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.