It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m jump-starting the office generator. Why, you ask? Because I’m the most hard-core expat aid worker in Africa.
I’m also the only expat aid worker still in Africa, as all the others have run away to beaches in Thailand or to cold, snowy cities where their friends have forgotten them and their families have spent the last ten years replacing them with a dachshund in the family portrait.
If I had to visit my family now, I’m so hard-core that I’d make a point of sleeping in a tent outside their front door.
“This is what Christmas is like for a refugee,” I would tell them every time I stumbled in to use the toilet (but not the toilet paper). “Don’t you feel ashamed of your pies? An estimated 82% of the world’s population has never tasted a walnut.” And then I would stumble out again to wash my hands in the snow, scorning their fancy reindeer-shaped soap.
I would also scorn warm clothes, because refugees don’t have warm clothes, and food, because refugees don’t have food. In the spirit of solidarity I would refuse deodorant and software upgrades. If the elderly neighbours wanted to hear stories from “the field” I’d tell them about that one time I saw a shaman shrink someone’s head.
On Christmas morning, I’d pass out deworming tablets and those tablets would be generic, maybe even expired, because you know why? Because my family’s last Christmas gift to me was a donation in my name to a charity that I don’t even work for, when all I’d wanted was a battery-powered immersion blender. And the year before that it was $25 i.e. the money they got for selling off the worldly possessions I entrusted to their care twenty years ago. Since when do I look like a person who wouldn’t enjoy a personal drone or a weekend in Chamonix?
Better to be here, in the field, preparing fufu for Santa.
The holiday season is the best time to be in the office anyway. Everyone stops working on 15 December and you can use all that extra internet bandwidth to stream Christmas specials like the X-Men.
This year, as I waited for someone in headquarters to respond to my urgent emails, I held meetings that no one attended and planned events that will be delayed until February. By 20 December even the cleaner had called in sick and I could stride the hallways naked, singing holiday tunes like It’s the End of the World As We Know It, and cutting snowflakes from the towering stack of all those Request for Reimbursement forms my boss rejected in 2015.
In the evenings I had sundowners, alone, astride the water tank, wondering if people still send out Christmas cards. I don’t remember ever getting one. Maybe they’re in that black hole of mail that my NGO has been promising to ship me for the last few years. I have several credit cards in that hole. And one gerbil, poor thing. I hope his box is ventilated.
Because it’s New Year’s Eve tonight I go to bed early. I have to be up at dawn. Saving the world is my New Year’s resolution and I want to get started right away.
Being the only hard-core aid worker around, however, I find it impossible to sleep. On one side, the evangelicals are drumming and singing and on the other side, the UN troops are doing karaoke. It’s like no one – but me – can remember we’re at war and the world is falling apart and any happiness beyond schadenfreude is anachronistic and embarrassing. The rebels get drunk, the army gets drunk, the security guards get drunk. Everything is going to go bang and I won’t know if what I’m hearing is guns or fireworks or the volcano erupting – I won’t know what emergency to request funds for. And if I die I won’t be able to finish writing the grant proposals that are due on 10 January.
Maybe next year I’ll make it my resolution to spend December in Thailand...
Dara Passano is a pseudonym.
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