Electric Memories
Warren Buttery
The Humanitarian World | Story 3 of 4
Electric Memories is an online storytelling platform that documents, records, and packages your defining moments, lessons learned, and personal history across multiple media for permanent storage, access, and sharing. For more information, visit www.electric-memories.com.
For the complete set of Warren Buttery’s audio, video, and text remembrances, visit www.electric-memories.com/warrenbuttery.
The interviewer is Brian Gruber.
This interview is the third of a four-part series featuring Warren Buttery. You can read the entire series at medium.com/electric-memories.
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I spent 22 years in the humanitarian world.
What does that mean?
It is going into complex places, as a professional, to talk to communities, understand what they’re going through, and how organizationally we can help them. In Afghanistan, as an example, I spent 10 years there over a period of 20. Problems have been going on for generations. Whatever actions we were going to take, we had to deal with the immediate, but with the idea of looking towards their future, developing the program around their needs, with their input, and within the limitations of the organization or sometimes, dare I say, the politics of the situation. Create a team, create the program, and, typically, then hand it on to somebody else. And then go off to another emergency. I was most of the time going from one place to another, short-term contracts, sometimes back-to-back contracts in one place. Places that I enjoyed and found interesting. Emergency work is very rewarding in getting to understand what the world really is, and what creates that world. Yeah.
What did you bring to that job? Why did people hire you to do that work?
Initially, naivety (laughs). I really jumped in and said, I’ll go anywhere, here’s my email address, wherever it was really challenging. What I really brought, because I had a military career 12 years before that, I understood my physical, mental, disciplinary limitations and boundaries. And so I could go into it. I went to Afghanistan, quite bold, but naively at the time.
Nothing in Afghanistan related to Australian forces?
No, no, no, I’d left the army one year before I went to Afghanistan. So I had an understanding about the military stuff.
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Serving in Danger Zones
You’ve likely had more intense experiences in your humanitarian work than you did in the army.
Oh, absolutely.
Did you ever feel personally at risk? Ten years in Afghanistan, I can imagine there were one or two moments.
There were a couple of moments. I’ve only been shot at twice. Both, they weren’t really trying to kill me, just trying to send a warning. But there was a moment in southern Sudan before it was southern Sudan. We were doing an emergency intervention. I was working for an international organization, relatively small. There was nothing there. There were no buildings with glass. The war had been so significant, particularly in places that we we’re working. I had to travel from one location to another location speaking to Dinka communities. I don’t know if you know the Dinka, really tall, like seven-foot tall, six-footers are short fellows. And they have really long legs, a lot of them were cattle people, driving the cattle right around the country into Ethiopia. Walking meant nothing to them. I had to get from town A to town B to help resupply, help support logistically, a small team out there; a small team means one nurse, an Irish nurse. I was talking to my colleagues, military Sudanese civil authorities, about how do I get from one place to another? They said, it’ll only take you half a day. No, I think they said a couple of hours. And we’ll give you a bicycle. At the time, this is around late ’98, there was a lot of flooding. So there was the conflict, there was the absolute poverty. There was…
Can you briefly describe why were you sent to southern Sudan and by whom?
I won’t name the organization, but it was a small international agency. My role was to support their feeding program. Part of their feeding program was food as medicine. So capturing people right on death’s door, not just babies, also adults. It’s some incredible work. The intervention that we had was a little town called Ajeep, it was written about because it was so extraordinary. It was a kind of work that not been done since World War Two, dealing with totally malnourished adults, because a lot of the children had already passed. The war was pretty messy, north and south and the inter-ethnic group war, which is always really the undercurrent if anyone knows about Sudan. It’s not about politics so much, it’s about what’s happening locally, cattle-rustling and people-rustling and kidnapping women for wives and all that kind of stuff was going on. It was horrific.
They gave me this old bicycle. The old Chinese model, what do they call it? Pegasus? Which doesn’t have handles this way, it has handles that way. It’s a weird sort of thing. And big wheels. They gave me a guide and he was only a little fella, so he would have been about my height. Beautiful, joyful man. He took off on a bicycle and I was trying to follow him in the heat of the Sudan desert. We came across quite early a boggy place because flooding had gone on previously. We couldn’t ride the bikes, we had to carry them, with a backpack of maybe 10 kilos. By that time we’d been traveling for about seven hours. It was so hot. We started five o’clock in the morning. I was exhausted, I sat down in this swamp, this guy had gone off ahead, I didn’t know where he was, I sat down in the swamp crying, bawling my eyes out. I don’t know where I am. There was elephant grass around me so I couldn’t stick my head up and see anything, and it smelt putrid and I said, well, what am I going to do now? You’re going to die here unless you get off your ass. So after 20 minutes or so of reorienting myself, letting loose some energy, I got off my ass and carried the bike, started plonking along in a direction. I didn’t have a map, had a compass. Probably an hour had gone and he found me. It took us another four hours and I finally got there, exhausted, and so appreciative. The Irish nurse who was there, she had been on her own for about a week, because we were flying in light aircraft, little Cessna things with alcoholic Russian and Ukrainian pilots. The airfield had flooded, we couldn’t fly in. She really needed help. So here I am. The hero train, right, I’m gonna go off there, and let’s do it. That was when I really looked at death.
