Gap Year

“And here, in ’99, you worked for Medicine San…what do they do again?”

“It’s a medical relief organization. Missions run by volunteers. It was founded in France.”

“Ohhhkay. Kind of a gap year, then?”

The silence hangs heavy in the air. I can feel his confusion. There is no intersection of sets between “aid worker” and “software salesperson”.

“You could say that.”

“Quite a change. What was it like?”

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It was 1999 and I lived in San Francisco. The NASDAQ , to everyone’s disbelief, had kept surging beyond anything that seemed rational. To work in tech was to suspend disbelief. Friends of mine, two brothers, started a little website from their basement and eighteen months in, got an unsolicited offer of purchase for six million dollars. Another friend was given free use of a Porsche for a year for having referred three new employees to his startup. Cottages in my Noe Valley neighborhood were selling at twice their ask. CNET had started a show that covered only IPOs, there were so many of them. Books in the stores screamed Dow 36000, all problems solved with technology, happiness forever.

I had opened an options trading account at Schwab a few years earlier after noticing that all tech stocks only seemed to go upwards and to the right. The CBOE had just introduced LEAPS, which were long-term options, and at this early stage, these securities were sparsely traded and often mispriced. Their price was set based on the history of older, much less volatile stocks in the S&P, and made no allowance for the fact that there was this one part of the market where an Internet stock often rose ten dollars in a day. As long as the insanity continued, it made sense to be aggressively long. My simple-minded strategy was: “Buy LEAPs on rapidly rising tech stock; wait for position to multiply; sell one-third of the position; buy LEAPs on another rapidly rising tech stock; rinse and repeat”. When my income from trading exceeded my income from my job, I quit my company to trade full-time.

And then I met a woman.

Her name was Latha Palaniappan, and she had just moved from Ann Arbor to San Francisco to pursue a residency in internal medicine. I knew so little about her field of study that on our first date, when she told me that she was a resident, I wondered why that was a big deal since I was a resident of San Francisco as well. She worked eighty-hour weeks, staggering home late each night from work only to begin early the next day. I, meanwhile, traded options between 6:30 and 7:00 each morning and then knocked off to get a coffee and spend the rest of the day reading. I joked with her that I was the only person in San Francisco awake at 11 each night to go out with her when she punched out from the hospital.

She felt that most people in tech were high on some kind of fairy dust, fast-talking hucksters selling increasingly surreal visions to one another. I tried earnestly to educate her on why it was different this time, that the Internet was going to make the whole world one, free of the tyranny of distance and time, and that the epicenter of all this seismic change was located a few miles from where she and I lived.

Her challenge was more direct. Was I willing to step outside the bubble, away from the lavish parties and the boat rides in the Bay?

What did she mean? Leave the Bay Area?

No. More. Leave California. Leave the US. Go somewhere where people were in need, to help them with health care and food and housing.

Where?

She didn’t know. But she did know of a volunteer organization that could help answer the question. It was called Medecins Sans Frontieres. Doctors without Borders.

The shortest known time interval in the world is that between Latha making a decision and that decision becoming reality. So it was that I found myself in an interview room in Los Angeles with MSF.

They knew right off the bat that they wanted her, of course. Doctor. Capable. Enthusiastic. Freshly trained. Done with all her rotations.

They didn’t know what the hell to do with me.

Computer science? Who needed help with code in a relief camp?

Technology sales. Workstation marketing. Options trading. Was I kidding?

I pointed weakly to my degree in engineering. Granted, I had never used it to make or deliver anything. But I was trainable. And the only way for them to get her to join was to take us as a pair. It was both or neither.

They told me that one of the few possible fits was for the job of logistician. This role required somebody who could do all the setup for a medical team. Putting up tents and clinics. Digging toilets. Refurbishing damaged buildings. Warehousing food. Organizing a cold chain for vaccines. Setting up an antenna for radio communication. It sounded wildly interesting.

