HUMAN NATURE: Why South Sudan’s Horrific Spasm of Violence Strikes A Deep Blow to Humanitarian Work

August 19th is World Humanitarian Day, and I’m planning to spend much of it thinking about one of the most complex, gut-wrenching crises on the planet right now, for a very sobering reason.

I know where the Terrain Hotel compound in Juba, South Sudan is. I’ve been driven past it several times. And I used to work for Internews, the media development organization that employed the late John Gatluak, a South Sudanese journalist who was executed in front of horrified onlookers at the Terrain Hotel during a July 2016 rampage against foreigners and aid workers in Juba.

And I was in Juba, South Sudan in for two sweltering weeks in July 2015. The knot in my stomach, and the tightening across my chest while reading about the brutal assaults at the Terrain last month have canceled any sense of relief I might have otherwise felt about the seeming divine intervention that dropped me, an American female editor working with South Sudanese journalists, into the vortex of a building storm, but also plucked me back out before the crescendo of violence morphed into a hurricane.

“Any man’s death diminishes me,” the English poet John Donne wrote. Any woman’s brutal rape haunts me. That’s why I feel an exponentially deep vein of anguish when I consider the work of journalists and aid workers in South Sudan, because I was there just a year ago. Though the prospect of lasting peace seemed dim at the time, there was a sliver of hope. Today, I realize I should have believed the handful of insiders who predicted the only thing that could stop the madness in South Sudan would be a certifiable genocide.

Now, in writing this post, I’m not trying to brand myself as an expert on humanitarian crises, or on the nuances of South Sudan’s relentless self-immolation. I speak as the archetypal “common woman,” someone who went to East Africa simply to help support young journalists build their skills.

I am no humanitarian. In hindsight, I wasn’t really prepared to witness profoundly disturbing examples of the cruelty human beings can inflict on each other. During my African journey, I’ve toured squalid refugee camps and slums, I’ve seen the most hardscrabble, desperate rural conditions, the scrawniest infants, the most traumatized men and women. I wish there was an app to delete those images from my brain. But at no time over the past decade did I ever pretend I wanted to roll up my sleeves and dive into the bowels of despair, to provide immediate hands-on comfort and support. I was only there to guide journalists through those scenarios, to help them become more than just stenographers. I wanted them to be able to connect the dots, to understand the policies and societal imperatives—or lack thereof—that had created those situations in their countries.

In fact, whenever I interacted with actual humanitarian aid workers, in Northern Uganda, in Ethiopia, in Kenya and South Sudan, in Tanzania and Rwanda and Burundi, I always came away feeling humbled, almost like an entitled dilettante. After all, when the reporting field trip ended, I could have my driver take me back to wherever my “expat domicile of the moment” was. In Gulu, Uganda, my little mint green cottage was sparsely furnished, and electricity and water weren’t guaranteed on any given day. But it was still palatial compared to living conditions for the average Northern Ugandan, still traumatized after a peace treaty ended 20 years of civil war. In Nairobi, I spent eight years living in three different apartments on the same tree-lined road in a leafy suburb. Again, compared to how most working class Kenyans lived, I was a card-carrying elitist Westerner. Sometimes, the money I earned as a consultant on a single short-term contract was more than some Kenyan teachers earned in a year.

No, I was not a humanitarian. But I met so many of them, like Dennis, the stocky, earnest young Ugandan UNHCR communications specialist who led me and a group of journalists through several IDP Camps, who actually lived in one of the camps and organized educational activities for youths. Or Roberta, the incredibly vivacious young Italian woman who was an emergency response specialist when I first met her in Gulu, and then when we re-connected in Nairobi, and who moved from there to Lebanon to work with Syrian refugees.

The pain I feel envisioning harm directed at people like Dennis and Roberta is hard to convey. They risk their lives every day, on little sleep and fueled largely by their nerve and compassion, and when their contracts end, very often they renew them without thinking twice. When I left Nairobi in May, I knew there was a very real chance that my own nerves might fail me, and I might not have the energy or the grit to return to East Africa. This week, while reading about those foreigners and aid workers being rounded up, beaten and raped in Juba last month, I did more than just think that it could have been me.

It was me. Or as the rest of John Donne's poem reads, "Because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

I believe that’s what people like Dennis and Roberta and all humanitarian aid workers around the globe understand, at a cellular level. They realize that their families and friends often bid them goodbye with a sense of pride mixed with sheer terror, and they go anyway. Often, they are only able to stay focused on their grueling tasks by forcing themselves to believe the mercurial umbrella of “International Cooperation” and obligation to the most vulnerable and traumatized will somehow keep them safe.

Even in the eye of a hurricane, the humanitarian aid worker MUST believe that they’ll be able to do their work without being crippled by fear of bodily harm. That’s their only baseline sometimes. They often live in the same harsh conditions as the people they serve. Their only luxuries may be clean water and a mosquito net, or meager canned rations versus bags of emergency grain or rice. Their pay might be more than what the locals make, but many are honest when they say it’s hard to calculate a value for their work.

I am ashamed to admit there was a time when I believed many of the people who signed up for these types of assignments were naive young do-gooders hoping for an adventure they could pitch to a publisher some day, or disaffected scions of the ruling class who were thumbing their noses at Mummy and Daddy by doing a Third World Semester Abroad. Until you bear witness to some of the settings they work in, and contemplate the sheer horror of parachuting into the most dangerous, squalid, vulnerable conditions imaginable, you can’t understand why anyone would sign up to be a humanitarian aid worker.

After you have borne witness, you realize that the real super heroes of this world don’t need computer-generated magic or flashy costumes to make magic. They use their own hands, and they are absolutely dazzling.