An interview with Mike McDonagh

“It’s very important that there’s an emphasis on being present and actually experiencing and writing what your ordinary mother is going through as she loses her children, as she loses her house, her farm animals, and ends up in a crowded camp. I think there needs to be more written about the people that are at a constant loss,” says Mike McDonagh. Mike worked for 34 years as a Humanitarian, first with Concern Worldwide and then with the United Nations. He is now retired in the West of Ireland.

How did you end up in humanitarian aid?

In 1983, I went overseas with the Irish NGO Concern Worldwide. I was working with the Ministry for Health, and at that time, the Government of Ireland had a mechanism where you could leave your permanent pensionable civil service job, work overseas for a couple of years and then return to your job. A lot of people went overseas to various relief and development situations for a couple of years and returned to their jobs. I am in the minority because I stayed overseas for 33 years.

When you reflect on your career, what was your greatest professional achievement?

To a large degree, my emphasis was always on humanitarian access at the very front where the situation was at its most difficult. I was with Concern for twenty years working on emergencies in Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda during the genocide, the Democratic Republic of Congo during the cholera epidemic, and in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola during the wars there. I spent two years in North Korea and a year in Zimbabwe and also did short stints in Honduras after a devastating hurricane and in Albania during the Kosovo crisis.  When I joined OCHA, my emphasis remained on advocating for access and on funding interventions at the early stages of a crisis.  

Tell me about the impact of your work.

The suffering was enormous, and the risks were high. In Angola, for example, our team were in the besieged city of Malanje where they were regularly shelled by UNITA. In Huambo, which was held by UNITA, we had a team that was regularly bombed by government aircraft, and in Kuito, both sides were literally across the street from each other. The tentative ceasefire was constantly broken and with heavy weaponry being used, the impact on civilians was appalling. Staying with the people was the right thing to do, but you know, it was always at the back of my mind that people, our staff, nurses, doctors, logisticians, engineers were at risk, and we did have incidents including a fatality and injuries.  Belligerents on all sides cared little for civilians and aid workers. However, back in the day, in most cases aid workers were not deliberately targeted as seems to be the case in recent times.

What was your toughest moment?

I lost friends. I lost a colleague in Somalia, a young Irish nurse, on the road between Mogadishu and Baidoa. She was 23 years old. There was an attempted hijacking. She was shot twice. She died instantly. I was in charge of a team of 42 expatriates and a thousand national staff and to lose somebody so young, you know, in the prime of her life, a nurse assisting malnourished kids, kids with all sorts of diseases, was a very hard moment for me.

How did you cope with that?

I was part of a very good organization led by two remarkable priests, Fr. Aengus Finucane and Fr. Jack Finucane, who have both since passed away. They were very supportive, but it was on my mind for a longtime afterwards. We had to continue the work, to take the risks. It’s one of those things that you hope never happens again because you’re responsible for other peoples’ children. They come overseas and expect to go back to their parents who expect them to return safely.

What kept you going?

It was like a vocation and I changed countries quite a bit. I was in some of these countries at very interesting and historic times.  I worked in a camp on the Jordanian Iraqi border in 1990 before the first Gulf War and up to a million guest workers from Kuwait were evacuated through this border back to countries like the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. In Cambodia, after the Paris peace accord in 1991, enabled the refugees in Thailand to return home. I oversaw setting up the reception sites for them. I was in Somalia for a year when it was at its worst. The US and other nations intervened, and there was a period of great hope and then it all died with the shootout  and Black Hawks down in Mogadishu. The nineties were a very violent period in Africa which saw millions of people die in Somalia, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, DRC, Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia.  The continent was awash with weapons and child soldiers. Over 90% of the deaths were of civilians, there was no respect for women and children.  What kept me going was my/our contribution of trying to alleviate some fraction of the suffering.

What did you enjoy the most about your jobs?

There was great camaraderie. I had wonderful teams of people, the Irish nurses, journalists along the way, UN colleagues, government officials, and even rebels I stayed friendly with. There was  camaraderie especially during tough times. The positive part of the internet is that I can stay in touch with people that I met almost forty years ago. These friends I made along the way kept me going, and also the achievements of reducing malnutrition, vaccinating a whole population in a camp, of being able to stay with people knowing that our presence reduced the worst of the deprivations that might have happened. 

What do you see as the major causes of humanitarian crises at the global level?

Conflict, weak governments, a proliferation of arms especially in the Sahel since the fall of Gaddafi in Libya has destabilized half a dozen countries. The West has a huge a responsibility for arming the likes of Saudi Arabia. The horror unleashed on Yemen and its civilians is appalling. There is a massive hypocrisy, the West arms Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries, they wreak havoc in Yemen and then the West turns up to fund the humanitarian fallout.  Even Saudi Arabia is a donor. Syria has suffered terribly due to the emergence of ISIS and numerous powers are now involved including Russia, Turkey, the US, UK etc., all supporting different groups with little consideration for civilians on the ground.  The five permanent members of the UN security council are the biggest arms exporters, for these countries, it’s about jobs, prestige, etc., but these weapons cause massive suffering.

You mention the lack of empathy. How can we create empathy?

The levels of suffering are high, the women, the kids, the elderly with nowhere to go. The whole world knows that this is going on, but how much news do you see about Syria on CNN, Sky News or BBC, etc.? You’ll see a bit of coverage, some condemnation, but you know, half a million people dead since 2014. Look at the horrific suffering of people in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, and very little coverage, given the magnitude of the crisis.  When there is little coverage, there is bound to be a lack of empathy.  There needs to be more coverage.

How did you cope with the frustration of not getting attention on your advocacy efforts?

At times it was very frustrating. If you were to look at the situation in Angola, for example: A rebel group, a Maoist rebel group backed by the USA against the Marxist Angolan government backed by Russia.  USA oil companies dealt with the government in Angola while Cuban troops guarded the oil installations for Angola. In the middle of it all, millions of civilians were under siege, tens of thousands of people were suffering from malnutrition. It was the cynicism, all sides, providing armaments, backing either the rebels or government, landmines from all sorts of governments.  It just went on and on and on and all we were doing was trying to treat the symptoms whether it was people seriously injured, or malnourished kids as a result of towns and cities besieged. At times, it was like banging your head against a brick wall, but you felt that it was important to be with the people, and to try and alleviate some of the malnutrition and health issues. It was very frustrating at times but being able to alleviate some of the suffering helped greatly.

What do you think the international community can do to stop war?

My view would be that countries like Saudi Arabia should not be allowed to buy weapons, and the US, UK and France are arming them. You’ll probably find that when it comes to the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the US is the biggest donor, and ECHO is probably the second biggest, and the UK is probably the third, what hypocrisy.  If you’re giving and selling weapons to the biggest culprit when it comes to the suffering in Yemen, and then you’re giving cheques to the UN and the NGOs to clean up the mess that you have actually caused as a result of the sieges, the bombings from the air etc. For me it’s about stopping the arms flow.

Tell me about a person or a situation you have encountered in your work that has had a profound effect on you and why.

The two Irish priests that founded the NGO Concern, which was founded at the same time as MSF during the Nigerian Biafran civil war in the late sixties. It was a horrific situation, the first televised famine. Those two priests, father Aengus Finucane and Fr. Jack Finucane had a huge effect on how I saw the issues, about being present, being at the frontline for the people, putting teams in to alleviate malnutrition, to provide health care, sanitation. These priests put the spine into me to be out there with the people. They had been out there themselves during the Nigerian civil war, in fact, Fr Jack was detained at the end of that war. He was released to the Red Cross and flown to Geneva in March 1970.

I want to ask you about stories. Tell me about the fiction books you’ve read set in humanitarian crises. A lot of books have been written about Africa in the nineties, but they’re not fiction, but I think they’re very interesting books to read about what was going on. There’s one by Scott Petersen called Me against my Brother about Somalia, South Sudan and Rwanda. Another great book about Africa in that period is by Keith Richburg called Out of America: A Black Man confronts Africa.  I read Emma’s War which was written about Emma McClure, who was Reek Machar’s wife. She talks about being in the bush, coming under attack, being on the run, during the civil war in the late eighties and early nineties in South Sudan. She talks about the suffering, the risks, the adrenaline rush when running for your life.

While fiction has a role to play to get people interested, I am inclined to recommend to people curious about war and humanitarian crises to read the Scramble for Africa, read about the silly borders that were drawn, learn why countries divide up and actually go to war with each other. I am inclined to recommend real life novels and books that were written about Africa in the nineties.

In your view, what could stories do to help us raise awareness on humanitarian crises?

When it comes to humanitarian crises, I think it’s very important to emphasize that there’s a vast anonymous population that’s very often dealt with in figures and percentages, that’s very often written about and talked about on emails and in reports, but is rarely seen. I think it’s very important that there’s an emphasis on being present and actually experiencing and writing what your ordinary mother is going through as she loses her children, as she loses her house, her farm animals, and ends up in a crowded camp. I think there needs to be more written about the people that are at a constant loss. This can be a villager in South Sudan who has lost everything or a villager in north Syria who doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from and wonders why the world has forsaken them. What I would be looking for in fiction is greater emphasis and an empathy for the suffering of the millions of people that find themselves without a roof over their heads, who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, who don’t know where the next bomb is going to land. There needs to be more fiction, books, screen time about this. Presently I am not seeing any coverage of what’s going on in northern Syria, Yemen, Tigray in Ethiopia, South Sudan or North East Nigeria. Back in the day, one would meet a foreign correspondent in the middle of nowhere and see a story written days or weeks later. Today, almost nothing gets written or filmed.  

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises? 

I hope and I am not so hopeful about this, but I hope that there’s more emphasis on access and presence, and people being on the ground than emails and reports and meetings. I honestly believe that there are vast numbers of aid workers who spend very little time where the situation is at its most serious or at its gravest and so my hope would be more emphasis on aid workers getting out there and not writing about the people or talking about the people or meeting about the people, but actually being out there. I must say my experience in north east Nigeria last year and the year before made me quite despondent about the lack of humanitarian presence in Borno in North East Nigeria. The UN had a fixed wing aircraft, 4 helicopters and IOM had established bases throughout Borno with very good accommodation and great IT.  But despite all these enablers, I saw very few international aid workers and there was little oversight of operations. MSF were the clear exception. There was risk, aid workers had been kidnapped and killed. However, I felt that the new generation of aid workers had somehow come to the conclusion that responding to an email, attending a meeting or a teleconference was aid work and was much more important that getting on a helicopter and going to see the displaced people in the various towns across Borno.

If you were asked for one action that people out there can do help address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises, what would that be? What is your call to action?

That there would be arms embargoes by all suppliers to civil wars and that there would be a robust UN presence on the ground that would report when arms are smuggled, would name the perpetrators, those who breach the ceasefire, the people that are dropping the bombs on civilians and would bring it up at the Security Council and embarrass these countries that are either supplying, that are dropping the bombs on buses, on schools, etc., in Yemen and Syria and other places. Robust presence reporting on the perpetrators that are responsible for the deaths of thousands of mostly innocent civilians. 

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An interview with Maaza Mengiste

“The stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that families pass down to each other about the people who have been lost or the indignities they have suffered as a result of conflict, those stories can help shape a reality that says we know what can be lost, let’s try to do everything that we can to avoid war,” says Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Maaza is a Fullbright Scholar and professor in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation program at Queens College.

Nina Subin/ http://ninasubin.com/

Why do you write?

Writing sprung from my love for reading. As a child, when I’d read, I’d completely lose myself in those worlds. This developed a love of literature for me, my imagination brought me into the world of words. The next step was to see if I could write. I also felt that there were stories I hadn’t yet read about Ethiopia, which I wanted to read. This was also part of my motivation to write.

All your stories are about war. Have you made a deliberate choice to write about war?

I don’t know if it’s a choice as much as a natural inclination. Partly, it’s what I was constantly surrounded by. I was in Ethiopia when the revolution started, so right from the beginning, my childhood memories involved that aspect. War has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. Thinking about conflict      also means thinking about love, thinking about what people try to save or who they risk everything to save, it raises questions of what survives, and how people hold on to their dignity, their hopes and dreams. War helps us think about all these things. For a Writer, it’s very interesting territory because when you’re writing about war, you’re writing about characters with very high stakes, and it crystalizes questions about moral ethics, about survival, and what we do to maintain peace. 

Is there a role for storytelling to raise awareness and motivate readers to take action to address the causes and consequences of war?

The stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that families pass down to each other about the people who have been lost or the other indignities that happen as a result of conflict, those stories can help shape a reality that says we know what can be lost, let’s try to do everything that we can to avoid war. I think these stories are imperative. When you have a country or you have communities that don’t have those narratives, that don’t speak of what was lost, that have no reckoning with the past, I think you have communities and countries that are less afraid to begin wars. So, I think that storytelling, the oral histories that have been passed on across Africa, have shaped our resistance to any more pain. We need to speak about these stories and this needs to happen in the West too as the West tends to ignore what’s lost when it enacts war.

What aspects of storytelling would you highlight that would help us to achieve this?

A part of telling stories about war is really telling stories about peace, telling stories about life, about human beings, who they are, what they’re like. We learn to see people who are different from us as human beings that have as much to lose as we would       if we were in the same situations, forced to survive. I don’t think that these stories have to focus on conflict; they can focus on what exists so we can begin to understand what could be lost if we were forced into war.

What is The Shadow King about?

The Shadow King is set in 1935 during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. It focuses on the women who fought at the front lines with men for the Ethiopian Army during this time. I also tell the story from the Italian side because I was very interested in what the colonial enterprise looked like from the side of the Europeans. What do they think of Africans? How do they navigate and negotiate and make peace with what they’re doing there? It’s told from the battle lines with a particular focus on female soldiers.

War is individualized, but in humanitarian work, we communicate about the people affected in masses. Tell me about the individual characters in the book, about their own stories.

When we think of groups of people, when we think of the issues that confront them, we tend to think about them as singular entities, collective masses of people without understanding the individual lives that are really at stake. I wanted to break apart this war and start looking at individual people; what was Fucelli - the Colonel in the Italian Army - like? That was a question that I wanted to deal with. We can talk about the colonialist or colonialism, but who were these individuals that were there, and what motivated them, what guided them besides hatred, which sometimes is a little too simple. What else guided them to even decide to join a military or an expedition? What was it like at home before they did this? How is it that their background, which is separate from anything African, has an influence on how they treat Africans? I was curious about those aspects of the interior world.

Ettore, a soldier, Jewish Italian, who brought his camera to the war, what did he leave behind, who does he miss, what advice is he being given, who does he listen to, does he have any choices, is he frightened of Africans, is he frightened of a female soldier, frightened of Ethiopians? I wanted to really look at these questions.

Hirut, a maid who eventually becomes a soldier in the Ethiopian Army. Italians thought that Africans could not really think conceptually and lacked all imagination. The only things in their lives are about survival. They don’t have dreams or creative talent. I wondered if I put Etorre and Hirut together in the same place, how would that racist thinking conflict, what would happen if he saw her, and suddenly could say, this is someone who actually has a brain, and can think. Hirut has no concept what Europeans are like. She thinks that they’re nothing but beasts, nothing but cruel animals with no real human emotion. I wanted to look at what happens when two people who have very different ideas of what the other is like might begin to recognize something in the other. You can only do that when you      stop      thinking about the collective and think of the individual.

There is this strong focus in the book on women, women as warriors. What was the role of Ethiopian women in this war?

You know, there’s the traditional role, which      was the only role I knew      at first, women were there to be the caretakers. They’d cook the food, collect the water, take care of the wounded, bury the dead, follow the Army to do those things. It was through research that I found out that women enlisted to be part of the military and fought in the frontlines. When I discovered this, it completely changed the story. I had their traditional roles which is what I had heard about, but I didn’t know this other side. Next to this, one thing that people don’t speak about enough is the sexual violence that the Italians perpetuated on East Africans. This is a history that no one really talks about in Ethiopia. You just see the children who are of mixed race, you know, in the next generation and no one talks about how that happened. It’s one thing that I felt I needed to address because we know that sexual assault and rape is a weapon in war. When it was happening in 1935, no one spoke about it.

The level of sexual violence is harrowing; in fact, all the main female characters,  experience sexual violence by people they know. The scale of Gender Based Violence during war is staggering.

It was something I was aware of, but it wasn’t until I started to focus on individuals that I really had to address this on an individual level. I always understood that rape and sexual violence is a weapon of war, but I had to ask, what does it look like in the life of one individual or two? How does it change Hirut for example or the other women in the book that are assaulted? I had to look at that, and that’s when the impact of it really became powerful for me. We can speak about rape and sexual violence in terms of percentages, which is what I was doing, but when I had to look at one life, and how that life was changed as a result, how every decision or every step in that one life was impacted by that, my understanding became more profound. Now, if we multiply that by the many women and girls (and boys and men though we speak less about that) who have experienced this, you realize how many other decisions boil down to those moments of intimate terror that happened.

