Bright Ideas with Daniel Wordsworth

Continued from Bright Ideas with Daniel Wordsworth

Wordsworth: That happened in Rwanda. It happened in Ghana. The international community has gone through great hand wringing over that. And, a whole bunch of things have happened since then to make these kinds of things more difficult.

That said, I always liked Mother Teresa's line. Mother Teresa was in Calcutta looking after people who were dying. And, she was approached by a journalist who said to her, "Don't you think you're focused on the wrong thing? Why don't you focus on preventative care, so that people don't have to be dying in these hospices? Why do you focus so much on the dying? Why don't you focus more on the living?" And, Mother Teresa looked at that journalist and said, "I think God is speaking to you. I think God is speaking to you."

Now, what did she mean? "If you see so clearly that somebody needs to do preventative health care, go my son and do it. Me, I'm focused on this person who's dying next to me."

In our community, I would say we are a humanitarian organization. We are focused on people who have been forced out of no will or desire of their own to flee from their homes. They desperately, after a long journey, want to be met by people who care for them, who can provide them and keep their children alive. And, I want to be with an organization that will stay with them to help rebuild their homes. That's what we do.

There are other people who are actively engaged at political level. There are military forces actively involved in trying to stop these things happen. We are all working together to make a difference. Are we doing this imperfectly? Yes. Are there things that we could learn? Yes. What I do know is true of our community is that we are constantly trying to learn those lessons because in the end, we have people on the ground in these countries who are risking their lives everyday to make this happen. You don't think that if those people knew a better way that they wouldn't desperately try to do it.

We trust imperfect forces to work with us in the same way that we're imperfect. The UN is working on these issues. And to those journalist that are ... It's not the fact that we run a camp that keeps that going. It's because perhaps the international community lacks the courage to go in and rip those guns from the hands of those people. That, maybe, is the bigger question.

Wordsworth: Yes. And, by the way, that's exactly what happened in Sierra Leone in the end. The Brits sent their paratroopers in and the whole thing was over in one week.

Smith: Those British paratroopers are used to...

Wordsworth: They're tough boys.

Smith: Yeah. They...

Wordsworth: I saw the same thing in East Timor. The militia were running wild until the [indecipherable 62:23] arrived.

Smith: Nothing like patrolling an old empire to stiffing the spine... [crosstalk]

Wordsworth: Stiffing the spine...

Smith: ...of paramilitaries, right?

Smith: We're going to take a couple of quick questions from the audience and then wrap up.

Here we go. Your name and where you're from please.

Kate: My name is Kate and I am from Minneapolis. And, I was wondering We touched on two hot button countries, Haiti and Somalia. And, Darfur and Sudan have been obviously very big in the US news.

And I'm just wondering, I know you guys are in Juba, and that's in the south, and how that's going with the elections coming up, and if the international community is expecting more IDPs, or is everyone just sitting in the office with the TV on watching what's happening?

Wordsworth: No. That's a tricky one in some ways. What I will say, though, is that the international community is doing a lot of preparations for a whole range of scenarios that will occur.

So no one will be surprised no matter what happens, because, basically, every contingency is being planned for. That includes us, but it also includes everybody involved in this kind of thing. So there's a whole bunch of stuff happening at levels.

Everybody's hoping that the referendum...there's a referendum that's being held about whether the south of Sudan should move into a separate country. So far registrations are happening. It's going smoothly. People are talking. And so, hopefully, it will happen all very well. But people are planning for all these different cases.

Smith: OK, then, over here. She has to hold the mike. [laughter]

Jesse: My name's Jesse. I've worked in the humanitarian sector, and one thing that struck me that's unique about it is, you're essentially trying to put yourself out of a job, to become obsolete, like you solved the problem.

How's that part of your strategy specifically in Haiti. What are you going to do so that you won't be needed anymore, and how long should that take, do you think? What's a reasonable amount of time?

I worked in Sri Lanka, and NGOs had been there for years, and it was hard to tell sometimes how long was too long.

Smith: I guess what that really asks is, "How do you know when you have succeeded in a given place?"

Wordsworth: So I'm going to answer that question as if you were asking that of the American Refugee Committee, not the community as a whole, yeah? So, we have a clear mandate when it comes to responding to things like Haiti, and that is just briefly, because I know I've obviously talked too long, and there's not enough time for enough questions.

But a thing like Haiti, there are three stages that occur. After the crisis, there's an emergency relief phase, there's what's called a recovery phase, and then it moves into a third phase called reconstruction.

The idea of the emergency phase in Haiti, for example, went from January 12th to the 1st of May. And your goal there, how do you know if you've succeeded? That is if people are alive, and that people haven't kept dying after the event. So you've provided immediate care.

