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10 November 2025
Fundamentally, by Nussaibah Younis, is a novel about someone (named Nadia) recruited to be an aid worker without deep preparation, fleeing the end of a bad relationship, who goes to Iraq to help de-radicalize women, and has adventures there. (This is my slightly misleading "non-spoiler" plot summary.)
I had a lot of thoughts reading this, but unfortunately, I don't know if I can use them, because this is a novel, and particularly a comedic novel, and so I don't know how realistic it is, having never been an aid worker myself. The author says, in her "Author's Note" at the end, that she strove for "authenticity in character, emotion, and theme" but sometimes "sacrificed accuracy in setting and context". And then she says later:
You'll find plenty more evidence in the book that it's a work of fiction, but where I have deployed significant artistic license, I have done so deliberately and in service of the broader themes of the novel.
If this book is basically accurate (just a little cooked-up to make it a "good read"), then it could be a good resource for young people trying to decide if aid work is for them. I considered a career in international development when I was young (got a degree in it), and I probably could have used a book like this. (Although the work I was apparently being educated to do was different than what Nadia does, I would guess a book like this would still have helped me be prepared for secular humanitarian culture and dealing with officials.)
I don't want to make this book sound like a handbook for dealing with aid culture and local (in this case, Iraqi) culture, as it does not go into too much detail, but it would have been eye-opening to me simply to be made aware of the basics of how much both aid culture and developing world cultures are not like that of a middle-class person growing up in the West, particularly not that of someone raised in the church. Either I would have said "no, this doesn't sound like a good career path", maybe switched majors or something like that, or I would have said "oh, wow, this is messed-up and hard, I need to start thinking of all the ways I would need to deal with how messed-up and hard it is".
In my own life, I ended up somewhat inexplicably veering away from international development, without a book like this, so maybe it didn't matter in my case. But I think for people similar enough to my past self, either saying "no, not for me" or "wow, I need to be serious and prepare" is a good thing, better then ending up on the field unprepared, burning out, messing up the program, getting fired, etc.
But as valuable as this book could be if known to be accurate,
if I was an 18-year-old I would not really know how accurate it was.
Fiction is a great way to energize the mind, to see what it already
knows. But, since it's made-up, it doesn't reliably tell you what
you don't already know. I would say this to any 18-year-olds reading
this review -- these are the parts that sound fairly plausible to my
38-year-old self that I would emphasize (maybe in a way I have to
be an authority along with Younis here, my interpretation is offered
to validate Younis' suggestions). These are things that make a lot of
sense to me, that the world would work like this, not that I actually
100% know that they obtain in the real world:
1. Aid workers are sometimes driven by personal psychological needs, not simply altruism. Some have a psychological need to do good that's really a form of therapy for themselves, some may just want a job and not really be that altruistic.
2. Aid work is stressful and goes wrong.
3. Local cultures may well want to benefit from aid workers, but they do not necessarily want to go along with whatever program aid workers want.
4. Secular aid workers turn to sex, alcohol, and other drugs to deal with stress (so if you don't want to do that, how will you deal with stress?)
5. Aid agencies are bureaucracies with red tape. Getting things done is political.
6. (less sure about how much I would emphasize this one:) The upper levels of organizations tend to attract "elites". "Elites" are people adapted to having power, to being powerful, often without much of a check. Elites live in a small world where everyone knows each other and the personal dimension of life is more significant ("it's not what you know, it's who you know"). "Middle class" culture (where the reader may come from, as I did) is more about "merit" (performing, obeying the rules, being evaluated more or less objectively). Being a middle class person in an elite culture may not be effective. Adapting to elite culture could cause you to compromise your middle class (possibly, your actually good) values.
This list of six items may seem a bit dry, like it won't stick in your mind. The value of reading Fundamentally, in part, is to dramatize these things, make them emotionally powerful, or at least more powerful. If you're the kind of person who can get caught up in a story, it can help you think more deeply about the basic dynamics of the life pattern the story talks about.