Another aspect I would like to ask you about is this aspect you write about, how women in violent situations relate to each other.

When women exist in a world that is so violently patriarchal, and patriarchy is violence, when women exist in that world, rather than think about ways to overthrow it, it’s sometimes easier and faster to accept it. They try to get some of the power that’s within that system. Women are not bonding together against the male violence. They fight each other to get closer to that level of power. We see it with Aster and the way she treats Hirut. There’s a very clear sense of class. Even though Aster herself is a woman in a system run by men, she has Hirut to treat less than her, to show that she too has power within this system. This is one of the things I wanted to convey. Within these systems, women try to gain power, but it’s often at the expense of other women, and these divisions can happen by ethnicity or by class or social understanding. Sometimes women think that if you can place yourself as close as possible to the big man it gives you power over other people. If the man who is assaulting you has a social standing that is very high, you’re lucky because you have some of that power through that contact. They don’t recognize this as real violence; they don’t think themselves as worthy enough to be thought of as someone who has rights and does not deserve that assault.

The characters are very resilient, strong, dignified. It’s not that they’re afraid, but they transcend their fears. You don’t portray them as victims. Why was this so important to the book?

This is partly to move that narrative outside of just victimhood. It’s possible to be resilient and vulnerable. It’s possible to be strong and still feel pain. We tend to position people as either survivors or victims or always resilient. I think this has the potential to dehumanize the person because no one is completely a victim or a hundred percent resilient. The question is, how do we recognize every human being as an individual who is both vulnerable and strong? No one should be forced to be resilient. No one should be forced to do that because that speaks to a survival against abuse, and no one should be forced to do that in life. This also speaks to a series of deprivations, but how do we recognize people’s vulnerabilities and strengths, and begin to work with that as opposed to swinging between victimhood and resilience.

Memory is another theme in the book. Why is this important in the book?

The idea of naming has always been important to me. I think it comes from being an immigrant. Coming here to the USA, if you have a name that doesn’t sound Western, you’re immediately confronted with the difference between you and the world that you live in. I became very much aware of who I was by my  name in the United States. In Ethiopia and many cultures across Africa and the world, I understood that our names are a connection to family, which is a connection to a community of people, which is also a connection to a region of the country. My name, for example, might connect to one specific region, my father’s. I wanted to show some of that inheritance through a name, through the names in the book. When my characters say their names, they’re not only saying their names, but they’re speaking about a history that the Italians wanted to ignore. They’re speaking of a history that the West has said doesn’t exist, that never existed. This was important to me because the Italians didn’t fully recognize all the people they killed, they never gave them names, they didn’t even put the numbers down. There were more people killed than they named or listed. I wanted to use the book to compensate for some of that.

Love. There were so many moments of love in the book. Several acts of kindness. War has this ability to bring the best and worst out of humanity.

No one would have been able to survive the war on their own. To some degree, people needed to come together. Even if someone like the Cook didn’t want a return of the old system and may have wanted to free herself from the way Ethiopia existed, she understood that she wouldn’t have survived without Fifi’s help, for example.  At the same time, there were people who depended on her for their individual survival. This war required the efforts of communities. Not everyone was united, but there were people that were willing to help their neighbors out. I wanted to show this through the Cook. People needed each other during the war. They were fighting for something that was greater than what somebody might say Ethiopia is, something akin to neighborly, sisterly, brotherly love. It was something about understanding that the next human being next to you might suffer and you didn’t want that.

What is the one thing that you’d like the readers of The Shadow King  to take away from the book?

How each of us are carriers of history. During this pandemic we’ve been living through a historical moment and the one thing that I’ve understood is that everybody’s perspective of this moment counts. I hope that there are people out there recording their stories in journals, in diaries, in personal notes they have for themselves. I hope people keep a personal written record of this moment so that when we look back at this history, the way I had to look back at 1935, this’ll be a history told from a collective of many different voices.

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An interview with Yasir Omer Taha

“Fiction stories are extremely important. They describe elements and details within a crisis that we don’t see, and dramatize and romanticize it. That stays with readers. It influences their emotions, and actions, and that awareness is very important especially to societies that haven’t experienced war,” says Yasir Omer Taha, National Coordinator with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Tell me about your work. What do you do? 

A key part of my job is to enable humanitarian access. OCHA has been mandated by the General Assembly to lead humanitarian access for the humanitarian system. We work with other UN agencies, NGOs and government officials to ensure that humanitarian personnel and supplies can reach affected people in time, and that people have access to assistance and humanitarian workers. This is the best part of my job. I am the focal person for engagement with the government. When I say government in Sudan, I don’t refer to the civilian part of government, but the other players in Sudan that have a role in granting humanitarian access. Another part of my job is to promote partnership with other national NGOs, the Arabic or Islamic or faith based organizations. These are important partners and we need to collaborate with them. 

What are some of the humanitarian access challenges you’re facing at the moment?

Humanitarian access has improved very much when I compare it with the old regime. The most important thing is that humanitarian organizations have the freedom, liberty and independence to identify humanitarian needs by conducting needs assessments, determining the targeted populations, and implement their programs in a neutral and independent way. We’re working to ensure all that obstacles are removed so that people in need of assistance are reached.  Right now, there’s peace talks in Sudan between the government and Non State Armed groups, and it’s important at this point to ensure that peace dividends reach all people including those not under government control. 

The containment measures imposed by the government have created new access constraints for humanitarian workers in Sudan for example, the movement of staff.  The restrictions are understandable as the government has been trying to limit the transmission of the virus and keep people save. I appreciate that humanitarian actors quickly reviewed their working modalities and adapted alternatives that keep both staff and beneficiaries safe.  Local authorities have also demonstrated openness and flexibility and are regularly conversing with the international community to find solutions to these access constraints.    

The pandemic had made it clear that nothing can defeat human beings when we think, create and find alternatives.  

What are the key humanitarian challenges in Sudan today?

Classically, the ability of humanitarian actors to reach people with humanitarian assistance is the number one issue. Sometimes, bureaucratic impediments, physical conditions, for example, the roads, are often impassable especially during the rainy season. The lack of funds is another challenge; out of US$1,633,403,131 that is required, only 42.2% US$1,633,403,131has been funded as of today . We may have access to certain locations, however the resources to intervene properly are insufficient or inadequate. For example, another challenge, particularly in the deep field locations in remote areas is inadequate capacity of local actors to implement programs and that’s why a lot of NGOs are partnering with national NGOs.  Recently, COVID19-related restrictions have impacted livelihoods of the most vulnerable, IDPs, refugees, farmers, daily wagers and pastoralists. Now there are more demands for interventions in all areas, including in health, water, hygiene promotion, education, nutrition, food, etc. 

When you think about Sudan or other humanitarian crises, what is the one thing that could be done to find solutions?

The world is a small village and what happens in Sudan has consequences in other countries, and what happens in other countries has consequences in Sudan. What I want to say is that if there’s a country with a challenge, a problem that’s slowing down the progress of another country, there should be a global effort to resolve that problem. If there’s war in one area, for example, there needs to be a wide platform to bring about peace in that country. There are wars in many parts of the world. We’re also seeing a lot of natural disasters, hurricanes, floods. Although am in Sudan, I should contribute to reducing the suffering of those people, to save their lives. We share humanity in this world and we should work together to address the challenges in our countries. By doing this, with all the resources, the expertise, the will, reducing interferences from regional countries in other countries, we’ll be able to reach peace. War is one of the significant factors causing crises followed by natural disasters, and in every scenario we should be able to work as one team. This may be very idealistic, but it’s the truth. If we keep interfering in the business of other countries, if we’re unable to support our brothers and sisters, we shall continue to have these problems and this will have a negative impact on the countries that are not in war.

What do you think can be done to stop these wars?

Political will in each country constitutes an important factor to reach or find peace. We all understand that every country has friends, alliances, lobbyists, that it works with. By mobilizing and advocating and influencing the friends of that country, its alliances, we’ll be able to perhaps change the political dynamics or will of that country to work for peace. That’s very important, and this is exactly what I meant about working together to make sure that countries experiencing war are not being supported to keep the war going on and on and on.

What has been your greatest professional achievement so far?

Am proud of a project I led in 2003, when I was working with UNICEF. It was during the war between south and north Sudan. We succeeded to construct forty classrooms with semi-permanent materials in 35 locations in Upper Nile and Jonglei states. The difficulty was that this project involved transportation of materials to the site and making sure the construction was according to national standards. The practice at that time was to construct classrooms with local materials, but for the first time we were able to build them with semi-permanent materials. 

What is your greatest professional fear?

I fear a situation where, and this is really very honest, we’re unable to reach certain locations, and when women and children, affected people, are not receiving humanitarian assistance due to access constraints that we were unable to resolve. That’s very tough.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

I celebrate a moment whenever we as humanitarian workers reach a location and provide water, medicine, food. That’s what I really like about my job, when I see the end results of our efforts in the eyes of the children, in the health of pregnant women, and so on.

What don’t you enjoy about your job?

When a decision is taken by a single official that adds more challenges to humanitarian access. It’s an individual, not an institution. It’s much easier when the conversation is between institutions, but if a bad decision is taken by a single person then you have to use a lot of informal ways, and it doesn’t necessarily work. That’s what I don’t enjoy; adhoc decisions by individual officials that complicates our work. 

How did you end up in humanitarian aid?

I always had a feeling that working in humanitarian action goes with my personality. From my early days, I wanted to serve people. At university, I participated in unions and societies that were serving students. In fact, I invested a lot of time working with societies that provided services to my colleagues. After my graduation, I was lucky to work with my uncle as a Research Assistant. He’s an expert in international water and he has a huge, big, rich library, and I started to read. I read about the United Nations, sustainability, community participation, and rural development. I decided to join humanitarian organizations. Every day I’d go to the book shop, buy a newspaper, look at job advertisements and apply. I applied for many jobs until ADRA Sudan offered me a position. I think I was lucky.

Tell me about one person or a situation that has had a strong impact on you during your work.

While working with ADRA as a Community Development Officer, my responsibility was to ensure community participation and the sustainability of water and sanitation projects. One of our priorities was to mobilize communities to support the construction of platforms for the drilled water handpumps. We faced situations where some communities objected to construct the platforms.  In one location, the community simply said, “No, we’ll not participate. You’ve been given the money and you’ve taken it so why should we sweat and mix sand and soil and cement?” Of course I hadn’t eaten the money. We were depending on the communities to help. I could have told them that there was no one to do this work, that it was their responsibility, and no one else could it and they were the ones who’d benefit, but I didn’t think it’d have led to the solution I was hoping for. I thought the best thing was to mix the sand and cement, which I started to do. Within ten or fifteen minutes the whole community came and asked me to stop, and they took over. It was the quickest time during which a job was completed. What I want to say is that it’s important to consult and listen to the community, get their advice, and understand their perspectives, and to lead by example.

What wakes you up and what keeps you going?

Hope that my family is successful. Hope that humanitarian access constraints are resolved, am back to that again. That my relationships with my neighbors are strengthened, the hope that my mother enjoys, without her, we as a family are useless. We need to have hope. I like this question because it brings the good side out of all of us. I think we need to work to realise our hopes.

I know you’d like to tell me a story instead of a book or story you’ve read.  Tell me the story. 

First, let me emphasize that fiction stories are extremely important. They describe elements and details in a crisis that we don’t see, and dramatize and romanticize it. That stays with readers. It influences their emotions, and their actions, and that awareness is very important especially to societies that haven’t experienced war. I keep referring to war as a cause of crises because my country suffers from this a lot. We need to mobilize additional people to stand against war, and fiction stories can help with this. 

The story I’d like to share with you was told to us by an old man when I was eight years old. It was about a family practicing agriculture in a conflict affected village. The village of that family was attacked by an armed men and the members of this one family were captured. The father was interrogated by the armed men and asked to give information about the leaders of his community that were supporting the rebels. The father said he’d give up the names if they released his family. While his wife and children were released, he refused to give up their names. After releasing his family, the man said he was happy to die, he couldn’t betray his community, he wasn’t a rat. He was tortured, but he never said a word. 

This is a typical story that happens during war. You may ask me, what’s interesting about this story, and why it remained with me. As a boy, I learned the importance of becoming solid and firm, regardless of temptation, but when I became a humanitarian practitioner and started to dig deeper, I started to wonder what happened to this family, did they separate from each other, did they survive, did they have water, what happened to their farm, did the children become child soldiers, did they stop going to school, would they revenge in future? These questions are very important, and for every single answer you find a particular intervention by humanitarian organizations. What we do, saving lives, providing water, food, medicine, shelter, protection to people in need, to the displaced, whatever they need, reuniting their families. This is why it stayed with me. 

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises?

To find peace, and when I say peace, I mean comprehensive peace without hate and with resources to enable people to restore their lives. Peace is important in my country and everywhere.

If you were asked for one action that people out there can do help address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises, what would that be? 

Come together and stand against war everywhere. Let’s be generous. If a crisis is based on a natural disaster, give one cent, one pound, let’s help each other. If sisters and brothers, in another part of the world are affected, I should have an obligation here in Sudan to help and support in anyway, and there are so many ways to support. Let’s come together, let’s share humanity, let’s unite for a better world. We live once on this planet, we need to enjoy our moments, whatever happens to me affects you.

** END **

An interview with Ruth Edgett

“I guess if “Hill 145” raises awareness or motivates action, it would be action resulting from the ability of the reader to identify with this veteran soldier, George, who—whether he realizes it or not—has been badly damaged by the things he saw and did on that battlefield. I hope it shows the reader this consequence of war, the damage it does to a generation of fighters who must eventually return home and try to put their lives back together. But, too, I hope it leaves the reader with a renewed awareness of the healing power of love; the love that George and his wife feel for each other, and that George feels for his children—that he would go “to the ends of the earth” for them if need be,” says Ruth Edgett, a former newspaper journalist-turned communications consultant, and author of A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007).

Tell me about yourself.

I’m a former newspaper journalist-turned communications consultant, originally from Canada’s Maritimes and now living in the province of Ontario. Most of my writing is about bygone life in Maritime Canada and includes a creative non-fiction book called A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007). Other fiction and non-fiction appears in publications based in the United States, the UK and Canada, one of which is “Hill 145,” 2017 winner of the CONSEQUENCE Magazine “Women Writing War” Fiction Prize, which is how you and I met. I’m currently shopping a novel to publishers and am finalizing a collection of short stories.

Why do you write?
Intriguing question… How can I not? I’ve been writing, since I was old enough to hold a pencil and construct a sentence. My first career was as a newspaper reporter. From that point onward, writing has been second nature to me. I’ve always found it easier to articulate my thoughts in writing than in speech. A famous writer (likely more than one) has said, “I write to know what I think.” That’s me, too. 

What kinds of stories do you write?
I like to tell other people’s stories, be they fictional people, actual ones, or composites of the two. Even my fiction is inspired by events that really happened. Most of my stories have an historical bent, and I try to stay true to the history while giving the reader the feeling of what it must have been like to live through the particular circumstance I’m portraying. I don’t aim to impart a message so much as to have the reader feel in some way uplifted by what they’ve read.

What do you enjoy most about writing?
Finding out where the story is going. I find that writing stories is at least as much fun as reading them—because there’s no telling where your characters are going to take you. I, as author, am usually just as surprised by the sudden in’s and out’s of a story as the reader. Another way of saying this, I suppose, is that the thing I enjoy most about writing is the worlds it takes me into—because in order to tell a story really well, I as the writer need to inhabit it; to see and feel as precisely as possible what the characters see and feel, so that I can translate that onto the page.

Tell me about any stories that  you have written about war or based on countries affected by humanitarian crises?

When I think of the term, “humanitarian crisis,” I’m inclined to think of crises happening today: the huge migration through Europe of refugees from so many horrible battles in which even the leaders of their own countries seem not to care whether they live or die—or whether, when the bombing is done, there is anything left to live for; or, the migration through the Americas of people fleeing drug lords, drug wars and corrupt governments; or, the continuing, rolling disasters in the form of floods and droughts that rob people, already living at barely subsistence levels, of basic food and shelter.

