Update Against Hunger - April 5, 2006
Field Notes:
Hiring the Perfect Team
Dear Action Against Hunger Team Member,
Several positions are open at our New York headquarters, and we're interviewing not only U.S. citizens but candidates from overseas as well. This can be challenging. A résumé from a French applicant, for example, won't editorialize; it will tell you simply a candidate's past titles and duties. A résumé from an American, however, will tell you all that and morehow a budget grew under the candidate's leadership, how many beneficiaries the applicant served, and so on. A manager can't simply compare the two. And simple face-to-face questions such as, "Tell me three good things about yourself and three bad things," can panic candidates from cultures that teach children never to bragor never to acknowledge a fault.
Hiring becomes even more daunting in the field. In the developed world, workers usually have enough familiarity with foreign customs to finesse difficult questions. But when you arrive in a developing country and must put together a team of a dozen nationals, competent candidates can be at a loss to answer questions that they haven't anticipated. They may not even understand the questions.
Yet assembling the right team at home and abroad is, in the final analysis, the most important task we perform. The successful completion of all our other tasks depends on it.
Cathy Skoula
Executive Director,
Action Against Hunger (ACF)
New from US Headquarter:
Our Opportunities for Interns
We depend on interns and volunteers at our New York headquarters to help keep our missions in the field on track. At the moment, for example, we have four interns (unpaid though they receive a stipend to help with the cost of lunch and transportation) who represent a variety of backgrounds and goals.
- Dana Finkelstein, 19, is already a veteran of humanitarian work. She grew up in Roslyn, Long Island, and at 16 went to work in the Dominican Republic building houses and helping to set up a day camp. It was her first exposure to international poverty, and it influences her world outlook even today. At college, she volunteered for local aid programs, including delivering food to AIDS patients, and she attended an Outward Bound-type program in Costa Rica that sent her to Nicaragua to restore a wildlife refuge and (again) build houses. Because Dana wanted to see a relief organization from the inside, she scanned Idealist.org on the Internet, found us, and applied to be an intern. We've put her to work at fundraising, responding to e-mail inquiries, and creating how-to materials for our website that will enable students to create their own fundraisers.
- Veronica Moreno, 31, came to us from Madridless because she wanted to work in humanitarian relief than because she wanted to follow her boyfriend to New York (where he's researching at New York University), and an intern's visa permits her stay in the U.S. for 18 months. She studied physics as a university student in Spain, then she went to work for a series of commercial businesses in networking services, outsourcing, and mobile-phone technology. When Veronica realized she needed a long visa to move temporarily to New York, she contacted Cultural Homestay International, a European organization that finds positions for Europeans abroad and which contacted us. Veronica's business background was a good fit with our business department's needs, and once in our offices she came to appreciate our relaxed informality. Now, she says, she has no desire to return to her old jobs.
- Lauren O'Mara, 21 is a political science student at Fordham who hopes to work full-time someday for a non-profit organization. Her coursework has covered such topics as politics and economic globalization as well as the political economy of poverty. When she realized that Fordham would give her credit for an internship, she found us through Idealist.org, hoping to learn what working for a humanitarian group might be like. She expected to be given tedious fundraising tasks such as filing and data entry, but in fact she has been given considerably more responsibility in our communications department. She's even writing an article that will be included in our 2005 annual report. Lauren's three-month commitment ends when she graduates in May, but her glimpse into the world of NGOs has only intensified her desire to stay there.
- Stefanie Schlueter, 23, studied business administration near her home in Cologne, Germany, and has had internships all over the world. She worked in sales of fire-fighting equipment in the U.K.; in General Electric's human resources department in Australia; and at home in Germany in the shipping department of a chemical company and as a tax auditor. She too found us through Cultural Homestay International, and during her four-month commitment to us we've put her to work on a variety of chores, including organizing our photo library and setting up our Restaurants Against Hunger promotion. Someday, Stefanie says, she hopes to be the chief executive of an international business, but right now, she says, she's discovering that work can be fun.
