In Praise of Atlas Logistique and Everyone Else Who Gets Things Done, Sexy or Not

My new friend Sophie is sexy. It’s not her fault. She’s French, so she has to be. She’s lighting another cigarette and her free hand is swooping around like a swallow. ‘Becuz,’ she says, ‘Nobudee likes trucks. Zey ahr nut sexee, n’est pas?’ Clearly she has not been to rural Canada, where there is a whole cross-section of the population that firmly believes trucks are sexy and everything else besides. But when it comes to relief work, she’s right. Trucks aren’t sexy. Try it out: Compare the following answers to the question, ‘What do you do over there?’

Answer 1: I help feed starving children.

Answer 2: I arrange trucks for food deliveries.

See? Sophie’s right. She rolls her eyes. Sexily. ‘Trucks, trucks, trucks! Thees eez boring, no?’

But today I sing my hymn to ones who arrange the trucks, because without them no one gets to be sexy. (Unless you’re French, then you have to be). They take their distinguished place besides the stagehand, the butler, and the guy who fixes your car. These are the people who make things work. Angelina Jolie may show up with her sultry million-dollar humanitarian smile, but someone had to make sure she got there in front of the cameras, and that’s the kind of someone I’m talking about.

Sophie works for Atlas Logistique, a smallish French NGO that specializes in logistical support for other NGOs. Oxfam gets to print posters with happy children drinking clean water, UNICEF gets to pin up photos of children being educated, MSF gets to show people getting medical assistance in the most dire of places, and Food for the Hungry get to show, well, the Hungry Being Fed, but not Atlas. They can show trucks, or waybills – or helicopters on a good day. Because that’s what they do, they move things around, and no one wants to give money for stuff like that. It’s boring. (Even helicopters are boring after awhile – trust me. It’s the throbbing).

This all came up at dinner tonight because Atlas is now having to merge with Handicap International, another French NGO that does sexy things with prosthetic limbs and rehabilitation of mine victims and the like. Atlas just can’t get enough funding by themselves. Not sexy enough. We are waiting for our dinner to arrive, hours late, at Jean-Luc’s, the Chinese French restaurant. ‘Maybee we disappere …’ Sophie is telling me with that wonderful shrug-and-pout combination that you have to be French to pull off without looking like the village idiot. ‘No!’ I cry, like we’re in the movies (something about being with French people brings that out in you).

But really, it would be tragic if they disappeared. They are good, they are great, they are indispensable. You don’t know this, and you’d never hear this in the news or around the water cooler at work or in the bar on Friday night, but Atlas Logistique are doing magnificent, wonderful things everyday over here. If I have things to move from here to there – things like 6000 shelter kits for people who lost their homes in an earthquake, say – then I call Sophie. ‘Allo,’ she says. ‘How much notice do you need to move my stuff?’ I ask. ‘Meybee foure ‘oweres,’ she says and I can tell, even over the phone, that she’s shrugging as she says it. But she’s not lying. She does it. She goes out and finds the truck drivers and pays them and sends them on their way, and the next day my stuff is moved and people have homes again. Do you know, can you even fathom how much easier it makes it to do the sexy good things we do? You can’t, I know you can’t, but try to imagine, ok? It’s like if you were to wake up with a panic attack because nearly everything in your life was going wrong and with one phone call you could say, ‘So how soon can you fix my life?’ and in four hours it would be fixed. People should be shouting from the rooftops about service like that, but no one talks about it, because that kind of thing is, well, ‘shipping’ and shipping is dead boring. Still, Sophie and her cheery Atlas squad go on doing it, for free, on time, ignored. The fact that they happen to be so French and sexy about it is just an added bonus.

So, anyway. I thought I’d take this blog out to shout from the rooftops of the world that nothing would happen without the Sophies of the world. No food would get moved and no houses would get built and no medicines would make it to dire places. Sexy aid workers in their sexy desperate situations would not get to look so good, and more importantly, people wouldn’t get so fed, so housed, and so healthy after major catastrophes. I hope Atlas doesn’t disappear, I hope the dimwitted world of funders wakes up to the fact that someone has to DO SOMETHING, or no one gets to be sexy (or fed), and I hope that one day Someone throws a gigantic party parade for the invisible ones in their dusty basement offices who always answer their phones with ‘Allo? Meybee foure ‘oweres …’ The ones who sigh and shrug and pout and get on with it. Here’s to them, and you, Sophie. Ok, you can stop rolling your eyes, now.

Of Lovesongs, Earthquakes, and Evergreens

It may actually be impossible to explain this. It’s closing in on nine o’clock at night and I’m in a Mercedes minibus on the highway headed from Lahore toward Islamabad, playing every love song I can find on my iPod for a 35 year-old man. I’m going through them alphabetically, but every now and then when I see he’s getting bored I play ‘Annie’s Song’ by John Denver again and he lets out this appreciative little, um, moan. It’s times like these when I wish I could bring everyone along on one of these trips so that I wouldn’t have to say anything but let them soak it up like I am. These are unbelievable times.