But my stories have been about the First World War. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that war—"The Great War”—was, most likely, the greatest humanitarian crisis of its time. And that crisis played out on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, just as today, innocent civilians were displaced by the fighting. In America, families and hopes were decimated when sons failed to come home. In all, 20 million people died as a result of that war and only half that number were soldiers. Canada (a country of barely 8 million at the time) contributed 61,000 dead soldiers to that total. No combatant country emerged without having paid a huge price—and the currency was human beings: a generation of young men who either died in the fighting or returned home irrevocably damaged in body, or spirit, or both. Then there were the civilians who just happened to be in the wrong places at the wrong times. Plus ça change…

Why did you choose to write about war? 
Actually, writing about war chose me. That is to say, I began writing about the First World War and my country, Canada’s, role in it purely by happenstance. I started writing a book that was a fictionalized account of actual events in my mother’s family. They were lightkeepers on a tiny island off the northern coast of Nova Scotia. I wanted it to be a living, breathing progress of events in the daily lives of a Depression-era family that allowed the reader, not just to see but to know, what it was like to be a child growing up on a tiny cliff-skirted island with no electricity or running water, with a small dory as the only means of communication with the mainland, where everyone had a role to play in the family’s survival. All of this under the stern and watchful eye of a former soldier who had emerged alive from three of the Great War’s bloodiest battles, and who brooked no dissent from the ranks of his six children. 

That man (my grandfather, who died when I was in my early 20’s) was a fascinating character in his own right. During my research for the book, I obtained access to his service records and learned a lot about the battles in which he fought, the wounds he suffered, and his general movements around France and Flanders between 1916 and 1919. I also found on-line the war diaries of his commanding officer. This gave a pretty good picture of his part in the battles he was involved in. So, I wanted to write about his war years in the lighthouse book. But the publisher had a different idea, and the chapter about his service—one of the strongest in the manuscript, I felt—had to be cut and all that backstory condensed into about 900 words.

But the damage had already been done, so to speak. This farmer’s daughter who grew up on the North Shore of Canada’s smallest province, swimming with my brother, sister and friends in the ocean all summer and racing our family dogs on our sleighs and toboggans all winter; this middle-aged woman (by the time of the book’s writing) who still could not tell you the precise years of either of the world wars, became a war history sponge—at least as it pertained to her grandfather.

That eventually translated into a number of essays and non-fiction pieces about various aspects of the First World War, and the short story “Hill 145”, which won the 2017 “Women Writing War” fiction prize in CONSEQUENCE Magazine. The timing of that prize was particularly meaningful to me, because the story is about a war veteran who returns to Vimy Ridge, France, for the unveiling of a massive Canadian monument that commemorates the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which began on April 9, 1917. My grandfather fought in that battle and was among the mere forty percent of his battalion able to walk away from the battlefield.

What are some elements from your stories or novel that could raise awareness or motivate action in response to a humanitarian crisis?
I don’t write to impart any particular message; my motive is to uplift people in some way—even when they are reading about war and crisis. I guess if “Hill 145” raises awareness or motivates action, it would be action resulting from the ability of the reader to identify with this veteran soldier, George, who—whether he realizes it or not—has been badly damaged by the things he saw and did on that battlefield. 

If that story does anything, I hope it does that: show the reader this consequence of war, the damage it does to a generation of fighters who must eventually return home and try to put their lives back together. But, too, I hope it leaves the reader with a renewed awareness of the healing power of love; the love that George and his wife feel for each other, and that George feels for his children—that he would go “to the ends of the earth” for them if need be.

Is there a role for narrative fiction/storytelling to motivate readers to take action to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises?
Yes, in a broad sense, but I would say it’s an incremental process. Fiction plays a role in raising the consciousness of a society. A rising tide floats all boats, they say, and perhaps this is the ultimate role of fiction: to make us better, more compassionate people, one story at a time.

Can you describe any incidents from your own experience where reading a fiction story or novel has led you to change the way you behave or caused you to act upon a particular crisis?
I believe this is the reason we have fiction: To allow the rest of us to experience a life without actually living it; which, in turn, gives rise to compassion for other people’s experiences—experiences for which we would otherwise have no reference point. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini is one of those books for me. Another is The Illegal by Lawrence Hill. Neither is about a specific humanitarian crisis, but both books are about people who leave the comfort of home to make better lives for themselves and those they love—in Hosseini’s case, even if it means splitting the family up in the process; in Hill’s case, even if he is not welcome in the land of his choosing.

A great eye-opener for me years ago was a book called None is Too Many by two Canadian historians. It gives a less-than flattering historic account of Canada’s treatment of Jews fleeing Europe between 1933 and 1948. They assert that, during that period, Canada did less to help than any other western nation. The title comes from a remark attributed to an immigration official asked how many Jews would be admitted to Canada after the war. 

This and revelations about the generations of utter neglect and mistreatment of Canada’s aboriginal people (which one report went so far as to label “cultural genocide”) have contributed to my own gradual realization that even my country has turned its back on—even, perhaps, created—humanitarian crises. Yet, from this have arisen some amazing indigenous Canadian writers, whose frank, warts-and-all writing celebrates their spirit and resilience.

I am one of the fortunate ones who relies on the power of the written word to imagine the hardships and crises we speak of. I look to skilled writers like Eden Robinson (Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift) and Richard Wagamese (Indian Horse, Medicine Walk) to make me see and feel what that hardship must be like. 

Newly aware, I can then do my part to keep pressure on my government to repair past humanitarian mistakes and  help keep it from making new ones.

What is the one thing you’d like the readers of your stories to take away?
The feeling of what it would be like to be the people in my stories. If I can achieve this, then I’ve achieved what I believe is fiction’s highest calling.

What one action can people out there listening to you can take to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises? What is your call to action?
Put yourself in the shoes of the people who are in crisis and guide your responses accordingly. Not everyone can race to the scenes of devastation and provide physical help; not everyone is in a position to donate money; but, anyone can feel compassion, can pay that compassion forward to the general public discourse and, thereby, ever-so-slowly and incrementally affect our governments’ actions on the world stage. True, that’s not a lot, but every heart turned to compassion is one less heart closed to suffering.  

***

An interview with Abdul Haq Amiri

“The Kite Runner tells you the life of every single individual in Afghanistan. People of my age ran through land mine fields that were thrown by helicopters and planes from the skies, which destroyed a lot of women and men, and maimed many boys and girls. The book outlined the suffering of the people, the atrocities committed by the parties to the conflict, the destruction of the infrastructure, of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the country,” says Abdul Haq Amiri, the Chief of Section in the Operations and Advocacy Division in Geneva with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) covering the Middle East and North Africa.

How long has the war in Afghanistan been going on for?

I had just started grade nine when the communist revolution started in the spring  of 1978. The young communists started arresting civilians, torturing and killing them on grounds that they were counter revolutionaries. There was a peoples’ uprising against the regime and a year later the Soviet forces invaded the country to save the regime. They entered by air and land. In my province, they entered through a neighboring district which today neighbors Tajikistan. I remember that it was during a very cold winter when the Soviets tanks and military entered my district. As a result of the invasion, I lost one year of school education. We were displaced to mountains with no means of transport, no food, and no help from anywhere. At the time there was no media, nothing to tell the world what was happening.

Have the drivers, the causes of the war changed overtime?

No, the causes haven’t changed. Afghanistan is a very unfortunate country that has spent much of its life since it was formed as a country at war either with its neighbors, the British, the Soviets or with itself. Like many other crises, the drivers are injustice, control for political power and resources, inequality and extreme poverty, accompanied by religious extremism, drug lordism and criminality.

And what in your view could be done to stop it?

I have come to the conclusion that the only way to stop the war in Afghanistan is to come up with a decentralized  mechanism or system. You can have the central government, but allow the provinces and districts to establish their own institutions through democratic processes and link them to the national level. This’d enable a shift away from the capital and better distribution of resources, power, income and the budget. It'd also facilitate planning at the local level and over a period of time it’d help to reduce inequality and to build a cadre of technocrats at the provincial and district levels that could run their affairs, ending the war.  As am speaking to you, the results of the elections have been announced, and we currently have three governments: The current government that has been declared by the election commission as the winner,  the opposition, and the Taliban, who have their own government and are in negotiations with the United States and the international community. Basically, in this small country, you have three governments, and this is really driving the crisis to a point that we’re all worried.

If you step away from Afghanistan, and look at it at the global level, what do you see as the main drivers of humanitarian crises?

There are a number of issues I’ve learned from the various countries where I’ve worked and particularly during the so-called Arab Spring:  Inequality, extreme poverty, dictatorship, control of power and use of power and resources to hold on to power and isolate others from having a say in the affairs of their countries, that lack of democratic institutions, I think, is ruining countries. Many countries have been shattered by conflict, majority of the youth who are well educated are unemployed, isolated and have no say whatsoever in the political affairs of their countries. This has left them discontent. The drivers of conflict stem from a combination of these issues. 

What one action could we advocate for to stop these crises?

Asking member states who have influence on the conflicts to put their vested interests aside and put the wellbeing of innocent people who have suffered for so long as their priority, and work with other member states to find solutions to these crises. They should also encourage politicians in these countries to adapt a policy of inclusive dialogue to build democratic institutions, and respect the rule of law.

When it comes to advocacy, do you think there’s a role for stories, fiction, to help us advocate for the resolution of these humanitarian crises?

I think humanitarian stories have enormous impact on this. At the end of the day, politicians are human beings like us who have their own feelings and when they read stories that are well written, that explain the consequences of the decisions that are made by someone else, but impact the lives of so many children, men, women, and elderly, I think it can help them to make the right decisions. It’s easier said than done, but one has to keep knocking on the doors, keep bringing the issues to their attention by all means and ways possible. Fiction would have a really powerful message for politicians, but also for the general public who vote for the politicians.

What kind of books, fiction stories have you read that have achieved this?

I have read quite a number of books. I started with Leo the African by Amin Maalouf. This book is the story of a man called Hassan who was a 16th century traveler and writer. He was circumcised by a barber and baptized by a Pope. While he’s referred to as the African, he isn’t from Africa or Europe or Arabia. Through Hassan’s story, Amin Malouf writes about pirates, slave-girls and princesses in a state of religious flux, the fall of Grenada, the Othoman conquest of Egypt, and the consequences of war that forced the North African people who went into south Spain to either convert or leave the country. 

I’ve read all the books by Khaled Hosseini, but I found two of them quite moving: The Kite Runner, which is about the life of a boy, Amir, a Sunni Muslim, his relationship with his father and his struggle to come to terms with an incident that occurred in his childhood. As the writer said, it’s a story of guilt, friendship, forgiveness, loss, and desire for atonement, and desire to be better than who you think you are, which are universal themes. But it’s a story set against the backdrop of war. In the book, Amir’s father had an affair with Hassan’s mother. Hassan’s family are from the Hazara minority, who were victims of cultural, tribal, poverty and class issues. Hassan was also Amir’s brother from a secret affair that his father had with his servant’s wife. Amir and his family migrated to the US after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A few years after the withdrawal of the Soviets, he returns to search for his childhood friend, but he learns Hassan was killed during the war, and his only son is in the custody of the Taliban. In my opinion, it depicts a picture that’s very grim.  

And then there is A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is about the life of a woman from one ethnic group who wants to get married, and what happens to her. It shows the impact that Afghanistan’s violent history has had on civilians, in particular the women and girls. It’s fiction, but you can see how the actions of others, politicians, tribal leaders, clergies, relatives have an impact on the life of a young woman who has no or very limited freedom in terms of choosing what she wants to be or who she wants to marry and so on. You may have read Emma’s War written by Deborah Scroggins. In this book, you can feel love, affection and  warlordism, and how it impacts people, and the politics of the distribution of relief and so on. 

In your view, how would Kite Runner for instance help to raise awareness and hopefully spark action to address the causes and drivers of conflict?

The Kite Runner, depicts how families escaped the country along the borders guarded by Soviet and Afghan soldiers, and what the Soviets were doing, and how the people were taken from their vehicles and killed, and how they ended up in Pakistan, and what happened there. When Amir came back to search for his childhood friend and step brother, he learned that he had been targeted and killed by the Taliban, however he left a son behind. The Kite Runner tells you the life of every single individual in Afghanistan. People of my age ran through land mine fields that were thrown by helicopters and planes from the skies, which destroyed a lot of women and men, and maimed many boys and girls. The book outlined the suffering of the people, the atrocities committed by the parties to the conflict, the destruction of the infrastructure, of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the country. It also reflects on the injustices and social differences that existed in the country for centuries.

How did you end up in humanitarian aid?

When I finished high school in 1984, the Soviet Union and the communist regime wanted to take people who had graduated from high school to military service to fight the rebels for 3 to 4 years. We had a conscription system for military service at the time. A group of us decided that this wasn’t a good option for us and we ran away to the rebels areas. One night, the local commander sent his people for me. When I got there, I found three people who had been injured by rocket launchers. They had shrapnel in their bodies and the Commander asked me to operate on them since I had graduated from high school. You can imagine, as a very young boy at the age of eighteen, the last thing you want to do is to operate on anyone, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even sit in the room. When they were taking the shrapnel out and the person was crying, at that time it occurred to me that if I ever have a chance, I’d use my life for something that helps other people otherwise my existence wouldn’t mean anything. War was raging in Afghanistan when I completed my education, but I said to myself, if I don’t go and help my own people, how can I expect others to do so? That’s why I went back, and that’s how I started.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

I am convinced that what we do, no matter how small, has an impact on the lives and wellbeing of many people whose lives have been shattered by conflict and disasters. This is one thing that I carry with pride, and has really helped me to stick to this job. Another thing is that we speak on behalf of people who are voiceless and no one can understand that better than myself. When you leave your country through land mines, through mountains, walking all night to end up all alone in another country with no money, with no future, with no hope, I’ve lived that.   

Tell me about a person or a situation you have encountered in your work that has had a profound effect on you.

In 1997, I took a group of Ambassadors to Faizabad province in northeastern Afghanistan, controlled by Northern Alliance. We went to one of the few girls school that were still operational in the country. The Taliban had banned girls from going to schools. The Swedish Ambassador who was also the dean of the Ambassadors spoke about the humanitarian situation and what the donors were doing to help. One of the girls asked a question that has stayed with me throughout my life. She asked the Ambassador why the world was so indifferent to their plight. What I liked was the Ambassador’s answer, which was very honest. He said, You guys are suffering because the interests of the member states that have influence in your country aren’t aligned and as long as those interests don’t come together, the war and suffering in your country will continue. He also said the UN couldn’t do much because the UN has to bring people around the table, and provide a venue for discussions, but as long as the member states don’t agree on a mechanism, there’s no solution, and this is what I’ve seen elsewhere.

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises? 

My hope is that the crises and suffering end quickly, that people have the freedom to go back home to regain their land and property and their lives, and that their children can go to school like normal children, like everybody else, and they can rebuild their lives, their country, their homes, that I don’t hear of any more suffering  both in my own country, but also in the countries in the region, and elsewhere in the world. I think this is wishful thinking, but we have to wish for the best. 

What one action do you think someone who’ll read this interview, who’ll listen to it, can take to resolve crises? 

They can do two things: one they should say enough is enough and put pressure on their politicians to find solutions to these crises. It’s critical to put an end to the continuation of conflicts and the suffering of people. In many countries, it has gone on for far too long and it’s enough. The second thing is that they need to help us, humanitarian workers, to help people in need. The crisis isn’t the making of civilians, civilians are the victims, they didn’t create it and yet they’re in desperate need of food, water, shelter, and  so on. At the minimum, we need to be able to provide these basic needs to people. We as  human beings, each and every one of us, has a role to play in this and can contribute something and the sum of all our efforts will be quite significant. 

***

An interview with Sofie Garde Thomle

“Stories provide a whole different level of insight. It’s like you go into the head of someone and see the world from that person’s perspective, you experience feelings and emotions. Stories help you to understand the connections between people and see the world in a different way. I think it’s an extremely powerful force in connecting people and in preventing conflict or driving that type of advocacy and belief that it’s possible to prevent crises and not just give up,” says Sofie Garde Thomle, Chief of the Humanitarian Leadership Strengthening Section with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Geneva.

What is a humanitarian crisis?

It’s a situation where human beings are in a crisis and they require some assistance from outside to meet  their basic needs for survival and protection. This situation is generally caused by conflict or natural disasters. 

How about people not affected by conflict or natural disasters that are  living in conditions similar to those affected by conflict? Should we also be assisting these communities?

There’s a lot of debate around this and it’s good that we continue to have this debate. Overall, I think the world is moving in a direction where the threshold for what’s acceptable in terms of human suffering, regardless of what the causes are, is getting lower and lower. Thankfully, this means that we’re more easily moved to assist people in crisis. The humanitarian response is, however, not always the most useful or appropriate intervention and often you’d need other types of response to these situations. Going  back to the question of defining a humanitarian crisis and my work right now, I see a link with leadership because when you don’t have the right leadership in terms of development, economy, security, and so forth, this is what can happen.

