A New Faith: Part 2: Chapter 22
Rachel had no idea what the meeting was about when she entered the conference room. She was about 10 minutes late and the first presentation was already underway. Maya, one of the senior bureaucrats from the main UN Secretariat, was on her third slide. Rachel found an empty seat at the far end of the long oval table around which all of the participants were seating. Maya was a sombre middle-aged woman who had been loaned by the Barbadian contingent to the UN Secretariat. Rachel had seen her around and traveled with her once or twice on UN missions to Africa.
She pulled out her tablet and pencil. Then she borrowed a copy of the agenda from the young man seated next to her. He smiled absent-mindedly at her and passed it over. Rachel’s boss, the US Ambassador to the UN, Mitch Harrison, had not bothered to send Rachel any details about the meeting at all. That was in keeping with his usual manner. He couldn’t be bothered to attend any official meeting of the UN unless there was a photo-op involved. It always fell on someone on his staff to represent the US at official UN business where they were forced to make up some excuse for the absence of their boss.
For some mysterious reason, her boss had actually known about this meeting and deigned to send her a curt message saying that she needed to attend the meeting at 8 am in the sixth floor conference room. She was to take notes and report back to him. Of course, he had sent the message at 7 am on the day of the meeting. Rachel had to rush through her morning routine which meant that she was barely awake. Luckily, some thoughtful person had arranged for fresh coffee at the meeting. She had picked up a large cup of dark coffee before sitting down.
The heading on the agenda said, “Re-settlement of Climate Refugees in the Nordic Countries.” No surprise that Rachel had been tagged for the meeting. Humanitarian relief efforts was her remit within the US delegation posted at the UN. She took a large sip of her coffee and tried to focus on what Maya was saying.
There were so many natural and manmade disasters happening all over the world that the role of the UN had been reduced to mainly bringing attention to the latest one. The UN would beg the member nations to offer some help - any help at all - to deal with the aftermath of the disaster. They would gamely try to appeal to the generosity and kindness of the member nations. They would try to highlight the global importance of the region where the disaster had happened in order to engage the transactional-minded member nations in some quid pro quo sort of way. And then, the next day and the next week and the next month they would do the same thing in the context of a new disaster in a different region.
Within a few months of joining the US staff that worked closely with the UN, Rachel’s well of emotions had seemingly dried up as the daily onslaught of disasters and suffering showed no sign of ebbing. She became a generally passive bureaucrat who treated each new disaster as simply another task to be added to her ever expanding list of things to do.
Maya had moved on to the next slide and Rachel realized that her jaw was on the floor. The two bullet points on the slide indicated that the three Nordic nations had allotted one thousand square kilometers of land inside their own national boundaries for climate refugees. A whole fucking thousand?! Was she still asleep? This didn’t make any sense at all. No country in the history of humanity had done anything even remotely like this. She pinched herself and looked around the conference table to see the reactions of the other participants. No one had even blinked. This had to be a dream. She fumbled for her coffee cup and took an even larger sip of the still too hot coffee. Of course that didn’t help. The scalding hot liquid burnt her tongue. But at least that meant she was wide awake. Why wasn’t anyone else surprised?
Then her vision became blurred as she read the second bullet-point - up to 25 million refugees could be re-settled on those thousand square kilometers. Something was really wrong now! She pulled out her phone and looked up the populations of the three Nordic countries that had apparently made this incredibly generous proposal. She mentally added up the three numbers on her screen and just stared at the sum. So… these countries were offering to double their population by taking in such a vast number of refugees? The only times when such vast numbers of people had moved across vast distances were during wars or slavery. And the way Maya was calmly moving on to the next slide, there didn’t seem to be any war or enslavement in the picture.
Her lips were still scalded from the hot coffee, so this was all happening. Had she wandered into one of those parallel universes that writers and directors were forever foisting upon them these days? Anyway, why the hell was no one surprised in the room. Were they not getting the incredible nature of this proposal? Or maybe this was not even a proposal. This meeting was probably one of those meetings where participants are encouraged to engage in blue-sky thinking. Maybe that is what Maya was doing right now. Somewhere at the back of her mind, though, Rachel knew that was not true because Maya wouldn’t randomly pick out these Nordic countries as an example.
Rachel was the deputy to the US Ambassador to the UN. Unlike her boss, though, she had worked her way up through the ranks of the diplomatic staff at the State Department. Most of the career staff, especially, the senior ones, had left long ago as they had seen the writing on the wall. She was among the few who had stayed back.
