I still feel bad about the squirrel I killed 20 years ago.

Such is the heart of a man who lives a life of aversion to personal wealth, who hears the sound of gunfire and runs towards it to make sure the children are safe. This is my friend, one of my personal heroes, Alex Gowen, who may live in Raleigh but is truly a world citizen. For all that he’s endured in this richest of lives, he’s still haunted by the harm that he’d done by accidentally running over a squirrel with his car in 1995.

Alex Gowen sits on a sofa in his small apartment, densely packed with mountains of books, DVD’s, and liberally garnished with memorabilia from his world travels. It’s not lost on the author that a book by Mother Theresa is nearby.

Alex Gowen is on the short list of the most interesting people that I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a myriad of most interesting people. Consider the context of how we were introduced:

I was an artist that had caught the attention of a local coven of vampires. No, they didn’t turn into bats at night and fly around and drink blood from peoples’ necks. But they did identify as vampires, and their matriarch had taken a special interest in me for a time.

“I have someone that I want you to meet,” she once told me. “He’s a very special man, and he needs more people in his life that can love him as he is.I think you could be one of those friends.” And while the vampires have moved on to other things, Alex and I remain friends.

Alex Gowen made quite an impression on me in our first arranged meeting. He’s a man of slight build but handsome qualities and indeterminate age (he’s 48, but you’d never guess by looking at him). Some moments, he’s unmistakably male and exuding testosterone into the surrounding room. At other times, he softens and reveals the inner divine feminine. That he has a long mane of enviably exquisite hair is not lost on anyone. It didn’t take me long to recognize: Alex Gowen is a very complicated, very layered human being. And getting to know him was going to be an adventure. In a way, I sort of felt like I might be meeting Dorian Gray on that first encounter.

Alex Gowen is the Founder and Director of The Fishermen, an international relief organization that, very frankly, sends Alex alone most of the time into some of the most dangerous places on earth to help orphans survive and thrive in the aftermath of humanities darkest conflicts. Every time he gets on a plane and leaves Raleigh, there’s some sense that he might not return. Part of being his friend is in understanding what drives him, and accepting that he’s chosen this perilous path through life.

The Phone

You can’t hang out with Alex and not notice that he’s using an antiquated flip phone from the turn of the century. With every passing year, it becomes ever more anachronistic. It’s been broken before, and somehow miraculously returned to service (with the help of super glue and good karma). Other than texting, you’ll not see Alex playing with his phone like so many modern people are wont to do.

The Fishermen

While it might be tempting to start at the beginning, in Alex’s case it seems apropos to start at the outermost layer of the onion. Most people who meet Alex do so through the lens of meeting the hero that runs off to war zones to help orphans. The outermost layer of the onion is the one that you see first, and also has the most surface area.

The Fishermen as it exists now started ten years ago, in 2005. Alex was emerging from the rubble of his second divorce, and was rebuilding himself in a pattern that re-emerges throughout his life. He looked at a map, and picked a spot that he initially claimed was random. Upon further questioning, this was a place that he’d already had some concern about. Alex got on a plane and went to Kyrgyzstan. He’s always been fascinated by the countries that once comprised the USSR, and Kyrgyzstan had just undergone the Tulip Revolution. Though he’d never worked with orphans before this, Alex felt a calling to go there and see what he could do.

Alex was on his own out there. He traveled alone. He had no organization watching his back, nobody back home handling logistics. If he found himself in a bad situation, he was well and truly stuck.

Birth of a Humanitarian

Alex was in Russia in 1992, traveling with an official government-appointed handler. He says he was traveling down a remote road and saw a pretty girl sitting on the side of the road with three bottles of oil. He asked the handler, out of sincere curiosity, “Why is she sitting out there with three bottles of oil?”

“She wants to eat,” was the simple response.

To Alex, this was the moment that transformed him inside of his heart. This is the decisive moment at which he decided he was going to selflessly dedicate his life to humanitarian pursuits.

Two Lost Souls Swimming in a Fish Bowl

Around the time that Alex was wrapping up his first solo trip, coming out of his second divorce in 2005, he’d met someone that had completely captured his heart. You can even hear the love and lament, the reverence and the pain, when he says her name… Sarah.

