In telling the story of her decade as a young and passionate humanitarian aid worker Jessica Alexander also manages to tell us the best and the worst of what this work is like and to speculate on the aid establishment-how it has changed, where it works and what its limits are.
"A no-holds-barred description of what it is like to travel to world disaster sites and engage in the complex, challenging, nitty-gritty work of making a difference across lines of culture, class, age, gender, and perspective. Tracing her personal journey from wide-eyed and na ve newcomer to hardened cynic and, ultimately, to hopeful but critical realist, Alexander transports readers to some of the most troubled locations around the world and shows us not only the seemingly impossible challenges, but also the moments of resilience and recovery. But we also see the alcohol-fueled parties and fleeting romances, the burnouts and self-doubt, and the struggle to do good in places that have long endured suffering. We watch as she manages a 24,000-person camp in Darfur, collects evidence for the Charles Taylor trial in Sierra Leone, and contributes to the massive aid effort to clean up a shattered Haiti. In this honest and irreverent memoir, she introduces readers to the realities of life as an aid worker. It was messy, chaotic, and difficult-but she was hooked. But the world that she encountered in the field was dramatically different than anything she could have imagined. Jessica Alexander arrived in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide as an idealistic intern, eager to contribute to the work of the international humanitarian aid community.
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