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.