Jasper, you once asked why I chose to be a humanitarian. At the time, I gave you the answer I gave everyone. I suspected you did not believe it but did not know for sure. It has always been hard to discern your reaction to the things I say about myself. You probably knew when it comes to me, the truth is never in the first edition. It is built over the subsequent and contradictory issues.
My suspicion was confirmed when you asked the question again. But, by then, I had been repeating that same answer so many times I had no other way to respond. My answer dissatisfied me and this time I knew it dissatisfied you. Consider the below an attempt at rectifying both.
I was born in India and I left at the age of four to Australia. You know this already. What you do not know is that at six years old my parents took me back to India. The reason was for an extended stay over the Australian summer months. The trip was meant to be a homecoming. It was not.
Travelling by train, bus, and car, I saw a country of tremendous poverty on that trip. I saw life being lived on the fringes. Under bridges, between buildings, next to railway tracks. The degree and scale of impoverishment was confronting and it taught me the meaning of words that I would only learn to spell much later. Wretched. Squalor. Emaciated.
However, as lasting as those images were, sometime else made a bigger impression. It was how people looked. They looked like me. Sitting behind that bus, car, or train window, I looked at my likeness and understood the only difference between them and I was the arbitrary circumstances of birth. Behind that window, I first felt the weight of unearned privilege.
An idea took hold on that trip. I decided I needed to earn that privilege somehow. To demonstrate through action that it was not wasted on me. Finishing that trip, I only had that in mind. I guess it was a young boy’s way of dealing with all the guilt he was feeling.
It took a decade until I was reminded of that idea. At fifteen, I was researching for a history assignment. Something about the allied camps in world war 2. Scanning archival photos, I came upon James Nachtwey’s photo series covering the 1993 Sudan famine.
Stark images of the dead and emaciated stunned me and I recalled that trip to India. I looked for more photos and forgot the assignment. Gradually I learnt about the famine and the international relief workers trying to stem its impacts. I realized with rare clarity that there was a concrete way to achieve what I sought all those years ago. A way to earn the privilege I had by default.
I know phrasing it that way makes my motivation seem self-centred. I don’t disagree. To a large extent my initial motivation did come from some desire for personal redemption. A desire to rid myself of the guilt a young boy feels when he sees another young boy the same colour as him in the dirt while he speeds by in an air-conditioned car.
There was a time when this worried me. When I thought it ruined what I am doing somehow. But now I realize all that matters is that I am actually doing this. I am helping people, right now, and the concrete impact of that can’t be taken away. I think you would agree with that.