Personal
Smokin’ fruit
This article could also be called, ‘How to make free money and extend your life’. But it isn’t. It’s about grapefruits. Not really. It’s about smoking and grapefruits. How weird is that?! It’s also about those twenty Virginia killin’ sticks. All lined up in two neat rows, clean and invitin’ like yet nowhere to go. All that glossy gold packaging telling you how sophisticated, how cool, you are. All those movies showing sultry film stars lighting up immediately after wasting twenty baddies with nothing but a ripped vest two sizes too small and a pump-action shotgun. Or after some turgid love scene with an ‘ass double’. What...
Read MoreHow to tell if you work for the UN
These are the top twenty or so indicators that tell you if you work for the United Nations. None of the scenarios are made up; they all reflect everyday situations. If you recognise yourself in more than five, you’ve been in the aid business too long and should consider taking a break. 1. You’ve just come out of a pre-meeting at 8 o’clock in the evening, having spent the last three hours discussing terms of reference for a task team whose job will be to spend the next six weeks coming up with recommendations on whether or not an ‘evaluability’ study is required to assess whether or not what your office does is ready to be evaluated. 2. It’s midnight, and you...
Read MoreUnpronounceable Identity Crisis
The Kyrgyz – that’s pronounced ‘Keer-Geez’ with a hard ‘g’ – are experiencing something of a identity crisis. Like my Alzheimer-suffering Aunt, they don’t know who they are half the time. Partly, this is because, after over eighty years as part of the failed Soviet experiment, the Kyrgyz think, act, and speak like Russians. The confusion starts on landing, Taxiing to the terminal, large blue neon letters glare through the darkness to spell out ‘Welcome to Manas International Airport’. It’s not until disembarked and jostling in the un-refereed rugby scrum that surrounds the lone consular official at the visa desk that it becomes clear we have not...
Read MoreHaiti: All The King’s Men
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. But all the King’s horses. And all the King’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty together again. More than a year after a 7.0 earthquake razed Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, killing many of the “King’s Men” – the civil servants who knew best how to put it back together again – the country remains in Humpty-Dumpty like pieces. If it was not what aid-speak refers to as a “failing state” before, it is certainly unencumbered by any pretensions otherwise now. Humanitarian aid operations saved countless thousands in the earthquake’s immediate aftermath, and continues to sustain hundreds of...
Read MoreHow to tell a country by the airport it keeps
Not for the first time, I find myself standing outside the arrivals hall sneaking a quick post-flight cigarette with other anti-social furtives waiting for a colleague to collect his baggage off the carousel wondering whether,if you can tell a country’s moral values by its advertising hoardings, can you tell the country itself by its airports? This time, it’s Nairobi. As a ‘disaster risk adviser’ for the UN, I attend conferences and workshops the world over, so I get to see a lot of airports and a lot of countries. It’s one of the reasons I do the job, I suppose; to travel … but preferably not in an aircraft chartered by the UN as, being contracted to...
Read MoreMerkava
A new award-winning film called ‘Lebanon’ is out. Directed by Samuel Maoz, it portrays twenty four hours of toil, sweat, and fear in the life of an Israeli tank crew during the Lebanese war of 1982-83. Here, James Shepherd-Barron, himself once a tank commander in the British military, recounts his brush with one such crew while he was ‘Operations Officer’ for the British contingent of the international peace-keeping force in Beirut. Tanks, like ships, are always female. Like ships, they have names, which crews paint discreetly yet lovingly in black camouflage paint on the turret, and which, as with ships, it is bad luck to change. This one was called,...
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