Impossible Odds

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 doing a worthy job. It requirednegotiating with governmental heads throughout the region, and it could put him across from them in tense negotiations over human rights reforms in the judiciary sector, or make it necessary to poke around in the worst prisons imaginable and stare into the faces of the walking cadavers held there.
    It was the right time in his life to make this journey. A few months earlier, his fiancée back home had called off their planned wedding. He wasn’t happy about it but had to admit she might have done right by both of them—trooping around Africa was never going to be her cup of tea.
    This made it a lot easier to put himself through all the necessary steps before making the journey to Africa. Once his life there actually began, he was relieved to be without the sort of strong emotional ties that would have put up distractions in the new job.
    As for family back at home, they weren’t thrilled with his choice of assignment, but nobody seriously questioned his motives. He was grateful for that. Instead they promised to visit as soon as possible and see his new hometown of Nairobi, Kenya, for themselves.
    He was struck by how good it felt to be alone, in terms of not causing anyone at home to worry. It seemed obvious that it would be completely unreasonable to expect to find a woman who could understand what he was doing and accept his need to be in that place.
    When it came to personal time, it was all too clear that work like his was destined to be an individual sport.

CHAPTER SIX
    Jessica:
    My truncated stay at the Childers orphanage in South Sudan was like being awakened by a plunge into freezing water. My senses had never been so overwhelmed. The experience didn’t change my overall goals, but it completely realigned my approach. I pulled back to work out a new strategy designed to actually allow me to be of service while also avoiding a pointless death there.
    I had done a summer teaching gig in Honduras, but nothing there prepared me for the normalized psychosis in Africa. The stark impact of every one of those boys and girls was enough to stop me in my tracks. Their expressions, the very flesh of their faces, had been carved by conflict. They were already old hands at drug addiction, sexual sadism, the uses of wartime weaponry, and the receiving or inflicting of savage outbursts of violence. They were “child” soldiers only in the counting of their years.
    The impact on my neophyte self was profound. Humbling, to say the least. We even had to