The man’s name is Qasir, which is a Muslim name, but he wishes he had a Christian one like John or Peter or something. He told me that once. He’s married. Three kids. ‘What is your idea about Marriage?’ he asks me as we vibrate along the highway. The Mercedes lets out a warning tone every time the speedometer needle nudges past 120 and our conversation is perforated with irritating beeps. ‘My idea?’ I ask. I know what he means, but I’m stalling. ‘Yes … I mean to say … what is your idea about the restrictions of Marriage,’ he says. ‘Is it better for married or for to be Single?’ The other guys in the van lean forward. They’re all single. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘My idea about marriage is that if you have the right person then it is good to be married, and if you don’t, then it’s not.’ This pronouncement has the weight of my 31 years behind it and everyone nods sagely and gives it a moment of silence before ignoring it. ‘The restrictions are very bad,’ Qasir says. ‘Pakistani womens are very badly difficult. If you look at a girl, I mean to say, they will be very in some angry mood: Why you look at this other girl?’ I stare at him. He’s serious. ‘Qasir, my friend, that’s not just Pakistani women.’ He seems surprised. Later, when the topic changes to music, he tells me he likes English love songs because he is a romantic. Tell that to your wife, I think, but I play him ‘Annie’s Song’ anyway, to keep him happy – and awake – until we get home.

We’ve gone to Lahore to look at some portable cabins for the team up in Bagh. Right now they sleep in tents and work in a building that stood up to earthquake but now has cracks in the walls that are steadily widening from pencil lines to crevasses you could put your fist into. We have declared this situation ‘unsafe’, and then ‘very unsafe’, and then ‘so unsafe we should do something about it’, which is why I’m looking at porta-cabins.

I was up in Bagh last week. It is beautiful. This is real Pakistani Kashmir - off limits to foreigners until now – in the foothills of the great mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush and Himalayas. Bagh spreads up the steep slopes on either side of the river, which runs as a brown ribbon through a wide bed of stones, a constant reminder of its grander days. I arrived by UN helicopter and got a ride to the Tearfund office with a doctor from the American Rescue Committee. He looked Pakistani but spoke with a British accent so colonial upper class it sounded fake. ‘Bagh was famous before the earthquake for its cakes and pastries and confectionary,’ he said like he was a tour guide for a museum. He actually said ‘confectionary’ and I had to look it up later because I didn’t believe him – not that Bagh was famous for it, but that it meant what he meant. It does. He dropped me off at the Tearfund office with a firm handshake and some more very slippery sounding words.

The next day I went with Sardar and Mohammed on a survey for ‘watsan’, the fancy euphemism for ‘water and sanitation.’ We were looking at springs. Sardar is like a small French slapstick comedian from the 1940s and Mohammed is a good straight man. Whenever we got to a spring box or a reservoir, Sardar would plop himself down on it like a kid having a tantrum in a supermarket and bark out orders for GPS coordinates, which Mohammed would read out to him. Then he would pop up again like he was spring-loaded. ‘Move,’ he’d say, and we’d move. I got an enormous kick out him and he knew it.

The country we were walking through was amazing. There were huge pine trees with long needles hanging in sweeping tufts like the tassels of a thousand Persian carpets, and juniper trees twisting up with their dark green waxy leaves, and a tree that looked like a fig tree but wasn’t. The scent of evergreen was everywhere and the warm air was mixed with cool mountain gusts from the snowy peaks above us. Below, the valley spread out with cottages dotting the slopes. We stopped by some lumberjacks who were cutting up a tree with an old double-handled saw that they kept carefully oiled. Sardar sat on the newly cut log and got sap all over himself.

When the day was over, Ismail the driver, took us down the road a little ways, wheeling his Toyota delicately around the hairpin turns with the palm of one hand, reminding me for some reason of an expert horseman. We stopped at a grassy place and Sardar and Mohammed took out the gas stove and the rice and beans and bread and we had lunch and tea looking out over the valley.

In Bagh, I would play my guitar in the evenings for a madly appreciative audience, fumbling my way through my five-song repertoire to rapturous applause. I’m learning ‘Annie’s Song’. The favourites are always the love songs. Because Shona was leaving, I learned a Scottish heartbreaker about missing home, and sang it badly at her leaving party. The others sang or recited poems as well, and one of the women sang a shy, strange song in her haunted ululating voice. At the end, Shona taught everyone ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and we crossed arms and held hands in a circle and sang it in a hideous din to say goodbye and send her off.

At night, I fell asleep in a tent with six other men, as if we were lumberjacks or miners, and their soft voices whispered in Urdu and slid on and on through the night.