Something I Learned One Night, Far Away
One warm night last year in Nha-Trang, Vietnam, I was talking with a man named Dave, a man who would later become a great friend of mine. From the streets of a bad part of England, he had a wide unshaven grin, and a kindness that softened his immense power. His job was emergency aid work. Logistics. You know: you see on the TV that there’s a refugee camp on the Sudanese border for half a million people. That’s him, that’s what he organizes, in the world’s most insane places.
We talked about this. About why. I asked him about the world he had seen so much of, the misery he had been in the center of all his life, all that he’d seen that the rest of us never will. I asked him what he thought of it all.
He grinned that sly grin, stubbly, beautiful, missing teeth from where a gang of errant Iraqis beat him up that one time. He took the cigarette from his mouth, paused a moment as the lines around his eyes crinkled in delight, and said, with much relish in his thick East-London accent,
“The world’s a shithole, mate.”
I’ve never known anyone who loved life that much.