She was in her late twenties and still optimistic that the US would re-join the global community. She was born and raised in rural Texas. Blonde and blue-eyed, she had been a cheer-leader in both high-school and college. Her parents were devout evangelicals and she was their only child. Maybe it was the cloistered life that she had experienced until college or maybe it was just her restless curiosity, but the moment she had enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin as a wide-eyed teenager, it felt as if she had found a wonderland full of people unlike her.
There were people from many different parts of the world. They spoke in strange accents and had weird customs. They had all arrived in this place to quench their thirst for knowledge. Like fish to water, she had taken to this life of exploration and experimentation. She had not only glimpsed the broad expanse of diversity that this melting pot offered, but had dived right in and immersed herself fully in the endless variety of ideas, thoughts, and experiences.
She had majored in philosophy and art with a minor in government studies. By her sophomore year, she had known exactly what she wanted to do after college. She had, in no way, been satiated by this brief taste of the world. She was going to join one of those international organizations and travel the world.
One of her faculty advisers in the government studies program had been a retired diplomat, Tim Scott. He had, mostly, entertained his students with stories from his vast repertoire of adventures as a career staffer at the US State Department. He had given up trying to make sense of the world and how it worked several years before he retired. He had known how it used to work, maybe even how it was supposed to work. But then, it had stopped working the way it used to. So in his last few years at the State Department, he had decided to simply enjoy the exotic locations that he was posted at. He was a UT Austin alumnus and when he was trying to find a suitable place to retire, he figured that a nice lecturer position at his alma mater would be the perfect blend of getting opportunities to tell his stories while also getting paid. He had claimed, frequently, that he was working on his memoirs that had all kinds of scandalous revelations. No one had seen a single word of the manuscript in the three years since he had begun teaching.
The one thing, apart from his stories, that he had retained from his days as a globe-trotting diplomat was his vast pool of contacts spread around the world. When Rachel had gone to him for advice about finding gainful employment in some international organization, all it had taken were a few emails from Tim to get her an offer letter from the State Department. It had only been a matter of time after landing in Washington DC that Rachel had maneuvered her way into the team that dealt with the UN which, in turn, had landed her in New York city.
If she had thought that Austin was a wonderland, then New York was - well - she hadn’t found the right word for it, yet. It had been love at first sight. Sure, over the years, many of the city’s flaws irritated her. After all it was an American city. Quite different from most American cities but still retaining enough of the problems that plagued all of the other American cities. For starters, there were too many entitled white boys with way more money than they had any right to. They trashed the city all the time, both physically and vocally. Most of the folks in the city mocked them the few times they bothered to take notice of their latest shenanigans. But like moths attracted to a flame, these boys - yes, they were all perpetually adolescent males - kept coming back to the city for some attention, some validation, some adoration even.
Rachel was stuck working with a few of these boys, including her current boss, who had tried to leverage their wealth and social network into vaguely important sounding roles in the US delegation at the UN. Unfortunately, for them, they had not gained any respect whatsoever despite this so-called public service. They had all tried the same things. In the first few days of their posting at the UN, they had tried to act all important and attend meetings where they would launch into lofty speeches. Then they had tried to get appointed on committees where they could pontificate and patronize folks from other nations - especially, the poor ones. They had held press conferences under flimsy pretenses such as their committee going on a fact-finding mission or issuing a new report. They had never been bothered to read the report or actually travel with the mission. That had been too much work for them. The missions had been invariably to some poor part of the world which no one in the media covered. No photo ops. Nothing. Reading the reports had been even more tedious. Most reports ended up pointing out the bad things the US had done in the past and then concluding what the US could do differently going forward. The tone of these reports had varied from pitiful pleading to sometimes strident hectoring. Those mollycoddled boys had no time for that either. That is when they had stopped showing up at the UN unless the press was going to be there. Rachel, by then among the senior-most staffers, had also become the de facto representative of the US at the UN.
The questions dwindled and at the top of the hour, Maya concluded both her presentation and the meeting. Everyone started checking their phones as they filed out of the conference room. Rachel couldn’t understand why they were all so blasé about it. She gulped down her coffee, stowed her mug on the tray, and hustled through the crowd to get to Maya.
Maya was texting and didn’t look up until Rachel tapped her on her shoulder. She raised one of her artistically shaped eyebrows. She detested the American ambassador to the UN and didn’t much care about the rest of the American delegation. She had seen Rachel in meetings and knew who she was. But she had never really talked with her, especially, one-on-one.
“This is a humongous deal!” blurted out Rachel.
Maya frowned.
“What is?”
“This proposal from the Nordic countries.”
Rachel’s words carried a slightly dubious undertone as she observed an entire lack of excitement from Maya. After all Maya was the one who had made that presentation a few minutes ago. What else was Rachel going to talk about right after that?