Sarah had the right mix of heart and heartache, love and lunacy, in equal measure with Alex’s. It seems to take some special blend of boundless compassion and restrained insanity to make something like the Fishermen work, and to hear Alex tell it she had it all. She was, as he tells it, the most perfect partner he ever could have asked for. It was Sarah, he says, that led Alex through the work of making the Fishermen an official charity organization. They soon married.

With her help, in 2007 they incorporated The Fishermen. And yet, in spite of all of that, the madness won. Alex felt that he had to have his beloved bride committed to an institution for her health and safety, which is something she doesn’t appear to have forgiven him for. Indeed, her first act after her release was to leave Alex.

There has not been, to date, any reconciliation between them. The very evening that Alex and I were talking about his life, Sarah had made a very public announcement through her Facebook profile. She was celebrating the finalization of her divorce from Alex. Meanwhile, Alex was baring his heart and showing the insufferable pain he still carried from the failure of this marriage and what he saw as the complete breakdown of the woman he loved several times over.

Alex remains tormented over what went wrong here, and has yet to move on to allow himself to love and be loved by another.

Alex Gowen on his sofa in his small apartment, surrounded by books, art, DVD’s, and memorabilia. His smile is warm and infectious, and yet barely contains the pain of a man that has perhaps seen too much of the world.

Kyrgyzstan was not out of the woods yet. Trouble flared up again, and this time a stronger and better organized Fishermen was there to help where it could. With their better organization, official status, and networking among other humanitarians, The Fishermen had arrangements for free shipping of humanitarian supplies into the conflict zone.

The true purpose of The Fishermen is to be on-location, to have face contact with these children or refugees, and teach them something so they learn how to take care of themselves. That’s really the idea behind it, because I don’t believe in band-aids.

As our conversation continued, I was struck by this pattern of desperate poverty in the parts of the world that Alex often travels to. I’d asked him about this, because I don’t think most Americans have any contextual basis to really empathize.

Orphaned children in these regions often can’t get any medical care. Even if they can get to one within a hundred miles of the orphanage, they usually don’t have the money or requisite chickens (yes, really) to trade for medical care. And the orphanages certainly don’t have the money for it. Children’s hospitals may have rooms with no windows, infestations of flies. Secondary infections may be a near death sentence, and in areas of desperate poverty people are reduced to bartering for insufficient services.

Alex goes on to tell me that on top of the tens of thousands of dollars of humanitarian supplies that often accompany him on field trips, there are books that he has written for the children. These books are often primarily illustrated with little written language. That way their impact in a variety of cultures may be maximized, and even children in areas of ubiquitous illiteracy may benefit. As an example, Alex tells me about The Hurt Book, which tells children how to diagnose injuries and treat them with improvised dressings made from commonly scavenged materials. Similarly, The Danger Book helps children to recognize special threats to their safety that can exist in conflict regions.

Ukraine

It seems to me that I bring the war. The first time I went to Ukraine, the war began like two days before I was supposed to leave the country.

Ukraine Without Orphans reached out to The Fishermen in 2014 shortly before open combat with Russia began. At the time, there were about a hundred thousand orphans in Ukraine according to Alex. That’s about 2% of Ukraine’s children, if the numbers are right. About one third of the orphans lived in or near the expected conflict region, and desperately ambitious action was called for.

Alex was struggling with the failure of his third marriage, and his coping mechanism for personal pain seems to be to go into war zones and help people who are hurting even more than he is.

The Ukraines were particularly sensitive to outsiders transporting orphans around, but together The Fishermen and Ukraine Without Orphans were able to negotiate special dispensation, signed by Ukraine’s interim president, and relocate thirty thousand orphans from the east to the west before Russia crossed Ukraine’s borders in open hostility.

Separatists started erecting checkpoints that Alex had to pass through. His face was being compared to photographs of outsiders that they were looking for, mostly journalists and suspected spies.

A second trip to Ukraine came in June of 2015. This trip was a prime example of how humanitarian missions need to be able to “play it loose”. There was a plan for the trip, and then there was what was necessary and what was accomplished on the trip. He was meant to see where his land mine education program was being enacted in local schools, but what he was seeing was the scrubbed government propaganda that Ukraine wanted outsiders to see. While he was there, he got word that an orphanage in Shchastya needed help.

