Here's the thing...

If this blog has taught us nothing else I believe it is that relief and development is an amusing way to fill one's day, problematic to its crunchy-hard-currency-filled core, and so chock full of contradictions that describing it is like trying to nail jello. And aid workers, as a group, get painted with the 'saint' brush a little more often than necessary when most of us are paid quite well and find our job difficult but also engaging, important and fulfilling. It's really not very sacrificial when you get right down to it. This makes it difficult to come up against real need. Real need outside the bounds of the $10 million projects that donors pony up the cash for without blinking. Here in Juba there are a couple of women working with the government to work with some street kids - 45 street kids to be exact - who they have managed to get into school by day and a shifty government building at night. However, they can't feed them. And, by next week, they need ...

I don't like to think of humanitarian aid workers as a bunch of soft, spoiled, whinging whiners but, more often than not, I think that just might be what we are. Yesterday was a public holiday and therefore, in accordance with - oh THE LAW - we gave all our national staff the day off. Including the cooks. This doesn't seem to me to be all that big of a deal. We're a bunch of grown ups. Surely we can hunt-and-gather our own food for a day...surely we won't waste away to nothing and be found by the cooks when they return (THE FOLLOWING DAY!) as a heap of corpses in front of the refrigerator our cold dead fingers having to be pried from the door that we were unable to open. Apparently, I was wrong. And I was told so in no uncertain terms in our senior managers meeting for at least half an hour. HALF AN HOUR discussion about whether we should pay the cooks overtime to come in on a public holiday. Seriously, the higher I am in senior management the sillier the discuss...