"Without him, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere... When we told him of
the MOP debacle, there was a hard-flint twinkle in his eyes, his jaw jutted
in barely contained frustration and he said, in an ominous tone, "?'ll take
care of it. You shall not be left stranded on the gravel of the Mammy
Yoko helipad, not on my watch". Kemal Saiki, fixer extraordinaire,
he-who-make-things-happen-fast as the the local paramount chiefs and
natives call him, whipped his cell phone out of his safari vest pocket
and barked a few orders. Moments later we could hear the whoop-whoop-whoop of an approaching big, WHITE, helicopter which soon swooped us on the
shores of Liberia and the halls of Monrovia... " (sic)
This is the beginning of a suggested entry of "Keeping the Peace," friends and relatives. And, truth be told, it's a smart move on Kemal's part to give us the helicopter rides and the access to all, big and small, to, in short, make it happen. We're heading into an interview with the head of the mission, Alan Doss, having just come back from Monrovia.
Now THERE is a difficult place to be a UN peacekeeper in the early stages of the game, with a third of your force on the ground and no solid infrastructure in place. More on that craziness later but I will just say that the highlight was touching down in a helicopter with the UN force commander and his Special Force dudes-with-more-defined-forearms-than-a-normal-athlete's-thighs in the middle of the jungle nowhere land so that the General could kick some proverbial rebel ass.
My point being, I've been set up to fall in love with these guys, with all of their flaws, with the 3 A's of mission life: alcoholism, adultry and apathy, the incredible amount of cash that can be involved in signing up for the peacekeeping cause, the accusation that peacekeeping forces help the spread of AIDs...The fact is that I've come to see what it means to be a peacekeeper primarily from Their perspective. I'm not doing a hard-core investigative story because I believe that I'm getting more and better material this way (plus, the helicopter rides, though quite uncomfortable, are cool).
And so, we've fallen in love. I think we're getting the story I came here to tell, and I think that it will show the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I also think that an intelligent, balanced consideration of the ugly will be one of my greatest challenges. At the end of the day I have to face the fact that I've been "in-bedded" without even realizing it. Hmmmm...but, as Rob pointed out, especially after being in Liberia, life can be hard for the guys with the blue hats, too.
In the meantime, Rob and are I wearily content with our Liberia mission. Very.
More on that to come.