An amazing yet cautionary tale of what it is like working for the UN and responding to humanitarian emergencies.
In 1998, bored and rather broke, John Burnett heard that the World Food Programme was looking for small-boat handlers to help deliver aid to the flood-stricken and starving people of Somalia and that the money was good. On the lookout for adventure and willing to take a risk, Burnett was nevertheless completely unprepared for the realities of working in a country without government or law where the only authority that matters came from a loaded gun - and where hippos, crocodiles and green mambas offered alternative means of violent death.
From his lack of proper tools and communication gear to the mad unsuitability of his water-ski boat for delivering aid supplies up a flooded river to the tragedy of watching a baby die of malaria in his arms and the gut-wrenching terror of being held up at gun point by a child soldier, the experience of being an aid-worker drastically changed the way he sees the world. It also shocked him profoundly to realize the casualness with which unarmed and untrained civilians were sent into literally explosive situations to try to help, and to understand how even the distribution of aid in the face of catastrophe can be seen as a political act.
This is at once the story of an amazing adventure and an uncovering of some of the unpalatable realities of aid-provision in the wake of disasters in the developing world - a cautionary tale for our times.