Through all those humanitarian assignments, was there an enduring sense that you were doing something important, were proud of it, this was a way that you were consciously choosing to make an impact on the world? Or was it a job?
It was a lifestyle. At times over at the bar, we’d sit down and say, ah yeah, we’re off to save the world tomorrow. Knowing full well that whatever communities I dealt with, working in places which had perpetual conflict and perpetual disaster, I could help this one year, but next year, they’re screwed. Because bad guys have come in or the so-called good guys would come in or because neither of them are good guys to their populations or a greater famine or whatever. That was the cynic coming up in us.
I could help this one year, but next year, they’re screwed.
I have gone back to places a few years later and connected with people that I’d worked with. On fewer occasions, beneficiaries, but people that I worked with, that’s always been my focus. I learned detachment very early. I can’t get lost in the poverty, the emotions of the religious fundamentalism or the politics, the conflict or whatever it was, I can’t get lost in those emotions. I focused all my attention on my national staff because many of them I employed right from scratch and gave them the opportunity to work for their own people and sometimes for their enemy. My focus was them, developing them, creating a safe space for them to flourish, and providing the structure and the benefits, the salary to allow them to deal with the people.
Working with the Taliban
Some of the people that I met in Afghanistan not long after the Taliban had taken over Kabul, my role was, as a semi-indigenous organization, to connect with the United Nations, connect with the Taliban presumptive authority, connect with communities on providing some unity of purpose. My national team was far more experienced than I. Afghans from different ethnic groups. And they became my dear, dear friends. When I went back to Afghanistan, the last time I met with all of them, who still stay very connected, they had become leaders in civil society, ministers, deputy ministers in government, not the crooked ones, the technocrats, the people who really cared and stayed all through the Taliban period and had their families kidnapped and tortured because of the work they did.
What was your experience with the Taliban?
As a foreigner, I was careful, I was protected. There was a particular security organization, office number two, and their job was to keep foreigners safe, and to spy on us, because they always thought there was something we’re seeing here. My role was to meet what they call deputy ministers, because the so-called spiritual leaders, they were all in Kandahar. The guys who were really wielding power at a Kabul level, they were acting or deputy ministers. I would meet with a couple of them quite regularly, including the acting minister of religious police. We would try to talk to them about different issues, it could be security about international workers and their national staff, it could be access to women’s health, because there was none. It could be children’s education. My role was to, with others, represent the humanitarian community to the presumptive authority on all these issues. They held me in fairly high respect. At least that’s the way it felt. We always felt safe. When I arrived in Kabul, there were 100 foreigners in Kabul and in Herat. Now up there in the Panjshir, they were different. It was a different country, because that was all Northern Alliance, we had no communication to them. The only communication we had anyway was to Peshawar in Pakistan via HF radio. A little bit of text like a tweet, that’s as much space as we ever had. Unless we drove out through Jalalabad or the Khyber Pass, which was always a big event. I’ve driven up and down half a dozen times over a year but also from Kabul into Kandahar. I’ve driven from Kabul into Quetta in Pakistan, all through that Taliban time. That was one of the times we got shot at, kind of our mistake. We were a bit slow. We didn’t reach the town before dusk. And there was a Taliban checkpoint up on a hill and so one fighter 50-cal just to say, hey, we’re here.
Did you have much contact with Islam or an opportunity to learn or be impressed by Afghans’ practice of Islam?
I had many Islamic scholars encourage me to come to Islam, they’d say you’d make a great Muslim. And I would say thank you. I really appreciate that. But those Christians were trying to convert me for a long time and they haven’t worked their magic yet. So maybe not now, but I love the ideas. The Taliban are mainly one ethnic group, the Pashtun. And I appreciate the Pashtunwali, the culture, not all of it, but some of it, their honor. The Americans would say, these people can’t be trusted. I’d never found that. There’s an old saying that you can never buy an Afghan. But you can always rent one for a length of time. They’re pious, they’re really stuck to it, and their commitment, the love underneath that facade of warrior is really deep. My friends from back at that time are still dear brothers to me today. Because when you connect, you stay, and you don’t have falling outs. You have a way of getting around things, of talking, of forgiving. I like that sense of honor. Afghans, particularly Pashtun, are warriors and poets. The poet Rumi, he’s Afghan. Afghans were ruling most of India. I respect and learned about many religions.