We were created to go where nobody else wants to go, or can go.

The checkpoints were still there on this trip, but this time they were run by the Ukrainian government. There were tanks and machine gun nests. Just getting around in-country carries with it a thinly veiled threat of mortal danger. Alex was warned before his arrival that shelling, sniper fire, machine gun fire in the streets, and other forms of open hostility were common occurrences in Shchastya. Miraculously, perhaps, the hostilities stopped just as Alex got into town. This was a really fortunate coincidence, and allowed Alex to travel a bit more freely.

When he got to Shchastya’s orphanage, only heartache and frustration followed. Anybody could see from the outside that the orphanage had been hit. Most likely, it was even targeted. He met the head of the orphanage and was not welcomed. He was not once allowed to meet any of the children. When people from the local police started showing up and taking documentary photographs of him, his driver advised that they got back on the bus and out of town.

And so it goes with conflict zones. Trips are planned that don’t happen. Trips happen that stray far from the plan. Opportunities disappear while new opportunities emerge. It would seem that there is enormous value to send someone like Alex into these places with some supplies and financial support, and let him figure out the situation on the ground, determine where the help will go to the best use. This seems like something he’s all too comfortable with, but supporters back home may get cold feet when the war doesn’t go according to plan.

While we’re talking, Alex is looking ahead to the third trip to Ukraine. It’s been postponed a couple of times, but looks like he’ll be heading back with a team of three this time. He has reservations about sharing danger with others that he feels responsible towards, but accepts that The Fishermen can do far more good with more people on the ground in the conflict region.

His Ukraine Trip #3 team includes Frankie, his adoptive brother from the Standing Rock reservation who is a medically trained EMS. Angela, a pediatric ER nurse who specializes in infant care, will also be a vital part of this next mission. This will allow Alex to focus on land mine training. This time around, The Fishermen is coming by the invitation of the Ukrainian government. The duration of the trip is limited by Alex’s personal finances, because The Fishermen is staffed entirely by volunteers. Every dollar is going directly to aid. The volunteers need to be able to get back home in time to earn income more conventionally and take care of their own affairs.

How can I help?

A little bit of money can go a very long way. A few thousand dollars could get the whole October mission over to Ukraine, keep them in-country for a couple of weeks, and bring them back home again.

Their Facebook page is the best way to stay current on missions and hard supplies that are needed for the trip.

Medical equipment, even stuff that is old by American standards, may well be a big step up from the 1950's era equipment often used in Ukrainian hospitals.

People helping out with the back end logistics in America are needed. Fundraising coordination, shipping and travel logistics, etc are all areas where Alex could use help. Since small donations can go a long way, making it easier for people to help out with small donations could go a long way.

Until now, The Fishermen has been a sort of organizational extension of Alex’s own quiet personality, reflecting his reluctance to allow others to get involved. But that’s changing. The work has been good work, and he’s getting more comfortable with the idea of letting people in to help.

Family

Alex’s good looks are often credited to his biracial heritage. His mother is Japanese, and lived in Japan during World War 2. His father was a professor of Irish-American heritage. While growing up in an academic household, he was never pressured to go to college and was supported when he decided not to attend.

The middle of three boys, Alex gives much credit to his late older brother Bobby for who he has become as a man. Bobby was born with Down syndrome, and was revered for his kind heart and generosity. “My brother was my best friend,” Alex would tell me several times. Bobby would keep his two younger brothers up at night during a bedtime ritual, living out fantasies of life as an international man of mystery. When he died, this had an enormous impact on Alex, and something changed for him: he started running (and never really stopped). In many ways, Alex now lives a life fulfilling the fantasies of adventure and kindness that Bobby never could.

A child of the cold war, Alex was fascinated by enemy nations. The USSR, and its constituent countries, were the catalyst to boundless intellectual curiosity. He’d read everything he could get his hands on, and even tried picking up some of the languages of the Eastern Bloc nations. It’s no mistake that The Fishermen focuses its activities mainly on this region.