What do you see as the causes of humanitarian crises today? 

Definitely conflict and the lack of ability internationally to find peaceful solutions rather than military ones. I also think it has to do with development; not all countries are able to meet the basic needs of their people. This is also closely linked to the type of leadership that’s required by governments and global institutions, and how resources are used. 

What one action could be taken to reduce human suffering, to stop the causes of humanitarian crises?

If we had just a bit more confidence that we could prevent these crises, if we had a bit more courage to say man-made conflicts or man-made emergencies aren’t necessary because there are other ways to resolve problems, the world would become a better place. I think the world is doing things differently and we’ve become much better at finding solutions but sometimes we forget or it becomes hopeless or very complex or very difficult and we settle for an inappropriate response. Some of the conflicts we have around the world today shouldn’t be going on for this long, but they are because the world is unable to come together and say this should be handled differently. For me, it really has to do with courage, with leadership. Today, we know that we can prevent famine, pandemics, but right now we’re faced with the Coronavirus, and yet we have a lot of tools and expertise and the knowledge about how to deal with this. Compared to 75 years ago when the United Nations was created, the world is in a completely different place, and we need to build on all of this and do more to prevent these crises. I think this’d help to reduce humanitarian needs around the world.

When you’re advocating so hard for the solutions to humanitarian crises, when you believe you know what our leadership needs to do, and it’s not happening, how do you cope with that?

Maybe it’s part of being an eternal optimist. Maybe it’s about reminding everyone that we’re all human beings, and that if we can see eye to eye with other people around us, we can address the discrimination and the fear, all those factors that have led us to allow these crises to go on. We can’t give up, we have to continue to advocate because it’s possible to prevent conflicts, it’s possible to anticipate natural disasters and disease outbreaks. We’re saying that we’re only going to see more and more of these pandemics and we’re seeing an increase in the number of conflicts, but we’re also seeing an ability to resolve conflicts in a way we didn’t see before. We have more women around the table, very few, but we have more women, we have more diverse groups of people involved in peace negotiations than we had in the past, and this will help us  to see eye to eye, to see  more humanity, at least that’s my hope. We should continue to demonstrate  that it’s possible, and we must remember and articulate all the times that we’ve been able to prevent crises.

 Do you think there’s a role for stories, for fiction to help?

I think storytelling, literature, and fiction is sometimes even more central in driving through these key messages more than anything we can ever do in politics or humanitarian affairs. Stories provide a whole different level of insight. It’s like you go into the head of someone and see the world from that person’s perspective, you experience feelings and emotions. Stories help you to understand the connections between people and see the world in a different way. I think it’s an extremely powerful force in connecting people and in preventing conflict or driving that type of advocacy and belief that it’s possible to prevent crises and not just give up.  

Can you tell me about a book that was set in a humanitarian setting that achieved this?

I’d love to share with you, and I’d encourage everyone to read, a book called Allah N’est Pas Obligé by Ahmadou Kourouma, a writer from Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. He published this book in 2000 right at the millennium, which is twenty years ago today, but for me, it continues to be a significant contribution to the conversation around the question of how we connect with other people who don’t have the same language or background or world view that we have, and how that person thinks. 

The book is about a boy who grows up in the Malinke area of Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. He loses his parents and gets involved in the war. He travels around the conflict area in the Mano River Union and when he meets someone, he has these three dictionaries that he pulls out and uses to translate the different words or cultures or perspectives from either the Anglophone or the Francophone part of the region or from the French from France. He makes a big distinction between the French spoken in France and the French spoken in the region. In some ways, Amadou Kourouma is the person who established African Francophone literature in it’s own right and language when he wrote the novel, “Les soleils des independances.” It’s an incredibly moving book and he opens the possibility for us to connect with other people, which allows us to push back on discrimination, and the perception that people are very different. While he acknowledges the  many differences, he chooses to focus on what we have in common.

How does Ahmadou Kourouma create empathy for the characters in Allah N’est Pas Oblige?

The story is  told through the eyes of a child so he’s a non-threatening and non-authoritative character who brings you along as a reader into his universe and his world as he sees it. This is very different from an adult where you’d have a perspective that is much more about whether the person is good or bad. Here, there’s no judgement and my sense is that this is specifically why Ahmadou Kourouma chose to use a child narrator, an old literary trick of telling the story through the eyes of a child, and it works because you can only feel sympathy for the boy even though he does some horrible things, but he also comes through these very challenging and difficult situations.

What is the boy’s story?

So, he grew up in this border area. He didn’t get to know his father. His mother had an ulcer and lost one of her legs so she’d crawl around on her hands and her other leg; she had a very difficult life. He tells this story where she’s not particularly kind or nice to him, but at the same time, she’s also doing all that she can. He loves his mother but it’s also clear that she’s struggling in the situation she is in. There’s one time, for example, when he has just learned to crawl and she’s chasing him because she’s upset about something. She’s actually crawls faster than him, and he runs into a fire, and burns his hand. It’s a terrible story, but it’s a lot about the circumstances that they’re in, and it creates empathy for the boy. He misses his mother, but he also knows that this background has marked, shaped and formed him. 

Is there anything else you’d like to say about this book?

I mentioned briefly that Ahmadou Kourouma also wrote the novel Les soleils des independances. And let me add that I had the honor and pleasure of meeting him when I worked at UNESCO in Conakry and went to visit him in Cote d’Ivoire. I’d really encourage you and everyone else to read this book. It’s one of those books you read in school in most of West Africa because it was such a foundational book for creating written literature in that region. He’s an amazing author and is much ahead of his time. It took him thirteen years to get Allah N’est Pas Obligé published because everyone kept saying it wasn’t proper French because French is such a constructed language, but he managed to get the book published with explanations from the region and from his background.

Tell me about a person or a situation you have encountered in your work that has had a profound effect on you.

One of the most profound humanitarian experiences I’ve had was in January 2017 when we realized from the analysis we had that there was renewed risk of famine in Somalia. The last famine had taken place six years earlier in 2011 and 250,000 people died. Earlier, we were speaking about leadership and in this situation in Somalia we had a very strong leadership team. There was a lot of mobilization, and we were able to work together. To see the whole world come together, at that time, and collectively respond to prevent that famine was unbelievable. In 1991, there had been another famine in these same areas. I remember meeting this one family – a mother, father and their two small children - in Baidoa in the southwest state at the hospital that was supported by the International Committee of Red Cross. They had walked for several days through areas under the control of armed groups. This was the third time that the parents were faced with the risk of famine. The children were clearly not in good shape. They made it to the hospital in time to save their children, but their faces, and the fear, and seeing them, and thinking this is the third time they’re going through the risk of famine, and their determination. We did manage to prevent the famine, but it’s not like it was a great situation after all, there was so much human suffering. Seeing that, and knowing that we were able to do it definitely marked me in what I do, and what I know is possible and I’d strive for the humanitarian system as a whole to continue to improve, because I know how we can deal with these types of emergencies going forward. I know that we can, and I feel that we have to, and we must continue to do better and ensure that next time, it’s not just a question of saving them from famine, but it’s a question of making sure that they’re not at the risk of famine for a fourth time.

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises? 

My greatest hope is that we can get there faster, we have better quality, we understand better what people want, and that we continue to improve our understanding, and that we get better at both reading what people want, at listening and hearing what people most desire. How can we best help them and adjust the humanitarian operation accordingly so we can help more people and in a way that’s adapted to their requirements.

What one action can people out there reading or listening to this interview take do help address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises?

The number one thing that we can all do and that’s obviously not just for humanitarian crises, is to listen more so we can understand where other people are coming from, we can see other people as equal human beings, and understand where they’re going and why. This is what I mean by the three dictionaries that this little boy in Allah N’est Pas Oblige has. It allows us to engage and connect with other people in a much more profound way than I find we’re doing today. It’s about globalization, but it’s also about humankind and seeing eye to eye with people and listening and understanding where they’re coming from and where we’re also coming from.

An Interview with Cindy Issac

“What’s interesting about The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, is that it’s not just about gender, it’s also about the dynamics of class, and it shows this cautionary reality check in terms of taking such a black and white view of situations, and resolution of situations that we’re seeing today, and that’s polarization again. It shows that even within these movements, you have people who understand that the original goals or gains have been distorted, and there’s a need to open up and re-think. I do think that in itself offers an opportunity for us to engage with the world that’s not black and white,” says Cindy Issac, who just left Yemen to take up the Deputy Head of office with the Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Somalia. She has also worked in Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan and Jordan.

How did you end up in the humanitarian aid sector?

When I finished my master’s degree, I looked at postings overseas and ended up doing an internship in Palestine focused on gender mainstreaming. My next job was my very first humanitarian job with a local NGO working with refugees from the Horn of Africa in Yemen. This set off my humanitarian focused career.

What wakes you up every day and keeps you going?

I absolutely love my job, my very different jobs with OCHA, Non Government Organisations (NGOs) and other UN organisations. I’d like to do good work. I have this desire to do good for myself and for those around me. I feel a sense of immediacy with regard to the humanitarian work that we do, and when I wake up, even though not always, I have a sense of the things that I can potentially do and achieve. This is what really keeps me going.

How would you define a humanitarian crisis?

Formally, it’s a series of events man made or natural, internal or external that cause some sort of a threat hazard to the overall security or wellbeing of a population. They can be immediate like a natural disaster or hurricane or cyclone or could be slow onset disasters such as in many conflicts that we see today.

What was a typical day like for you in Yemen?

I wish I could say my typical day was so exciting. I tend to wake up relatively early and go straight into my emails to see what I need to respond to. Part of the reason why Yemen is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world is because there are so many different elements and aspects that need a quick response. My focus is to be up to speed and to respond with immediate effect. In the office, it’s really trouble shooting and working with my team but I also attend numerous meetings. What makes it fun though is when I get to go to the field, and I’ve been lucky as am able to go to the field on a regular basis to visit sites of the internally displaced people, and meet with our partners who are the first responders. I engage with them about the challenges, gaps and bottlenecks they face, and follow up at the national level by identifying ways to unblock them.

How does this conflict impact people on a day to day basis?

Yemen has always had, relatively speaking, poor development indicators and what the conflict has done is exacerbated an already difficult situation. What I’ve particularly seen are the stark challenges for the population in terms of freedom of movement. Due to the conflict, there are limitations where people can go both in Yemen but also being able to fly out of Sana’a airport because of the air blockade. The war has taken a toll on the economy, the impact on the currency fluctuation, the lack of employment and jobs, and the overall challenges associated with livelihoods for the average Yemeni. It’s quite extraordinarily difficult to see and the impact it is having on the daily lives of Yemenis.

What are the drivers of this conflict?

What’s interesting about this conflict is that it shouldn’t be a conflict given the nature of what’s happening on the ground. Political shifts have taken place, specific parties have taken over parts of the country, and external influences associated with all of this. These were followed by certain allegiances and alignments within the Yemeni political parties and the failure of the national dialogue towards peace. All this created a political crisis which turned into a humanitarian crisis and the only way to really resolve this is through some agreed peace dividends. 

What in your view could be done to stop the conflict?

This really sounds so simplistic, but it’s really peace, and in my opinion in Yemen, peace is feasible if we can bring all the parties to the table. Although there are significant external influences, it is an internal conflict. So if we can bring Yemenis to the table and find some sort of negotiated settlement, which would include power sharing arrangements, I do think that this conflict could end.

Working in Yemen where despite concerted effort to resolve this conflict, it just seems to go and on and on, how do you cope with that? 

It’s very frustrating especially as it’s a conflict that shouldn’t be a conflict, it’s not clear why the fighting continues. In terms of coping strategies, what’s helped is the community engagement, having that opportunity to engage directly with Yemenis who for the most part want the conflict to stop. They want to go back to pre-war times and look at how to further develop Yemen. What drives me, what keeps me going is that sense of hope that does exist in Yemen which I don’t see in other contexts, and there’s a level of resilience, and hope towards peace that many Yemenis have expressed to me and their belief still that it’ll come.

Can stories, fiction help with advocacy to resolve the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises?

Well I don’t think it’d hurt and I think it’s a really cool idea as it helps to set the scene to advocate in a really unique way, in a creative way, for parts of the population that are less engaged on what we’d say the nonfiction side of things, the political side of things, so yes I don’t think it hurts. I actually think it’s a fantastic way to broaden our advocacy efforts in a creative and unique way.

Have you read a fiction story or book that was set in a humanitarian crisis?

I did have the opportunity to read Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. It’s not directly related to humanitarian crises, but interestingly it reminded me of parts of Yemen. It was a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and shows how a society can easily shift and be swayed into what’s quite a conservative and dogmatic approach to life. Interestingly, enough I see that now, this extremism, polarization, which I believe is exacerbating humanitarian crises and this book particularly resonated with me.  If we’re not careful, this is where we’re going towards, and we already are in some contexts including in parts of Yemen. 

What elements about The Testaments in your view could actually help us to raise awareness?

There’s the gender dynamics, but what’s interesting about the book is that it’s not just about gender, it’s also about the dynamics of class, and it shows this cautionary reality check in terms of taking such a black and white view of situations, and resolution of situations that we’re seeing today, and that’s polarization again. It shows that even within these movements, you have people who understand that the original goals or gains have been distorted, and there’s a need to open up and re-think. I do think that in itself offers an opportunity for us to engage with the world that’s not black and white.

Tell me about the characters in that book that have stayed with, you connected with and why.

There’s one character, Aunty Lydia the antagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale who becomes the protagonist in The Testaments. For me she’s this interesting character who as a female is technically subjugated to this societal dogmatic restriction, but she’s also a woman of power. Because of the nature of what she took and what she became in The Handmaid’s Tale and what’s interesting in The Testaments is how as a senior member of the society she takes on a protagonist role of leaking information in order to open up. She understands that the ideology is gone, is no longer beneficial for the society as a whole, and it needs to be opened up. Her character I think is an interesting one because she shows that there are in any extreme situation those people that you can engage with and she offers that gray that needs to be unpacked in terms of what we do, and how we do things, and how we look at crises, but also how we look at their resolution at the political level. 

I can see how these characters were basically dislocated from their day to day lives and how that impacts them, and this in the development world. I can see how we can really juxtapose that with when a conflict happens, and how that pretty much dislocates peoples’ lives.

You have the dynamics of gender but you have the dynamics of class as well, and what’s interesting is the book’s richness of the different characters and their roles and where they sit within that society, and how that plays out, which is quite interesting as well the depth. The other thing too is how we engage; do we look at people from a status basis or do we look at them from a vulnerability basis?

Anything else you’d like to talk about The Testament?

I just recommend to read it, and I know it might be unique in terms of the choice of looking at humanitarian crises. I’d like to highlight again why I’ve spoken about this book. I think it has a digestible way of looking at the causes of humanitarian crises. We tend to look at humanitarian crises in terms of the end, the result, the displacement, the need for basic services, and so on, but what caused this in the first place?  When we look at the nature of the big large emergencies that we’re working on, they’re conflict based, and why are they conflict based, what brought us there is usually a political and/or socio-economic crisis.

Tell me about a person or a situation you have encountered in your work that has had a profound effect on you. 

When I was in Afghanistan as the Senior Human Rights Officer working on child protection, there were a group of children that were in the maximum-security prison, the infamous Bagram that used to be run by the Americans and was taken over by the Afghans. With my very small team, we managed to advocate for the children (and there were children as young as ten) to be transferred out of this prison into juvenile detention centers or rehabilitation centers in Kabul.

To this day, the impact was just huge. We were a small team and we just kept harping and harping and pushing even internally within the UN system that these children were not terrorists, that we needed to look at them as underage minors, and we were able to get them out of that prison. That to me was very profound in the sense of changing a viewpoint of a certain population group, and then effectively being able to ensure a more human approach to the children’s rehabilitation based on what was national Afghan law. It was one of the more positive examples of being able to push and advocate internally with the Afghans, within the UN, with donors and member states on the importance of this issue.

What has been your toughest moment?

There’s been a few. In general, the toughest thing for me is when you really know that you cannot make a difference, you cannot change a situation. The most recent example was just before I left Yemen. I mentioned that there’s an air blockade. The United Nations Special Envoy organized medical evacuations with the World Health Organization and the Humanitarian Coordinator, and there was this family, what I understood afterwards which I didn’t know at the time, the youngest son had to be medically evacuated due to a critical stage of diabetes. I was sitting there because I was supposed to be on the same flight and it was interesting because as we were getting ready to go through security, national security came, and basically stopped them from travelling. I remember thinking to myself, here I am going on this plane where I don’t really have to go as am just doing a field visit to Aden while this family is trying to get to Amman for medical treatment, and is being stopped for whatever reason and I felt so helpless because you know, it shouldn’t happen. 

