This is a true story. The story of a modern day hero.
Marc Vachon was born in Montreal in 1963. His mother abandoned him at birth. He went from one foster home to another. He knows the injustices that the weak must suffer in any society. He knows the violence, the abuse, and the emptiness that life can offer in so-called “developed” countries.
He dealt with it in the only way possible: through drugs and crime. He turned into "a bad egg" as he puts it.
Until the day when, escaping an unbearable situation at home, he came across Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Paris. Since he had some experience in construction, he was hired to supervise the logistics of a cholera camp in Niaminthutu, Malawi. From that point on, he drew on the survival instincts he picked up on the streets, delving into his work to forget the pain, never looking back. He made himself indispensable, quickly becoming the frontline logistician for MSF, moving mountains, commanding respect, afraid of nothing or no one, able to build shelters for tens of thousands of refugees in record time.
He also became an adventurer, taking great pleasure in forging documents to smuggle trucks over the Kurdish border or trafficking Harley Davidsons in Baghdad. “Instead of being a black knight on a black Harley in Montreal, I was a white knight on a white Harley in Iraq.”
A number of missions followed: Iraq after the first Gulf War, Mozambique, Sudan, and Rwanda, where he witnessed the genocide firsthand and could only feel profound shock at the failure to act on the part of certain high-ranking military officials who hid behind their orders.
Power struggles often occur in the humanitarian sector, and Marc Vachon could never really accept them. They always seem to go hand-in-hand with injustice. This has inspired him to deliver a biting and fascinating review of humanitarian aid, or at least the way it is in the present “news-entertainment” era.
This is the story of a rare hero.


To read an excerpt