Emergency Sex

This memoir by three UN workers, Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson , was very difficult for someone like me to read. It covers most of the horrors of the 'nineties - Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda and Bosnia - and the reality of what happens in the UN and how the UN workers survive it.

The book is divided into the three narrator's, but the voice is so similar I would guess that Ken Cain (who is a writer) did the actual putting to paper. It's well-written, in that clear, blunt, TV-timing kind of American way. It's also structured well, beginning with each character's background, their journey from naivety to stunned disbelief, and from difficult situations (a murder in Cambodia) to outright horror (stepping on fields of bodies in Rwanda). The three characters are very different - Ken's an idealist who wants to change the world, Andrew a MK who believes in what he's doing, and Heidi a divorcee who wants to change her life. That's where the sex comes in; she seems to sleep with everyone in the entire world, and the disconcerting part is not her own descriptions of herself as a sexual being, but her two mates' view of that as well. If that's post-feminism, I wish we were past it.

I'm sure it's all controversial to people who don't realise what the UN is like - and not just the UN of course, all large humanitarian aid organisations - but for people like me it's more of a difficult vindication of one's own opinions. I particuarly liked, and wanted more of, the personal doubts and psychological difficulties, including suicide ideation, the sense of being separate from the rest of the world, and needing to go back despite everything. I think it could have had a little more of that, but I suppose the three writers did need to keep back something of themselves. A very important and very good read.