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.