What can I say, three youngish people join the UN. Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia. The chapters alternate between the first person accounts of the three authors. There is a lot of mutual congratulation. The doctor was the one I admired. Interestingly, though, all three quit after a number of years. The doctor understandably burnt out.

Now, I feel I’m treading on dangerous ground here as this is non-fiction. But I found two of the authors’ motives a little unsettling. Postlewait seemed to have joined because she was bored with her life and needed a good paying job. She spends a lot of time drinking, taking drugs, going to parties and sleeping with everyone. Sometimes her parts of the book seem like a diary of a sex tourist. Cain is a Harvard law graduate convinced that America will enlighten, liberate and generally save the world. For all that he went through, he seems to have come out of it only slightly shaken and still remarkably naive.

I’m going to stop there. I don’t regret reading it, because it certainly was a small window into a world I didn’t know much about — i.e.: a glimpse of how the UN functions on an everyday basis.

Related:

If you have Real Player, you can listen to an interview with the authors.

Here’s an interesting essay entitled “Dereliction express” by Roger Sandall on the problem of philanthropy and corruption in Africa.

I heartily recommend the movie Constant Gardener. (It’s based on the book by le Carré. Interestingly, I found the film better than the book — it’s almost always the other way around.) This is a work of fiction, but as the author said, what he found in research was a lot worse than the story he came up with.

And if you’re just overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world and are tired of feeling helpless, consider helping Doctors Without Borders. They have some pretty painless monthly automatic contribution plans starting at $7.50 a month. They’re “an independent international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries.”

If you’ve read Flaubert in Egypt or Geoffrey Wall’s magnificent biography Flaubert, you’ll remember Gustave’s travel companion, Maxime Du Camp.

Before they headed to Egypt, Du Camp studied for six months with a professional photographer. No disposable or point-and-shoot digital in those days! You practically had to be a chemist. And the amount of luggage it generated was incredible: bottles and bottles of delicate chemicals, crates of glass plates plus all the peripheral equipment and finally, the camera itself. It was a major undertaking.

And Du Camp, if memory serves, was the first to take photos in Egypt. The first to capture the pyramids, the desert, the ancient monuments. I remember reading somewhere (where?) that Flaubert was horrified — no one would ever see these things for themselves first, through their own eyes. From then on, everyone would see these wonders through layers of previously seen photographs.

Well, it’s far too late to us, drenched as we are in images. So enjoy flipping through some lovely early photos of Egypt and North Africa and here’s a complete NYPL scan of the book of photos that Du Camp published when he returned.

And just for fun, here’s an excerpt from Wall’s bio.

Flaubert made conscientious efforts to imitate the bizarre cry of the camel. “I hope to perfect it before we leave, but it is quite difficult because of the particular gurgling sound that quivers somewhere beneath the screech…” […and a little later…] Suppressing the urge to put a bullet through his friend’s head, Du camp sent Flaubert away to ride ahead at a safe distance.