An Interview with Les Roberts

ePulse: Yes, social justice, peace and justice, exactly. So, when did you make the transition to your entire, your career, your job, your everything, your being, this peace and justice ...

LR: That was 1984. I went to Kenya to teach high school - to teach high school physics - and when I got there, I saw these women carrying water on their heads unbelievable distances. It was just heart-breaking. And I thought, “if these women need to carry water on their heads miles every day, the world doesn’t need more physicists.” The world needs more water and food and medicine and some pretty humble things.

ePulse: So environmental engineering.

LR: I went to Public Health school to advance justice in the world. It just so happens that when your topic is water, the way you advance it is by helping people organize, raise money, understand science, have access to technology so that they can get their water. That’s your mission.

When you start working documenting events in war, the public health response - the most important public health response - is ending the war. Which is innately far more political than getting a village water. Getting a village water can be political, but ending war is by its very nature more political.

ePulse: Did you have a mentor?

LR: Yes. I had a couple. The most important one was at the Centers For Disease Control, my boss, Mike Toole. He was a physician, an Australian, and he was probably the world’s foremost authority on refugee health. He really nurtured and pushed me. He had a very wonderful blend of kindness and high expectation. Which was annoying on certain days (Laughs).

ePulse: On Monday mornings?

LR: When he wanted me to go to Bosnia and I didn’t want to go. But he was and still remains a wonderful mentor. When I think about changing jobs, when I have struggled with the hardest things ... quitting my job at the International Rescue Committee in protest of their participating in the Coalition [of the Willing in the war on Iraq], he is the main person in my profession whose advice I seek.

ePulse: What motivates you to go into these intense war zones?

LR: Catholic induced guilt. It happens that I have been trained to do this, fate hasn’t brought us children and I have an incredibly idealistic and supportive wife. There aren’t many people who are willing to have a conversation in which you decide there is a really high chance you are going to die in Iraq, but that this is more important than your life so you should go and do this anyway. And when I went to Iraq, I’m not sure I expected to die, but I thought the probability was really, really high ...