“Pray tell, why you think this is a humong… whatever that word is… deal?”
Rachel paused and tried to get the thoughts straight in her head before speaking.
“You do realize that this will be the first time in the history that any nation has voluntarily opened its doors for millions of refugees. Right?”
“So?”
“What aren’t I getting, here? Why are you acting in such an indifferent manner?” a slight tinge of exasperation had slipped into Rachel’s voice.
Maya put her phone into her satchel and looked squarely at Rachel.
“Because it means nothing. It is bullshit!” she said. She didn’t show it on her face, but she was bit puzzled by this reaction from Rachel. Was this young woman naive or was there something else going on, here?
“How? What was that presentation all about then?” more doubt had crept in Rachel’s voice.
Maya was not her usual cynical self that morning and decided to continue the conversation with Rachel in good faith. The participants for the next meeting were patiently waiting outside the door of the conference room. She motioned Rachel to follow her out of the room. Both women smiled apologetically at the folks outside the door and vacated the room.
“Do you mind walking with me as we talk? I have to get back to my office for a video call.”
Rachel nodded and hurried along to match Maya’s long strides.
“I know you came in late and probably missed the first part of my presentation. Let me recap that for you and you will know why I referred to it as bullshit.”
“The Nordic folks don’t want to integrate the refugees in their society at all. They have merely offered a parcel of land in the middle of nowhere, way up in the Arctic circle, as far away from their main cities as possible. Furthermore, they want the refugees to be strictly confined to that land parcel. The responsibility for administering this parcel is given to the UN. In other words, they have offered a glorified prison for refugees in one of the coldest regions of the world where habitation is all but impossible unless a huge amount of money is made available to build the infrastructure necessary for survival. They know that no funds are available with the UN and hence, nothing will materialize from their proposal. So… as I said earlier… it is all bullshit!”
Rachel was confused.
“Then why even make this offer?”
Maya looked to check if Rachel was kidding with her. But no, there was no sign of anything but sincerity on Rachel’s face. She looked genuinely confused by Maya’s explanation.
“Which part are you not getting, Rachel?” Maya decided to continue being patient with this young American woman. In her experience, the relatively good-natured young white Americans tended to be naive in their understanding about how the world worked outside of their hermetically insulated bubbles of abundance and freedom.
“If the Nordic folks don’t want refugees, then why did they even make such an offer in the first place? Why go through this charade?”
“Are you pulling my leg or just completely out of touch?” Maya said with a touch of irritation. Not that Rachel noticed it. Rachel just kept looking at her with a genuinely confused expression.
“Look, Maya. I just got back last week from Africa. I had been there for the past three months. Since the heatwave tragedy, I have been helping with the logistics for bringing in supplies to the UN refugee camps. The governments in many places have ceased to exist from an operational perspective. I have not had a chance to catch up on news at all. I don’t really know what all has happened in that period.”
Maya studied Rachel for a moment trying to decide whether to accept Rachel’s explanation for her ignorance. Now that she thought about it, Rachel did look quite ravaged. For starters, Rachel’s face and forearms were tanned deep brown and covered with freckles where they were not tanned. There were also numerous pockmarks from insect bites on her hands and face. Rachel’s eyes had dark bags beneath them from chronic lack of sleep. There was also an immense sadness in the way Rachel’s shoulders were slumped.
She remembered Rachel as being one of those wholesome American girls. She was aware of Rachel’s reputation of being an extremely social person who never missed an opportunity to hang out with UN staff and delegations from various countries. The version standing before her looked nothing like the one she remembered.
With a touch of bitterness, Maya thought that at least Rachel had the luxury to leave the catastrophe playing out in Africa. The Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans were condemned to suffer through the horrific aftermath of the heat wave. But she grudgingly acknowledged Rachel for doing what she had done to help out. Most folks from the US and Europe couldn’t care less about poor folks in far away countries. Hell, she had seen wealthy Americans and Europeans being mostly indifferent to the pathetic plight of their poor fellow citizens living right in their midst. Now that she thought about it, Rachel had always seemed like an outlier among the usual Americans she had met.
Maya nodded at Rachel. They had reached the door to Maya’s office.
“Come into my office. We can talk about this in there.”
They settled down on the small sofa chairs.
“So you missed the big announcement and the hunger strike?”
Rachel had big question mark on her face.
“A few days after the heat wave, the leader of the indigenous people in the Nordic countries, completely out-of-the-blue, invited all the climate refugees in the world to the land of her ancestors. She made this announcement at the signing of the new treaty among the three Nordic nations - Sweden, Finland, and Norway - and the Sami people. The treaty was about handing over a large expanse of uninhabited land in the northern parts of the three countries back to the Sami people who have been living there for millennia. And before you ask, no - the Sami were not going to form their own sovereign nation. All they were getting was stewardship of their ancestral land.”