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises? 

It’s not just those who are affected by humanitarian crises. For me it’s a shift in how we view ourselves, and how we view the world. I’d love to leave this world in a place where we break down barriers and accept diversity. These conflicts are due to misunderstandings, political decisions, dogmatic views, and what causes that? For me, it’s about breaking down all of this, and really building a world that accepts differences is what I’d love to see, at least it’s my hope.

 What one action can people out there reading or listening to this interview take do help address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises?

For me it’s about being aware and informed. It’s really thinking beyond your borders and whatever those borders are. It could be your community, your neighborhood, your country and thinking beyond those borders however you define them, and also beyond your lifetime in terms of the choices you make, that’s the other thing too. A lot of crises are due to this immediacy of want, and if we can think beyond ourselves, and the choices that we make that affect us in our lifetime. I believe this would help to prevent specific humanitarian crises.

***

An interview with Greg Puley

“When you read a story about a person and you can connect with them it becomes an entirely different thing. It makes you think about what it’s really like for people living these nightmares. This soldier, it just made it far more human than a statistic or a description because it’s a story with a person with a name.” Greg Puley, Chief for the Middle East and North Africa Section with OCHA discusses humanitarian action and the role for narrative fiction/storytelling to raise awareness on the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises and spark action.

How would you define a humanitarian crisis?

When people are suffering on a large scale due to a conflict or natural disaster, but what makes a humanitarian crisis distinct is that there’s an unusual external shock which turns a large number of people’s lives upside down.

And if that shock is caused by poverty, would you still consider that a humanitarian crisis?

I consider poverty to be a crisis, but there’s something valuable about guarding a different category. The kind of large-scale incidents that cause a lot of suffering because the way that you respond to them has to be different. You can’t solve poverty, using the tools that are helpful to us in an earthquake or when people flee war. These things are related, and there are some humanitarian organisations that try to do both of these things. Am certainly not of the school that thinks there’s a blissfully isolated sphere of humanitarian action that’s not related to poverty. I do think there’s some value in having this category because the tools that we use to help people in a defined humanitarian crisis are different from the tools to overcome poverty.

Say you have high mortality rates due to lack of development in an area, is that a situation where humanitarian assistance should be provided?

No. That’s a really hard no to give, isn’t it? If someone doesn’t have shelter, should they have a tent? On some level, yes of course, they should have a tent, but should the global response to be to provide them a tent or should it be a much more comprehensive response, empowering them to change their circumstances? I think it should be the latter, addressing the structural issues. That’s what entrenched poverty demands. If we respond to poverty with humanitarian tools, buckets of water and tents and chlorine tablets and cooking supplies and so on, we’re not doing anything about the underlying structural causes. For me, the response to poverty has to be looking at injustice and the structures that created it.

What do you see as the top humanitarian challenges today at the global level?

In conflict, just the flagrant targeting of civilians, the complete disrespect for the laws and rules of war. While not having any illusion that there was ever a golden period where they were perfectly respected and there was accountability, in the second half of the last century there was pretty significant effort to build global norms and institutions around protecting people in conflict best put together in the Geneva conventions. In the last few decades we’ve seen an unbelievable level of flouting and willful disregard of the difference between civilians and combatants, and for me that’s the biggest humanitarian challenge right now. With climate change, inevitably, I fear there’s now going to be a very large increase in the number of what we call natural disasters, droughts, and severe storms in particular. When you combine this with large scale movement of people that climate change is and will continue to produce, that’s the other big one. For me this also shows the interlinked approach between the deep structural changes and the kind of humanitarian responses as climate change requires both of those. We need humanitarian response to droughts and hurricanes but to really address it, we need wholesale changes to the economy, and that’s not something humanitarians can provide.

What one action could be taken or could we advocate for that could make a fundamental difference for the people affected?

The most important thing regular people can do, if we’re talking about climate change, number one, look at your own behaviors, and the way you act and spend your money, and vote. Number two, find an organization that shares the values that you have and join it, work with other people towards solving these problems. Not just for climate change, but also for the issues around protecting people in conflict. I don’t want to sound a note of total despair because it’s actually possible to make changes in the way that wars are conducted. We know that because it has been done in the past, not perfectly as I said, but when more people are engaged and mobilized and paying attention and caring it can make a difference. We didn’t have an International Criminal Court twenty years ago, we didn’t have landmines conventions. These things have made a difference so you know people caring and working together on these issues can make a difference, but you feel very small, alone, you need to find others and there are great organisations that are available for that, so join one. 

You’ve mentioned some progress, we have laws of war and we’ve seen them work, can you give me an example?

Well, we had criminal tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and establishment of the International Criminal Court where there have been very high profile convictions there, Slobodan Milošević died in prison. The idea that there’s not going to be impunity for forever for whatever you might do. Aung San Suu Kyi was in the Hague in December at the International Court of Justice. Obviously, there’s a long way to go in that area but it’s not like we’re starting from nothing, and I think it does cause people who are engaged in conflict to think a little bit about decisions that they might make. There are fewer landmines in the world since the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). These steps have certainly not gotten us anywhere near where we need to be, but they have made a difference. Public has also influenced the way armies behave, certainly in western countries. While we’re in a very bad place, we shouldn’t despair or feel it’s impossible to change it.

 Myanmar, what was that like?

It was tough. It was very difficult. I mean, what is it like as a place? It’s a very fantastic place, you know, it’s a beautiful place, and it’s a very interesting country, and a very interesting moment politically. But it was also very difficult to see what people there were going through you know some of the most marginalised and most dehumanized people particularly in Rakhine, am speaking of the Rohighya people there. That was very difficult to go through, to see the struggle of the United Nations system and the international community to really fully respond to the scale of what was happening there. It’s very difficult as a humanitarian when you see on the one hand just the awful things that people are living through, and on the other hand all the complexities and imperfections of the way that we respond to them. Sometimes the distance between those two things is painful. And so I felt that kind of pain there for sure. 

What wakes you up every day and keeps you going in this job?

First of all, working with amazing people. We have great colleagues from all over the world. It’s easy to forget how, what an amazing privilege it is to work with people from all over the world. We were talking about Myanmar, the colleagues that are from there, for them it’s their home, and they’re so talented and committed. It’s an inspiration to work with such colleagues for sure and some of them are amazing heroes. I think about Syria, I think about the nationals, the Syrian people who have risked and lost their lives, trying to help fellow Syrians through this nightmare, so that’s inspiring, it really is, that’s fuel to propel me through what might feel like a difficult moment sometimes. And then I try to hold on to a few small moments. I can think of a person I met in a difficult situation and know that what am going through is trivial compared to that. I remember this kid I met in Gaza who had lost his whole family in a rocket attack. He was sitting in a room in a wheelchair and all the pictures of all his family were up around the room like ten or twelve of them. He was sitting there alone in his wheelchair room. So, if I ever feel it’s so tough for me, I think about that guy. Things aren’t actually tough for me, I’ve got a great life doing this work which is a weird paradox, and that in itself is tough. Anyway, I’ve got a little bank of four of those.

What is your greatest fear?

Becoming a bureaucrat. The UN is a bureaucracy, and there are some things about it that we can make better, and more effective, and more collaborative within it. There are some things about it that require member states to change. I think you can make a mistake by pretending it’s all the second category, and not doing what needs to be done in the first, like getting over the kind of narcissism of our turf issues between and within UN agencies, which I find really frustrating. You can make a mistake by pretending that it’s all about the member states and structural changes, and we’re doing our best with in it. You gotta focus on the way you behave within the bureaucracy on the one hand, but then you also have to recognize that there are some things you can’t change about it. I can’t reform the security council, I can’t change the staff rules that go through the General Assembly, etc, but you gotta think about the attitudes and behaviors that make the kind of frustrating bureaucracy what it is, and then try to change them in yourself and in others, you know sharing information, being collaborative, cutting through unnecessary long processes, treating people like human beings. All the negative things about a bureaucracy, they all have a human response that you could try to make better yourself, and that’s what you gotta do.

Tell me about a fiction story or novel you’ve read about a humanitarian crisis.

I went through a phase where I read a lot of great war fiction, European stories about the great war. I am still interested in that by the way, I still read nonfiction about it. They’re not specifically about humanitarian action but that war was so awful, you know, and its impact on people was so brutal, and it went on for so long, and was so huge in scale. I remember a book called Johnny Got His Gun about an injured soldier who comes back to the United States. I remember a book called Goodbye To All That about a British soldier, there’s a Germany one, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernest Hemingways’ novel about the Spanish civil war called For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 about the second world war. Those books had a big impact on me. I love Catch 22 because the book showed how absurd the war was, and the insanity of what war does to people. While am certainly not an old war hand, I understand war a little bit better now as I’ve been involved in the kind of logic of some conflicts. The time I read these books they were quite foreign to me, but I was very taken by what you’d call the humanitarian content, the way people suffered in those wars. 

Shall we talk about Catch 22? Did it teach you anything about a humanitarian crisis? 

One thing is the psychology of war. These are mostly men, and they’re soldiers. So it’s not a humanitarian story in the sense of the impact of war on civilians, although that’s part of it, they’re certainly in it, but the thing that stayed with me, was the psychology of what the war did to the soldiers, and how it made them want to escape the war. The point of Catch 22 is that Yossarian, who is the main character, wants out of the army because he knows he’s gonna die, and he’s seen his friends die. There’s one very moving part about his comrade, Snowden who dies. To get out of the army, he has to prove that he’s insane. If you’re in the army, and you know you’re gonna die, the only sane thing is to want out. The fact that he’s asking shows that he’s sane, and that’s the Catch 22. It brought out the psychology that a conflict, the insanity it imposes on everybody that it touches in a serious way because you know, all conflicts are insane in a sense, what they ask of people is so wildly disproportionate to what they end up achieving. Their costs are so much higher than their achievements, but people get caught up in them, and they’re impossible to escape, both civilians and combatants. Catch 22 showed me that in a way that only a story can. You can read a psychology text about war, but the fact that it’s art reveals more about it, reveals it in a different way.

What are some elements in Catch 22 bring that out?

I mentioned the soldier, Snowden, who dies in the story. He’s in the airplane, and I think he’s hit by shrapnel, but the plane is still flying. There’s a kind of poignant description of the way that his friends are trying to help him, but they can’t. Am sure the author called him Snowden because what he’s constantly saying is: I’m cold. They try to put a blanket on him, and he’s bleeding. You have to read quite a way into the scene until you realise how badly hurt Snowden is, and that he’s going to die. In our jobs, our stock and trade is statistics about large numbers of deaths. It’s very kind of asceptic. It’s on a piece of paper, it’s a number, and we churn out all these situation reports, which is absolutely necessary, and a good thing we have to do, but they can become just another number. When you read a story about a person and you can connect with them it becomes an entirely different thing. It makes you think about what it’s really like for people living these nightmares. This soldier, it just made it far more human than a statistic or a description because it’s a story with a person with a name.

Tell me about a person or a situation you have encountered in your work that has had a profound effect on you.

I’ve told you about that kid in Gaza, I’ll give you another one that’s more positive. In Ethiopia, during the drought we were doing livelihood activities, and were providing some initial financing, like micro credit, for people impacted by the drought to have an income. I remember this guy, I think he was doing bee keeping, and home gardening. He got a very small grant and was hooked up to the market. We visited him early on in the response, and several months later I went back to this same place to visit him. It was the first time he gave us lunch in his house. This guy was the Bill Gates of this small Ethiopian village. He was an unbelievable entrepreneur. I think by then he had two bikes selling his honey and he had turned the home vegetable stand into something bigger. This guy had all these ideas, and was incredibly creative, an entrepreneur, it just made me think, there’s unbelievable potential in the people. They have all this creativity, all this verve, and they just need a chance to let that do its magic. It was an important message not to think about people impacted by disasters as just recipients of aid. This guy had the potential to change the lives of hundreds of people. If I went there today am sure he’d have a big business. That one stuck with me too.

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises? 

That there’d be fewer of them for people that are impacted. Sometimes, I feel like everything we’re doing is not good enough. On the one hand, it’s not enough, there could be, and should be more assistance. On the other hand, it just kind of feels like it’s too much waste, it’s too big, and sprawling, it’s too fragmented, it’s too focused in on itself, it’s too much competition, all the imperfections in the humanitarian system if such a thing exists, the ecosystem. I often feel like we’re not living up to what these people deserve so my hope is that those who are trying to help them, and we who are trying to lead and coordinate those who are trying to help them, can be good enough for them, can live up to what they deserve. In my worst moments in this job, I’ve just felt like, oh my God, this isn’t good enough, this is really not good enough. My hope would be to overcome this feeling, and feel like, it’s good enough. Their situation is still terrible or it’s not fair, but what we’re doing is good enough. I’d love to feel that.

***

An interview with Daphne Kalotay

“Anything that dramatizes and humanizes something that otherwise seems foreign or far away is a valuable tool for engagement. Part of what drew me to write Blue Hours was my own feeling of how disturbing it is that we here in America can, if we choose to, completely ignore our own war in Afghanistan, simply because it is taking place on foreign soil. And it has been going on for so long that most people have simply grown bored and choose not to engage or to educate themselves about it,” says Daphne author of Calamity and other short stories, Russian Winter, Slight Reading and Blue Hours.

Tell me about yourself

I’m a writer who also teaches creative writing and literature. I grew up in a family where stories and poetry and the arts in general were really important, and I continue to take my nourishment from the arts—mainly books, music and dance.

 What kinds of stories do you write?

Mainly traditional short stories, although occasionally the uncanny slips in, and as you see in “The Archivists,” I do sometimes use a less conventional approach. In general, I like to write small, focused stories about everyday people, to show how ordinary lives can in their own ways be extraordinary.

 What do you most enjoy about writing?

The deceptive sense of having captured something for posterity, or those moments when you find just the right word or phrase to describe something. I love wrangling with language, and with composing a story or novel there’s the feeling of piecing together a puzzle, which at first seems impossible and only at the end comes together with something resembling ease.

What is your story “The Archivists” - https://lithub.com/the-archivists/about?

On the broadest level, it’s about war’s long reach, how the consequences of conflict continue long after peace treaties are signed. On a more specific plane, it’s an attempt to memorialize my grandmother and her stories—from her youth and later her experience of the Holocaust.  

 But it was also a response to a writing prompt; I was invited to contribute a short piece to read at an art opening, and the theme of the exhibit was how digitization, social media, and “the cloud” have affected or degraded our memories. For some reason, that prompt immediately brought to mind my Hungarian grandmother showing me how to make dumplings for soup: Just as in the story, my grandmother told me to drag the tines of the fork through the doughy mixture in order to know when the consistency is right, and how her friend—who by the time my grandmother showed me was already dead—had taught her that trick. It’s the most analog form of memory, this sort of passed along knowledge, and because it involves a physical movement, I also thought of muscle memory, which made me think of dance.

 Back when I was a student at Vassar College, my dance professor was Ray Cook, who beyond having been a ballet dancer and a wonderful teacher was also known for being the first person to professionally take on Labanotation fulltime. He notated the works of Doris Humphrey, José Limón, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, George Balanchine, Lester Horton, and many others. In fact, he researched, notated and staged a number of Humphrey works that had been considered lost. And though I don’t know that I was consciously thinking about this as I wrote the story, now that you ask me this question, I definitely see that without knowing about him and his expertise, I probably wouldn’t have thought of this branch of the story.

As for the epigenetic angle, I have been fascinated by this science and wanted to include it as another physical manifestation of what we may think we don’t remember at all.

 Why did you choose to write about war?

These are my family’s stories, it’s what I know. My father is a Holocaust survivor. I’m haunted by the fact that the last witness to that crime will die during my lifetime; I feel the need to tell that story. The detail about the hydrangeas in my story is true. My grandmother loved a boy whose eyes, she said, were that color blue—and he was murdered in the Holocaust. So, I want to tell his story too.

Tell me about other stories you’ve written about war or based in countries affected by humanitarian crises. 

Well, I have another story about the Holocaust, “Relativity,” that was Boston’s One City One Story read in 2017, so it’s available in various languages on my website. And my newest novel, Blue Hours, is about our intervention in Afghanistan. It starts in the U.S. just after the first Gulf War and then leaps forward in the second part of the book to eastern Afghanistan in 2012, where the characters from Part One have ended up. 

Is there a role for fiction to motivate readers to take action to address the causes/ consequences of humanitarian crises? 

