6/31 - An Imperfect Offering

I recently finished reading a book called "An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the 21st Century" by Dr. James Orbinski. He was the international president of MSF (Doctors without Borders) when they won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has a lot of experience with MSF, and has also started his own organization called Dignitas International, which focuses on community-based treatment, care and prevention of HIV in the developing world.

It was a good read, although it took me a while to get through. He talked extensively about his experiences with MSF in countries such as Rwanda, Zaire, Sudan, Kosovo and Afghanistan. In his own words, he describes the book:

"An Imperfect Offering" is about finding a way to confront unjust human suffering in the world as it is. Today one of the greatest challenges facing humanitarianism is the blurring of boundaries between humanitarian assistance and the political objectives of military intervention.

(Sorry this quote is long, but I had to share the whole thing.)
Stories, we all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do. We find ourselves in them, make ourselves in them, choose ourselves in them. If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we better choose them well. This book is a series of stories. I ask again and again, "How am I to be, how are we to be in relation to the suffering of others?" It is a question that has preoccupied me for much of my life. This book is a personal narrative about the political journey I have taken over the last twenty years as a humanitarian doctor, as a citizen and as a man. I have witnessed famine, epidemics of preventable diseases, war and its crimes, and genocide. I have witnessed politics fail and I have witnessed the struggle to be fully human when it does. I have witnessed an endless catalogue of terrors, and in them I saw myself, knowing that I might merely be a spectator to these, that I might suffer these, collaborate with these or inflict them on others. It is not a dispassionate story. I do not pretend to be outside of the events and circumstances I describe. I have lived and live in them, between them and through them. For me, these moments have been bigger than the smallness of time itself. They are personal moments, political moments or moments when there is no difference. Nor is this a sentimental story that meets victims with pity and paternalism or worthy of aid so long as they are not a source of fear. It is about a way of seeing that requires humility, so that one can recognize the sameness of self in the other. It is about the mutuality that can exist between us, if we so choose.

I love those last two sentences ... "a way of seeing that requires humility, so that one can recognize the sameness of self in the other." Good stuff. I strive to do this with every person that I meet - regardless of differences that may exist between skin colour, religion, culture, I try and see them as someone who is just the same as me.

Lastly, I thought I'd share one of my favourite quotes from the book. It ties in nicely with what I shared a couple days ago, about not just thinking and talking, but actually doing. I also like how it talks about once you've been somewhere yourself - and know faces and personal stories - you can't help but act. Before that though, it's impersonal to you, and while you still should care, it's often hard to. So true.

A few weeks after I returned from Zaire in January 1997, I went to see Benedict [a mentor]. "Justice is an illusion," I said as we walked through the woods.

"Not when you know what injustice is," Benedict replied immediately. "The victim is someone quite concrete. Justice only fails when we fail to imagine that it is possible. But like so many things, it depends not only on imaginings but on what we do."