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Group Therapy
Who'd want to be an international aid worker trying to bring peace and stability to Somalia? Chatting to one last night, she told me how meetings on Somalia were coming to resemble group therapy sessions.
"One person will start off by explaining how they were running a great little project, getting results and moving things foward," she said. "But then they say it's all been ruined by fighting or clan rivalries. Then someone else pipes up saying yes, they know how it feels because the same thing has just happened to their clinic or school or whatever. No-one has any solutions left so we just sit around commiserating with each other."
2 Comments
That's very uncharitable. And anyone else who tells me that people are queuing up to work on Somalia so that they can live in Nairobi (with pool, big garden, cook, gardener etc) with no risk of ever being actually transferred to Mogadishu, will also get short shrift. A few people working on South Sudan have looked for jobs in Somalia programmes as soon as a transfer to the tent city of Juba became an option, I'm told. Although I find this hard to believe.
What do you think?
Rob Crilly in Jerusalem
Rob Crilly is a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem writing for The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Mail. He spent...
World Vision (although I can't be sure it was the Somalia office) obviously decided they needed a 5 day trip to the Masai Mara to find all the answers to their woes. They booked out the entire Serena. I heard one American say "HQ are complaining we're not working. Hell my laptop just ran out of battery...but then I aint plugged it in for three days!" There were more WV landcruisers tearing up the reserve's tracks than there were safari vehicles. Get on with some work!