How do you negotiate a multitude of identities while working as an aid worker? As a half-Israeli half-British woman, with a questionable accent and unruly hair, I have had to deal with speculation about my background and motives day in, day out while on mission in Muslim countries, sometimes when I least expected it. It grates on you pretty quickly, and soon it becomes easier just to keep things vague, particularly when working in a place where your nationality may make you a target.
Let me take you back to one of my previous assignments as an aid worker. I had run into a group of friends drinking coffee, when one of them – a new Irish guy – said, “Hey, I know you, you’re the Israeli girl who worked with us in that post-conflict west African mission five years ago. Fancy meeting you here, bang in the middle of the trouble zone – isn’t this country a bit too extreme for the likes of you?”
Not the sharpest tool in the shed – he clearly didn’t realise he could be putting me in danger – I flat-out denied knowing him. That may seem harsh, but my paranoia levels were running high. A few days earlier I’d been told I’d looked an “awful lot like the women guarding the checkpoints in the West Bank” by another colleague. The comment had been made in front of a Palestinian friend and the encounter had been uncomfortable.
For me, not disclosing my true identity in these situations was about feeling safe, but the pitfall of your past coming back to haunt you is relevant to most aid workers to some degree. Or as I like to call it, it’s a small (aid) world after all. You were a clueless, ranting feminist and wore all the wrong clothes to an IDP camp when you were 26 and on your first mission. This will come back to bite you as a 35-year-old programme manager, when a former colleague can’t stop talking about how much the naive 26-year-old you has grown up.
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