Dead Centre - Andy McNab [5]
Major disaster or not, the Indonesian military didn’t like us coming in. They didn’t like foreigners at the best of times, but this last week, in the wake of the tsunami, they’d had no option. Now they were re-exerting their authority. They were starting to restrict our movements, scared our supplies would go to GAM. They wanted to keep the fuckers starving, and didn’t give a shit if everyone else was too.
6
AN ARGUMENT ERUPTED outside between an American and a German who sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a wedgie. It was over what group was going to get the military permit to travel to some remote village with aid.
Over the years, I’d seen NGOs running around in places like Africa and I never really liked what I saw. It seemed to me that they were businesses, at the end of the day, and these two sounded like they were busy competing for a slice of the disaster pie. The locals didn’t just need food and shelter. They needed protection from this fucking lot.
The MONGOs – My Own NGO – could be even worse. They were the guys who thought they could get things sorted more cheaply and effectively than the real aid workers. Most of them arrived under their own steam. Tourist visa in hand – if there was anyone around to issue one – they rented a vehicle, bunged on an ID sticker and, bingo, they were in business.
I’d Googled ‘tsunami’ and ‘donation’ just before we left and got over sixty thousand referrals to MONGO websites, all brand new. Some of them, of course, were scams for cash.
Individual aid work was trendy in the UK, Scandinavia and Australia. And in the US, the tax authorities were granting exemption to an average of eighty-three new charities a day. More than 150,000 had been registered so far – and these were just the lads who’d bothered to go through the system. The only reason I knew all this was because Mong, BB and I had gone that route.
Aid 4 Tsunami. That was us. We carried accreditation to prove it; we’d printed it ourselves. It wasn’t the most original name for a charity, but it would do. There were far worse out here. And it was as well funded as any other MONGO.
7
OUR STRETCH OF tent city was heaving with Western MONGO medics who’d dropped everything to come and help – which mostly meant setting off alone in hired wagons with a first-aid kit on the passenger seat. Some of the local lads had been examined three or four times each, and didn’t have a clue what the doctors told them, what drugs they’d been given, when and why they should take them.
The docs ran around in full George Clooney mode, getting it all on video so their sponsors at home would send more money. A lot of them did a great job, of course, but others made incorrect diagnoses because they were moving at speed and didn’t know about the particular challenges of the landscape. BB had a better grasp of the local parasites and diseases, and he was only a patrol medic.
The God Squad MONGOs were the worst. I’d once come across a gang of Christian hippies with guitars in Africa. They were there to round up patients for what they called their ‘mercy ship’. It turned out to be an old cruise liner that had been converted into a floating hospital to bring ‘hope and healing’ to the poor heathens.
All well and good, but because the thing was only there for a week, they could only do operations that didn’t need much aftercare. The place was crawling with people dying of gunshot wounds and machete amputations, and all the mercy ship could deal with were cataracts and hare lips, followed by films about Jesus.
There were already about four groups of happy-clappies in the camp and a hospital ship on its way. The Scientologists were also on