Love, Africa Quotes

“It's easy to explain why you like something. But love? That's tricky. That's a story, not a sentence.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“you can have it all, just not at the same time.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Everybody should work at a small newspaper. The amount of life you take in is staggering.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“you know everything you need to know about a guy by seeing how he treats waiters.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“I discovered something I would inflict on myself several more times: the primacy of loneliness. If you’re working hard and lonely, or traveling a lot and lonely, or even chasing down a dream and lonely, you’re still, at the heart of it, just lonely.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Often it’s not the bad things that split people apart but the opportunities.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“First comes Coke, then asphalt, then power lines, then maybe education, justice, and human rights.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“If you’re with the one you love, the rest should be logistics.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The values that America stands for are superb; it’s what we do, especially in those places few Americans care about, like the Valley of the Caves, or south-central Somalia, that makes a mockery of these values.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Famines are not natural disasters. Famines are man-made. Droughts happen from time to time. But in this century, for any drought to metastasize into a famine, it takes a monumental breakdown in the economy, in relief efforts, in communication, and in the customs and traditions that usually keep places like Somalia from totally unraveling.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“More than 2,000 years ago Herodotus wrote, “In peaceful times, children inter their parents. In war times, parents inter their children.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“however crazy this world gets, however accustomed to misery someone may be, we are all the same. No one ever totally gives up hope, no one is made in such a way that he is grief-proof. Not even in Somalia.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“People were selling pyramids of oranges from wooden carts. Powdered milk and sacks of grain sat on the shelves of the little stores we passed, the very food that little girl had needed to eat. It didn’t seem to make any sense, but famines are caused by shocks to the food distribution system, not necessarily by poverty per se. There was still plenty of food in Somalia; it was just relatively expensive because of the drought and the rise in global food prices.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The news of suffering takes a new shape when you’re a parent. Fatherhood peels back a layer of skin, exposing a network of nerves I hadn’t known existed.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“it takes no more than ten grown men to prevent a stationary car from getting away—”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“These young men said they had plenty of friends of different tribes back in “uni,” but up here, it was different. “Why is it different?” I asked. “Because this is about family,” one said. For years, politicians on all sides had stoked their bases by casting aspersions on other ethnic groups, talking about dangers to “the community.” There was tinder lying everywhere in Kenya. The stolen election became the fuse, and the result was front-page news around the world.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“America’s decision to green-light Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia and overthrow a popular, grassroots, and surprisingly effective Islamist administration led, over the next five years, to the explosion of chaos, high-seas piracy, terrorism spreading across East Africa, and ultimately the next Somali famine, in which more than 250,000 people died. That policy decision was one of the most questionable in recent history—right behind Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 2, if measured in lives lost, although I’m not sure what else you’d measure it in.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“That’s how the Islamists are,” Louis went on. “They keep changing and changing, but they’ll never give up on their goal to rule the world. They have a totally different concept of time.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“I can’t remember any time the Americans have delivered a worse mess than this. You know what they’re doing?” He bent forward and dropped his voice to a whisper—that’s what I loved about Louis, life was a Le Carré novel to him. “They’re still backing the warlords. The CIA never cut the assistance, even after the clerics kicked the warlords’ ass, despite all those briefcases of cash. You know the assholes the CIA was backing? Qanyare? Abdi Qeybdiid? Hussein Aidid? They were the same assholes who shot down your helicopters during Black Hawk Down. You Americans”—he waved his lit cigarette at me—“you’re so tragic at history.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“Once I heard a remark made about a certain New York television reporter to the effect that he was the type who would have asked, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” I suspect that Mr. Gettleman fits that description.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The Oxford dons had accomplished the impossible. They made Africa boring.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“often it helps to hang it on the boss. It’s also the tone you strike, the eye contact.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“There’s always that thrill of learning something new, feeling your brain grow inside your head, no matter what that something is.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The aid industry has saved millions of lives, but it is complicated (and maybe this is a necessary evil) by a set of feelings that often leave the getters feeling patronized and the givers feeling a little cynical.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“What if they didn’t even want my help? From pit latrines to condoms, we were trying to assist countless people in every aspect of their lives, from how they shit to how they fuck. And many didn’t even like us. And now they were torching our cars.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“We were trying to rebuild people in our image, convincing them that our way of doing things was superior to their way, that they should put down their tea and pick up our Coke.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“He taught me more about aid work than anyone else. He knew that it took strategy, not heart.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“More people were slaughtered, hour by hour, in Rwanda than during the height of the Holocaust, and the Hutus didn’t have cattle cars or gas chambers.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“The world does not have enough topic sentences.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

“There’s exactly one difference between an adventure and a tragedy: death.”
― Jeffrey Gettleman, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival