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fearlessness.
We gladly climbed into the tiny plane, whose size and condition didn’t trouble me nearly as much this time. It rattled and coughed its way into the air, carrying us away from the Lord’s Resistance Army and a problem just a tad larger than we expected. I didn’t see anything in the Childers orphanage that justified attempting to return to that place, and I had to ask myself what sort of help I would be providing to the orphans if I did. The departure was sudden and painful but the message in it was clear. Wherever my future happened to lie in Africa, it sure wasn’t there in South Sudan. But I had seen enough to know it was somewhere there in Africa. I could already feel the roots taking hold.
CHAPTER FIVE
It wasn’t Erik’s stint as a conscript sergeant in the Swedish military back in the day that landed him in Africa in 2006. Although his military unit dealt with antisabotage and counterintelligence, teaching him things he still used in Africa, all that had no bearing on his decision to go. He had studied international law and politics for years and was fascinated with the twists and turns of legal arguments, but those things alone never would have taken him so far from home. His commitment to work in places like Kenya and Somalia was cemented by his work at the Swedish Migration Board in the position of asylum officer in the four years just before his move to Africa.
The job kept him face to face with asylum applicants from the Horn of Africa region, one after another. Many showed up desperate to pour out their stories of repression in their far-off homeland, often describing a list of lethal dangers menacing them if they were forced to return.
He ran across a few fakers from time to time, knowing every public resource will have its problems of abuse. But he didn’t believe the average human being could convincingly fake such stories when the audience is someone who listens to them every day. A person develops the unhappy skill of spotting liars by listeningto so many tales of organized state psychosis. Erik soon came to believe that the daily experience of working in this atmosphere will either teach you something important and vital about the human experience or turn your heart to stone.
The trade-off for the knowledge of such terrible things was that the job changed him forever. He found that a few simple but powerful messages had become riveted into his worldview, chiefly the conviction that any level of fraud within the system paled against the sheer human misery facing many of those people. More than anything else, it’s his memories of them that brought him to such a faraway place—not just their stories, but the sense of truth they radiated while they spoke.
He met with asylum seekers two days each week, listening to a litany of horror stories. His division was sometimes able to prevent people from being returned to troubled regions, but after years of listening to stories of misery, the root problems behind them became his prime concern.
His friends tolerated that in him and accepted his aversion to sugarcoating the truth, but it wasn’t always appreciated around the office. The impact of those years as an asylum officer had left him impatient with bureaucracy and hungry to get involved on a more direct and local level.
By the time he arrived in Africa, he was emotionally finished with life in Sweden, comfortable as it was, and with the familiarities of his homeland. That plodding line of asylum applicants, combined with the safe predictability of life, driving him to seek the unpredictability that was the essence of his new position at a major Swedish NGO, working in the semiautonomous state of Puntland in northeast Somalia. After a long series of interviews he convinced their hiring committee he was a good fit as their new legal and human rights program manager. This was a position formerly filled by an experienced man in his fifties, so Erik felt a healthy level of anxiety about
We gladly climbed into the tiny plane, whose size and condition didn’t trouble me nearly as much this time. It rattled and coughed its way into the air, carrying us away from the Lord’s Resistance Army and a problem just a tad larger than we expected. I didn’t see anything in the Childers orphanage that justified attempting to return to that place, and I had to ask myself what sort of help I would be providing to the orphans if I did. The departure was sudden and painful but the message in it was clear. Wherever my future happened to lie in Africa, it sure wasn’t there in South Sudan. But I had seen enough to know it was somewhere there in Africa. I could already feel the roots taking hold.
CHAPTER FIVE
It wasn’t Erik’s stint as a conscript sergeant in the Swedish military back in the day that landed him in Africa in 2006. Although his military unit dealt with antisabotage and counterintelligence, teaching him things he still used in Africa, all that had no bearing on his decision to go. He had studied international law and politics for years and was fascinated with the twists and turns of legal arguments, but those things alone never would have taken him so far from home. His commitment to work in places like Kenya and Somalia was cemented by his work at the Swedish Migration Board in the position of asylum officer in the four years just before his move to Africa.
The job kept him face to face with asylum applicants from the Horn of Africa region, one after another. Many showed up desperate to pour out their stories of repression in their far-off homeland, often describing a list of lethal dangers menacing them if they were forced to return.
He ran across a few fakers from time to time, knowing every public resource will have its problems of abuse. But he didn’t believe the average human being could convincingly fake such stories when the audience is someone who listens to them every day. A person develops the unhappy skill of spotting liars by listeningto so many tales of organized state psychosis. Erik soon came to believe that the daily experience of working in this atmosphere will either teach you something important and vital about the human experience or turn your heart to stone.
The trade-off for the knowledge of such terrible things was that the job changed him forever. He found that a few simple but powerful messages had become riveted into his worldview, chiefly the conviction that any level of fraud within the system paled against the sheer human misery facing many of those people. More than anything else, it’s his memories of them that brought him to such a faraway place—not just their stories, but the sense of truth they radiated while they spoke.
He met with asylum seekers two days each week, listening to a litany of horror stories. His division was sometimes able to prevent people from being returned to troubled regions, but after years of listening to stories of misery, the root problems behind them became his prime concern.
His friends tolerated that in him and accepted his aversion to sugarcoating the truth, but it wasn’t always appreciated around the office. The impact of those years as an asylum officer had left him impatient with bureaucracy and hungry to get involved on a more direct and local level.
By the time he arrived in Africa, he was emotionally finished with life in Sweden, comfortable as it was, and with the familiarities of his homeland. That plodding line of asylum applicants, combined with the safe predictability of life, driving him to seek the unpredictability that was the essence of his new position at a major Swedish NGO, working in the semiautonomous state of Puntland in northeast Somalia. After a long series of interviews he convinced their hiring committee he was a good fit as their new legal and human rights program manager. This was a position formerly filled by an experienced man in his fifties, so Erik felt a healthy level of anxiety about
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