A Blog Post by Forest Whitaker
World Humanitarian Day is a remarkably reflective and moving observance. This is a day when we are invited by the United Nations to take a step back and think about the millions of human beings whose calling is to assist other human beings in situations of distress – such as an earthquake, a tsunami, or a civil war. We often admire their selfless dedication, which is the reason why we call them humanitarian workers in the first place. They devote their lives to the welfare of humanity for the sake of humanity. World Humanitarian Day is assuredly about such dedication.
But this day is also about courage – the physical courage it takes to move into places of danger and suffering, places which are sometimes full of violence and despair. Most people will know of humanitarian action from a safe distance – in the news. But humanitarians and aid workers are there on the ground – exposed to pain and loss, exposed to self-doubt and trauma, and exposed to death – both by accident and by murder. And indeed, World Humanitarian Day is about sacrifice. It was designated in memory of the August 19th, 2003 bomb attack on the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, which killed 22 people. Before that attack, the United Nations had never been targeted at that scale. This was a day of sadness and shock. And it was a day about courage and hope, extraordinary attitudes that are common in the seemingly ordinary people who choose to engage themselves in humanitarian and aid efforts. Despite the sadness and the shock, I have never heard of humanitarians who chose to renounce the ideals they were serving. The one person I met who had been in the hotel is, to this day, one of the most passionate advocates for human rights that I’ve come to know.
As CEO of a humanitarian organization, I am truly humbled by these women and men who can demonstrate the physical courage it takes to move into places where humanity is flailing. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that everyone should rush to peoples’ rescue in emergency situations, as this would be to the detriment of coordinated action by professionals. Yet, there is still much one can do. Of course, I first think of those who move into remote places where humanitarian crises stretch over long period of time to assist displaced people, help combat hunger, dig wells, teach math, and so on. 99.9% of this work is carried outside of the news cycle. It does not make the front page. It is patient work that nevertheless calls for great courage. I happen to know this firsthand because WPDI is present in South Sudan. Since 2013, the country has been engulfed in a civil war of varying levels of intensity. That intensity has varied throughout the nation’s recent history, but there has been a constant: South Sudan has been regularly designated as the most dangerous country for aid workers. This fact represents a difficult reality, and yet, life in South Sudan is not like a constant battleground of kinetic or cinematic intensity. Life in South Sudan is almost normal by conventional standards, and were you to visit, you would see most people actively building a country from the ground up. But this normalcy is only a fragile aspect of places that have suffered from decades of armed violence and senseless conflict. Those are places where the capacity for tolerance and dialogue is very, very thin. Everything can be normal for some time, until suddenly, an eruption of violence sparked by an apparently minor incident throws everything to the ground, forcing people to rebuild from scratch time and again.
South Sudan is an extreme case, but there can be volatility in the other countries and places where WPDI is active. I will rarely spend a day without thinking about WPDI’s staff and youths – with both concern and admiration. It takes physical courage to struggle for the welfare of people and communities in such contexts. When I ask them how they remain so determined in doing their work, they typically say that someone has to do it. In their words and attitude, I read a lesson of humanitarian courage that’s applicable to everyone. These humanitarians aren’t telling us to come and do their work. Rather, they are telling us to do our jobs at home and care for the people around us – as any human being should. This is a message befitting the World Humanitarian Day: Courage begins with a recognition that we can only consider ourselves truly human in so far as we can reach out to other humans.