Maya could tell from Rachel’s expression that she was blown away by this piece of news. Rachel was gaping at her as if she had seen a unicorn. Maya continued.
“Of course, all three Nordic nations immediately pulled out of the treaty. The governments of all three countries hoped that this unexpected announcement would be quickly forgotten if they ignored it and acted as if it had never even happened. They forced the Sami Council to disown their leader. And that would have been that if not for a bunch of Norwegian college kids.
These kids picked up on the announcement and decided to force their governments to follow through on it. Initially, it didn’t work. There was a huge backlash against those kids and they, apparently, vanished for a few days from the public spotlight.”
Rachel was absolutely fascinated with the story. Her large eyes were wide open.
“The kids then changed tack. Instead of their usual aggressive shtick, they decided to go in the diametrically opposite direction. They started a hunger strike. You know… like Gandhi? They just sat quietly and quit eating. No protests. No slogans. Nothing. But they put their lives on the line.”
Maya was now fully into telling this story to Rachel. She had read about this. She hadn’t really discussed any of these developments with anyone. But in her mind, she had raised a toast to that little-known Sami leader and those Norwegian kids. They took a stand and somehow had made it stick. At least on paper, Maya thought. Describing all this to someone like Rachel was making her realize slowly that this was a very very unusual story indeed. Seeing Rachel’s reactions, though, she found herself getting infected by Rachel’s enthusiasm and optimism.
“I think a kid died of hunger. I don’t remember all the details now. Maybe more than one kid died. Come to think of it, I believe the father of one of the kids who died also died. It was so shocking that the three Nordic governments had to stop ignoring the hunger strike and sit down for negotiations.”
As if the spell was broken, Maya sighed heavily and added, “yeah right… negotiations!”
Rachel was nodding her head. She could see where Maya was coming from. Almost as if she were talking to herself, she said, “what if we can find the money…”
Maya looked at her kindly and asked, “do you know anyone who has that kind of money to give away?”
Rachel looked up at her in dismay. Then something in her manner changed visibly. Her chin jutted out and she squared her shoulders purposefully. She drew herself up to her full height as she got up from the chair.
“I will find the money to make this a reality. Even if it is the last thing I do. We have to do it! These people have no chance at all of surviving these disasters. Millions have died and billions will die in the future if we don’t do anything. For the first time, one of the biggest barriers to moving refugees to safer locations has been lifted. However, cynically the proposal may have been structured, this is still a huge opportunity and we must grab it.”
“I understand how you are feeling Rachel. But we have been down this path and it has always ended in complete disappointment. At some point in life, you need to accept reality. Stop kidding yourself. I am saying this not because I have become cynical. It is what it is."
Rachel was not seeing Maya, though. Her eyes were fixed somewhere far away in the distance. There was a sadness in her eyes as the memories of the suffering that she had witnessed over the last few weeks flashed across her mind. Then the expression on her face morphed into that of stubborn bull. The premature lines that had shown up on her face made her look old and wise instead of young and unrealistic. The jaw was clenched tightly and she defiantly stared back at Maya.
Maya found herself getting angry at Rachel. Because Rachel’s resolve was inadvertently affecting her. She was getting swept up in Rachel’s passion. And she knew that this attempt at finding the money to help people was also destined to fail like all the previous ones had been. She didn’t feel like she had any more fight left in her. She was spent after more than two decades of trying at the UN, at the World Bank, at the IMF, at the COP, and wherever else she could think of. She had repeatedly sought money to help poor countries adapt to climate change. The wealthy countries made promises on which they ALWAYS reneged. Shamelessly! Mercilessly! Again and again and again…
Like pitiless stones, the wealthy nations had watched millions die over the decades because of climate change. The climate had changed because of the actions of the wealthy. It was a blindingly obvious situation of cause-and-effect. The perpetrators and victims were defined as clearly as possible. The entire moral argument was on the side of the poor victims. Yet, the compensation had never shown up. Even getting the wealthy countries to simply accept their historic responsibility had been impossible for years. They had eventually accepted it, but they refused to be held liable for it. The world was just so fucking unfair. There was no way she was going to ride this emotional roller-coaster all over again. Rachel was most welcome to go on that ride on her own.
Some part of Maya, though, felt sympathetic toward Rachel. She decided to not unload her baggage onto Rachel. She said, firmly, “Rachel, find even one country willing to put up a few million dollars and then come talk with me about this. Until then, I am not going to waste my time on wishful thinking.”
Rachel nodded at her and left.