In mapping out the chapter sections for my forthcoming book, The Disaster Tourist: How Journalists and Relief Workers Survive in War Zones and Disaster Areas, While Still Being Able to Find Beer, I see that these broad chapter outlines are useful as blog entries in their own right.
For anyone whoever wanted to grow up to be a refugee but instead had to settle for being an aid worker or foreign correspondent this section is about living conditions.
“Water is Life” It’s a trite saying heard world wide when people are forced to live on the edge of survival. The obsession with finding safe water to drink consumes everyone in a disaster area, refugee or not. Relief workers and reporters die violently in disaster areas but a far greater number fall deathly ill because of the water.
Relief workers and reporters risk Dengue fever, cholera, and foul internal parasitic diseases that ruin the body for life. Half the foreign population in any disaster area at any given time is wrestling with grotesque illnesses or searching for a toilet.
After water comes food and in the search of food people will do anything for it, including murder.
In Sarajevo, many people worked for hours every day hauling water up ten and twenty floors of bombed out high rises to their homes, making countless trips for firewood which sold for nearly the price of gold. They ate any food possible including pet dogs and cats. They and the aid workers would think little of running through sniper alleys if it meant they could find a source of food.
In Ethiopia, refugee camps the size of Cleveland or Fargo sprawled across the Ogaden Desert far from water, food or fuel. Getting enough of all three takes all day without break and it has to be done for years on end.
The aid business is about transporting food and sometimes the best way to get it to the starving is to let the looters help themselves.
Handy Living Tips
Here’s how everyone except the starving makes a fortune out of the generosity of foreigners. How looters go about their craft, the techniques of the inspired thief, the futility of aid workers in trying to prevent theft, and the extreme danger they run in trying to do so.
Other handy living tips for reporters and relief workers include the use of beer as toothpaste, mouthwash, hand lotion, and general pick-me-up after a long day of being shelled.
How to properly enjoy slivovitz, the hell liquor of Bosnia that spawns rapers, looters, pillagers, and thrill murderers, how to chew the narcotic Khat, (the drug of choice for crazed Somali gunmen), with elan and aplomb, and which aid agencies serve the best meals no matter how great the apocalypse around them.