We were told that they staffed field missions with group dynamics in mind. Every single person in a team had to carry their weight. No allowances or special treatment for being part of a couple. In most cases, only one person at a time needed to be spotted as they got done with their term. There was rarely a time when two new members swapped in for two returning ones. The only exception was during emergency situations when they had to get a lot of boots on the ground immediately. Places like Srebrenica or Kigali.

Whatever it took, we said.

We flew to New York for training, to the town of Stony Point on the Hudson river. The instructors seemed remarkably young and remarkably experienced. One had done five year-long missions in a row. Another had gone back repeatedly to Sudan and the Sahel. We were taught the right mix of cement, sand and water to make concrete. How to dispose of sharps. How to run barbed wire to protect an encampment. How to defuse tense encounters by proving that you were there purely for medical relief and not for any political end.

Latha and I went back to our dorm each evening with our heads swimming. Everybody around us seemed to be more worldly-wise, more able, and more ready. They talked knowingly about the gunmen in Liberia and the mosquitoes in Surinam and the civil war in the Congo. My experience of tension the previous week had been my corner coffee shop not putting enough foam on my mochaccino.

Our group bought some chips and drinks from the local sandwich store to celebrate the end of training. We couldn’t have spent more than fifty dollars. When our head instructor found out about this, she was tight-lipped with anger. Didn’t we know that MSF treated its donations responsibly? That children around the world collected pennies in jars to help them? Did we know what percentage of their funds they spent on operational overhead? I raised my hand and guessed 20%. The correct answer was 2%. It was run with the efficiency of a SEAL squad and the economy of a monastery.

We flew back to San Francisco and waited. When the call came, it was in the form of a message on our answering machine on the night of our wedding reception. There had been a civil war in East Timor. The Indonesian army had invaded and laid waste to the island before retreating. A truce was in effect, UN troops had landed and MSF was establishing a base in the capital city of Dili. They needed a dozen people on the ground. Were we ready?

The wedding was behind us and we had just seen all our friends. I still hadn’t gone back to a job. Latha’s next academic program was willing to let her delay her entry by a year. We owned very little and could fit everything in a garage. My roommate said that he would hold the apartment. There was every reason to say yes. Within the week, we were on a flight to Darwin in Northern Australia, for our final briefing before landfall.

Timor is the easternmost island in the Indonesian archipelago. Its western half was a Dutch colony which was turned over to Indonesia in 1914. Its eastern half remained a territory of Portugal all the way until 1975, at which point the Indonesians invaded and occupied the land . The new regime was brutal and exploitative, and was resisted by a guerrilla group called Falintil, headed by a charismatic leader named Xanana Gusmao. Over a hundred thousand people had died during a 24-year conflict.

In 1999, a UN-led referendum asked the East Timorese whether they wanted to continue being bonded with Indonesia or peel off to form their own country. Over 75% voted for independence. This incited the wrath of the Indonesian army which crossed the border from West Timor and laid havoc to the land. They torched the towns, shot anybody they suspected of being revolutionaries, and forced over 200,000 locals into camps across the border. Most of the population abandoned their homes and fled to the hills. It took pressure from both Australia and the UN to force Indonesia back west of the border. By that time, the country was in ruins.

We landed in Dili a few days after the fighting had ended. Soldiers in camouflage circled the airport, rifles at the ready. The buildings on the outskirts of town were still smoking. All the telephone wires had been cut by the retreating Indonesian army. Shop windows had been shattered and the water mains punctured. The streets were completely empty.

The MSF house was a babble of different languages. Three Dutch, two French, two Germans, a Belgian, a Canadian, an Englishwoman, and us. All the others had been on at least one mission before.

Refugees were returning at a rapid clip, so the first order of business was to establish a clinic to treat injuries. The only location guaranteed to be safe was the soccer stadium at the center of the city because it housed Australian troops with sandbags and machine guns. Christophe took me there to help set up the tent. It was to be our clinic for the next two months.

