Preface. My friend and colleague Sean Healy died last night and it hurts. Too soon, too unfair, and too painful to so many people.  A great MSFer, humanitarian and person. 

You might think that people working in the humanitarian business would be familiar enough with life and death to be more prepared for when the latter invades the private and organizational space. Perhaps the doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers are. Perhaps not. I’m not medical. So this morning’s sharp sense of Sean’s death catches me off guard. Two thoughts come to mind.

One. We humanitarians spend too much time occupied with relief in terms of the provision of assistance and services. An attention to biological sustenance that we critique on occasion and then slide away from addressing.  Over the past 24 hours, scores of Sean’s friends have been coming together on a WhatsApp group, to offer testament and support and to do something more basic, to be with others as much as such virtual assembly will allow. Similar WhatsApp groups now form spontaneously among many crisis-affected families and communities, yet one has to wonder if the sector could not have set up and scaled up decades ago in order to provide similar services in situations of crisis.  There were certainly some related efforts, such as message services, bulletin boards, and the like, but they remained minimal in their reach.

The point is not about the lack of the services but our inability to grasp or give appropriate weight to the need in the first place.  Its absence does not threaten life. What about suffering? As well, the sharing of pain and seeking community relates to the enduring sectoral blindness to or avoidance of the spiritual, of people’s need to connect with a higher power at a time of natural calamity or armed destruction, and to share this ancient social experience.

Two. With tragedy and pain comes the need to act, to do something, to respond to the external and internal needs. This is com-passion: the need to address the suffering of others as well as our own discomfort at their suffering.  We feel for them. We feel for ourselves. So: do something. Take action.  Even writing a blog. It helps.

Imagine, though, that somebody else wrote this blog for me.  Maybe it just needed to be written, and maybe it would have been of much higher quality, with a description of the aforementioned message services or links to insightful articles on spirituality and aid. What if my need and my agency were ignored? Or consistently ignored, gripped in the iron hand of a dominant foreign doctrine?

This brings us to enormously complex issues such as aid and dependency, localization, disempowerment, and dignity.  Principles and values crisscross our ideology and work – my preferred lens on the aid world – to such an extent that it is easy to lose sight of the basic need of people to do something. A need no weaker than food, shelter, water, or medical care. A need perhaps less urgent, perhaps even less possible in the earliest stages of a crisis; and at the same time a need that could be more deliberately recognized and reflected in our programming as a both a way to conceptualize and deliver vital relief to the recipients of aid, and to the givers.

[Updated: I made some minor changes to this post on 27 November.]