Definitely. Anything that dramatizes and humanizes something that otherwise seems foreign or far away is a valuable tool for engagement. Part of what drew me to write Blue Hours was my own feeling of how disturbing it is that we here in America can, if we choose to, completely ignore our own war in Afghanistan, simply because it is taking place on foreign soil. And it has been going on for so long that most people have simply grown bored and choose not to engage or to educate themselves about it. 

What is the one thing that you’d like the readers of your stories to take away?

We’re all connected to one another, no matter how distant our lives may seem or how vast the oceans dividing one continent from another. Our actions matter, and reverberate.

* END *

An interview with Erato loannou

“Reading fiction allows us new perspectives of the world. Everything we read, inevitably may alter the way we view the world to a lesser or a greater degree. Everything we read is bound to affect our perspective of the world and consequently it is bound to change us. Most of the times we’re not consciously aware of these mysterious doings of the stories lurking in the pathways of our minds long after we’ve read them,” says Erato, Author of Cats Have it All, a collection of short stories.

Tell me about yourself.

I am Erato Ioannou, a writer from Cyprus; a small island tucked in the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean Sea.

Why do you write? 

Why write, indeed! This, I guess is one of the questions that most writers dread. There is no ‘right way’ to respond to it. There’s an intrinsic urge to write—a need characterized by such urgency and it is essential to respond to it. Writing is a means of deciphering the psyche—a process through which a writer plunges into the innermost, darkest, forbidden zones of human existence. Writing is an exploration; a strife to understand ourselves, our immediate and not so immediate surroundings. 

 What kinds of stories do you write? 

My stories are triggered by ‘what if…” Usually, they start with a small detail—be it a weird bit of conversation or an image, which runs the risk to stay unnoticeable in the midst of our everyday preoccupations. That’s all it takes to spark a story, along with “what if”. What if I put this character in this odd situation? How would she react? I believe that stories are within all of us. They are just waiting to be told. What makes a writer is that need to discover the story; that keen eye for detail which will bring the story to life. My characters’ point of departure is the story’s devastating setting—physical or emotional. A devastating setting to which they react in unexpected ways, making the story twist and turn in a rhythmical manner as though it has a mind of its own.

 What do you enjoy the most about writing? 

The end of the process. I enjoy the final product. The work of art that has come out of me and it is let to roam free in the world. It’s a moment of transcendence, really, when your story manages to touch other humans in so many unexpected ways and at so many levels. Writing itself, is a painstaking procedure. It tears you apart. You depart from a real world, from everyday life, from all the mundane occupations, to plunge into a fictional reality—which does not spare you. When I write, my characters’ experiences, their thoughts, their dark secrets, their pain, their anger, their loath has to go through me. There’s no other way to do this, really, if you want to write. Inevitably, the murky water of your characters’ essence will have to go right through you, and you pick all there is to pick up. It’s exhausting, to enter the psyche of another human being—as characters should be treated as true human beings by a writer, or else they will not be genuine. In the end, though, the whole process results to redemption, to healing, to a deeper understanding of humanity; and this is valuable. 

Your story Deserted, what is it about?

The town of Famagusta or Varosia was deserted by its inhabitants in the summer of 1974 when Cyprus was invaded by Turkish military troops. Varosia remains a ghost town as we speak. Deserted https://www.addastories.org/deserted/ is the story of eighty-year-old Anna who decides to stay behind. It’s a story about Place as part of the self. When Place, your home, is violently taken away from you, the self is also torn and this is as painful as when the flesh is torn, dripping with blood and memories lost.

 Why did you choose to write about war?

It’s not a matter of choice. We carry Place within us no matter what. And by Place, I mean the country we were born in, the country we were raised in, the ones that we’ve visited, or we’ve lived in for short or longer periods of time. Place shapes who we are. It molds our personalities and our identities. Some people may not be familiar with the tragic history of Cyprus—my homeland. The results of the Turkish military invasion on the island in 1974 have inflicted deep wounds. Inherited trauma has been haunting us. It has left its mark on the literary work we produce. Even when one makes a conscious decision not to write about the war there is no escape. Its violence has not subsided. It is still present in our memories even in the memories of those born after the war. It is present in its physical form—in the line separating the island into two parts. It has marked the souls of the refugees, the lives of those who lost their loved ones, their homes, their everything.

 Tell me about any other stories that you have written about war or based in countries affected by humanitarian crises?

My writing is influenced by trauma caused by war. Even when my stories do not directly deal with it, war is still there, lurking under the surface. After all, the aftermath of the Turkish military invasion of Cyprus is still there. My country is still divided. Thousands of soldiers occupy the north part of the island. War affects my characters in all the ways that it has affected all Cypriots. Of course, this is a challenge for writers writing from small places. How do we make the specific universal? Why should a wider international audience care about the characters of a small distant place? I was honored and humbled and happy to see that my stories could speak to a wider audience, beyond geographical boundaries. My short story “Something Tiny” it’s such a story tells the story of a Cypriot Yiayia who has found a weird way to rationalize with her husband's disappearance during the war.

 Is there a role for narrative fiction/storytelling to motivate readers to take action to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises? 

Stories have been a means of bringing about change since the beginning of time. But beware! Setting out to write a story with an agenda, embarking on a storytelling journey thinking “this is how I’m going to change the world” then you end up with a didactic text serving propaganda. The reader will not react positively to it. It won’t be literature. It will be something else. Through storytelling, the writer explores. She asks questions. She allows her reader to ask them too. The reader will reach her own conclusions based on her own personal experience. When a writer manages to make the specific universal, then yes, things start to change—from within.

Can you describe any incidents from your own experience where reading a fiction story or novel has led you to change the way you behave or caused you to act upon a particular crisis?

Reading fiction allows us new perspectives of the world. Everything we read, inevitably may alter the way we view the world to a lesser or a greater degree. Everything we read is bound to affect our perspective of the world and consequently it is bound to change us. Most of the times we’re not consciously aware of these mysterious doings of the stories lurking in the pathways of our minds long after we’ve read them.

 What is the one thing that you’d like the readers of your stories to take away? 

I want them to take away the stories themselves. I want my readers to make my stories their own.

*** 

First, the basic facts, figures and trends in 2020 from the Global Humanitarian Overview

https://www.unocha.org/sites/unocha/files/GHO-2020_v9.1.pdf

• In 2020, nearly 168 million people will need humanitarian assistance and protection. This represents 1 in about 45 people in the world, and is the highest figure in decades. The United Nations and partner organizations aim to assist nearly 109 million of the most vulnerable people. This will require funding of $28.8 billion. 

• The situation will keep getting worse unless climate change and the root causes of conflict are better addressed. On current trends, projections show that more than 200 million people could be in need of assistance by 2022. 

• The humanitarian system is more effective better prioritized, more innovative and more inclusive than ever. In the first nine months of 2019, humanitarian organizations reached 64 per cent of people targeted to receive aid through Humanitarian Response Plans (HRPs). 

• Globally, at the start of 2019 some 821 million people were undernourished, including 113 million who suffered from acute hunger. Conflict is the key driver of hunger. By the beginning of 2019, armed conflicts and persecution had driven a record number of nearly 71 million people from their homes. 

  Global trends and Challenges

• Highly violent conflicts take a heavy civilian toll 

• Hunger is rising, and conflict is the key driver 

• More people are displaced, and displacement lasts longer 

• Attacks on health care and aid workers continue 

• Humanitarian crises increase the risk of gender-based violence 

•  Climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities 

•  Slower economic growth and debt problems risk entrenching humanitarian needs 

• Millions in humanitarian crises are at risk of preventable diseases

An Interview with Stephen O’Malley

“You need extremely good writers whose writing touches you emotionally, without it being overly sentimental, says Stephen O’Malley, the Head of Office of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in South Sudan. 

What does a typical day look like for you?

I am normally picked up at around eight o’clock in the morning every day to go to the office. A lot of my time as the Head of Office is spent on coordinating the humanitarian response in Juba, making sure that the big pieces are fitting together. I do get to go to the field from time to time but not as often as I’d like. OCHA has a really important role to play, but I kind of like to go and see a bore hole being drilled or a new water system being installed. I guess it’s because of my background which is output focused. I miss that. During the day, I’ll have a variety of meetings with government officials, UN agencies, NGOs, diplomatic missions, the Humanitarian Coordinator, and from time to time with the peacekeeping mission. These discussions are all about trying to make sure that we deliver humanitarian assistance effectively and efficiently. We’ve been spending a lot of time these past months on the response to the heavy flooding which has affected more than 900,000 people. That means making sure that we have teams going out to quickly assess the needs, and provide the right supplies to the people in need, and that we have the extra money we need for this.

Could you tell me more about your background?

My introduction to the humanitarian world came through working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from 1993 to 2000 in a variety of settings. Those experiences were much more about being in the operational end, much closer to the people we were assisting than I sometimes feel now. When you’re doing coordination, particularly in the capital, there’s a little bit of distance, and that’s why it’s good to go and see what’s going on so that you feel connected to the people you’re working with.

 How did you end up in humanitarian aid?

I think I always knew that I wanted to do something in the international field. When I finished University in Canada, I had this opportunity to join a private consultancy firm in Canada which I did, and I really enjoyed it. At the same time, some friends of mine had started MSF in Canada in the late 1980s. It was a very small office. They asked me if I’d join in 1993, and I did, and that’s how I started. In 2001, I came to OCHA and I had a period working in development as the UN Resident Coordinator in the Caribbean from 2013 to 2018. 

What wakes you up every day and keeps you going?

You know, I really do think it’s the sense that somehow you can make a difference. It may not be a huge difference but that every day you can make a difference. You can make things go a little smoothly, a little bit better for somebody, on the protection of civilians’ issue, or in one of these flooded communities that we’re responding to at the moment in South Sudan. This year, South Sudan has had the worst floods in 20, 30 years. So, this is really the driver for me. Just trying to make things a little bit better. 

 What is your greatest professional achievement?

I’d say my greatest professional achievement was in February of 1998 when I was still working for MSF in Freetown in Sierra Leone. Despite things going completely crazy, street to street fighting between the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group largely led by Nigerian forces and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council and the Revolutionary United Front rebels, we managed to keep the surgical unit in the main hospital in Freetown running for those three or four days of intense fighting. The team running the unit operated on more than one hundred people during that time. 

 What is your greatest professional fear?

I am very fortunate that I’ve never been a cynical person, and I don’t think I could become cynical, but it’s really that kind of cynicism, that kind of loss of a sense of what the possibilities are because there are always possibilities of one kind or another in every situation, even in very dire situations.

 What do you enjoy most about your job?

I definitely like the people I work with and not just in OCHA but in the broader humanitarian community here in South Sudan – UN agencies, NGOs, diplomatic community, government. I like going out to the communities to talk to the people. South Sudan is a very fascinating country. Whenever I am going to go out of town, there’s always something to look forward to.

 What is it you find most fascinating about South Sudan?

The history is very interesting and the sense that South Sudan successfully fought this incredible long war of national liberation and succeeded in really difficult circumstances. You know, you can see the challenges that come from building a state from very little. Whatever the British colonial system would have left in 1955 would have been steadily eroded over the years of the liberation struggle. So, the question is how can you constructively, involving the people of South Sudan, provide some kind of better assistance? People here have been recipients of one form or another of humanitarian assistance since the eighties; you had Operation Lifeline Sudan for example, but also several famines that have taken place at different times. How do you work within that history and environment, with a Government that still has a lot to do in terms of service delivery? How do you work with the government to better meet peoples’ needs?

 How would you define a humanitarian crisis?

It’s where peoples’ needs are so far from being met that it requires some form of intervention, but also that the people whose needs aren’t being met are in some way being discriminated against. They’re being disadvantaged, they’re being marginalised. For me, it’s that combination of how people are treated in the situation they’re in.

 How about when these needs are caused by poverty? Should there be a humanitarian response?

For awhile I worked with MSF in Angola. This was in 1996 when the war was still on. We had hospitals out there and I’d fly around to see these hospitals. There were also these colleagues I knew from a small Canadian NGO called Development Workshop. Their thing was, “We’re providing water and sanitation in the slums of Luanda, that’s what we’re going to do to help people.” They took a very development-oriented approach to it, and it showed me that development-oriented approaches could coexist with humanitarian work. 

Notwithstanding, this fashionable talk on the humanitarian/development nexus and things like that, I do think that sometimes there are distinctions. Certainly, there’s a distinction in the timeframes, and in the way programmes are designed. In some ways, humanitarian organisations could learn a lot from those organisations that do better consultations. In fact, it’s something we were talking about with the Humanitarian Coordinator recently when organizing the response to these floods. What do people want? We’ve got this multi-sectoral response to provide food and non-food items like jerry-cans and fishing kits, depending on the situation, but what do the people actually want both now and to support their recovery? 

 Is development programming possible in South Sudan?

You know, there’s been some very interesting research that’s been done. After the Comprehensive Agreement in 2005, there was an effort by some of the major donors to take a combined approach. They created a joint office and focused on extending basic services throughout South Sudan. But later, all of the big evaluations highlighted that nation building was in fact missed. The sense that this is a nation rather than a disparate collection of ethnicities and so on. Now we’re in a different context, emerging from five years of brutal civil war, and there are interesting programmes on resilience building.

 What are the main causes of humanitarian crises?

From my perspective, it tends to be the actions of States and the actions of Non-State Actors.  Marginalisation. When you see a population, a people with some kind of distinguishing characteristics being targeted by the State.

 What are the main humanitarian challenges today?

The huge number of people displaced or refugees with very limited prospects of being resettled or returning home within any kind of reasonable timeframe. I also think about the behaviour of states, and here I am speaking generally, towards the people to whom they have the primary responsibility to care for, is the major issue.

 How could this be resolved?

You try to uphold International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law. I don’t see any other fundamental options. If you look at the history of the so-called humanitarian interventions, they succeeded under extremely limited narrow circumstances, and often had unintended consequences, for example, Somalia 1992-1993. There are a number of other things I could think of, but they have hardly had any effects. Unfortunately, it’s long, hard normative work with States and Non-State Actors. 

It’s not working. Why isn’t it working?

I think states and others have realized that the sanctions related to not upholding International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law are, at this point in time, relatively meaningless. They just don’t feel compelled.

 What does advocacy mean to you?

I have a relatively simple definition. First of all, I go back to the MSF approach of temoinage, which is this whole idea of being a witness, that you’re there with people witnessing what they’re experiencing. There’s a risk there that you can end up speaking for the people because you have privileged access to the western media and so on, but I think there’s something very powerful about the idea of being a witness and the solidarity that can come from that. Advocacy, for me is also about changing peoples’ behaviors. Trying to find ways to convince them through argument, effectively and emotionally, that they need to change their approach.

 What do you see as the big challenge we should advocate for that would have the strongest impact?

I wish that we could find a better way, and maybe your project touches on this, to address the fact that sometimes the numbers are so overwhelming that we can turn off. You know, for better or worse you can see how individual stories change the narrative, change the course of history in one way or another. I am not talking about changing the decision of a particular member state. For example, I am firmly convinced that horrible tragedy of the young boy whose body was washed up on the shore in Greece, that those pictures were so difficult for people to ignore, to pretend that wasn’t the reality. So, to me those kinds of human stories, the focus on the one person or the one family, are the things that make the individual impact. The Security Council might be concerned about the threat to international security and peace when large numbers of people are moving, the effects on the neighboring states. That becomes about scale, the numbers, 50,000, 100,000, 150,000. I think that can be overwhelming for many people, because you lose touch with what it means for an individual or a family.

 We all talk about human stories, even with pictures some of our audiences find them difficult to take. I struggle with numbers. Is 100,000 too many? Is one million sufficient? How many should we care about? Regardless of the numbers, whether it is one individual we should care.

That’s the point. Have you read the book Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar? It’s a set of linked non-fiction stories where she goes and meets with eight or ten different people who are extreme altruists, and will do anything for others. You can see in there as well that for some people therein lies madness, but it’s really interesting to read, and reflect on what that kind of commitment can mean. If you read Mountains Beyond Mountains about Paul Farmer and his commitment to people in Haiti, you can see the positive effects of this kind of extreme commitment. 

 What is the top one issue to advocate for that’d have the strongest impact?

I don’t know what’s the best or the single most important focus. Somehow, for me it’s about the set of protection issues, although protection, as you know is broadly defined that it can include everything. Somehow for me those protection issues need to be the ones we don’t lose. If people can exercise their rights effectively, then we’re on the right track. I am not saying humanitarian organisations should now become human rights organisations, but you know, it’s very difficult to make things better in a meaningful long-term way if people can’t exercise their rights.

 What fiction books or stories have you read set in a country with a humanitarian crisis?