I wish I could say that I was calm and cool and collected in those early days. In truth, I was anything but. I shrank into the back of the truck in the ride between the house and the stadium. I forgot things I had studied a few months earlier about sanitation and masonry and equipment maintenance. The German logistician was returning to Berlin in two weeks, and I followed him everywhere, filling a notebook with instructions. I worried about being the first person in the organization’s history to get water chlorination levels wrong and wreak illness on a returning refugee population.

Displaced families set up makeshift shacks all around us on the grounds inside the stadium. There was jaundice, malaria, bullet wounds, broken limbs, childbirths. Many returning Timorese students began to volunteer at the clinic, desperate to do anything to help their broken country. Latha noticed that they came to work with the same clothes, day after day. She told them that they didn’t have to think of it as a uniform. They replied her that they had fled the war with only the clothes on their back. They had nothing else to wear.

Two months passed, then three. Slowly, a semblance of order started emerging from the chaos. We organized a vaccination camp, and inoculated 1200 people in a day. I was given the help of a local construction crew and we refurbished hospitals in Baucau and Liquica. A weekend market emerged, and we were able to finally escape the tedium of the daily fish and rice. A UN provisional administration was set up in the former Congress building. Seeing the hundreds of troops, a Darwin businessman opened his first new business on the outskirts of town. It was a brothel and it was a roaring success.

More NGOs had begun to pour in. An organizing committee began dividing the responsibilities for medical care and reconstruction and education. It was the reboot of a whole civilization, everything from first principles.

There was a giddy freedom to not having any rules. I drove the Land Cruiser on whichever side of the road I felt like. On weeks that we got a new food shipment, I was able to get right up to the Cessna on the runway to unload it, no customs officials, no forms to fill. To lighten the grim surroundings, we had visitors bring pop culture magazines like People and Hello and OK when they flew in. On Sundays, the whole crew went down to a nearby beach that nestled below a hill on which stood a statue of Christ the Redeemer. We swam and cooked burgers and danced to Britney Spears and the Vengaboys. If there hadn’t been the constant presence of armed soldiers behind us, it could have been Carmel.

That fall, there was a surprising announcement. For its work over almost thirty years, MSF had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. Toasts were raised at headquarters and there was much celebration at hundreds of field missions in six continents. The then-president, James Orbinski, went to Oslo to accept the award on behalf of the organization.

By the New Year, there was less and less for the aid organizations to do. The UN had brought in hundreds of people, housing them in a cruise ship out in the bay. Different government organizations had begun to sprout and the East Timorese were eager to govern themselves. Timor Leste became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century, and Xanana Gusmao, the former guerrilla, won election as its first President.

The team left slowly, month by month, until it was time to give Heidi, the medical leader, a last hug as we walked towards our transport plane. San Francisco now seemed like it belonged on a different planet. The first night after our return, I went to the Safeway in Bernal Heights to re-stock the refrigerator. Walking into the produce section was dizzying, all those rows of perfect red tomatoes and ripe grapes and mist wafting gently over the greens.

I returned to the US with a changed perspective. No experience I faced at any time in this country would come remotely close to that of the East Timorese being shot at by marauding bands of soldiers and running to the hills, defenseless and hungry. They had more fortitude and resilience than I would ever be called upon to demonstrate in dealing with the mundane stresses of a white-collar life. Complaining about the traffic on 101 or not getting into an event began to seem utterly ridiculous. The real sin would be not to understand how very lucky I had been and continued to be in my life, and to not be utterly grateful.

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“What was it like?”

I snap out of my reverie.

“Sorry?”

“You never answered me. What was it like?”

I think of the green rice paddy and the perfect blue bay, of soldiers playing basketball in full uniform and checkpoints on mountain roads. I remember spiders scurrying as the first light of dawn brushes their corners and geckos flicking their tongues lazily on fall afternoons. I think of fragrant morning coffee and supply ships backed up in Dili harbor and students proudly singing the new Timorese national anthem.

“It was amazing. The best year of my life.”

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You can learn more about MSF at https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org