(RNS) — For nearly four decades, Ken Isaacs has led the disaster relief efforts for Samaritan’s Purse across the world, earning a reputation as a swashbuckling Christian fixer ready to swoop in to any global hotspot to orchestrate the delivery of aid.

Now Isaacs has written a memoir of his travels to the ends of the earth to help alleviate emergencies, among them the Rwandan genocide, the Haiti earthquake, the Japanese tsunami, the Sudanese civil war or the Liberian Ebola outbreak.

In “Running to the Fire: Helping in Jesus’ Name,” Isaacs recounts his humble beginnings as a North Carolina well driller and his hiring by Franklin Graham, the head of Samaritan’s Purse, to help oversee a well-drilling project that an Ethiopian church was undertaking. Isaacs, who was raised as a Baptist and began drilling wells for his wife’s family business, recalls a mission trip he took to Togo as a lay person and how, while there, he felt “called to the world.” 

“So that led to me beginning a very dedicated prayer cycle of, ‘God, if you’ll open a door, I’ll go through it,'” Isaacs told RNS.

“Running to the fire” is the humanitarian ethos Isaacs developed over the years. As he explains, “Samaritan’s Purse has always intentionally gone into dangerous places, while also trying to recognize, understand and mitigate the risks to protect the lives and well-being of our staff.”

That risk-taking led to some harrowing situations. He recounts being taken hostage by soldiers in Zaire in 1996 who suspected he was a spy. (“If there are guys with guns,” he writes, “it’s a good idea if they’re your friends.” In this instance they were not his friends, but he was able to befriend them.) While authorities in some countries granted Isaacs access and permission to facilitate aid distribution, in other places he had to work around non-functioning bureaucracies and take over abandoned hospitals and other compounds.

His ability to negotiate with warlords as well as government officials led to a short stint as director of foreign disaster assistance for the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, during the presidency of George W. Bush.

In 2018, the Trump administration nominated Isaacs to be director general of the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. The IOM board eventually rejected his nomination over disparaging comments he made about Islam. He later apologized. 

Earlier that year after a terrorist attack in London, Isaac reposted and commented on a CNN story that quoted a Catholic bishop saying “This isn’t in the name of God, this isn’t what the Muslim faith asks people to do.” Isaacs responded: “CNN, Bishop if you read the Quran you will know ‘this’ is exactly what the Muslim faith instructs the faithful to do.”

RNS spoke to Isaacs about his work at Samaritan’s Purse where, as vice president of programs and government relations, he oversees a staff of 4,000 employees in 18 field offices around the world. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

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Franklin Graham needed your expertise in well drilling in Ethiopia. How did that come about?

(Franklin) had received a project proposal from a denomination with probably 3 million people in Ethiopia. They had a surface water program, and they wanted to have a well drilling program. So they had an engineer write a letter saying, we want to have a drilling program, and we need this, this and this. He gave me the list. But I never could get on the same wavelength with the engineer. So around about the end of 1987 I met with Franklin and said, “You need to find somebody that would just go to Ethiopia and find out what they encounter on a day to day basis.” And Franklin said, “Would you go?” And so I went.

Did you already have good diplomatic skills?

Not at all. My initial skill set was very much bottom-line: get the job done. Over time, I learned, sometimes the hard way, that you can attract more flies with honey than vinegar. You need to talk to people in a way that’s always respectful. It wasn’t that I was disrespectful, but I could be pushy and determined. What helped me was that I could intuitively tell how to talk to somebody to get what I wanted. Then you start looking: What does that person need out of this relationship? What affirms that person? Maybe we can trade here some way. But the diplomatic skills developed over time.

You’ve done a lot of work with US government agencies. For a while you worked at the now-shuttered USAID. What do you think of governments’ work in providing humanitarian assistance around the world?