I was thinking of a book that I didn’t finish because I didn’t like it. It’s called Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo, and it’s set in South Sudan during the aid effort of the late 90s. I felt he had hung out in Nairobi for awhile and got it in terms of the texture, but in my mind, it didn’t really help me to think differently about something I had experienced. You see I worked in South Sudan from 1998 to 1999. A book I really liked is The Constant Gardner by John le Carré, which you wouldn’t necessarily think of, but I think Le Carré has some fascinating descriptions of South Sudan, flying around South Sudan as part of the aid effort, and overall, his devastating way of describing how businesses and organizations can grind up everything and everyone in their path. 

 What facilitators or barriers are there for fiction to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises?

My big worry now is this whole fake news craziness. How’d you use fiction to change peoples’ approaches, but make it clear that it’s fiction? It’s one thing if it’s a story in the New Yorker for example, and it’s another thing if a story is launched out there without a context. But then I think about this story, CAT Person, by Kristen Roupenian published in the New Yorker, the one about a bad date with Me Too elements and that sparked this huge conversation on an uncomfortable romantic date because it resonated with a large group of people. This is an example of a story that changed the discourse on a topic.

 It’s a valid and important point on fake news. Suppose it’s a good work of literary fiction, what elements of fiction would facilitate or become a barrier to addressing the causes and consequences of a humanitarian crisis?

You would need extremely good writers whose writing touches you emotionally, without it being overly sentimental and so on.

 What elements of the Constant Gardener resonated with you?

There are a number of them. The determination of the wife to have her child in Nairobi Hospital with catastrophic consequences. When he’s investigating the suspicious tuberculosis drug. The descriptions of flying over South Sudan, that attack by the men on horses, the slums in Nairobi. I’ve always liked Le Carré, not all his books, but he has a certain insight in some of his earlier novels on how bureaucracies work. The Constant Gardner came out in early 2000 when the war in South Sudan was still ongoing. Have you read books by M G Vassanji – The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets? The former is set in Zanzibar during the time of independence and the latter in East Africa at the time of the first world war. His books are less about humanitarian issues, and more about the experience of Indians in Eastern. Africa. They have a strong sense of place, and I really appreciate writers who can give you a sense of place

 Tell me about a situation or a person where you have worked who has had a profound effect on you.

Sierra Leone. For various political reasons, the UN had pulled out and there was MSF and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). That was it. No donors, no NGOs. They came later. No UN agencies. On a certain day, I think it was a Sunday afternoon, for whatever reason, the rebels who controlled the city dropped a couple of mortars on a very crowded settlement in Freetown. We went to the hospital to see how we could provide assistance, and one of the doctors insisted on taking me into the morgue and there was a woman with her child there on the steel tray. That was just a very moving experience. I mean, people had been going about their daily lives and some idiot just decided to fire off a couple of mortars for God knows what reason, and without thinking of the consequences. 

 How do you cope with something like that? Does it drive you to continue?

I guess. I don’t know. You meet lots of other people. When I was Sierra Leone. Because it was so intense all the time, because several agencies had pulled out, the NGOs had relocated all their international staff, I got to know a number of our national staff much better than I’d have without intermediaries, and there was a strong sense that we were in this together doing what we could under very difficult circumstances. Then I remember the happiness of the people when that part of the conflict - it reoccurred a year later - was over, and we had all lived. That too stays with you.

 What’s your greatest hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises?

That we give them what they want. There are certain things that I can’t fix. The only thing we can fix is listening to people better, and giving them what they want. What they themselves say they need.

 How have you been able to balance work and family life?

I guess that goes in phases. I was single when I started with MSF. I met my wife and she came to Sierra Leone and Uganda with me. I joined OCHA in New York. Frankly, that was at a time, 2001, 2002, 2003, when people in NY didn’t really travel, and didn’t really go to the field on 3 to 4-month deployments as they do now. It was a very different time. I might go to DRC for 2 weeks or Uganda for 2 weeks, but that didn’t have a real effect on my family life. In the Caribbean, I travelled a lot to the ten different countries I served, but Barbados was a very calm and safe place to live, and after a two to three-day trip, I’d come home. So now being out here in a non-family duty station for more than one year, it’s super hard, it’s super hard, you know this too, you’ve deployed somewhere for a period of time away from your daughter.  Different people cope differently, have different ways of dealing with it, but for me it’s very hard to be apart from my family.

 Any advice?

No, I don’t have any advice. Everybody has a different situation and different considerations, and I’d not want to judge someone else’s decisions. My main thought is that if the job gets too hard for the family you gotta do something else. I mean I have no interest in being divorced. I’ve no interest in having a fractured relationship with my daughters. That’s what I have to manage.

 What can someone out there, someone reading this conversation, what can they do to make a difference?

I think they should find an organization which aligns with their values and interests.  There are lots of ways to identify such an organization, and lots of websites to help you to ensure that the organization has a solid track record etc. They should provide unrestricted financial support in whatever amount they want to that organization.  And they should raise their voices – however and wherever they can.

An interview with Wafaa Saeed

“Desert Flower was able to show how much suffering is inflicted on women and girls by this treatment. She was able to say what it meant to her, how it affected her, how it shaped her life. Many young girls would not be able to articulate it, to have the courage…” Wafaa Saeed, Deputy Director, East and Southern Africa region with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York discusses humanitarian action and the role of stories to raise awareness on the causes and consequences of humanitarian action.  

Tell me about your current job.

I am currently working in the Operations and Advocacy Division of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York covering the East and Southern Africa region where I provide support to our field operations. This is the most important aspect of my job. The other pillars of the division are advocacy and outreach. It’s essential that we all have the same narrative on the crises we work on.

What does a typical day look like for you?

The first thing I do when I wake up is to sort through my emails from the countries I cover, media news and twitter, people from the academia that I follow, Crisis Action, to find out if there’s anything urgent. You see there’s the time difference. Mornings are important. I can interact with my colleagues in the country offices and if there are urgent issues to respond to, I can pick up the phone and call. And then we have these internal meetings, sometimes, they’re many, but working as part of a team, it’s necessary to share information and brainstorm. I also try to meet with external partners. 

Where else have you worked?

I started to work with the United Nations in my own country, Sudan. I moved to Somalia which was my first international experience, then Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, and now New York.

Working in your own country, what was that like?

That was such an eye opener for me because I was born in Khartoum and I hadn’t seen much outside Khartoum. At the time, the media was really controlled by the government and gave a different narrative about the conflicts in the country, in the territories controlled by the armed groups. Working for the World Food Programme (WFP), I had the privilege to visit different parts of Sudan, and talk to people. My knowledge about what was happening changed and so did my perspective. It was quite empowering too as I no longer relied on newspapers and television. I could go back to Khartoum and challenge things, point out what wasn’t right. It gave me credibility in my advocacy for the people. I think that was good. But it hurt too. I believe that people should have equal rights, equal opportunities, and to see civilians in my own country lose their lives. I spoke to women who told me horror stories about being raped. It was very painful. I felt strongly about this, but I was also very much inspired that I could do something, send a different message. It was very rewarding for me to work as a national staff in my own country.

What wakes you up everyday and keeps you going?

I sincerely believe that we’re making a difference. It maybe not in every aspect of need, and there are areas where we need to do more and better. I’ve heard it from people. For example, when I worked with UNICEF in Syria, our Executive Director came to visit. We wanted him to go to an area where the conflict was active. We got government approval, but we wanted to make sure that the groups controlling the area would welcome us, and allow us to talk, and listen to the people. We were thanking them when this young man said, “We trust you.” They knew that we were helping civilians. There have been moments like this when people have said that we appreciate what you’re doing, you’re making a difference for us, you’re helping us. This is what motivates me. The belief that we’re doing something. 

How did you end up in the humanitarian sector?

When I was in middle school, I came across the United Nations Charter and it was a very special moment for me. I think I was 14 years old. I remember reading, We the peoples of the United Nations, united for a better world, about treating everybody with dignity and respect. These are values I feel strongly about. Everybody in the world, no matter what, must be treated with dignity and respect. I was drawn to this, and I remember thinking that I’d want to work for the United Nations. I studied architecture and worked for the private sector and became a Lecturer. Because I am an Architect, I thought I’d work for UN HABITAT. I applied for so many jobs, for everything, even a job as a Ware House Manager in Malakal. I was always hopeful that one day I’d be successful. Eventually, WFP employed me as a Programme Assistant. 

What is your greatest professional achievement?

When I was working with UNICEF in Somalia, there was a drought, a very bad drought. It was in the areas controlled by al-Shabaab. These areas had the highest levels of malnutrition. We had this community-based malnutrition programme. Mothers would come and we’d explain to them how to feed their babies and give them the special food they needed to survive. We also made sure that the other family members were also getting food. The children were very sick. I remember their arms, thin like pencils, and they had these big heads. It was like magic to see these children, whose mothers felt they were bringing them to the center to die, regain their strength, day by day. It made a difference for these families, and I was very proud to be part of this good story. I always remember this programme. It brought hope, and I can’t forget the look on these mothers faces. They moved me. Even in such despair, they managed to smile. 

What is your greatest professional fear?

Irrelevance, and here am talking generally about the United Nations. The UN has different roles. I believe the most important one is that of a convener, to bring everyone to the table, to create the space. To do that, we have to treat everyone equally, and have strong relationships with all the stakeholders. We can’t be biased. The UN is also a knowledge leader, a technical advisor, and an advocate for the rights of the people. At the end of the day, it’s about human rights, right holders and duty bearers, and the UN has to support both. 

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Being of service. Being part of a community that is of service. 

How would you define a humanitarian crisis?

A situation where people are impacted by a shock. This could be conflict, climate change, where peoples’ lives or overall wellbeing is at risk or risk of deteriorating significantly. It’s not just that they maybe affected. It could be the economy. Today, we’re seeing a number of overlapping shocks, and the national and local authorities, and communities don’t have the capacity to respond. Peoples’ rights being violated is often a characteristic of a humanitarian crisis. 

What about poverty? Does this fit within the definition of a humanitarian crisis?

Poverty is a development failure. There’s this issue of inequality around the world, between those who have, and those who don’t. If I think about poverty, the survival of poor people would not be threatened by their poverty; they’re not going to die because they’re poor. In some contexts, however, they’re excluded from governance, accessing basic services, and that is a problem. Then it’s a question of being discriminated against, excluded, not represented. Governments in many countries can address these challenges if they had the political will and policies in place or plans to address poverty. 

What are the main causes of humanitarian crises today?

Most of the large and complex humanitarian crises are a result of conflict. The international system hasn’t been very good at making peace and finding political solutions which leads to these humanitarian crises. We’re not addressing the political crises, the conflicts, so we end up with protracted crises, for example, South Sudan since 2013 when the current conflict erupted, Darfur since 2003. If people can get on with their lives, if they can farm, even if they don’t have much, get on with their normal lives. We’re just not good at making that happen. And during conflict, the laws of war aren’t respected, civilians aren’t spared. This is one problem. The second problem is the natural disasters. What we’re seeing with climate change is that these disasters are becoming more severe, more frequent, unpredictable and they’re not going to go away. 

What are the key consequences?

Disruption of peoples’ normal lives. You know you have a house, or a hut or a tent, you wake up, whatever you have, you have an animal you were going to sell in the market, you lose all this. Peoples’ livelihoods. They aren’t able to cope, to survive. Loss of life. I try to think about things within the sphere of human rights. So many lives lost, injured or impaired due to physical attacks. Women and girls continue to be specifically targeted and raped, sexually harassed. Even in contexts of natural disasters, they’re exploited because they’re in need. Your right to be respected, to consent if there’s a sexual act. Children are out of schools and lose their future. 

In terms of responding to all these problems, what do you see as the main challenges?

At the global level, there’s a deficit of humanity. We see an abundance of humanity and solidarity at the local level from communities and neighbors taking in refugees, displaced people. We have to be humbled by this. Powerful member states however are saying this isn’t their problem. Look at the refugee crisis. This global commitment to humanity is under threat. Also, our tools are no longer effective to protect civilians. Times have changed since 1945 when the United Nations was created following World War II. We still have a security-based approach to addressing protection problems despite evidence that this isn’t really working, and we need other kinds of solutions. And then, we’re not treating all suffering the same. We come up with people in need of assistance based on criteria we have agreed on, but we’re unable to provide them the assistance they need, and that’s difficult. 

How could these problems be resolved?

What gives me hope is that within the United Nations, there’s recognition at the highest level that we have to do things differently. We have to look for new coalitions and partnerships, and really be accountable to the affected people. We’re are not doing very well on this. This has to be a priority and we have to do better, and find a way to appeal to the public. At the end of the day, it’s the public that shapes the vision and actions of states as they’re the electorate. As the United Nations, we have to find a better way to communicate what we’re doing. The language of our reports isn’t appealing. I sincerely believe that the UN values, morality and humanity are shared globally. There’s goodness in the world, so many people wanting to do good. How can we broaden our audience? There are always solutions, we just have to find them. And it comes down to competency. At the leadership level, we have to make sure we have the best of the best because even with the most difficult governments, we should be able to find solutions, to build alliances, and that needs a lot of moral courage too.

What does advocacy mean to you?

It’s very much action related. It’s that you’d like somebody, someone, a government, a community or a person to do something to change a given situation. To convince whoever has to take action to take it to change something. Sometimes people think that we have to speak up, to say this is not right, but speaking out by itself isn’t enough: what is it that we need to change by speaking? 

And what is it that we want to change?

We need more humanity and solidarity across the globe. And it’s possible. There’s so much generosity. I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve worked. So many people would like to help. The question is how to do we turn this into a global value? I know it’s an aspiration. It has to be. For the people affected, persecuted all over the world, so we can bring that humanity, create empathy for them, and make their lives better. I want to believe in human solidarity because everyone can contribute to that bigger goal. But I can’t forget about protection which I link to accountability. There has been very little accountability or meaningful accountability for those who are guilty of atrocities. There are examples, Charles Taylor, for example, who was tried by the International Criminal Court. After so many years however, we have very few examples to show. Look at the people of Bosnia. We have to find a way to hold people who have committed atrocities accountable. This’d be a game changer. People knowing that there’ll be consequences. I think that’d be good. And of course, we have to advocate on climate change. The scariest thing is that we don’t even know how it’s going to happen.

What you are saying is that we need more humanity, more solidarity. Can we care more? Can we have more empathy, be more compassionate, more sympathetic? How do you get that? What is hindering that?

We need better evidence and facts to make a case that global humanity and solidarity is a win-win for all of us. How can we have stories that articulate that when you care about other people, the planet will be a better place for everybody? And we need champions, global leaders like late Nelson Mandela. I was reading an article on the occupied Palestinian territory crisis, the Palestinians and Israelis, and the writer made the case that in South Africa, apartheid was overcome because Nelson Mandela made it possible for everyone to win. Right now, it’s about winners and losers. We need global leadership, Mandelas who are compassionate to carry this message. We could have campaigns, the media, but the messenger is also important. For example, on the issue of refugees, we look at Angela Markel as a global leader who at her own risk and her political party took a principled stand on opening doors for the refugees.  

I’d like to talk about fiction/story telling. Can it help? What are some elements in fiction stories/storytelling that could raise awareness or motivate action to respond to a humanitarian crisis?

My experience with stories was as a child. When I grew up, I didn’t have a lot of books to read, but our grandmother used to tell us stories about our culture, our values, as a way of raising us. Reading is essential to me, but I read nonfiction. I read Desert Flower by Waris Dirie and Cathleen Miller. I actually come from Sudan, where more than ninety per cent of girls go through Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). I saw this as a child, the experiences of women around me, how this suffering followed them throughout their lives. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t end there. It ends when you go to your grave. Waris telling her story was so important. She was very open. For example, I wouldn’t even want to tell people whether I’ve gone through FGM or not even though I believe the more we can talk about our problems, the more people can connect with us. Everyone is going through a struggle and when am going through that struggle and share it, people will connect. You become vulnerable but then people will realise that we’re are all struggling.

We can talk about non-fiction. What was it about Desert Flower that resonated with you? What did it teach you about a humanitarian crisis? 

Desert flower depicts what young girls go through at a very young age. It’s not just about FGM, but personal freedom, how girls are treated very differently from boys. It’s not about religion, it’s about culture. I was so touched by it. I’ll tell you something. I really liked cycling as a child. When I was thirteen years old my mother said, “No you cannot ride a bike. I asked why.” It’s not like she had a problem. It was about the neighborhood, the community. This need to conform. That’s a big burden. Women are often put in these very difficult situations. Desert Flower was able to show how much suffering is inflicted on women and girls by this treatment. Sadly, in many areas where we work, there’s so much sexual violence towards girls and women. Many people who read the book might look at it differently. I think mothers would look at it differently because Waris was able to say what it meant to her, how it affected her, and shaped her life. Many young girls would not be able to articulate it, to have the courage, and you know communication is a skill, a gift. We’re all not able to tell stories in such a compelling way.

