No One Can Stop the Rain: A Chronicle of Two Foreign Aid Workers during the Angolan Civil War (review)

Attracted by the idea of emergency work in a civil war context? This is the book to read. Using a combination of letters home and subsequent reflections upon their return, Karin Moorhouse and Wei Cheng have provided an accessible, thought-provoking, and inspiring account of their year-long experience as volunteers for Médecins sans frontières (msf) in Angola in 2000. The book follows their day-to-day experiences in the central Angolan city of Kuito where Wei was a surgeon (indeed, the only surgeon!) and Moorhouse a financial officer in the city's (and region's) only functioning hospital. While not analytically deep, the book's short chapters – variably written by each of the authors – flow smoothly and are filled with empathetic insights into the variety of challenges and personal rewards that emergency work in developing world contexts can offer.

The book's political insights into its civil war context are perhaps its weakest. There are periodic references to Angola's brutal colonial past under the Portuguese, to the civil war's origins in broader and complex Cold War struggles, and to the more localized struggles for power and control over Angola's significant economic resources – oil and diamonds – between the government and unita rebel movement. These are joined by references to the West's complicity in Angola's violence – fuelled by the corporate interests of the global oil and gas and arms industries (especially small arms and landmines). As Wei angrily remarked, 'so-called small arms! What is small about the suffering they inflict?'

Moorhouse and Wei, however, are much more interested in describing the human consequences of these various intersecting processes – visible on a daily basis from their vantage point in the 'melancholy' town of Kuito: the collapse of the Angolan state, including its rudimentary health care system which Wei described as 'rotting at the core'; chronic malnutrition, 'manmade' famine, and endemic poverty caused by the destruction of Angola's tremendous potential in food production; and one of the highest rates of internal displacement in the world (one-third of the population), most of whom were women and children, uprooted by the competitive government and rebel campaigns of limpeza (or regional 'cleansing'). Indeed, Kuito, which Moorhouse at one point describes as 'a vast humanitarian citadel,' had become a major staging post for these ongoing streams of internally displaced peoples. Finally, emanating from their daily experience of hospital life in a conflict zone, the book is full of medically descriptive examples of the horrors of war: of little six-year-old girls shot in the face, of a man with 'a criss-cross of machete chops to the face,' and of the more general filth of most of the incoming patients, 50 per cent of whom Wei estimated to be infested with worms. In portraying the reality of these 'unconscionable acts of brutality' and of the 'wanton' and 'senseless killing' that 'swirled around us,' Wei and Moorhouse have performed a valuable, if unenviable, task.

The most important contributions of this book, however, lie not in its portrayal of the desperate situation facing the ordinary peoples of Angola. Rather, it is in the simple but powerful portrayal of the humanity of this suffering population that is so easily forgotten by 'the self protective minds' and 'detached indifference' of people and life in the West. Even Moorhouse repeatedly describes her own struggles while in Kuito to avoid succumbing to a desensitized sense of 'tired resignation' in the face of the atrocities that surrounded them. Be it in the ability of ordinary Angolans to 'live for the day,' to make suffering and grief more palatable through dance and song, or of the enterprising ability of children to craft toys from the discards of war, Moorhouse and Wei's account ultimately leaves the reader with an odd sense of hope. As Moorhouse so powerfully wrote near the...