The New Yorker almost never has articles about Africa. I may have purchased last week’s issue at the newsstand to read Ariel Levy on Sex and How to Have It, but it was Lives of the Saints that held my attention.

The article is a dispassionate but engaging account of just why it’s so hard to help people on the arid border of Sudan and Chad. And not just why it’s hard to help refugees, but why it’s hard living for those trying to help them.

A lot of accounts of this type could get caught up in whether or not the world is responding to what’s happening in a moral way, or whether or not the UN is wasting money, or other such polemical questions. This article doesn’t bother trying to have a final word on these issues – the author seems to recognize the futility of trying to have that kind of final word.

Instead, it focuses on the day to day technical difficulties of getting supplies from one place to another and giving them to the people who need them and not the people who want to steal them. It’s a series of mini-portraits of the people who have chosen this as their job.

Here’s one that stuck with me:

Over a meal of fried plantains and bony fish from the Chari River, she told me that, among the variety of aid workers, two broad categories stood out: the runners and the seekers. The runners were fleeing their past lives; the seekers were looking for adventure or enlightenment. She was a runner, she said, but offered no details.

She went on to say that she had reached a point in her life where she must make a choice. She was thirty-three, young enough to return to her country and try to establish a life with marriage, children, and a home. Or she could continue on as she was, with reassignments every few years and little chance for marriage and children. “Look around,” she said, “and you’ll see that this business is full of women thirty-five to forty-five who are strong, competent, good at what they do, and single.” She had never had a long-term relationship. She must make a choice, she said. It seemed to me that she already had.

Few articles give such straightforward insight not just into the lives of aid workers, but into how aid work is being done. A must read for anyone – aid worker, journalist, missionary, whatever – interested in Africa.

I also loved the photo that the print issue used. There’s a slide show online, and then more photos on Christoph Bangert’s website. His photos are amazing and thoughtful. They show small incidents, sweeping landscapes, all with eerie lighting and intentional jarring moments.

The article’s author never decisively names these aid workers as saints in the context of the story, though with a title like that his opinion is a foregone conclusion. I’m not so sure. I think some of the polemical questions he doesn’t tackle complicate sainthood.