After his second marriage fell apart, Alex spent time getting to know the people of the Lakota-Sioux nation at the Standing Rock reservation. And while he was getting to know them, they were getting to know him, as well. And so they adopted him into the tribe. And in doing so, Alex’s family grew once again. He speaks kindly of his Standing Rock family, and laments that his overseas missions have kept him from spending the time with them that he would like.

Standing Rock and other Native American communities are going to figure in heavily to future Fishermen missions. They need help badly, but getting help to them is surprisingly expensive compared to getting help to Ukraine.

I will always be an unsettled person. I will always be an adventurer. I will always jump without looking. And I will always shoot for the stars, because I always land much further than I expect.

Alex knows in his heart that he’s done good things, important things. But he’s reticent to say it out loud. He’s uncomfortable with his achievements, which is a special kind of torment that I’ve seen inhabiting the hearts of other lonely geniuses that have uncomfortable relationships with their works.

I see in him a pained humility. There’s this dichotomy, this eternal yin and yang at war within him that fuels him. He goes out and does incomprehensibly brave acts of kindness for children in far away places, but then he comes home and suffers a very real sort of internal pain from what he’s seen. And the only way to chase this pain away is to run, run back into danger and help more kids. Which, of course, brings more pain.

What’s love got to do with it?

Alex has had three wives, and it’s clear to me that he’s loved every one of them, and their absence in part fuels his pain. Especially the loss of his third wife, Sarah. But true to form, Alex’s first wife, Tatiana, lends support to Alex’s James Bond vibe. Tatiana, you see, had been a KGB agent during the reign of the Soviet Union. They’d met in 1992 in Russia, when Alex was brokering an arms deal on behalf of the US DOJ to buy a fighter plane and ferret out who was selling these arms, how they got a hold of them, and what else they might be selling.

“She could break my neck in a second if she wanted to,” Alex dryly mused. He alluded to the idea that they had each saved each other’s lives, but upon pressing for more detail he told me about a scenario in which his first wife-to-be saved his own life.

On one trip to Russia, Alex found himself in a really desperate situation. He’d gone in to Russia on a trip funded by the US government. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and Russia was still picking up the pieces. The black market profiteers in Russia were basically selling off the Soviet Union’s arsenal for pennies on the dollar to anyone that could show up with the little bit of money they were asking.

This particular profiteer had contacted Alex with promises of having in their inventory: flame throwers, T-72 tanks, “some kind of missile system”, MiG-29's, and the Su-27 Interceptor. The DIA sent someone down to meet Alex and send him on what was effectively a suicide mission to gather intelligence and procure military hardware. If he got himself into any trouble, he was on his own and could expect no help. The DIA funded the trip.

While he was there in Russia, he was working on the Iraqis. He showed up at their embassy in Russia a few hours after Clinton had struck Baghdad with almost two dozen cruise missiles. The Iraqi’s had an American and wanted to put him to good use. Instead of taking him upstairs for his meeting appointment, they took him down into the basement to a small unadorned cement room with a drain in the middle of the floor and two metal chairs.

“I looked at that,” he said with a long, pained pause, “I didn’t lose my crap, but I knew I wasn’t coming out of there alive. These guys started questioning me… intensely.” One guy stood in the doorway and watched as the defense attache interrogated Alex with questions. While he didn’t describe any physical torture, the threat of it was clear.

The session was interrupted by the entrance of the upstairs receptionist who whispered something in to the defense attache’s ear. Without explanation, Alex was told “OK, you can go now.” As it turns out, Tatiana had pulled strings and interceded on Alex’s behalf. Alex believes she saved his life.

Upon his return and debriefing, the DIA took a dim view of his romance with Tatiana (which ended in 1997), and they never used him again.

The Pain

The degree of my pain is exemplified, or brought to light, in the level of danger involved in my humanitarian activities that follow.

Alex tells me of how he had to leave Russia in a hurry in 1993, but during a time of great pain in 1997 he returned. He didn’t know if he’d be in trouble upon his return to Russia, but went anyway.

His work represents a series of measured risks. Often those with the most need for his help go hand in hand with the greatest risk (otherwise, other charities might be helping them). Alex’s acceptance of greater risk is coupled with the personal pain that he’s dealing with. While some may call it a “death wish”, I don’t see that. I see a man who loves life, who values life, but perhaps lives life a little more fully when the guarantee of tomorrow morning is less credible.

