Emergency Sex

About 3 weeks ago I finished reading a book with this provocative title, 'Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures)'. It is the short recollections of 3 young people who worked for the United Nations in the ninety's spliced together chronologically. Their work spanned 4 continents; the conflict zones of Cambodia (where they all met), Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and Liberia. Each person - Ken Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thompson - became involved with the UN for very different reasons and brought very different skills, motivations and expectations to their tasks. It is the convergence and divergence of these three's relationship that shapes the narrative, but it is their 'unedited' experiences of field work that forms the content of the book.
This is a raw, funny, confronting and troubling insight into the reality of international diplomatic work; It is an open window on the lives of the very ordinary people who work in extraordinary circumstances; it is an expose of the paradox that is the United Nations.
If you don't believe that human beings are capable of both great good and terrifying evil, this book is convincing evidence. It is also convincing evidence that this world is not a happy place for massive numbers of our fellow men, women and children.
I thoroughly recommend it. Thanks to my colleague on the clubbe ward at the Children's Hospital who lent it to me.

Here are some excerpts:

Andrew, Rwanda
"This is an average massacre by Rwandan standards, unremarkable in scale or circumstance. Several thousand civilians had gathered in the church grounds, promised protection by th Hutu governor. Hutu militias went methodically through the crowd instructing other Hutus to leave, and government soldiers cut off the escape routes. Then the governor fired his weapon in the air as a kill-the-tutsis signal and the young men drunk on banana beer hacked them all to pieces. It's hard work killing that many people in a confined space with only machetes and clubs, so the killers returned home to their families each night to rest and drink before the next days work. It took three days and so far we know of only two survivors...
What's difficult now, five weeks and four hundred bodies into the dig, is the pile of entwined corpses several yards down in the grave. There's just no way to find the bottom, no matter how often the backhoe goes in. It's a wicked game of pick-up-sticks, whrer I grab a leg or arm of what looks to be the easiest corpse to lift off, only to find that another part of the same bofy is buried under half a dozen others, all of which have the same problem. Sometimes I get obsessed over one that won't release and spend hours on it with a pick and trowel. This annoys my team, because they have to heave off other bodies just so I can extract mine, but I can't face the same body two days in a row."

Ken, Liberia
"We estimate that a third of the women in displaced persons camps have been raped. Half the population of the country was displaced during the war, so if we're right, that means one in six women has been raped. We give questionnaires to demobilized fighters and ten percent of the fighters admit to having raped more than ten times during the war. Not a single prosecution, investigation, UN report, press expose, nothing. It's as if 100,000 rapes never happened.
I shake Mr. Ignatius Peabody's hand. We shake our heads. He's going back out there, through the gates, through the checkpoints. I have to go to a morning staff meeting.
'Thankyou Mr. Ignatius. I can't promise that anything will happen with these reports, but I will pass them on to New York.'
'Ah say, ma people, what we have done-oh'
'Godspeed Ignatius'
'Tank Gawd for life, Mr. Ken.'"



Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures). Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thompson. Erbury Press, London (2004).