I’m self-taught and results oriented. I use common sense. I’ve developed a set of guidelines that I go by. What I saw that was being defined as development work wasn’t effective. That has always made me somewhat of a skeptic of development programs. When I was at USAID, I heard frequently that USAID shouldn’t be in the humanitarian assistance business, because we are the Agency for International Development, so that was sort of telling me, you really shouldn’t be here. And that made me think, where should humanitarian assistance be? If two-thirds of your budget is for things that are not humanitarian assistance it creates a toxicity, particularly if there are political agendas involved. I think that that needs to be moved into the State Department where it can be sort of a coherent and cohesive kind of approach. I have said all along that we should continue as a nation to save lives. We should have compassion on people who are hungry and people who are sick, and we shouldn’t abandon the PEPFAR program (the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief), but we also don’t need to carry it on for perpetuity.

It seems like the Trump administration’s attitude is America First and let’s not help people abroad. Are you on board with that?

I am on board with helping people who are in the ditches of life. And I feel like Americans are typically compassionate and generous. I publicly advocated in the State Department that the humanitarian response components not be shrunk. I have also publicly advocated for the continuation of PEPFAR. But the other things that were under the umbrella of USAID, I believe they’re better served in the State Department. I believe America is a force for good in the world. That doesn’t mean everything we do is good, but I would not want to see us letting starving people starve. I don’t think it represents who we are as a nation.

Why did you decide Samaritan’s Purse should partner with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has come under such intense criticism?

I was very skeptical of the GHF. But I went and talked to them. I was invited to see what they do. I was with them for about three days, and what I saw was totally different than what I had heard.

They told me that not only had they not killed anybody, they had not even fired a single weapon since they’ve been there. By the time I left, I believed them. I also don’t believe it’s the policy of the Israeli Defense Forces to kill people as a means of crowd control. Does that mean there haven’t been deaths? No, but it is war. I think there are a lot of different agendas on the ground. There are no perfect players. What I have seen from the Israelis is that they’re not trying to kill Palestinian people. The death toll would be huge if that’s what their intention was. The Israelis, to a great extent, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. But Israel holds investigations. They may drag their feet, but they hold investigations. They release the results. So I have much more confidence in the Israeli government than I do in Hamas.

Some of the stories you relate — being kidnapped and taken hostage, seeing the horrors of the Rwandan genocide — you mentioned that, in retrospect, you understood that you suffered from PTSD. Are you still dealing with that?

I think I’m okay now. I’ve grown through it. The first thing I noticed was this mystery of when an airplane door closed, I would start crying and I felt guilty leaving because I was attached to people that I had met, and then I could just get in a plane and fly away. I felt like a hamster running on a wheel, and I needed to get to the next thing. I would have emotional periods of my life, and I would also have trouble relating to other people, connecting to other people. Then in 2001, I took an eight-hour course that shed a light on the subject. Around 2002 I had that same instructor come to the Billy Graham Training Center, and she gave us a 40-hour training on PTSD, or CISM, critical incident stress management. I sent about 60 people down there, including myself, and sat through the whole program, just so we all broadly understood it. That was really the beginning of our staff care effort.

Is medical care the predominant need that Samaritan’s Purse meets?

Medical care is the highest-profile thing that we do, but it’s not the predominant thing we do. The predominant thing is distributing food and clean water. We’re not handing out bottles of water. We’re looking for clean water sources. And an important part of that is, what do you do with the human waste? That entire sector is called wash water and safety hygiene, or sanitation and hygiene.

If you think of the parable the Good Samaritan: A man was coming down from Jericho. Robbers fell on him. They beat him, stripped him, and left him for dead. The Samaritan bandages his wounds, puts him on the donkey, takes him to an inn, takes care of him and leaves intermediate assistance. So what he provided to him was medical care, emergency logistics, emergency shelter, emergency food. Those are the primary sectors of emergency response. And I think what I want us to be known for is the ability for a multi-sectorial response. I’ve worked to build that capability. I don’t see it changing.

Are you planning on retiring?

I’m 73 now. I think I’ll have at least three more good years in me. As long as God gives me health, I want to keep working. Why would I want to retire from something I love so much?

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