Interested in Humanitarian Aid Work?

have you ever thought about doing
humanitarian work welcome to
watchmojo.com
I’m your host Leila today we bring you
my possible job who tells us about her
own humanitarian aid involvement what
were your early interests and
involvement that led you to do
humanitarian work well I think I was
born with it some people are born to
there they want to be dancers or singers
I just wanted to do mentoring work so I
started a long time ago with my masters
in New York and so an internship at the
United Nations and you know doing an
internship is always a good way to get
to know an organization and to get to
know the people and after that I was
able to land a job with the United
Nations in the field
what were your positions in the UN and
the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Italy while I was in Rome I was working
for the World Food Programme and there I
was in charge of needs assessment so
basically when a new catastrophe would
hit I would be sent out there to
evaluate how much food aid was needed
and to whom we should send it in which
type of food aid so this is how I
traveled the whole world and then I went
to the Congo for two years and there I
was in charge of coordinating do you
mention aid for the entire Congo so
imagine that we had a budget of about
400 million dollars we had donors from
all over the world Canada Japan USA and
so on so forth we had a name blood that
I would have to redistribute with a team
of people also to monitor to ensure that
the money that we were giving to those
projects were well spent
how did you work together with
peacekeepers there in the Congo this is
the biggest peacekeeping force in the
world called ma nuke I worked with a lot
of them in the field because they
deployed all over the country because
often I couldn’t travel by myself there
are more than a hundred thousand UN
peacekeepers deployed worldwide we hear
of misconduct by them in Democratic
Republic of Congo
what were your own observations think
about it you send people away from the
families for over a year to 18 months
and I met those men in places extremely
harsh no running water
the Sun is sestra me hot you don’t have
really the food that you usually eat
this is not to excuse what those
gentlemen have done okay by any means
but yet think that those people are put
in very harsh conditions and sometimes
their behaviors are not up to the
standards
how relevant is violence and conflicts
to areas that need humanitarian aid
usually when you have conflict that
means you have displacement usually so
that means that you do need a mentor an
aid unless the people are capable to
cope so this is why they sent teams like
I used to go to assess what are the
coping mechanism that people have
because if you have an earthquake would
you give food and shelter to people we
have a lot of money in the bank but if
you have you know the same kind of
earthquake somewhere else in China in
the backyards then you know those people
don’t have a big bank account and they
can rely upon you always have to see you
know who needs it and who doesn’t so
conflict does bring a lot of suffering
especially for women and children based
on your experience what makes
humanitarian issues political issues
because they’re intertwined you see
people dying and you have to have
governments responding but the whole
problem for dinner nations is hard to be
able to intervene I think we sit right
now with in bad way with Mugabe I think
van ki-moon has been very clear you know
to not recognize the elections we want
countries to be wholesome and yet we
want countries to be doing well and
sometimes it poses a problem and I think
the United Nations needs to address this
issue in the near future because it’s
been happening a lot in the past few
years as you see thank you very much
nice meeting you