A new breed of heroes

When aid workers, battling in distant places to bring some kind of comfort and safety to displaced and miserable people, are asked why they do what they do, many reply that it all comes down to the immediate and very simple satisfaction of giving a hungry person something to eat. ‘There are,’ notes David Snyder, a young American whose chapter on Sierra Leone appears in a new anthology of pieces by humanitarian workers, ‘few such pure exchanges in life.’ Something of this unaffected matter-of-factness marks much of Another Day in Paradise, the ironic title Carol Bergman has chosen for her collection of front-line stories from the aid world. If one was seeking a definition of all that is not paradise, one need do no more than read this book.

Good deeds are notoriously hard to write about. Digging wells, running refugee camps, feeding malnourished children, are not activities that lend themselves to eloquence. Even wars, of which this anthology is full, quickly lose their tension, as attack follows attack and casualties mount. But Another Day in Paradise, as John le Carré points out in a short foreword, is neither exactly about war nor even about those he dismisses for their phrases like ‘collateral damage’, when what they mean is civilians blasted to pieces. Rather it is a book about ‘another country’, the disaster areas of the world — societies collapsing under violence, famine, fear — as seen and experienced by those ‘brave enough to visit life’s hells on foot’ rather than from behind a camera or a notebook. For this anthology is really a celebration of the newish breed of international aid workers, the doctors, nurses, nutritionists, logisticians and engineers, who build camps, dispense food, bring water, negotiate truces, interview prisoners and curb looters on behalf of such organisations as Oxfam, Medecins sans Frontières and the International Rescue Committee.