In your work, tell me about a person affected by a humanitarian crisis or a situation you’ve experienced that has had the most profound effect on you.

When I was in Syria. In Homs, the old part of the city had been besieged. There was an agreement to evacuate women and children. Not the men between the age of 15 to 55 years. There was this family. A father and his three daughters. He was 40 years old, but he looked sixty years old. His oldest daughter, she must have been fourteen years old, is the one who affected me the most. Their story was that a mortar had killed his wife, their mother, and his youngest son, their brother, on the spot. They found them dead on the floor in the kitchen. You’d think that the father would take care of these three girls, but this girl, she was the one taking care of her father and sisters. There she was, smiling and hugging her sisters and father. I don’t know where she drew her strength from. She started drawing. Her drawings were very beautiful. They were of positive images. Her mother with her baby brother. Maybe she was thinking they were still a family. She was drawing with so much color. I recently lost my father, but she had lost her mother so young. How these disasters can shatter people’s lives. Before that, they were a normal family, going to school, they had their house, and now their life had been shattered, and for them to see that trauma. I thought she’ll never be a child anymore. I still think of her. There were so many heartbreaking moments that day that I wanted to cry. There was this other woman who had a cat and was afraid that people would eat her cat. There was nothing left to eat so people had started to eat dogs, pets. She was so relieved that she managed to save her cat. She called him Shaggour which means fair because he was a blondish cat.

What is your hope for the people affected by humanitarian crises?

People are more resilient than we think. They’re their main source of survival, and relief comes from their resilience, that they’re able to go on with life despite the difficulties. My hope is for them to maintain their resilience and hope. I don’t know whether with time it becomes too much, and you despair, and lose hope. For many mothers, their hope is to send their kids to school. We think it’s food, but they want a future for their children. And I hope that as humanitarian workers we do justice for them, for their dignity. We’re doing a better job of listening to affected people and asking questions, but we’re not taking sufficient action. People tell us what they want, and we continue to provide pre-determined assistance, and we lack the courage to go back and explain why we cannot do certain things. That’s not good enough. If we could change that. People know better than us what they want.

What can someone out there, someone reading this conversation, what can they do to make a difference?

Be a voice to call for global humanity and if you can’t do it yourself because you need a venue, a message, being a voice is not an easy thing, if you can’t do it yourself, join a coalition or a group, and support them to amplify their message. 

An interview with Kristele Younes

“Fiction transcends the immediate material situation of that person and goes straight into their psyche, their soul. This is really what would be essential to me, it’s how I relate, how I empathize.” Kristele Younes, Section chief for West and Central Africa with the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs where she supports operations in seven countries (Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, Cameroun and the Regional Office in Senegal) discusses humanitarian action and the role for narrative fiction/storytelling to raise awareness on the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises and spark action.

What does a typical day look like for you in your current job?

In my current job, my role is to provide remote support to our operations in West and Central Africa. When I wake up, the first thing I do is look through my emails, and I usually have a lot of emails from the different countries asking for help. This ranges from staff recruitment, figuring out how to put together an access strategy, advocate for a particular issue, look for funds. I work with a team here at Headquarters in New York so my typical day would be to respond to these requests and help colleagues in the country offices to find solutions. 

And in Syria, what did a typical day look like for you there?

In Syria, there was not much of a typical day. Everyday brought a new set of emergencies or issues so a typical day would be to wake up and find out if anything urgent had happened in the night which sometimes it did, mostly fighting. I’d then go to the office, meet with my team and figure out the urgent things we had to do. These new emergencies were always on top of ongoing emergencies. Often, we had planned a convoy that we had try to make happen in a besieged area and now we had this new emergency and we had to make the response to the new emergency happen, something we hadn’t planned for. Sometimes, it’d be negotiating for access to people in an area that we hadn’t been able to go to, so really everyday in Syria was different. It was nonstop. 

What was hardest for you about your job in Syria?

The feeling of powerlessness, realizing that you can be a Head of Office but a lot of things that happen are outside the control of humanitarian workers, and ultimately are very political so you sometimes feel like a pawn where you are trying to help people, but you really depend on much bigger powerplays to get anything done. That feeling of knowing that you could be doing so much more but can’t was very difficult to cope with.

What wakes you up everyday and keeps you going?

When I was twenty-two and starting out in this career, I met this guy working with MSF (Doctors without Borders) who said to me, You just need to be okay doing a little bit sometimes for some people. It stuck with me because ultimately that’s what it’s about: being able to find satisfaction in doing a little bit sometimes for a few people. If you think you are going to change the entire world or feed an entire population or whatever…it just doesn’t work like that.

How did you end up in humanitarian aid?

I always wanted to work in the humanitarian sector. My mother is Palestinian. She was a refugee in Lebanon. My father is Lebanese. We left Lebanon for Canada when I was three years old because of the war. I grew up in an environment of always talking about war, war problems, you know the effect it has on families, civilians. We used to go back home every summer, during the war, because my whole family was there. I was always very politically aware, and I always wanted to work in this field.

What’s your greatest professional achievement so far?

To be honest, I don’t know. I find it difficult to figure out an achievement. I try to think of achievements in terms of impact that you may have had on people rather than a position or responsibility. I’ve had a few great achievements here and there. I can think about the Iraqi refugees we were able to resettle to the USA, and making sure that countries in the Middle East had enough resources to respond to refugee crises. I think in Syria, my biggest accomplishment was being able to stay true to myself and to feel that I wasn’t compromising on the things that I felt were absolutely fundamental. In such a politicized environment, and with pressures from all sides, I believe I was able to lead my team in a that upheld the humanitarian principles – independence, neutrality and impartiality and humanity. I consistently advocated for civilians wherever they were in the country, and put people ahead of everything else, even if it was sometimes very difficult to do so. 

And your greatest professional fear?

To become a bureaucrat, to push paper around and not do anything that matters. 

But the United Nations is a bureaucracy!

I think it really comes down to human beings. Even in the UN, which is a bureaucracy, I’ve seen people make things happen. If you become indulgent and cynical its very easy to hide behind the bureaucracy and say it is because I work for the UN, but if you are somebody who wants to do things, and you are in a position where you can, then the bureaucracy should not stop you.

What is your greatest hope for the people affected by crises?

It’s difficult as every crisis is different. Certainly, more self-empowerment. People should have the ability to decide for themselves what they want, how they see their future shape, what type of assistance they need, to be much less of a recipient of the aid industry, and be its guiding light. We are moving in that direction, but it’s very slow.

When you say every crisis is different can you see a thread that connects all these different crises especially the way crises impact people?

It sounds like a cliché, but the common thing I’ve seen everywhere is the worst of humanity and the best of humanity. Everywhere you see people forgetting that they’re dealing with human beings, using civilians as pawns, you know starvation, encampment, dehumanizing methods to fight wars against armed groups, and making civilians the victims of that. But then you also see the best. Those civilians themselves rising up. People organizing. Local communities coming together. People looking out for each other’s children. NGOs doing amazing work on the ground. These are the two things I see everywhere.

How do you define a humanitarian crisis?

It’s a crisis caused by either a natural disaster, the spread of a disease, or conflict that reaches a degree whereby a significant portion of the population is affected, and the government or the authorities in question don’t necessarily have the willingness or capacity to respond. 

How about poverty?

Poverty is not a condition. It’s a status, and it’s not an emerging situation, but I do think that we tend to treat poverty like a de facto thing rather than the potential warning sign that a crisis is coming. When you have high malnutrition rates that are linked to poverty, and you know, poverty is usually endemically linked to other issues, climate issues, lack of land, inequality, poor governance, lack of access to resources, etc., it is a good indicator that there might be a crisis down the line.

What do you see as the main causes of humanitarian crises today?

Climate change is definitely a huge issue and we are seeing it more and more. We’ve seen it for a while but called it differently, access to water or access to arable land, fighting for dwindling resources. Sectarianism of any kind and proxy wars. For sectarianism, people feel ostracized; they don’t feel represented, they don’t feel spoken for, and they are often looking for something to belong to, fighting for a meaning of their lives. 

What do you see as the key consequences of humanitarian crises on people?

Besides the obvious ones, inadequate food, nutrition, shelter, access to health care, the two that resonate with me are linked to what we call in the humanitarian community protection, this inability to live your life as it should be, to live as a subject of rights and be respected. The second thing is the question of dignity: to be treated as a recipient of aid, of misery, and not be the owner of your own future.

So really it comes to the person not necessarily the material needs although these too are important.

The material needs are obviously essential, they’re issues of survival, but being hungry or sleeping in a tent isn’t what leaves lasting trauma. It’s having felt less than human or not having felt safe in any way or not having had a voice about where you are going to go, how you are going to live. 

What do you see as the key challenges to responding to all these problems?

I think first and foremost is the lack of political will, but it is also very much the general disease of indifference. I think we struggle more and more to care. We’re getting hit bit by bit by the syndrome of too many problems. There are too many problems and you have to choose your battles. If you start caring about everything you’ll go into depression. It’s difficult to put energy into every single problem and respond to every single one. Indifference really is what scares me the most.

If indifference is the main challenge, how do we change that?

It’s very hard. We have more information than we’ve ever had before. Most people at least have access to internet and so many other sources of information. Not knowing isn’t necessarily the issue. It’s relating. A few weeks ago, I read an article about a dog that was found alone on a bus. Someone snapped its picture and put in on social media and everybody and their mother wanted to adopt the dog. There are tons of dogs in shelters that don’t get adopted. They’re not on Facebook. There’s not that outcry. Of course, am not comparing this to a humanitarian crisis, but my point is that it’s very difficult to understand what will spark actual care from people today. For example, living here in the USA at the moment it’s difficult to understand how much more can be said about the situation of immigrants at the border, the family separation. Nobody can say they don’t know and yet this fact that it still feels like the other, that it couldn’t happen to you, I think that’s fundamentally the problem and am not sure advocacy can change that. Something much more than advocacy has to change that.

What do you think that thing should be?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’d be interested in speaking to psychologists about how you break down the barrier of the other. We’ve read a lot of books about this, e.g. The Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. It’s fascinating because it brings you back to moments in history or a time where you think surely, I’d have done something different, surely, I would have, but maybe not, you don’t know, and not all these people were monsters, how do we become indifferent to people’s suffering? I think there’s a lot of work to be done and a lot of discussions to be had with psychology specialists. I often regret that we don’t study psychology in humanitarian work. We really need it.

What does advocacy mean to you?

First and foremost, it’s about amplifying voices of those that don’t necessarily have access to people who have the power to influence, to make change. It’s about making sure messages are passed to people who have the capacity to make change possible. Those messages need to be strongly anchored in the reality of people, in their voices, and the more people can advocate for themselves the better. Sometimes we speak for people without necessarily having consulted them on what it is exactly they want. Fundamentally it’s about bringing that message to people who can make change.

What books have you read set in a humanitarian setting?

A thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini which really impacted me in many ways. Emergency Sex too, but it’s nonfiction.

How did it impact you?

I read it when I was on mission in Afghanistan. I had previously lived in Afghanistan for two years. It’s a country that’s very close to my heart. I love that country. I was working with a team of Afghans who were absolutely amazing. The book is written by an Afghan and it only features Afghans and it reflected a lot of things that my colleagues had said to me about the war, the Soviet occupation, the Taliban and the characters were incredibly human. The lead characters were women portrayed in all their complexity and not only as victims of the Taliban regime. Women who were much more than that. They were human beings with complex emotions, thoughts, and the book did an amazing job of showing that.

What did that book teach you about the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan?

What it taught me was that every time I met somebody, an anonymous face, in a camp of internally displaced persons, to remember that there is a lot of complexity behind them, that they’re not just numbers, recipients of aid. We tend to forget that these are people with very rich lives and families and emotions, you know, flaws and qualities.

If you think about this book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is there a role for narrative fiction/storytelling to raise awareness on the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises and spark action?

There’s a huge role for fiction. First and foremost, to vulgarize the issue, to humanize, and bring the crises to a larger audience. More people read fiction than biographies. Fiction reminds people that crises happen to people, and can happen to us. This brings us back to our conversation earlier, about indifference, maybe this is a way to mobilize more care, and less indifference.

What elements of narrative fiction/storytelling can facilitate this?

The complexity of the person facing that crisis and more importantly the relationships this person has. I think we relate to more people when we know that they are loved, that they have somebody in their lives, children, a mother. We all do have a mother, children, or a partner. Fiction transcends the immediate material situation of that person and goes straight into their psyche, their soul. This is really what would be essential to me, it’s how I relate, how I empathize.

Tell me about a person affected by a humanitarian crisis that has had a profound impact on you. 

I remember when I was twenty years old. I was volunteering in the West Bank in the occupied Palestinian territories during summer. I remember being at a check point and there was an old woman who wanted to cross the checkpoint to go sell her mint, I think it was mint, on the other side. I remember the soldiers wouldn’t let her cross and she was crying, she was really an old woman and she was saying, I just want to go sell my mint, I just want to go sell my mint, and I remember absolutely being heartbroken by this and feeling the entire weight of Palestinian conflict in that particular moment. And in Syria, I was in a place that was being evacuated after it had been besieged for years. I met a young man who was to be evacuated in the north of Syria. I remember him grabbing me and asking me to help him reunite with his fiancée who was in another area that had also been besieged. He was desperate to make sure they were evacuated to the same place. That was his number one concern. It’s stories like this that stay with you. It’s not necessarily the worst situation I’ve ever seen or the most miserable people I’ve ever met, but certainly it’s the most compelling because of the humanity of the situation.

Empathy Is Not Enough

In her theme essay, Empathy Is Not Enough, published by talking writing, http://talkingwriting.com/empathy-not-enough Laurette Folk  explores how great works of literature and art can alleviate suffering. She says, “Empathy is only the starting point. Readers can empathize with the plight of characters they love, as I did with Stephen Dedalus; people can be captivated by works of art for very personal reasons. Yet, I believe that when somebody says art matters, it’s because he or she has been moved beyond personal illumination to act more compassionately in the world.”

And she concludes her essay with this reflection: “Works of art and literature can help us acknowledge these commonalities, yet it’s a subtle thing. Most people aren’t immediately aware of how such empathy can spark compassionate action. It takes time for empathy to sink in and cause a shift in beliefs. It takes time for this internal shift to have conceivable, positive repercussions—repercussions that run the gamut from a simple act of kindness to writing your own novel to creating an organization that fosters world peace.”

Humanitarian Crisis And Fiction: The Complete Truth Must be Told

In this article – Humanitarian Crisis And Fiction: The Complete Truth Must be Told – published by inter-action, Vol 1 Quarter 3, https://lilainteractions.in/humanitarian-crisis-and-fiction-the-complete-truth-must-be-told/, I explore how fiction can be used to tell the full story of  people affected by crises, which reports are unable to do.

Introduction

I relish telling stories. I enjoy listening to stories. I make up stories for my daughter who enjoys them except when I forget she’s eight and include scenes of gore. My best experience, listening to stories, was as a child, listening to my grandmother tell us stories as she roasted maize. My siblings and I would sit around the fire, waiting for the maize, our faces the color of fire, breathing in the smoke and smell of maize. These stories, mostly folklore, with their teachings, were always captivating to my seven-eight-nine-ten-year-old self. There was something very intimate about that setting that I long to recreate. I wish I could remember them in detail so I could write them. My grandmother has since passed on.  

When I read a story, am immersed, and I’II think about the characters long after I’ve put the book down. I’ve read a lot about how great literature leads to empathy, sympathy and compassion. This has sparked my interest to find out if stories can lead to action to find solutions to the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises. Why?

An average of 345 disasters per year affect 153 million people around the world and force more than 40,000 people every single day from their homes. In recent years, more than 120 million people each year have needed urgent humanitarian assistance and protection. There are more crises, affecting more people, and lasting longer today than a decade ago. More than 1 per cent of people across the planet are caught up in major humanitarian crises and this year, the number of people in need of protection and assistance is nearly 132 million people (OCHA 2019). Given the scale of the humanitarian crisis, its impact on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and peace and security, we must take action to find solutions to the drivers of humanitarian crises.

It is in this context that I’d like to have a conversation on how narrative fiction/storytelling can be used to advocate and mobilize action to resolve the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises. I’II review fiction stories set in countries facing humanitarian crises, review literature on the question – can reading lead to empathy and sympathy and inspire action, interview humanitarian practitioners, academics, authors, refugees and internally displaced people on this question, write about select current humanitarian crises and run a book club, and a podcast.