Ultimately, I think that camp had over 100,000 people. Even counting the number of people in that camp was problematic because people kept coming and going.And of course, the aid community was responsible for these people. It’s terrible when people perish on your watch. |
A woman is being interviewed in Afghanistan. photo | courtesy of OCHA |
The irony was that every year we would appeal for money, and every year we would get about half of what we asked for. It is hard to carry out programs when you don’t have money. Fortunately, the food aid operation was fairly well funded, but the needs were real, and the people had suffered over such a prolonged period. As spokesperson, I was very committed to trying to attract media attention to the country. It is challenging – kind of like doing a very difficult crossword puzzle you know you will never finish. |
The Afghan people are very interesting people because on the one hand they have a reputation of being very proud and fierce, but they are also hospitable, kind, and generous. I remember meeting [a man] who was working with the World Food Programme. He was wearing a beautiful shirt with embroidery of a quality that is not for sale in shops – this kind of embroidery is done by a close female relative. “I have never seen a shirt that beautiful,” I kept telling him.
“Please take it,” he said. He was actually ready to give me the shirt off his back, but I told him I could not take it, and that if he gave it away he would be in deep trouble with his mother or sister.
My office is concerned about situations like Darfur and Gaza as well as Iraq, among others. It's interesting because there are emergencies that go on for a protracted period of time, like Darfur.
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The tsunami of 2004 affected 13 countries and 230,000 people are reported dead or missing. photo | courtesy of Linda Cullen |
| But then there are other emergencies that suddenly erupt like Liberia a few years ago. Then of course there is the element of natural disasters thrown in. So [I] never know from day to day what’s going to turn up on [my] desk. There was the tsunami, which killed 230,000 people and affected about 12 countries. In December 2003, there was an earthquake in Bam, Iran. [Many of these disasters have shown] the aid community, the UN in particular, that we need to be structured in such a way that we can deal with more than one emergency at a time. An example of this was the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. It was a different crisis than the tsunami but it was enormously difficult because some of the areas affected were at high altitudes, the terrain was rough, and it happened in October, right before the onset of winter. With 70,000 killed, and about 3 million people rendered homeless as winter was coming, it was a very complex logistics operation, in which the Pakistani and American militaries lent their aid. |
The south Asia earthquake left more than 3 million people homeless. photo | courtesy of Maciej Dakowicz |
In Darfur, 4.2 million people (which is nearly the population of Norway) are in need of aid, and 2 million of them are internally displaced – living in camps and highly insecure – and the situation on the ground has not improved for aid workers. The people are being kept alive and aid is getting to the accessible, but the aid community is doing a lot by air now rather than land because of insecurity. There are many hijackings, kidnappings, harassments and killings. It’s true that [the Darfur operation] is a success in that the aid community has kept people alive for three years, but the number of displaced persons is growing. We’ve run this operation for years while the number of people only increases.
Cyclical crises also trouble me. In 2002, there was the Southern African food crisis, the so-called triple threat of food security, HIV/AIDS and governance. A massive aid operation helped save lives, but, now this year again, we have issued appeals for Swaziland, Lesotho and Zimbabwe, which are in crisis again. It seems to |
me that if we have enough money and people with enough brains to have a space station, why can't we figure out how to resolve these recurrent crises?
It's very disconcerting in this line of work to wake up in the morning and realize that right now people are suffering from floods or cyclones in Pakistan, China and India. These are not mega-scale disasters, but they are still very large disasters. They are displacing people, and they are causing large losses of livelihoods. This kind of suffering is going on day after day, month after month, year after year. [I want people] to be aware that these people are people like us. It could be you. It could be me. It could be my children. It's not about the body count; it's about what it does to people, especially to the survivors. |
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