Must-Read : Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures)

This is a new recurring feature I'll be posting every so often and which I hope the literary-types out there will enjoy and possibly find useful.  Since I'm in a car so much, I try to always keep a book around to pass the time.  The roads are usually too rough to try to get work done on a laptop, and if I stare too long out into the endless distance, I generally starting thinking about home and then can't stop.  So, I try to stay mentally busy.  In general, I read books that are in some way pertinent to my work, development, Africa, etc.  There are exceptions, most recently Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", an excessively long novel about a girl from backwoods mountains North Carolina who gets a full scholarship to the fictitious Dupont University (which seems highly based on Duke) and proceeds to get sucked into a world of athletes, frat boys, and general college unsavoriness.  I wouldn't particularly recommend it, but did find amusement in how accurate a lot of it seemed. 

Anyway, carrying on.  I'm currently reading a supremely fascinating book told from the varying perspectives of three expatriates in the early 1990's working for the UN and the Red Cross.

'Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures)' begins in the months leading up to the first democratic elections in Cambodia after the rule of Pol Pot and his horrific genocide.  The main characters are real - Heidi, a woman running from her failed marriage and trying to score fast money by doing secretary work for the UN; Andrew, a doctor from New Zealand who seems to be running from life in general; and Ken, a law school graduate running from a slow death in corporate law who wants to do something 'meaningful'.

One of the recurring themes in the book is the juxtaposition of the pampered, excessive expatriate lifestyle with the usually-scary, often life-threatening work each of the characters carries out.  In the first post of this blog, I wrote about a personal internal discussion which attempts to reconcile my life on the weekends dancing in clubs and talking to my family on wireless internet with the poverty I see everywhere around me during the week.  In 'Emergency Sex', the heights to which the expatriate lifestyle can grow are written about in frank detail.  From massive colonial houses with gleaming wood floors, to a private generator that powers a blender for mango daiquiris, to kiddie pools on the roof filled with water from the sink, to cavorting with a Masai tribesmen for three days in a sex-filled, joint-smoking bender that ends with Heidi paying him $200, the excess is a bit breathtaking.  I don't live an impoverished life in Kigali, but I certainly don't live like that.  In addition to a $40,000 salary for six months (in a country where the cost of living is likely 1/10th that sum), Heidi earned an extra $140 per day just for expenses.  Incredible.  At the same time, the three main characters constantly live in a state of alert - a UN volunteer is brutally murdered during their time in Cambodia, gunfire is always just around the corner, and their work automatically makes them target of rebel groups with something real to prove.

I'm only about 1/3 through the book, but the back cover tells me that after Cambodia, the three continue their work in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti.  After a little investigation on Wikipedia, I learned that Andrew, the doctor, was fired from the UN after the book was published and that then-Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan himself tried to stop its release.  With this in mind, I'm exceedingly interested to read what Andrew has to say about the UN's infamous role in the Rwandan genocide.  This is something I'll write about in more detail later, but in short, the UN knew what was coming ahead of time, actively ignored pleas from General Dallaire (commander of the mission to Rwanda at the time) for extra peace-keeping troops, forbade him from authorizing any kind of action (not even to confiscate the thousands of machetes the French were flying into the country), and then refused to recognize the genocide as a state-sponsored campaign (which would have compelled them take some action), even though Dallaire had plenty of documents to prove it was.  In short, the UN could have prevented the genocide, and didn't. 

I love reading uplifting stories of successes in the developing world, but I think I like reading about the failures even more.  For far too long, those of us doing the 'developing' have done a piss-poor job and have reaped the spoils of obscene salaries and a lavish lifestyle while accomplishing embarrassingly little.  (Just for the record, I don't have an obscene salary.  I think the technical term is 'stipend'.)  Stories like this provide a great opportunity to think about where and why past attempts have failed in light of the work we're currently doing. 

So, in closing, if you're interested in how the UN operates from the inside, what the expatriate lifestyle can look like when allowed run amok, want more insight on how complicated 'development' work is, or just like a well-written story, check this book out. 

But don't take my word for it.