Shame - Confessions of an Aid Worker in Africa

by Jillian Reilly

Twenty-three-year-old Jillian Reilly went to southern Africa in 1993 at the close of apartheid, desperate to do good. She only planned to stay for six months, but the promise of playing savior was just too great. Jillian’s career in the aid industry flourished.To all the world, she looked like a successful ‘do-gooder’ — even a precocious one. If only she weren’t being suffocated by her own sense of futility. Jillian left southern Africa in 2000 quite clear that the only person she could save was herself. 'Shame' is her the story of a young American woman growing up, and old, in Africa. Realizing her own limitations, and the sorry realities of the big business of doing good.

Genres: Nonfiction

235 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 30, 2012

About the author

I've spent my career inside moments when old systems stop working and people have to figure out what comes next — from the HIV/AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe, where I worked as an aid worker in my twenties, to executive boardrooms in London, to stages across three continents.

What I kept seeing, in every context, was the same thing: most people aren't failing. They're just running an operating system designed for a world that no longer exists. That's what both my books are really about. Shame came from years of witnessing how broken systems crush people who are doing everything right.

The Ten Permissions came from decades of asking what actually helps — and distilling the answer into ten concrete invitations to stop waiting for external approval and start designing a life that genuinely fits.

I'm also a TEDx speaker, a global change-facilitator, and someone who has spent thirty years being genuinely fascinated by the gap between the life we're told to want and the one that actually works. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, you're in the right place.

Reviews

[Dejiariyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really dont know why anyone has not reviewed this book but this is very good one and i think its a must read for anyone going to Africa on humanitarian grounds and also Africans who allow these NGO to play saviours on them.

[Neha · Rating 4 out of 5]

a 3.75. when I started this book, I felt the author was naive, stupid, and white and never going to get out of her savior complex and her knack for cultural misappropriation. but as she left South Africa for Zimbabwe, Jill really came into her own. She shed her naiveté and became attuned to the realism and reality around her. I just felt there was so much more the book could have said but didn't. why did Jill really need saving? there is nothing about her past the book reveals that leads her down that road and to finally leaving Zimbabwe to save herself. I wish the book also spoke a bit more about what she did after she left Zimbabwe... it would have been great to listen and hear about life after the field...and perhaps be of help to those who are navigating challenging circumstances and retrenchment in the sector these days.

[Allan Wind · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice start

But the book would have been far stronger if it had less "tell all" at the beginning and more on the true evolution and learning of Jillian and how she applied them.