This was such an interesting and intriguing read, that I consumed the 274-pager in a day and a bit – which, in my current brain foggy state, I am quite proud of! This is a semi-autobiographical narrative which was originally written in French by Montrealer Marc Vachon and François Bugigno. The English translation was done by Charles Phillips.
Marc begins the story of his life, starting with how he was abandoned by his biological mother, and his experiences of bouncing around from one foster home to another. Some of the experiences were truly horrible – and one particular family actually evoked images of the Dursleys in my mind – only, much, much meaner. This family, which Marc does not explicitly name and shame in the book, made him do all the domestic chores, and on Christmas eve, sent him on a wild goose chase looking after some embers so that he would not get in the way of the family celebrations. Such intense was the torture he lived through with this family, that he once rode up, ready to pump bullets in the body of the lady of the home… but fortunately, he realized that such an action would end up destroying his future.
In his mid-teens he worked in construction, but very soon, he started to take the short-cut to make money. He started small, shoplifting jeans and small stuff, and fenced them to his friends for half the marked price. This helped him collect a small fortune, and he soon graduated to breaking and entering, and even taking orders from friends for specific items. He was so adept at this, he could even bypass the alarm systems and other security measures. While all of this was happening, he slowly graduated from smoking to drinking alcohol, to marijuana, and soon enough, to harder drugs. At one point, he claimed he was doing as much 5 to 8 grams of cocaine a day – which sounds like a LOT to me!
At the end of the day, despite all his illegal antics, all Marc wanted, it seems to me, was a sense of belonging, a family. And the first family he found was with his girlfriend Maria’s brother – who led a biker gang. He loved bikes, and naturally, was enthralled to be welcomed into this tight-knit fraternity. He started with small tasks with the bikers – ferrying messages, negotiating connections, and helping strike up deals. He was able to venture into places where bikers were loath to enter, and helped extend their network. Before long, he started holding drugs and guns for the bikers. He was making a lot of money, but he was also going through life and drugs at a furious pace. One day this realization struck him, and he hiked out into a forest trail, where in the freezing cold he detoxed from the cocktail of drugs his body had grown used to. Soon enough, he was on his was to Paris, where he ended up joining Médecins Sans Frontières, more commonly known by their initials MSF or their English monicker Doctors Without Borders. Initially, he was placed to work on a project in Paris, where MSF was helping rebuild older homes with lead problems. He liked the work and appreciated helping people, but felt the dire need to do international work. Before long, he was shipped off to Malawi, to work as a logistician.
He describes his baptism by fire working with experts in building and managing the project, which included working on a cholera treatment center. Marc has a lot of interesting insights, so I won’t give too many spoilers in case you end up wanting to read the book. Suffice to say, that over two decades, Marc worked in almost all the contemporary conflict-affected areas, whether it was for MSF, or Action Contre le Faim or the UNHCR.
There are several anecdotes where Marc’s mischievous nature comes out. Once, when MSF’s medicine delivery trucks were halted at the Turkish border, he undertook a dangerous, if somewhat illegal operation, to release them. He posed as a doctor with MSF, and struck up a friendship with the Turkish guard holding the border post down. He then proceeded to scare the heeby-jeebies out of the guard by diagnosing him with a disease in which his testes would shrink and fall off. The guard was so freaked out, he begged Marc to help him. Dr. Marc lamented the fact that all the medicines that could help the guard were stuck on the other side of the border. The guard was so scared, that in a few minutes he over-rode all border block orders and salvaged the two trucks for Marc. Dutifully, Marc stuck him on the bottom with an intramuscular injection of normal saline, all the while assuring him that the more it hurt, the better the medicine was taking hold… and an IM injection of NS does hurt a fair bit! Following this event, the guard became fast friends with Marc.
Marc took advantage of the guard’s gullibility to show down another logistician working with a German NGO, who had a particular dislike for Marc. As it so happened, the German NGO had 11 trucks stuck at the same border entrance where Dr. Marc’s patient stood guard. On the pretext of doing a follow up check, Marc went to see his old friend with many a trepidation. Fortunately, the placebo treatment had worked miraculously for the non-existing disease, and the guard was in a very benevolent mood. Marc used his good standing with the guard to get the 11 trucks released – and he paraded them all around town before depositing them with the German NGO. He ends with a very self-satisfied note telling us that the very next day his nemesis, the German logistician was sent home.