When I started my yoga practice, and started learning the philosophy, it gave me the opportunity to go back to all the books that are written by men. They all say the same thing. They all talk about love. It’s wrapped around these stories of genocide and stories of misogyny and stories of retribution. But they all talk about love.
I break it down into two main areas. Religion is about God. If you obey, you’re okay, you’re in. If you don’t, you’re punished. And it’s supposedly guidelines for living a better life. Well, philosophy is also guidelines for living a better life. But the biggest difference is, there’s no God, and there’s no punishment. That’s what yoga brings to me. I don’t like this idea of being punished. If I don’t agree with you, I’m going to hell, the greatest of all punishments. With yoga, it’s try, and if it works for you, great. If it doesn’t work for you, try this instead. It doesn’t say hey, you must, it’s trial and error. And I appreciate that. That had always been my life, like from my parents. You must do. I’m not good at that. I’m not good at being told what to do, that commanding officer when he said (laughs), you’re not officer material. Thank you, sir. I don’t like being told what to do. And I don’t like telling what to do. I do encourage thought. I do encourage questioning. There’s a reason I was kicked out of Sunday school, I asked too many questions. Who’s that Jesus fellow? Really? What did he do? Can that be real?
They all say the same thing. They all talk about love.
Can you describe how you were kicked out of Sunday school? Sounds like fun.
I asked too many questions. United Church, Protestant, but kind of lackadaisical. I think parents use it to send the kids off so they can have a free Sunday morning. When I was a baby, we’d come into church and I’d be squealing as soon as I got in there. There was a little silent booth which overlooked the pulpit and there were toys up there. As soon as I got up there, I’d be quiet and start playing with toys.
There is no truth. It’s perception. The only truth that we have is ourselves. This is my truth if I can say it without impeding upon yours. That’s a big deal for me, being told what is, what is not.
Sierra Leone
Relationships are the best way to learn, the best opportunity to have a reflection of oneself. There’s a story I want to tell, it still has a massive effect upon me. I was living and working in Sierra Leone during the conflict, 1999, for MSF (Medicines Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders). It came as a charity mission. When I was in Sudan, I was with a wonderful partner. Her name was Jane. I went to Sudan. She went to Honduras. And in Honduras, she died in a helicopter accident. She was an Australian doctor. We went to Afghanistan. It was an incredible relationship. The idea was, I was going to do a short mission in Sudan and meet her in Honduras. She was also working for MSF.
In Sudan, I met a guy in the middle of the bush, this American fellow. We were sitting around at the end of the evening swatting mosquitoes and probably drinking a whiskey. He told me how he had a former partner died in a helicopter accident. I said, whoa, what are the odds of that happening? Wow. They had been partners for some time and they’d split up and then this helicopter accident happened. When I was in the Australian Army, there was this very famous accident, two special air service helicopters collided and 19 men died, half of them were my friends. That was a big event in Australian military history. Two days later, I got asked to come back to Lokichogio, a town in northern Kenya, where the big aid effort was C130 aircraft dropping pallets of food for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. The army would take it and use it and the communities would get some. At the airport, this Irish guy, the logistics chief, pulled me aside at the back of the airfield and said, Warren, we’ve got some news about Jane. And, whoa, whoa, what? Well, there’s been a helicopter accident four or five days before, because of the big hurricane in Honduras, Hurricane Mitch. And — are you ready to deal with this?
My bottom dropped out of my life, didn’t know how to behave. The agency she was working with were generous enough. I was working not with MSF. I was working for somebody else. They said, we’ll fly you to Honduras, but they’re still looking, the French Navy’s out there and local authorities and I said no need if the reports are a helicopter explosion over the ocean. They found bits of the helicopter and bits of the pilot.
I went to Melbourne to meet her parents. And for the first time in 15 years, I put their estranged relationship into the same room. That was for me the most appropriate thing to do. I had to go through six months of grieving. I didn’t know what to do. I said to MSF, maybe I want a job. Get me out. And they said, okay, we’ll send you to Sierra Leone. Cool. Go to Sierra Leone for MSF.
We were some of the first people to go back after the invasion of Freetown, horrific. If you know the Sierra Leone war, it’s about diamonds, and the hallmarks of that conflict were the use of machetes. Started with cutting off thumbs so they couldn’t vote. Lips, ears, carving Revolutionary United Front in people’s chests. And MSF had set up a camp, the MSF amputee and war wounded camp. And everyone went there, Kofi Annan and his wife, Mary Robinson, the former Irish president, they’d come visit. We were basically capturing these people to come in off the jungle with these horrific wounds, gangrene and stuff. They’d been in the bush for a long, long time. MSF volunteer doctors would patch them up, maybe a bit of re-amputation here or there because they had to cut up the dead flesh. I was supporting the hospital and the camp. And yeah, you can imagine there were some stories around that camp.
