ABSTRACT
This chapters focuses on a crisis facing our international institutions, both intergovernmental and non-governmental, and the media who seek to alleviate and report human suffering throughout the world. Lamenting that representatives of the United Nations, relief agencies, and the media are no longer given protection by warring parties, as befits their impartial status, is understandable. But it is unrealistic to expect that this alarming trend will be significantly reversed. In today’s world, there are likely to be attacks on more tents with red crosses on the roof and on vehicles with the UN letters on the side. The significance of the fit between the individual’s personality and the place and nature of the assignment was driven home to me in Rwanda when the author was asked to evaluate a young man who had been placed “on a back hill” where he was all alone after the workday, and “became utterly depressed and nonfunctioning”.
