Aiding the Aid workers?

Happy Birthday Mum! And belated birthday to my little sis yesterday- ah the delights of being raised with all those scorpios! Hope its been a good few days for you both.

The "strike" called by Hamas in mourning for the deaths in Gaza went off without too many incidents- well not much more than normal. Its scarey how the "acceptable levels of violence" mentality takes over in such situations and perhaps is a too handy and familiar response learned from the conflict in the North.

Spent sometime talking to some of the expat aid workers here over the last few days. Many of them seem to be in the 25-30 age range which gives me a good 15-20 years start on them. There is a discernable amount of burn-out among them. Indigestion and sleeping problems abound, heavy drinking on their free time, and conflicting emotions of frustration and guilt. Guilt because they feel headwrecked by the situation and yet have an *out * clause if they need one while Palestinians do not, frustration at the lack of political progress and a sense of futility in trying to accomplish anything substantial while wedged between a national political vaccum and international apathy.

I have been surprised at the lack of emotional support mechanisms for aid workers on long term placements here. They are, after all in a war zone where the threat is constant if not always imminent around them. I know of one aid worker whose job it is to document the killings and injuries of children and I thought often about her last week and the appalling vistas of photographs and videos from Gaza she would have been examining and analysing. All without any avenue in which to de-brief and unload her own inevitable and justifiable distress at what she was seeing.

Of course, the people who live here have the greatest amount of trauma- but they also have family and community networks, a sense of struggle and identity to help sustain them. That is not to diminish the very real impact- emotionally and psychologically which the brutality they are subjected to has upon them, but it hardly helps the locals if aid workers are burning out prematurely or unnecessarily.