incredible work getting a school going (I think the
kids are all orphans). He’s faced ridiculous opposition, obstacles and greed on
the part of the government time and time again (no good deed goes unpunished).
He just keeps going. He’s an amazing guy, driven by his faith in God and his
compassion for what he’s doing. Most people would have given up long ago or at
least become so cynical that they are rendered useless.
So I try to keep one foot in the idealist camp and the other
in the cynic camp. If I lean too far in either direction I’m doomed. I have to
believe that we are making a difference in people’s lives. But I also realize
that human greed will often thwart the most venerable of efforts. Just as I
said in the previous post that I’ve seen courage beyond belief, I’ve also evil
in humans beyond belief. Both help me understand the context in which I work. I
do love what I do but I’m also very aware that humanitarian work is not always
pretty.
Today is the first full day without my family. Yesterday
morning they “relocated” to Rwanda for security reasons to join most of the
rest of my international staff who are already there. I heard quite a bit of
gunfire late last night and early this morning and it tempers the sadness of
missing them. They don’t need to be here for this. It sucks but I can’t
complain. I’m not a robot and I’m fully aware that the tens of thousands
displaced by this violence don’t have anything close to the support that we
have.
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