In another era, he might have been looked upon as a sin eater, one who absolves the sin of others by way of ritual magick, and perhaps taking it on themselves. While his smile is warm and sincere, and his outlook is full of hope, one can’t help but to bear witness to the pain that he also carries with him. But this pain does drive him forward, drives him into the dangerous places that other humanitarian missions just won’t visit until their safety can be better assured. It’s no coincidence that after each of his three marriages failed, he found himself in war zones helping those in need.

I know that all of my humanitarian activities are driven by pain.

While others drown their pain in alcoholism, Alex admits to some level of hedonistic adventures, but not so much to dull the pain as to pass the mundane downtime of life at home. His pain is treated only through selfless acts of compassion. And in acknowledging this, he refutes the idea that his work is somehow altruistic. Helping others is in some way an act of atonement. What is less clear is what he feels he has to atone for.

The unprecedented level of risk that he’s taking this year is commensurate with the level of pain in his heart over the loss of Sarah. He describes this pain as a sort of noise that follows him around, and that through his work with The Fishermen, the noise abates, if for only a little while.

Perhaps the irony of it all is that the Ukraine missions, the ones that started after the marriage to Sarah ended, are the first missions that Alex describes as “true Fishermen missions”, a Fishermen that Alex and Sarah built together, though the first true missions started without her. This isn’t lost on Alex.

Advice for Would-Be Do-Gooders

I asked Alex what his advice would be to others who want to save the world but don’t know where to start. He considered this for a moment, and then offered:

Follow your heart. Keep your mission true. Believe in what you’re doing. Don’t make it about profit or publicity. And pick a good team. I think those are the most important things you should do. And that team should be full of people who are far more capable than you. Take advantage of the resources that are available to you to make your operational costs as cheap as possible. There are a lot of free things out there. Free shipping, and so on. Take it! Use it! Because most people don’t. You’ll then have that much more [money] that you can use to directly help other people.

I followed up with inquiring about those of us who really want to do good things in the world, but have comfortable lives here, or obligations here, that preclude us from reasonably running around the world saving people directly. How can those people help?

There’s always donating to other charities. Making sure, of course, that they are legitimate, however you can do that. Just because they have a 501(c)(3) doesn’t mean that they’re doing good work. So do your homework. There are a lot of missions that you can go on where there isn’t [mortal danger] involved, such as Haiti, and other areas.

We also shared some lighthearted jokes about opportunities in Durham, how the risk of being shot has been greatly reduced, and the likelihood of being taken to an interrogation room with a drain in the floor is pretty low.

He went on to offer this advice to anyone getting into field work to offer direct aid to those in need:

There are a lot of swindlers out there, plenty of them. And I’m not talking about the charities; I’m talking about the recipients. And no matter how much research you do, you cannot guarantee that the supplies that you send to a hospital or orphanage or whatever is actually going to get to the people in need. If you want to see that the people in need are getting the supplies that need the help, you’re going to have to walk from Point A to Point Z. Because even after supplies reach a hospital, there are still doctors and nurses and orderlies who will take those supplies and sell them out the back door. It’s sad, but it’s true. If you really want to make sure that what you’re donating is getting to the people, go through a trusted organization or take it there yourself. We had to learn that lesson the hard way.

That hard lesson was an early trip to the DR Congo. A lot of money was lost there, and Alex had to leave, chalking that trip up as his greatest failure. Though through this failure, Alex has learned the important lesson of seeing his work through directly to those in need. This hard lesson has made the Ukraine missions far more successful.

Alex sitting on his sofa, leaning in to describe his adventures in Ukraine. A massive DVD collection is seen over one shoulder in the background, cardboard boxes full of paper files are stacked high behind him over the other shoulder.

He looks at Ukraine as a great success. Not just because of the help that he’s already done, but because the government has seen it and invited him back to do more with their blessing. He holds up the Ukraine missions as his crowning achievement to date, an example of what The Fishermen is and was always meant to be.

You can learn more about Alex’s work with The Fishermen via their web site and the most up-to-date information is on their Facebook page.

-MX