How to Be Humanitarian Aid Worker

How to Be Humanitarian Aid Worker Have you ever thought about doing humanitarian work? Welcome to WatchMojo.com. I'm your host Leila. Today, we bring you Marie France Bourgeois about her own humanitarian aid involvements. Leila: What were your earlier interests and involvements that led you to do humanitarian work? Marie: Well, I think I was born with it like there some people who are born to be doing as dancers or singers. I just wanted to do humanitarian work. So I started long time ago with my Masters in New York. It was 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 United Nations in the field. Leila: What were your positions in the UN and in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Italy? Marie: While I was in Rome, I was working for the Well-fit Program and there I was in charged of needs assessment so basically when a new catastrophe would hit I would be sent out there to evaluate how much food that was needed and to whom we should and which type of food to eat. So this is how I traveled the whole world. And then I went to the Congo for two years and there I was in charged of coordinating the humanitarian aid for the entire Congo. So imagine that we had a budget of about $400 million. We had donors from all over the world, Canada, Japan, USA and so on and so forth. We had an envelope that I would have to redistribute with a team of people. Also, to monitor to enter that the money that we were giving to those projects were well spent. Leila: How did you work together with Peacekeepers there? Marie: In the Congo, this is a biggest peacekeeping force in the world called MONUC. They worked with a lot of them in the field because they’re deployed all over the country because often I could not travel by myself. Leila: There are more than 100,000 UN Peacekeepers deployed worldwide. We heard of misconducts by them in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What were your own observations? Marie: Think about it, you sent people away from their families for over a year to 18 months and I've met those men in places extremely harsh. No running water. The sun is extremely hot. You don’t have really the food that you usually eat. This is not to excuse what those gentlemen have done by any means but you have to think that those are put in very harsh conditions and sometimes their behaviors are not up to the standard as they should be. Leila: How relevant is violence and conflicts to areas that need humanitarian aid. Marie: Usually when you have conflict that means you have displacement, usually. So that means you do need humanitarian aid unless the people are capable to cope. So this is what they send teams like I used to go to assess what are the coping mechanisms that people have because if you have an earthquake, would you give food and shelter to people that have a lot of people in the bank. But if you have you know, they sank on the earthquake somewhere else in China and their backyards then you know those people don’t have a big bank account and they can rely upon. You always have to see now who needs and then who doesn’t so conflict does bring a lot of suffering especially for women and children. Leila: Based on your experience, what makes humanitarian issues political issues? Marie: Because they are intertwined. You see people dying and you have to have governments responding the whole problem for the UN nations is how to be able to intervene. I think we’re seeing right now with Zimbabwe and with Mugabe. I think Bankemon has been very clear to not synchronize 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 United Nations miss to address this issue in the near future because it has been happening a lot in the past for years that you see. Leila: Thank you very much, nice meeting you.