About

The Disaster Tourist is home to a collection of tales, accounts, reports, and essays on all things related to war zones and humanitarian disasters.

It also takes in the weirdness that assaults travellers when they venture in the Back-of-Beyond, which is frequently where relief workers and foreign correspondents make their livings.

My name is Rick Grant and I have been a Disaster Tourist for many years in many lands. I have worked as a journalist and as a relief worker in Afghanistan, Somalia, Indonesia, Albania-Kosovo, Kenya and Sudan, the Former Yugoslavia and many other places as well.

I have also traveled extensively in the Circumpolar Arctic as a television and radio journalist specializing in Indigenous Peoples issues and arctic resources questions.

This set of web pages comprises, in many ways, a try out area for me to organize thoughts relating to a book about the life of a Disaster Tourist.

Disaster Relief workers and War Zone reporters know the Disaster Tourist phenomenon well. Anywhere that the world has started climbing into a hand basket for a trip to hell you will come across the naive, those with too much money, the hopelessly romantic, and the downright delusional, who think that a country bent on turning itself back into the pre-stone age is something worth touring.

But Disaster Tourists are not just hapless wanderers getting off on tours of killing fields, they can also be found among the ranks of the reporters and relief workers — people too hooked on the intensity and bizarreness of conflict and famine to stay away so they take any job they can that will get them into the thick of the disaster.

I am a Disaster Tourist but I like to think that I have done some good through my voyeurism.

I also like to think that I can help ease the curiosity of the oh so many people who have a fascination with parts of the world that get torn about by god, man, or nature.

So, welcome and please have a look around. If there is anything about the world of disaster relief work or war correspondency that you would like to know about then please let me know and I’ll see if I can oblige.

And yes, if you haven’t discovered it yet, there are entries on how to get a job as a foreign reporter and or a relief worker.