Most would-be humanitarians, like their prime-time and/or celebrity inspiration, planned to spend their days becoming one with The Bottom Billion, delivering babies by candlelight in the dead of the night in a tent out on the border between Nowhere and Off The Grid, braving crocodiles and hippos to get hygiene kits into the hands of adolescent girls, or enduring days without a proper toilet for the sake of ensuring the provision of a gravity-fed water system which (if properly installed by foreigners) will enable the grateful yet simultaneously empowered villagers to break the cycle of poverty for sustainable perpetuity. That´s what she`d envisioned before the reality of a real aid job had taken hold.

Those outside the humanitarian aid industry are frequently critical of professional humanitarian workers for their apparent cynicism. Cynical, snarky aid blogs, gallows humor and what may often appear to outsiders as wanton excess living are held up as proof that the humanitarian system has run amuck, lost its way, and ceased being about "the poor". The critics are perhaps partly right, but for reasons they don´t understand. Maybe the cynicism, the snark, the excessive team house drinking are at least evidence, if not proof in and of themselves, that the aid system is broken. But where the wide-eyed critics are wrong is in believing that these are what make aid broken.
In fact it´s the opposite: Aid is not broken because aid workers are cynical, hedonistic alcoholics. Aid workers are cynical alcoholics because aid is broken, and further, because they have been repeatedly slapped down by their own leaders for trying to make it better.