A Singular Opportunity
More News from Our Headquarters in New York
Nicholas D. Kristof, a New York Times columnist, wants to take an American college student over the age of 18 to Africa. He writes: "If your dream trip doesn't involve a five-star hotel in Rome or Bora-Bora, but a bedbug-infested mattress in a malarial jungle as hungry jackals yelp outsidethen read on." His itinerary, not yet determined, may include "a jaunt through rural Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa, or an odyssey from the coast of Cameroon inland to the heart of the Central African Republic." Interested candidates should send him an essay of fewer than 700 words on why they want to go, along with two letters of recommendation, one from a teacher. For more details, go to http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/winatrip.
News from the field:
Preparing for the Avian Flu
Avian flu, first reported in Asia, has spread to Europe and Africa. Staffs at our Missions have yet to encounter it, but cases have been reported in Mongolia and Pakistan, and the disease is suspected to be present in D.R. Congo.
All current evidence indicates that the virus doesn't spread easily from poultry to humans or from person to person. The greatest risk to humans seems to come from close contact with diseased household flocks during slaughtering, defeathering, butchering, and preparation for cooking. No case of human infection has been linked to exposure to wild birds, nor have cases been linked to the consumption of properly cooked poultry or eggs, even in households with flocks that had the disease.
The socio-economic consequences of avian flu, however, are likely to be heavy, affecting small producers who use poultry farming as an income source and as a major source of protein. This year, only three ACF MissionsMongolia, Northern Caucasus, and Sri Lankahad poultry-raising programs for beneficiaries, but now these have been terminated, mainly because if the birds die from avian flu, the programs clearly won't be sustainable. In addition, we can't guarantee that the birds in our programs will be free of infection or that beneficiaries won't market sick birds outside our supervision. Nor can we ensure hygiene in the field that's necessary to eliminate risk to our beneficiaries and staff.
At this time, we aren't advocating slaughtering the chickens previously distributed in our canceled programs, though we're training beneficiaries in protective measures and hygienic practices. But an ACF committee in Paris is monitoring developments regarding the disease and will help us modify our protocols if necessary.
Person Profile:
Profile - Georges Tabbal
Georges Tabbal was born and raised in Beirut during civil unrest that sent Lebanese NGOs scrambling to help victims. Inspired by their work, as a teenager Georges volunteered for the Lebanese Red Cross, organizing events and fundraising.
Georges' home is still in Beirut, but he earned his bachelor degree in civil engineering in Montreal and his master's in environmental engineering and water quality in Boston. As a graduate student he spent months in the Himalayas researching a thesis in Nepal on water filters designed to remove arsenic. Afterward he worked as an intern with a research institute in South Africa.
Next, Georges took a job in the commercial sector, working for a civil engineering firm in New York that developed local projects for such clients as Donald Trump. But, he says, "I wanted my work to amount to something. In the private world, you work very hard to make some people richer." Which was not a life he wanted. So he searched the Internet for a non-religious and non-political NGO that could use his skills. He found us.
In Georges' first assignment for Action Against Hunger, which he recently completed, he served as project coordinator/water-and-sanitation officer in Nakasongola in central Uganda. He was in charge of opening the base, finding its location, hiring and training its staff, establishing its procedures, and establishing relationships with other aid organizations and governmental authorities. Once the base was operational, he supervised the drilling and rehabilitation of boreholes, the construction of latrines, and educating the community about borehole maintenance and hygiene.
In Uganda, Georges was struck by the lack of assistance he received from local authorities and by a staff that was dedicated but not always because of humanitarian ideals. "It was not really an obstacle," he says. "It was just a surprise." But the experience hasn't cooled his own dedication, and his next assignment for us will send him to D.R. Congo as a water-and-sanitation officer. Long-term, Georges says, "I want to stay in this field and hopefully move to a policy-level position
