Working for the UN begins with idealism but can end in cynicism. For one former employee, it became all about maintaining the status quo

You have just received your first UN job. Congratulations! Granted, the whole recruitment process took 284 days, what with the written test your best friend could have taken in your place and the telephone interview your mother could have passed. And sure, nobody ever checked your references or titles, and you were asked – just when you had lost all hope – to deploy within a week. To the desert.

Still. Doped with the accumulation of indispensable but last-minute vaccinations your GP seriously advised against – yellow fever, cholera, tetanus and bad temper, to name but a few – and armed with the air ticket emailed to you barely two hours before departure time, you are ready to start the greatest adventure of your life.

Suddenly, there you are: wearing a UN T-shirt, armed with your belief in UN principles and a notebook, and braving occasional shelling under a blistering sun. You courageously and systematically patrol your area of responsibility, recording armed movements, humanitarian tragedies and, from time to time, human rights violations. You go where angels and most other people fear to tread. Largely due to the liberal spreading of landmines by rebels and government troops.



Sometimes, you can’t help but wonder whether a little more training – about your role, about the situation in the country – would have helped. Those three days in the capital during which you were warned about hippopotamus mating habits and local liquor suddenly feel insufficient.

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You also wonder how you are supposed to cope, psychologically, with moving from a quiet village where cow fights made news headlines to counting dead bodies and stemming your driver’s gunshot wound after he decided to speed through an ominous looking checkpoint.



You also start to doubt the seriousness of certain colleagues, not least your head of office back in the capital. The reports you submit are not greeted with a response. Unless you fail to send one, of course, in which case you are immediately and seriously reprimanded. Consequently, your warnings about impending war are left unheeded until the day you are evacuated, at two hours’ notice, because rebels are knocking at the governor’s door with heavy artillery.

Later, temporarily stationed in the capital, you start to understand how things actually work. No wonder your reports never elicited action. Politics, you realise, are way more important than the occasional collateral damage, like the 10 men who disappeared from a prison and were later found dead with clear signs of torture.

Through the years, you’ll encounter a similar set-up during assorted field missions; how many would seem to be inversely proportional to your intelligence and professional ethics. Then, one bright day, you are called to share your accumulated experience: a cushy job at headquarters is yours.

Now, you tell yourself, now – finally! – you will be able to make a difference. Here is your chance to change the systems that prevented you from having the impact in the field that you knew was possible. Now you’ll show those timid paper-pushers what field people are really made of, those who have faced death and maiming, terrorist attacks, humanitarian vendettas, post-traumatic stress disorder, soul-tearing solitude and incipient alcoholism. You won’t rest until reform and restructuring have created the organisation of your dreams.

Then you discover Real Life. You have an office. Not a tent, not a container – an actual office, with a working telephone and a computer and a rocking internet connection. Your Armani-dressed colleagues stroll in, coffee in hand, at quarter to 10; glancing at the pile on your desk, indicating you have been hard at work for at least two hours, they look at you with undisguised contempt. There is nothing urgent to do, everything can wait – because it is only paper.

There are no anxious families sat just outside your door, waiting to hear about their kidnapped son. No starving faces pressed against your car window as you drive through a camp. No crying widows, fathers, mothers, begging for a minute of your attention. You don’t need to work weekends, because nobody does and to do so would set a bad precedent. You are expected, even pressed, to take leave.

What’s more, you can marry and have children. After years of three- to six-month contracts, you have a well-paid, two-year deal. Health insurance. Pension contribution. Education grant for your kids. Rental subsidy. Dependency benefits. Regular salary increases.

You can even walk down the street without fearing for your life, or drive off for a weekend break without a map of the 10 most probable sites for hijackings ending with murder stuck to the steering wheel.

With this golden web delicately spun around you, suddenly you realise how wonderful life can be. And how desperately fragile. Push too hard, you are made to understand, and you can be cast out of heaven. Remember that guy who insisted on addressing issues of sexual abuse by western peacekeepers? Rumour has it he was found guilty of misuse of UN copy paper, demoted to a P2 post and shipped off to a previously non-existent duty station in the middle of a tropical jungle. He’s lucky he still has a job.

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Slowly, you learn the meaning of fear. Should you make your boss notice the mistake in the list of your department’s results? Should you speak on the phone with an external counterpart about claims of corruption within the organisation? Should you show up at the farewell party of someone your bosses dislike?

Because you know that if you do, they will know; the people up there, the all-powerful, enshrined in their aura of success and might, those who hold your future in their hands. They can disapprove of you, they can start rumours about you, they can sideline you. Eventually, they can send you back where you came from – a fate you suddenly cannot face, whether it is a field mission or the real world, where there are few jobs, ones for which you are clearly not qualified any longer (if you ever were).

Where would you be then? Without privileges, that’s where. Without business access to airport lounges, diplomatic passports, tax-free shopping. No more supercilious look in your eyes as you are wafted through waiting lines by protocol, no more affecting an apologetic air as a prime minister lets his people wait while he hushes you into his office, pumping your hand. What would be left of the you that you’ve grown to love?

So you shut up. You go along with the mistakes, the unethical behaviour, the unprofessional performances. You hunker down, keep a low profile unless safe to do otherwise, and never utter the word “problem”. Because there are no problems in the UN – you know that now – only challenges.

Something hardens inside you as you rise through the ranks. You learn to look straight ahead, ignoring anything that could jeopardise your position and standing.

You learn to recruit people who will not threaten you: the mediocre, those who soon wise up to the rules of the game. Occasionally, you allow yourself the luxury of an original thinker, someone capable of shaking things up the little that is needed to make a couple of the older bosses fall out of their places, allowing you to get a higher post. Sometimes you pick on someone who is stepping out of line, who thinks things can be done differently – better – and make an example of her. Because you can. You’re a fear-maker, now. Unaccountable.

And you realise there was a higher plan all along: maintaining the status quo. It’s just you weren’t among the powerful ones who knew about it. But you are now, and nobody is going to move you off. There’s no retirement age for bosses at the UN, you know.