Never Fall In Love With An Aid Worker

In the case of my own particular aid worker, I try not to admit that love is involved.

The furthest I go is to say that when my wandering, infuriating and joy-inducing aid worker leaves, the color from my otherwise satisfying and sparkling life drains away. I growl to my friends that it is unfair that he thinks it is ok to drop into my life and remind me why I connected with him, before he stomps off back to “the field”. But secretly I would never forgo his visits. It's just that his absence knocks against my ribs.

It’s been almost three years now. Three years of a drifting connection through R and R’s and random emails and those stupid pinging skype messenger texts. Three years of one then the other of us seeing other people.

When we were together, my aid worker made clichés sing and the stars and universe jam themselves into the most glorious alignment. He brought far off exotic places to my finger-tips and created a larger sense of meaning to everything. He understood why I wrote about refugee camps or researched rape as a weapon or war, or agreed to move to a totalitarian regime without a moment’s hesitation. He not only got all of that, but went further, lived harder, pushed harder, even than I pushed myself. But I only realised all of that mattered later on.

When I first met him, my desire to kiss him had nothing to do with the direction he was taking his life and everything to do with the fact that my particular aid worker once fashioned me a Halloween costume out of an enormous two metre Chinese fan; He played a guitar-mandolin for days while we hiked on the edge of Burma; He removed leeches from my blisters and still kissed me afterwards; He helped me climb onto the top of a huge construction lorry to overlook the largest traffic jam in the largest water festival in what felt like, the largest of worlds; When a small kid asked, he gave away his guitar-mandolin.

Later, I didn't mind his absences, because when I was with him, he let me be my most playful, childish and silliest self. When we were together we persuaded trishaw drivers to get out of their driving seat and let us drive; We taught my whole Burmese office Scottish dancing; We spent my birthday buying plastic animals and making a blood red sea creature cake that we set to swim in a bath tub of jelly; We organised a colonial murder mystery for our friends; We spent hours in a South African national park practicing acrobatics; We pulled all the mattress in the house into the living room so we could set up a trampoline and we could fly; We played music with the pots and pans.

I think I fell for him because he reminded me that no matter how terrible the stories I heard about gang rapes and massacres and police brutality, there is joy and silliness and beauty in the world. And he did so, without ever uttering a word. He did it all by letting the side of me that plays play.

But aid workers have refugee camps to run and children to inoculate and local capacity to build. Love, if it exists in such a world, is fitful and passionate and a part of the drama of the emergency. An earthquake smashed Haiti, and my aid worker fell into an aching, black hole that sucked everything into it. How could I compete with millions left homeless? When the cholera epidemic took hold, how could I mention how crappy grad school was? Period pain or new friends or my routine had no meaning verses the endless needs of Haiti. And my aid worker and I drifted apart, while I bore (yes I’m sorry to say) a secret resentment to the tens of thousands of beneficiaries in Haiti.

He still fell into my life: two fleeting visits in the past year. Others were promised, but a crisis came up or something happened and he didn’t come.

His last visit ended last week. I have cuts on my arms and knees from where we raced bikes too hard through Central Park and crashed into the snow. I have a Chinese dragon puppet hung on the back of my door and Haitian coffee in my kitchen. The wounds are scabbing now and my dragon looks bedraggled.

I’ve chosen and I love my transitory life. But for some reason, this particular aid worker makes me wish things were a little bit different. He makes me wish for a playmate in my adventures. And whether that will be him, or not, the mere wishing and missing and longing for it, is a new sensation.

I leave New York in a couple of days to Thailand and the worst flooding in decades. I’m off to write a story about slavery.

In these days of packing and goodbying an email from my aid worker sends me into a quiet, cold nostalgia and the composing of this blog entry. I am reminded again of my own advice -- never fall in love with an aid worker.