There are numerous such examples where he skirted the laws and rules to help people. Like fabricating a fake aqueduct building project to bypass Iraq’s embargo on sending fuel to the Kurds. Or the time when he managed to buy two Harleys from a shady businessman for $500 – then he exchanged engines and repainted them. In addition, he managed to buy a brand new Toyota truck from the streets of Baghdad for a mere $2500. He managed to ship both these vehicles back to Paris when the project was closing. Rony Brauman, then the President of MSF, came out and jokingly chided him for not bringing another bike for him. Apparently, Brauman is a huge bike fan! Who knew?
Marc had a tendency to force his way through any obstacles. In another anecdote, he relates how he worked non-stop with hundreds of people to fashion a cholera treatment center with 700 beds in less than a week. However, his methods were not appreciated by MSF headquarters, and he soon fell out of favor with them. He had very little patience for bureaucracy and paper-pushing when there was real work to be done. To me, it seemed that he was operating on the basis of the fact that if there were people out there breaking rules and laws to harm people, there’s nothing wrong in bending some oppressive rules and laws to help out! This “hands on” attitude was accompanied by something that quite surprised me. He is not a fan of the principle of temoignage that MSF follows; for him, that is a cover behind which to hide and justify inaction. He seemed to be more appreciative of the Red Cross, which kept their mouths shut, stayed out of the media, and did the work to help people.
Another interesting take he has is on the role played by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general leading the peacekeeping troops during the Rwanda crisis. He compares his prior experiences from the post-Yugoslavia wars and expresses his dissatisfaction with Dallaire’s inability to spring into action. He feels had Dallaire initiated military action, then the other partners would be forced to join the fray to save face, and hundreds of thousands of lives could be spared.
In another hilarious experience, he ends up getting appointed as a humanitarian attaché with the French government – essentially a diplomat’s position – and is sent off to analyze the situation in the Serbian conflict, especially with respect to how the French donations were being used, and on strategies to improve the perception of the French armed forces amongst humanitarian workers. The irony of the situation is not lost on him – because he became a diplomat representing the government of a country where he did not even have residency status! The almost child-like glee with which he describes, momentarily, his rise from the streets of Montreal to the hallways of the French government, is such a pleasure to read!
The book, like Marc himself, moves at a breakneck speed. I don’t know if this was an intentional decision, or a lost in translation type situation, but the tone and tenor of the book is a bit gruff, a bit ruffian-ish. Not unlike Marc! Lots of short sentences, staccato descriptions, and unemotional, matter of fact descriptions of horrid, horrid situations – I read through at breakneck speed! One thing I did miss though, was a narrative arc. It seems like tons of experiences of Marc’s were thrown into the book, and although they somehow come together to tell a story, I feel that the narrative lacked a bit of structure. Or maybe that was also an intentional decision – a meandering book, moving at a rapid pace, jumping from one story to the next – almost like Marc, who kept moving on…
My heart cried for Marc, when he resigned from MSF – it was almost as if he was being abandoned by another family. There are some common characteristics of Marc’s which strings together invisibly throughout the book – impatience, need to move forward and not settle down, and the longing to belong to a family… it is an undercurrent that flows beneath all the adventure, all the law-breaking, all the unconventional decisions.
Marc has a lot more work to do, and a lot more to offer the world. So, naturally, the ending comes abruptly, and leaves us wanting a bit more. As a reader, I sometimes like to get closure on the narrative arc… but nothing about Marc and his life is conventional. So, while in the last couple of pages it seems like he finds a modicum of peace. He ends up finally meeting his daughter with a short-term girlfriend, whom he regretted abandoning. Something tells me Marc will have more stories to tell in a few years… and maybe even another book!
As far as recommendations go, if you are looking for refined literature and a wonderfully woven narrative arc, this is not the book for you. However, if you are looking to read about an extraordinary man, who overcomes insurmountable odds and turns his life around, all along the way pissing important people off, breaking inhuman laws, and living life on the absolute edge – this is it. If you are interested in the world of humanitarian health and crisis response, this is an absolutely fantastic read!
Scepticemia 