If you’ve been following my other projects over the past year/months, you know that I’m very much about gaining and presenting, to those who apparently matter to this group of people we call “aid workers.” We’re understudied, usually mis-represented, too-frequently both lauded and also blamed for the wrong things. Beyond a few, frequently cringe-inducing memoirs, the voices of aid workers themselves are largely absent from the majority of current writing, analysis, critique, and other representation of the aid industry.

Depending on which numbers you choose to read and how you choose to read them, females–women–account for anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of the aid industry workforce. This means that if we to understand the global community of people we call aid workers, we inevitably need to look specifically at the experiences of the women who go out to the front lines (including the front lines of Geneva, Brussels, DC, and NYC) to carry out relief and development work.

Chasing Misery: an anthology of essays by women in humanitarian responses is the first book that I’m aware of which shares the experience of aid work from a uniquely female perspective. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of essays and photographs, of and about aid work, by women who are aid workers.

This is not some dry 35,000 ft. theory debate, or boring digression into the weeds of statistical regressions. No, Chasing Misery is an engaging read that keeps you turning pages.  The chapters are short and readable, the writing is visceral and emotive. The images are strong, sometimes gritty.

I knew many of the official answers as to why it was broken—
lack of budget allocation at the national and provincial levels,
poor incentives for female doctors to stay in this remote area,
abysmal management, supervision and recognition of health staff,
low education and nutritional status of pregnant women—but
I couldn’t get my heart to understand why, with a multi-million
dollar healthcare project, there wasn’t more care for those babies,
more options for those mothers.

p. 107

Chasing Misery is not a book to read if you need a happy ending where all the grateful beneficiaries bow slightly and say ‘thank you’ before returning home, content with their bag of CSB and bottle of vegetable oil. Chasing Misery summarily dispatches the myth that aid is some romantic, soft-focus international adventure. It’s not the end-all-be-all, of course, but then it’s obvious that it’s not intended to be. Chasing Misery is an invaluable early addition to the much too small, but thankfully growing, body of writing and perspective out there by actual aid workers.

It has been years now since I last set foot in the sands of Darfur,
but the condition remains with me still. In books, in friends, in the
far corners of life, I have continued my search for the ‘why’. And I
have yet to find it.
The condition is hard to shake. Surely, there must be some
explanation. So I continue to go around and around in the
maddening cycle of my humanitarian hamster wheel of questioning,
and of all the countless sources.

p. 239