Aid workers

There’s a lot of critical stuff that is written about the international aid worker scene, a group of people I guess I have joined lately. Some of that is justified. But to focus on their merits, they are often an interesting bunch of people inhabiting a very odd globalized world. The norm is that your partner comes from a completely different country, and they live in a third country as well. This month I spent time with a Brit working in Sierra Leone who calls home a place she rents not far from Mexico city. While in Dakar a couple of weeks back I spent a very pleasant evening with a Quebecois working in Senegal who lives in Buenos Aires.

They are more familiar with the good places to eat in Kathmandu or Kinshasa than in the capital city of their country at birth, and they generally can link themselves to any other aid worker in any other part of the world through a mutual intermediary: ‘Oh you worked in Haiti? You must know X, who I worked with in Goma’ etc. In some ways, they often resemble their poorer, younger cousin, the ‘backpacker’, but with the years they are keener to look out for safer, family friendly places, and often need to put down roots somewhere, whether it’s buying a place in Latin America, or a coastal cottage in Vietnam, while they continue to make a living in the latest L3 humanitarian emergency.

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