Until December

Dr Astrid Nyström is supposed to be finishing something.After a sudden funding crisis forces the organisation she worked for in the Philippines to close, the Swedish humanitarian doctor spends seven unpaid months helping four longtime Filipino colleagues complete the final audits, government requirements, records, and goodbyes.By July, almost everything is done.Then an earthquake strikes.A typhoon follows.And a message arrives from a community they once worked with:They haven’t received anything yet.The organisation has no emergency budget.Astrid has no salary.What she does have is savings.So she says yes.First to forty-seven families.Then to another small request.Then another.When the four consultants’ contracts finally end, Astrid gives each of them five months of modest financial support, August through December, paid in advance. Not to keep them working for her, but to give them enough breathing room to find what comes next.If they find a job tomorrow, they are expected to take it.Astrid is looking for one too.What begins as a temporary arrangement between five unemployed colleagues slowly becomes something none of them intended to build: a tiny, stubborn community network helping where it can, referring where it cannot, and repeatedly insisting that it is absolutely not an NGO.There are job interviews and rejection emails.Floods and damaged roofs.Receipts.Medicine.Shared meals.Arguments over money.A child wearing a cooking pot as a crown.And ordinary families continuing to laugh, work, study, celebrate, grieve, and live in places the wider world notices mostly when something goes wrong.Warm, quietly funny, and deeply human, Until December is a novel about humanitarian work after the funding ends, the dignity of helping without making yourself indispensable, and five people learning that loyalty does not always mean staying.Above all, it is a story about the lives that continue beyond projects, headlines, and emergencies, and one woman slowly discovering that caring for everyone else must eventually include herself.