There's a set of what's called "sphere guidelines" that tell us the minimum level of service that we have to provide across all those 10 sectors that I mentioned earlier. So we get in and rapidly provide that level of service and keep people alive.

The next phase you move into is the recovery phase. That's where you're essentially stabilizing those populations and preparing them for reconstruction. That may take a year, or in the case of Haiti, probably two or three years. And then a reconstruction phase happens where you put people back into their homes.

We then typically leave after that time in a place like Haiti. We don't get involved in long term poverty issues in that country.

We are basically...when it comes back to a point that's better than it was before the earthquake, but where people are basically back up on their feet, back in homes, back in their schools, back with health services, then we feel like we can then leave that environment with a clear conscience.

Sometimes in a case where there's been refugees who actually go back into...return with them into their country and rebuild communities, but we in ARC don't get involved in long term poverty or development activities.

So we have at each of those three phases have fairly clear objectives for us so that we know, "OK, this has happened. We can move to the next stage, or we can move to the end of that time."

Smith: We'll take two more questions, so if you have one, don't be shy. Go ahead.

Amy: Hi. My name is Amy, and I'm from St. Paul. And I wanted to first just thank you for the work that you're doing with ARC, and was I hoping that you could speak for just a minute about fostering resilience, both among your employees and among the IDPs and refugees?

Wordsworth: Good question. Well, we build...actually our approach is built around the innate resilience that people have anyway. What we try to do there is one we believe in inherently, that refuges bring a lot to whatever environment they're in, and that they're struggling to express those things or to actually fulfill those things in that setting.

So what we do, for example, is in a place like Haiti and you have resilience affects different population groups at different amounts. Like the resilience of an eight year old versus an 80 year old is quite different, and the way you respond to that is quite differently. So I'll take just some quick notions.

What we will do in a place like Haiti is for adults, we will try to get them back into useful, gainful employment. In our clinics we use Haitian doctors and Haitian nurses, typically from the very camp where they're working.

To run our child friendly spaces where we're working with children in the camp that they're Haitian teachers that run those spaces, and they come from the camp themselves.

So we actually work on this assumption that they have this resilience, and we allow them then to express that and to then shape the outcomes and shape the way the programs go based on that resilience and based on their own values.

Of the 1700 or so employees that you mentioned at the beginning of this, 95 percent of our staff are refugees themselves or from the local communities. We have a very strong orientation to actually working with refugees.

We now have a person running two of our camps in Rwanda. He was a former Liberian refugee. We met him first working at one of our camps in Guinea. He's moved his way up. Now he runs camps now in Rwanda, and he's like a young star in our organization. So we have strong belief in them.

How do we work that with our own staff? We have sort of a staff care thing that we do, but in the end the thing that makes us most resilient, I know this will sound corny, but people ask me all the time, "How do your staff, and how do you keep doing this for all this time?"

And the answer is a simple one, is because it does actually work. Like we have the best...we are in the best situation. Because for some people, you can look at Haiti and think, "What can I do?"

We can look at a situation like the cholera and do something about it. Now I can't tell you how that is just a great situation to be in, and it's great for your personal resilience, and it stops burnout.

Smith: One last question from over here. Tell us who you are.

Amal Elmi: Hi. My name's Amal Elmi, and I'm from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And my question is back to the project that you're currently working on, the Somalia project. And my question is...well maybe I heard wrong, and maybe I'd like you to correct me, but when...well, we know that Somalia has been at war for almost two decades, and that it's...most of the world has practically given up on us.

And so when you say that you're taking your organization and the relief work you want to do, and are you...you did say that you're going to areas like Somaliland, and Puntland that want to accept help.

But what about the rest of the country that is still involved in the war, and what about the people who most likely most need it? Are we just going to ignore them, or not ignore them, but just say, "Well, we can't help you right now, at least until the war stops, " or do you guys have any plans for them?

Wordsworth: I would like to say, this is a thing we constantly talk about. It's...the south has got really terrible things happening. It's really appalling. But a lot of people from the south have gone into Galkayo, for example, on the border area, so there are 70, 000 people displaced around Galkayo from the south. So that's the group that the council is focused on are the people who've been displaced from the south into those camp environments. In a place like Somalia, we can do something there. We can do something now. And then we can grapple with the problem of how we can then expand down into Mogadishu in the south.

But we also...you know Dr. Hower is arriving this week. We can also help people like that who are working and running hospitals in Mogadishu. We have to do something, but we have to be able to start.

And frankly, we have to be able to get our team in there, and they have to be able to operate safely enough that they'll survive the experience. And so all we can do right now is start in Puntland. But we're not forgetting what's happening in the south. Thank you.

Smith: Thanks very much, Daniel Wordsworth.

Wordsworth: Thank you.

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Transcription by CastingWords