Update Against Hunger - December 7, 2005
Field Notes:
A Big Surprise for Many Would-Be Expats
Dear Action Against Hunger Team Member,
We get résumés constantly from applicants eager to charge into the field, to cuddle and spoon-feed starving babies, to dig up a carefully chosen shovelful of dirt that miraculously exposes a stream of clean water, or to enlighten distraught refugees about staying hygienic in their camps. We're always happy to hear from idealistic candidates for our expatriate jobs, but the work we'll ask them to perform is often quite different from the tasks they foresee.
Our expats are most often managers rather than miracle workers. They typically supervise other staffers, hired locally, who perform our humanitarian acts. Action Against Hunger's managers must oversee budgets and stocks of supplies, and they're likely to spend as much time at a desk clattering away on a computer as they will meeting the beneficiaries they've traveled halfway around the world to aid. We depend on our managers to accomplish our goals, but candidates must realize the true nature of their jobs, and often they're taken aback.
Cathy Skoula
Executive Director,
Action Against Hunger (ACF) USA
New from US Headquarter:
Our New HIV/AIDS Report
In recognition of World AIDS Day, December 1, we released a report highlighting the interrelation of AIDS and hunger. The report describes how hunger and malnutrition can impact victims of HIV/AIDS, and it also discusses the hunger and malnutrition that HIV/AIDS can cause.
Malnutrition causes deficiencies in its victims similar to those caused by HIV. Moreover, when victims of malnutrition are also HIV positive, their immune systems have difficulty slowing the infection's progress and preventing the onset of full blown AIDS. An adequate diet is essential in delaying the evolution of HIV infection into AIDS.
In addition, those who are HIV positive frequently suffer from fever and diarrhea, impairing the effectiveness of their digestive systems and reducing their ability to absorb nutrients. This can lead to weight loss and eventually to malnutrition, further impeding their ability to fight infections and disease. As a result, HIV positive patients need a higher caloric intake than someone not infected with the disease.
And because victims of HIV/AIDS are often unable to continue working, agricultural production in a community can suffer, leading to malnutrition among victims' neighbors.
Action Against Hunger is working to address these issue. From taboo-breaking treatment and prevention strategies, to targeted feeding and food security programs, we approach the consequences that HIV/AIDS and malnutrition have on each other through innovation, respect, and community involvement. Read our report on the problem and our evolving solutions:
ACF World AIDS Day Dossier 2005
News from the field:
Priorities Shift in Pakistan
We seldom launch a mission without careful research in advance to ensure that we'll meet a community's needs. In Pakistan, however, the 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8 caused such sudden mass destruction that within hours it was clear that we were needed, so we immediately dispatched a team to deliver food.
But we soon estimated that Pakistan's latest harvest had produced enough food to feed survivors. Instead, towns had been totally leveled, so Pakistan's most urgent need was for tents that could protect refugees from the cold of an imminent Himalayan winter. We immediately revised our priorities.
Then we recognized that water-and-sanitation facilities were insufficient where refugees were gathering. So we focused intently on wat/san installationsonly to revise our estimates of food stocks soon afterward, because careful investigation proved they were less plentiful than we had figured. Now our efforts concentrated equally on food, wat/san, and tents.
Next (are you still with us?), the U.N. and Pakistani authorities announced that the supply of tents was adequate but food supplies were not. And then we learned of an epidemic of diarrhea at a camp where we weren't working, so we intensified our wat/san assistance. And now that winter has arrived, many tents in place have proven inadequately winterized, so replacements are needed urgently.
In short, Pakistan is proving once again that we have to stay flexible, that wherever we work, we may need to switch priorities swiftlyeven daily. A careful and protracted survey might have focused our effort in Pakistan more acutely from the beginning, but the immensity and suddenness of crisis didn't give us time. Also, aftershocks continue to plague our mission there. The ground keeps shifting under our feet, both literally and figuratively.
Person Profile:
Profile SONIA SEZILLE
Working in Congo"A Fantastic Year"Sonia Sezille is a French citizen who has never lived in France and who speaks English with a blended Australian-English accent. Her father was French, her mother was British, and Sonia was born in New Caledonia in the South Pacific. She grew up mostly in Australia and England but now feels as if she doesn't have a home anywhere"except where my friends live." Many of them, she explains, live in England, but the rest are scattered around the world.
Sonia earned a B.A. Honors degree in business and finance from Brunel University in London after absorbing "London capitalism," she explains: "If you live in London you naturally go into business." After graduating, she worked for Sony, first in Amsterdam, later in Shanghai "earning lots of money," she says, "which allowed me to live well and travel." But when NATO bombed the Balkans, she says, she began to question the life she was leading. "How come so close to us?" she wanted to know.
So Sonia left the business world, earned a master's degree in political science in Sydney, then sent her résumé to various non-governmental organizations, including Action Against Hunger-USA, which she discovered through a friend. We forwarded her credentials to Paris, and our French headquarters hired her for six months as a logistician in Monrovia, "which I absolutely loved," she says. There she helped train staff and coordinate projects throughout Liberia while learning how Action Against Hunger works. Next our New York headquarters hired her as Head of Project in Uvira, D.R. Congo.
"It was a fantastic year," Sonia says. She managed a staff of 50 that ran two Therapeutic Feeding Centers and nine Supplemental Feeding Centers and also taught hygiene and nutrition to 1,000 Congolese a week. Her team also initiated home treatment in outlying districts and launched 80 collective farming projects that coordinated 35 farmers cultivating a single field per project.
Having completed her stint, Sonia was recently debriefed in New York and Paris, and she looks forward to more humanitarian work, ideally for us. Humanitarian work, she explains, "is the only job that makes me get up at six a.m. everyday and say, 'Yes, I want to get to work.'"
