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.