No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man

I was late checking for my flight today.

No matter how convenient the time that I need to be at the airport and no matter how far in advance – how many weeks prior – I know that I’ll be traveling, the morning of there is always some extenuating circumstance, some reason why I rush out of the house at the last minute…

* * *

It’s not easy to balance aid work and a family life. When, for a variety of family-related reasons it becomes necessary to come back “home”, to relocate to a first-world city for an HQ job there’s the expectation that things will be somehow easier.

But they never are.

You’re here, but your real work is over there. Your heart is over there. You’re constantly torn, pulled in multiple directions. No matter where you are physically, there’s a nagging, tormenting notion that you should be somewhere else. At home, you need to be out in “the field”; out in “the field”, you know you should be home. …At “home.”

*

My wife puts up with a lot, bless her. It can’t be easy being married to me. Or to any itinerant aid worker, for that matter.

I scheduled this trip after a previous one fell through at the last minute. Apparently the generals in Myanmar didn’t see fit to give me a visa to their fair country. At least not this month.

And it’s a good thing: see, I was going to miss Halloween.

Not that Halloween is any big deal. Until it seemed that I would miss it. And then there was drama. My daughter (8 going on 15) had a meltdown: Apparently I’m never there. I miss everything…

And then the trip to Myanmar fell through and all was well. Until this trip – the one I’m on as I write this - came up. I knew about it and discussed it a full ten days in advance. There was full disclosure on this one. No ambiguity; no, “well, I’m still sorting out the ticket…” And so, after some discussion and finally booking a ticket at the last minute – one that departed and arrived at decent hours – and after a day of all being well, and then an evening of watching “must see” TV with my wife, I confess that I was a bit grumpy when at 11:03 PM she looked at me with the “you’re never here” eyes and demanded to know why I’d booked travel to be away on my son’s semesterly parent-teacher conference.

I am currently overseeing more than ten grants in eight countries. I meet every reporting deadline, get the no-cost-extension paperwork in on time. I meet my in-house administrative obligations, too. I submit my electronic labor-accounting reports, I do performance appraisals of those I supervise, I review and give meaningful feedback on proposals and strategies and plans and policies. People depend on me for a lot, and I follow through for them. I am dependable. I can deal with the big picture without losing the details. I get stuff done.

But at 11:03 PM last Wednesday, I had no answer for my wife. If I’d ever even been aware of it to begin with I’d totally forgotten about that damned conference.

*

My daughter (8 going on 15) sometimes has her little friends from the neighborhood come over to play. I try to be cool with her and them: Let them have their tea parties in the backyard or organize their “Littlest Petshop” figures on the dining room table.

I think I’m a pretty good dad. Okay, maybe not as over-the-top involved-in-the-minutae-of-their-child’s-lives as some. I don’t personally participate in the backyard tea parties… But, still, I’m a heck of a lot better than many.

Sometimes, though, I need to weigh in as a parent. Sometimes meals just have to be eaten, baths taken. Sometimes SpongeBob has to be turned off so that homework can get done. And very often those are moments when my sweet little daughter morphs into the Wicked Witch of the Wild West.

In the course of a single week I might make financial decisions equivalent to the gross annual budget of some smaller NGOs. I make recommendations on strategies for entire regions and that will affect hundreds of employees, thousands of beneficiaries. I participate in discussions in different forums that are relevant globally. I have hired and fired people who depended directly on me as their supervisor for their livelihoods. I have handed relief items to refugees fresh from a third-world war zone, haggard and frightened. I have personally made decisions about where hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid would go and not go.

But when my daughter doesn’t like what I want her to do, I suddenly become temporarily a nobody. And I have to swallow a level and quality of attitude and disrespect for which I am utterly unprepared.

* * *

The hardest part of this job, hands down, is just trying to stay balanced. Being a whole person. Not totally losing yourself in the work. You learn, soon enough, that there kind of are multiple worlds that we’re required to inhabit simultaneously. There’s the world of aid: the high stakes, the pressure, the intense debates, the even more intense subject matter.

Then, there’s the world outside of aid. Family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors who cannot begin to comprehend the stuff that we see and deal with. Not because it’s so complicated or technical, but because it is so heavy. I long ago stopped trying to explain what I do to the soccer moms and dads on the sidewalk outside my daughter’s school waiting for the bell to ring. If the subject of my travel comes up, I stick to stories of shopping, weird food, and how hot it is there.

I think this is the least acknowledged paradox of aid work, actually. The fact that we do inhabit multiples worlds (some of us more expertly than others). We act globally in the full sense of the term, hopefully for the better, as our “job.” And then, after hours, we’re extraordinarily mundane.

My 8-going-on-15 year old daughter helps keep me very well-connected with that reality.

* * *

My flight this morning left late. Around 11:00 AM. Enough time for me to walk my daughter to school, about two blocks away. She walked on ahead. Didn’t really want to talk with me, beyond a few strongly-worded directives about how I’d better be back for Halloween.

The bell rang, I called out to her, she looked embarrassed and ran inside. 8 going on 15 years old.

I wanted to hurry back, but my son was busy shuffling through the leaves piled up along the sidewalk. I stifled impatience. I know I’m gone a lot. I don’t want his childhood memories to be of me being on his case to hurry up so that I can leave.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)