With any fiction, you can let the book energize you and you can generate a lot of scenarios based on it, and ask yourself how you would deal with them. Even if the book plays up certain things for laughs, could you handle those exaggerated versions of some dynamic or character type? What about the less-exaggerated versions of those dynamics or character types (or of the physical setting, like the heat in Iraq)? You can do this even if you don't have any idea how much the book is rooted in reality. If you go through all these scenarios, you may be better prepared if you decide to go ahead, or maybe even the thoughts will help you be prepared in some other area of life. Possibly you can tell from even an exaggerated book that a life path is not for you.
Of course, if you're really serious about a career in aid work, you should probably see if you can find other resources to help you decide whether to go into it and what it would be like. For instance, memoirs, or some kind of study of aid workers and aid work (similar, perhaps, to Holly Berkley Fletcher's study of missionary kids in The Missionary Kids). I tend to be underread and to compensate by thinking a lot, but that's probably a better life strategy for a writer than an aid worker, and you might be better off looking for a lot of sources on a career you might pursue. That all may sound obvious to many readers of this post, but was not so obvious to my 18-year-old self.
As much as I have emphasized that aid work is not for everyone, I think it is something that does not have enough good people in it. (Certainly that's what Fundamentally makes it look like.) Aid work gets a bad reputation as wasteful and corrupt. That can damage the reputation of altruism itself, which could keep people from coming to have the heart of God, which is essentially altruistic. (Good people going into aid work can marginally make it less wasteful and corrupt, and perhaps certain good people with a plan might be able to reform it overall.) From experience, I know that people can sometimes endure what they don't think they can endure, and accomplish what they don't think they can accomplish -- if they have to. So perhaps I would discourage someone from turning away from aid work (or similar intense altruistic work) if it looks hard -- not absolutely, in the sense that it's never a good idea to choose a different path, but relatively, in the sense of saying to many people considering it "see if you can make it work -- not everyone ever feels any call to do this work, but you do". The need is real, it's not for everyone, but some people can handle it even though it looks hard. But, definitely I would say "it doesn't hurt to be more serious and prepared".
I could definitely see there being a better book out there than Fundamentally for what I'm trying to get out of it. But this is what I have for now.
--
Nadia disturbs me with her hungry lust, anger, obsession, and aggressiveness in trying to deconvert a Muslim woman. I was haunted by Nadia after reading the book. One perspective is just that she's immature, and has been through a lot. Maybe that excuses her? Maybe not. If it does, it doesn't make her any less dangerous or unreliable than her example shows.
A comedy book like this will want to portray folly, and play up the follies of aid work. I think that wisdom comes often from sensitivity, and sensitivity often goes with being prone to being overwhelmed by things. Maybe the young and foolish are exactly the right people to do things like be aid workers over the short term in uprooted parts of the world. They are more suited for that. (The kind of people suited for war zones, perhaps, create their own war zones.)
If you're too old for that kind of thing, could there still be room for you in a developing country doing something altruistic? Maybe so. Someone could move to another country, one that is not currently in a war zone (but in principle, any country can become a war zone if the right/wrong things happen). Then, they try as best as possible to become not just an ex-pat, but an immigrant (someone who has really moved to a country deeply), yet retaining their foreignness at the same time, never completely fitting in. From this vantage point, a person could spread MSL/VMH religious views if appropriate, anti-tempt, solve certain secular problems within reach, but first, build relationships with people over time and develop a deep understanding of the culture. This would be kind of the opposite of the approach UNDO took in the book. No timeline, probably best without being supported by an organization needing to justify spending on you (and thus demanding legible results), just you being a person. Still harder than living in your home country, but not as stressful as what it looks like aid work is from Fundamentally.
Who could financially afford that kind of life? Some people manage to be ex-pats, so they could. Maybe people who do remote work. Maybe other people can manage something like this if they retire early.