Can’t Read My P-P-Poker Face

People have always underestimated me in poker.  I think the only game I ever lost was one four or five years ago when I was playing with both my boyfriend’s friends and his money.  After a long flight and a fair amount of sleep deprivation, I made the choice to go all in on a bluff hoping that 1) it would make me look really awesome if I pulled it off or 2) I could at least curl up on the couch and sleep if it didn’t.  I’ve often inquired as to why I am taken (mistakenly) for such a poker pushover and the answer is almost always the same: people think I am far too easy to read.  There’s a lot of truth to that.  I don’t make much effort to hide my thoughts or emotions whether shared through words, furrowed brow, or ecstatic eyes.  It just takes too much effort to constantly mask what’s real or fuss over facial expressions.  If we only have a limited amount of time and energy in this life, is hiding true thoughts and feelings really what we ought to devote them to?  In most circumstances, I think honesty truly is the best policy.  The only exceptions to this come to my mind from films where, for example, walking down a dark alley and loudly professing you hold the winning lottery ticket may not pan out well.  I learned that poker is another exception, where it’s to my benefit to show the opposite of what I am truly thinking and feeling, but because this is not a regular occurrence, it always seems to catch people by surprise.

My incredible friend Karina, doing amazing
development work in Somalia

 I met up with a friend, Karina, a few days ago in Nairobi.  I only knew her for about a month seven years ago when we worked at UNHCR together, and I haven’t seen her once since.  I have always remembered her as this strong, gorgeous, fearless, brilliant humanitarian.  That hasn’t changed much, except that when I met her for a drink on a beautiful rooftop bar with a backlit pool overlooking the city (where drinks are the same price you’d pay in Manhattan’s upper east side), I caught a touch of the human weakness and fear that I’d always imagined her completely immune to.  On October 25, two of her friends and co-workers were taken and held by nine gunmen in Somalia.  According to my understanding of the situation, they were not treated well.  However, about two weeks ago, they were rescued by American Special Forces who killed all the abductors in the raid.  The two aid workers had been handed over to the kidnappers by their own local head of security who had worked with them for years.  I cannot imagine what it feels like to know that someone you have worked beside, trusted and befriended, whose sole job it is to keep you and your staff safe, would turn you over to harm and possibly death if the price is right.  It is in these moments that my faith in humanity lightly flounders, that I have to stop and wonder if there is a point to what we do, a valid reason to so constantly put ourselves in harm’s way to help others, some of whom so obviously wouldn’t do the same in return.

Karina's friends, two aid workers
recently rescued in Somalia.

Most of you who know me know that on May 18, 2010, my life and many around me changed in an instant.  I was sitting in my office in DC editing training and capacity building materials for Burundian refugees when I received a Skype message from a friend who’d been working on the ground in Africa for years.  “I don’t want to worry you, but Flavia has been taken.”  When I saw the bubble pop-up letting me know I had a message from a friend, that sort of message was not at all what I anticipated.  I just sat in silence, so thankful to have my own office, so thankful I’d shut the door when I’d last come in to cut out distractions.  The world was still, as though time had stopped.  It was one of those moments where I held on to a secret hope that I was reading it all wrong and if I just stared long enough it would turn into a message that made more sense.  That if I didn’t acknowledge it, the message and the fact simply wouldn’t exist.  If I didn’t respond, didn’t even let myself process the words on the screen, then maybe I could go on living in a blissfully ignorant world where that truth did not exist.  I suppose it had always been in the back of my mind that with so many friends working in development and relief in conflict zones, it was more than likely to happen at some point, but I’ve never dwelt on that fact, content to cross that treacherous and difficult bridge when I came to it. But with me, the need to know always overtakes that desperate clutch onto the peace of ignorance. “Taken? By who? When? Where?”

Flavia, my other dear friend Steph, and I had become a little unit since our time together at Mercy Corps.  We were all on the move constantly, but yet we somehow all came back together time and again, fiercely refusing to let time and distance truly separate us.  Flavia at a glance is petite and delicate and incontrovertibly beautiful. She has always inspired me in so many ways, an example of which is the day she decided to pack it all up and move to Africa.  She’d been looking for jobs unsuccessfully but had some money saved up.  She just packed up and went. She lived in a few different countries and did fantastic work for a few different orgs before she joined Samaritan’s Purse in South Sudan.  Working in South Sudan is challenging in and of itself, but working for an overtly Christian org in a nation where around 95% of the population are either Muslim or Animist is a whole other ballgame.