There was this man, 50-ish. I was sitting in the medical clinic in the little camp. I just sat down next to him. And he started to tell me a story. He had no arms, they’d cut his lips off. And he started to tell me the story about how he was really lucky. The RUF had taken him out into the bush and he’d witnessed his wife being raped and then murdered. They’d already cut his arms. And then at that moment, the ECOWAS, the Nigerian soldiers came rushing through and cleared the camp and he went running into the bush with his stump. He had his niece, a little three-year-old, pushed against his own hip to stop bleeding. And his other little boy holding what was left of his arm. They’d cut it, but not through at this stage. He eventually got out of the jungle, they operated on him, German surgeons, incredible people, using ketamine to knock them out as an anesthetic.
I was dealing with the trauma of my dead partner. And I started bawling. I just wept like a child and literally ran out of the clinic and ran home and I took maybe four or five days before I could muster the courage to go back into the camp. I went back into the camp and found him. I sat down with him and I said, thank you, thank you so much for your story but, I asked, why did you tell me this? He said, I felt you needed to cry. He felt my trauma and wanted to share his experience to be able to allow me to let it go. That was a huge catharsis for me. I continued working at the camp and I really appreciated him. That was a big event. Yeah, me trying to tell that at Burning Man one year to a young, scantily dressed woman while we were on LSD was a really bad mistake (laughs).
He said, I felt you needed to cry.
The camp occupants, residents is a better word, amputees and war wounded, they decided to have a football game. There was enough space in the front of the camp, it was on the main road. And they called it the amputees versus the war wounded. Some dignitaries came. It was amazing. The amputees won. There were no handballs! Some press and humanitarian workers thought this was disgusting. “How could you do this?” I didn’t do anything, man. All we did was supply some food. They set it up all themselves. But it was a beautiful day where they got their humanity back because they wanted to play football with each other. We just provided some football gear. That was wonderful.
How did the experience of those humanitarian missions inform how you choose to live your life now?
With awareness that I will never know everyone’s story. And every story that I have the privilege to hear is something I can learn from. The stories that I had experienced, my stories and stories that others had told me, of generations of suffering, you think you and I might have a bad day. And you did. But it’s nothing in comparison, you know that after these exploits.
And I recognize that every story has its message. And every time it’s shared is a connection from one human being to another human being of great privilege. And great respect. Great honor.
How do you view service now, having had those prior experiences before?
Such extremes gives me an essence of credibility, what we, as teachers, practitioners can go through and experience and live healthy and happy lives. We don’t need to be trapped in our trauma, there are ways out and this is a big part of what yoga had been to help me change my life. I’m not saying it’s pure medicine, but it’s certainly been very, very helpful for me, the philosophy as well as the physical practices, and they can be used to release trauma. Yoga gives a connectivity to people the same as how religion was formed to bring people and communities together so they understand each other. So when I meet another Muslim, and I know who they are, if they can feel safe, we have a story that connects us. And I see yoga as part of that, stoicism would be another part of that, a different but similar understanding of how we see the world. In my humanitarian career, I used to rely upon cannabis and alcohol to de-stress. The last mission that I had done, it was with a British NGO who I’d worked for a few times back in the day, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Oxfam, a credible organization.
You picked some good ones.
Yeah, I try. I spent three years in Burma up until my injury, up until 2016. And I’d come here (Koh Phangan), I’d been in Nepal. I’d lived in the States for a little while, growing cannabis and living with a wonderful but severely depressed woman. I learned a lot there too. The Rohingya refugee crisis sparked up again, where nearly a million Rohingya Muslims were pushed out of Burma by the army, fastest exodus of humanity since the Rwandan genocide. So I went there because I was connected already to the environment and to the issue. Oxfam accepted me and I did a six-month mission but I no longer had alcohol, no longer had cannabis in my life. I had yoga and that helped me find balance. I went back and I saw these humanitarian teams, very committed individuals, mainly of Western origin, but also some amazing Bangladeshis, professionals, who had gone from emergency to emergency to emergency from the Sierra Leone to the Ebola crisis to this one to this one. And I saw myself in them at different stages of my 22-year career, I saw the martyr, I saw the savior, I saw the PTSD, I saw the ambition, and I saw the exhaustion, deep, deep exhaustion, and how that affected not only themselves as individuals but the team and how they were with their nationals.
We don’t need to be trapped in our trauma, there are ways out.
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Electric Memories is an online storytelling platform that documents, records, and packages your defining moments, lessons learned, and personal history across multiple media for permanent storage, access, and sharing. For more information, visit www.electric-memories.com.
For the complete set of Warren Buttery’s audio, video, and text remembrances, visit www.electric-memories.com/warrenbuttery.
