It's Wanting What You've Got

One thing that drives me insane is very quickly is perky, cheerful career expatriate family who insists, apparently of one accord, that nothing is better than relief and aid work while married with children. To hear them tell it, they traded nothing in exchange for a lifetime of humanitarian work. They regale dinner guests with stories of their kids being born in bamboo or mud huts under the care of a local midwife in some far-flung corner of a remote country. They all speak French plus two tribal languages. Their favorite comfort food is a kind of grub found beneath the bark of some exotic kind of bush that grows only on Madagascar. The kids will spend summers doing internships with the UN: internships that turn into full-time employment in relatively senior positions by the time they’re out of college. The parents have high-profile roles in major emergency responses for many years before becoming full-time free-lance consultants in specialized sub-fields like “civil society” or “peace building.” Heated family debates deal with the question of whether to spend Christmas on Zanzibar or Denpasar.

The reality for most of us who do humanitarian work is that we have made and continue to make trade-offs in other areas of life - in some cases very costly ones - to be here.

I often discuss these trade-offs with my colleagues. With my age peers it's all in commiserative tones. With my younger colleagues the tone tends toward something between rueful whinging and pontification. In some cases they’ve asked my opinion on the right timing for life changes like marriage or having children, all in the context of continuing with humanitarian work as a career. It is a reality of this work – perhaps an unfortunate one – there is a series of trade-offs which inevitably take place in the lives of those who, like myself and my friends, want to do this work and also contemplate “family” options. Moreover, these trade-offs are not always obvious. They sneak up on you and insinuate themselves into your life framework without you being consciously aware until it’s too late and you’ve made the trade almost without knowing it.

As I meet with married colleagues, whether in the USA or in distant ports of call, after the day’s discussion winds down, ties loosened, and conversations turn to personal things, it is the norm for me to hear them wonder aloud – perhaps only half joking – whether keys to the front door will still work upon return. While I’m not specifically aware of any statistics on marriage success or failure among aid workers, my own anecdotal observation is that this work is hard on marriages. The number of my own friends and acquaintances whose marriages have dissolved under the pressure of a field setting at least equals those who have made it through marriage intact.

Even so, among my single colleagues, marriage is the most common question. How does it work, being in relief work while being married? How do I do it? This is a question that even I am not able to answer coherently on some days.

The nature of this industry is such that despite genuine attempts to the contrary, relief organizations at times must at times move their field-based people around like pawns on a chessboard. Further, even when both partners are relief professionals, positions are almost always for one person – not two. Which inevitably means that one must leave her or his job, life, etc. and uproot for the sake of the other to a context where the unknown is the most reliable constant. Over time, with repetition, this pattern can build sentiments that are difficult to articulate in terms other than plain resentment.

Being based in a “developed” country, but with frequent travel is not necessarily better. No matter how many tickets I purchase for my wife or mother-in-law with frequent flyer miles, no matter what exotic gifts I might bring back, and no matter how many times I call home per week or per day while travelling, the conversation about the dates for my next trip is always a difficult one. Beyond the purely logistical challenges of managing a home, dealing with children, and generally keeping up with all the things that need to be kept up with, is the mental and emotional toll of having a family member absent (or being absent from one’s family). When repeatedly the length of time home between travel is counted in days rather than weeks it becomes increasingly untenable to argue that “quality time” together is as good, on balance, as quantity of time.

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Then I go to the field for a few weeks, meet my colleagues – those edgy, single 30-somethings who, I like to believe, remind me of me back in my “glory days.” We share war stories for a while. I hear them talk about what they have already given up or might give up in order to keep doing that job: relationships, office jobs... I hear them wonder aloud if they’ve made the right choice or if it’s too late to make the other choice… I see trade-offs quietly inserting themselves into their lives. I wonder if, in the end, my friends and colleagues will make their trades consciously. Or maybe another massive rapid-onset emergency will happen next week and they’ll be on to the next deployment, and that deployment will lead to another, and eventually the trade-off will surruptitiously make itself for them over time.

Or, on the other hand, maybe a proposal of marriage will come and they’ll accept (or maybe they initiated it) and suddenly, without knowing what happened, they’ll find themselves as an accompanying spouse or perhaps negotiating the bruised feelings of an accompanying spouse. And over time that, too, will morph and transpose from selecting posts based on the high profile of the position to selecting posts based on the availability of western education in a secure capitol city somewhere. Evenings will be spent, not out drinking G&Ts and swapping war stories, but at home drinking chocolate milk and reading Thomas the Tank Engine books. And another trade-off will have quietly made itself.

At 25, slogging it out in southern Vietnam, my girlfriend a couple of borders away in Thailand, I was convinced that I absolutely could not go on without the promise (or at least reasonable assurance) of the warmth of marriage and the stability and security of a family in a picket-fence home. Then, as I sat listening with a tiny bit of secret envy to my single, edgy 30-something friends one-upping each other with stories of their exploits in the field, and me, the silverback among them with house and family in North America (exactly what I'd wanted at 25), let loose for only a few weeks at a time, the though flashed briefly in my mind:“What have I done???”

As I listened on, though, to those same single, edgy 30-somethings contemplating their options, it struck me that no matter what which option you choose on any of it (relief or development? International work or cubicle farming? Married or single? Children or not?) you will one day wake up wondering if you made the wrong choice. No matter which choice you make, there will be a time when you envy those who made the other choice.

Unfortunately there is no great sage advice to leave here. Simply an acknowledgement that as cliché as it may be, it is true that the grass can often seem greener on the other side of the fence. And to acknowlege as well, that others often look across the fence to our side to see greener pastures where we stand.

And as usual, I retreat into the words of the great poets of our times for solace and inspiration. In this case, Sheryl Crow who once sang:

“… It’s not having what you want… it’s wanting what you’ve got.”