At the end of that Skype conversation time remained still.  When I was able to stand, I didn’t know where to 

A photo from Reuters of Flavia on the day of her release

go.  A wise man once said never to confuse movement with action. Where to go? What to do? From a sleek office building in Washington, DC, what use could I be to a dear friend in a dire situation worlds away?  I opened the door and just stood there.  The hall was still and silent.  I walked with leaden steps across the hall to my assistant/friend’s door and for the first time opened without knocking.  I couldn't trust myself to make any unnecessary movements. I had little focus or energy to spare on such things. Jen (whose office I entered) and another colleague looked up from a meeting and I didn’t know where to begin, how to find the words.  I have no recollection of what happened next, but those two friends held me up and pulled me through the awful beginning to the longest 105 days of my life.

Rooftop bar at the Sankara in Nairobi

At that rooftop bar in Nairobi a few days ago, my friend and I discussed how despite all of our trainings on what to do if you are stopped at a checkpoint, if you’re assaulted, robbed, or kidnapped, we are never trained to cope when a friend experiences the same and we are so far removed that we can do nothing.  Perhaps they assume we would know, or the impact on those who love the person whose life hangs in the balance is negligible.  I will never begin to assert that what any of us on the outside looking in have experienced can remotely be compared to what Flavia went through.  I have never pressed her about that time, but it has come out in stories and recollections from time to time and I don’t know how she managed to survive.  For my part, I had to go to work, walk the dog, pack my lunch, continue on with life as normal as possible.  I never was a good sleeper, and for over three months I barely caught a wink.  My appetite deserted me.  Focus on simple tasks and projects was incredibly painstaking.  My body reacted in every possible way to the fear and helplessness that overran me. My poker face failed me.  I functioned but the world was film on a screen, passing me by and I was numb to anything that wasn’t news of Flavia’s survival.  In 2008, about a year after I had left the International Rescue Committee/Women’s Refugee Commission to work in Mercy Corps’ Education Program, three incredible women I had greatly admired in IRC’s Education Program were gunned down in an ambush of their humanitarian aid vehicle in Afghanistan.  I didn’t know any of them that well.  They were far above my station but doing precisely what I hoped to do in the near future.  Bringing education and hope to those most vulnerable in conflict zones. Until what happened to Flavia, that is as close as I had come to such pain.

Kenya is a rather stable place, but even here too, at times my poker face fails me when I am standing in a schoolyard watching children being brutally caned by their teachers.  When I heard the news last week of one of the fourth graders we work with at Nyametaburo being ‘accidentally’ caned to death by his father, the weight of my disgust and dismay weighed down upon my shoulders like an avalanche.  In a game of cards, it’s easy to pretend, but watching suffering being inflicted on those with less power, less strength and less say is one of the most painful things I continue to experience here.  Here too, we have one Western staff person whose verbal abuse and degradation of our Kenyan staff and the local Kenyans who repair our home and support us is almost too painful to bear.  Hearing the shouts and insults, the abuse which is an almost daily occurrence, I reflexively flinch, a wholly visceral response, as uncontrollably as I do with each crack of the cane in the schoolyard. I could launch into my ravings about the gall of those who use their station or their weapons to beat others down, to take them captive, to threaten their lives, but I would only be preaching to the choir and have written for too long already.  All forms of abuse are vile, though some worse than others. At times, I long for those blissfully ignorant days again, when seeing Westerners degrading and condescending to Africans was only in stories so you would know exactly who the bad guys were and when no one I knew was so near harm’s way, when the only kidnappings I heard of were of strangers on the news, so far removed from my reality.  Though even for them I often wept.

The first time I saw Flavia after her release.

At that rooftop bar my friend said that I should come to work for her when my time here in Kenya is done, to help build the capacity of those in Somalia to create a better future for themselves.  Her friend that was abducted, an American also coincidentally named Jessica, is 32.   In 24 days I will be 32.  When I saw Jessica’s photo in the news and felt the relief of her rescue (for her, her family and friends, and for my dear friend Karina), I thought of Flavia, of another friend of a friend who was taken in Sudan the year before, of all my friends who have chosen to put the welfare of those in unstable places ahead of their own safety, and of my own potential future life path.  My friend David and I discussed on the long ride back from Nairobi what it would mean to work in conflict zones and whether we could do it and who/what we would have to consider.  I am grateful beyond words that I have my Flavia back, that despite the unseen consequences that have affected her internally, she is whole and safe and free.  I still believe in serving those who are most vulnerable and to me those are still the people in conflict and post-conflict zones.  Where this belief will lead me, I can’t say.  I do know that when it counts the most, when my own safety or that of those around me is riding on it, I will put on that poker face and until that point, I will do whatever I can to ensure that no one is in a situation so dire and impoverished that they could put a price on betraying their own humanity.