What it's really like to be an emergency response officer

“Emergency response” often conjures idealized images of aid workers doling out food and medicine to exhausted families as they arrive at a refugee camp or consoling children left traumatized by acts of violence. But sitting long into the night working on proposals, budgets and reports, I discovered that the office rats in Yangon normally started scuttling around at 9 p.m., that the barbecue place downstairs stopped serving food at 10 p.m. and that cycling home under a pale full moon through the rutted and muddy backstreets was a respite to the previous 12 hours staring at a computer screen. In reality, an international emergency response staff member will spend more time in front of a desk and at coordination meetings. Yet the excitement of winning a major grant after a team has spent many long nights pulling it together — knowing that this money will help secure food for families suffering the effects of conflict — can be exceptionally rewarding. The work is fast-paced and challenging — but not in the ways one might expect, something I learned firsthand last year as part of the Rakhine emergency response in Myanmar. In 2012, brutal violence in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State between Rakhine Buddhists and the persecuted Muslim minority group, the Rohingya, left more than 100 dead, thousands of homes burned and 140,000 people displaced and living in makeshift camps. U.N. agencies and international nongovernmental organizations scrambled to provide temporary shelter, food, medical supplies, safe spaces for children and basic sanitation facilities to help keep people alive and reduce suffering. One year later, the response continues, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children still live in camps, dependent on aid agencies. Unlike some emergencies, this was sudden onset. Like a natural disaster, events happened quickly and required an immediate scale-up of resources and staff to meet people’s needs. Many organizations have dedicated teams of international staff employed on contracts that move them swiftly between countries where needed. These are often the first to be sent to a sudden-onset emergency, and comprise a range of disciplines, such as team leader, who manages the whole response; logistician, who organizes the purchase, storage and distribution of equipment and supplies (many people say that an emergency response is 80 percent logistics, 20 percent everything else); and technical experts such as nutritionists or water engineers, who advise on specific programs. My deployment was a little less orthodox. Having just finished a role in London, I received a call asking if I was able to fly out to Myanmar within the next few days. I agreed without hesitation. As a junior response officer, the focus of my role depends on the needs of the particular emergency response and can cover anything from general administration, proposal writing or coordination. In this case, the priority was to manage the patchwork of emergency grants that financed our organization’s response to the crisis. The conflict in Rakhine had spread with devastating swiftness, and agencies had to bring in funding very quickly from a wide array of sources in order to help those people displaced as quickly as possible. Now, months after the initial surge of violence, each individual grant had to be managed properly — a massive administrative cleanup operation following the whirlwind activity of the first few weeks. The reality of this was grueling: hours of checking and reallocating expenditure across 20 or so grants, communicating with donors and trying to make sure that everything was being spent correctly, monitored and reported upon. At the same time, the team was working hard to secure more substantial, longer six-month to one-year projects to ensure that families in Rakhine would have the food, shelter and basic services they needed for the coming months. At one point, a major government donor indicated its interest in funding activities and came in for a meeting. “Can you submit a proposal for Friday?” the representative asked, as their government was keen to publicize its response to the crisis in the coming week. There could only be one answer to that question. This left us with effectively 48 hours to design, write and budget a yearlong, million-dollar emergency program. There was another 48 hours for our regional office to check it over and for us to respond and make amendments in addition to all other day-to-day tasks. We achieved it with a number of very late nights and some amazingly hard work from all involved. But it wasn’t the type of excitement I had expected. When I first joined the humanitarian world, I went through emergency response training that included two-weeklong crisis scenarios. My colleagues and I were dispatched to an isolated corner of Wales, and did our best to set up generators, work satellite phones and plan activities as rain lashed our tents and gale force winds pulled out poorly setup radio antennas. We endured simulated night attacks, kidnaps and sleep deprivation. Yet the reality of aid work is rarely as front-line as this. In Myanmar, like most others, I was based in an office. For me, the hardest part of working is not the long hours and stress, but the lack of contact with those people you are trying to help. In the humanitarian world, there is a mythical place known simply as “The Field.” One experienced aid worker once told me that you are always one step away from “The Field,” and this I’ve found to be true. The people who actually deliver assistance are almost all local — from managers and technical specialists to casual workers such as community mobilizers and data collectors. These are the people who often belong to the communities that aid projects try to reach and have the skills, language and nuanced understanding of local context that international staff can miss. Unless you are a doctor, nurse or engineer, your role is primarily as facilitator, and you identify the situation in a language of statistics: 100,000 displaced, 15 percent acute malnutrition. You can lose touch with the reality of suffering and it can be difficult to understand what is actually happening on the ground. Despite the frustration of discovering that, ultimately, you are a functionary in a wider system — a system that can be terribly slow, illogical and inefficient — there are moments when these frustrations are put into stark perspective, like securing a grant that will fund basic hygiene and sanitation facilities for more than 18,000 people. Or working together with local colleagues to design a proposal that will provide safe spaces for children left traumatized and homeless by violence. Even learning that staff working in the camps in Rakhine State have also been touched by the bitter intercommunal hatred, that death threats have been sent to many iNGOs — and that local colleagues have been living and sleeping in the single tiny field office for months, hoping that this will keep them safe. Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.