How Aid Works

Nuran Higgins knows how hard it can be to live from hand to mouth, not knowing where the next meal is coming from. Once homeless, she is now helping to improve the way aid is delivered from Nepal to Afghanistan.

No matter whether you’re on a remote Pacific Island or in Syria’s largest city, toilets are critical to any humanitarian operation. Sanitation expert Pete McArdle gets to the very bowels of the matter.

Just once, try this: Walk a kilometre downhill, fill three buckets with water and carry them back home. Then you’ll have the faintest sense of what clean water means to millions of mothers and their children around the world. Celeste Swain talks about the things that change once people get access to water:  from everyday things like avoiding snake bites, to life-changing things like the opportunity to go to school or get a job.

To run an Ebola treatment you need big piles of cash. In this age of plastic cards and electronic transfers, providing aid costs money. And while you’re handling the finances for a multi-million dollar recovery program for a whole country, where do you find time to teach yourself to swim and compete in a triathlon? Meet the Red Cross iron woman of finance, Patrea Ryan, who helps explain where the money goes and how it helps.

One minute you’re in the Himalayas of northern Pakistan helping communities recover from devastating floods. The next minute you’re in an outback Aboriginal community in Central Australia helping Aboriginal women give birth. How do you switch realities and cope with the culture shock? Nurse Yvonne Ginifer shares her secrets.

Every day, silent plagues of mosquito-borne diseases are killing thousands around the globe and Kym Blechynden is leading the charge to beat them. Working across the Asia-Pacific, how do you take on the mighty mosquito to stop killer diseases like dengue, malaria and zika in their tracks?

What’s it like having an aid worker for a father? How does that change the way you see the world? In this special discussion, veteran aid worker and humanitarian legend, Bob Handby passes the baton to his son, water engineer Mark. They reveal how a love for humanity is handed down the generations.

Why the hell does cholera still exist? Libby Bowell, who’s been tackling preventable and horrifying diseases for several years, explains the perfect storm of conditions that come together to cause an epidemic.

Is it time for more intelligent aid?  Red Cross International Director, Peter Walton, reflects on his days in the field and how we can turn aid on its head; from using drones to help in disasters, to using local Pacific businesses to supply relief goods to their own communities.

Imagine facing thousands of people needing shelter after an earthquake. Then imaging trying to coordinate shelter arrangements in three languages at once.  Shelter specialist Leeanne Marshall shines a light on the challenges of delivering one of the fundamental necessities of life; a roof overhead.

Modern day Florence Nightingales explore the big questions in emergency health: how do you provide medical care with minimal equipment? How do you keep your cool when people are dying around you because there aren’t enough doctors, nurses, medicines or time? Why are children still dying of hunger? How do field hospitals work?

Three Florence Nightingale Medal recipients reveal what it means to follow in the footsteps of the woman who inspired the international Red Cross Movement. Cath Salmon shares a story of binding shattered limbs in a war field hospital, Ruth Jebb cares for a man whose his wife was washed away in typhoon floods and Anne Carey talks about how local volunteers beat Ebola in West Africa.

The mission’s over. Time to catch up with your mates and a season’s worth of Game of Thrones. Except that people treat you differently after you’ve worked in an Ebola zone. And you’ll never watch the news in the same way again. Aid work leaves its unique stamp on you.

Learn to manage risk, because someone will shoot at you. Stop being so damn idealistic. Sit back and listen. There are no heroes, least of all you. Our guests share advice they wish they’d heard when they started their careers in aid work.

What could possibly go wrong on a relief mission? Well… border disputes, power outages, strikes, random epidemics, natural disasters, insurgencies, rains shutting down roads and governments being overthrown. You’ll see why aid work needs an indomitable spirit.

Listen up, Humanitarians of Tinder! It can be hard to maintain relationships with family, let alone find love, when you’re going from mission to mission in high-security zones. We talk honestly about the birds, the bees and the precautions.  

How do you feel watching families flee in an apocalyptic sea of people? How do you cope with an Ebola nightmare sweeping before your eyes? And what passes through your mind when you witness an exploding donkey amid drought and violence?

Sometimes you’re faced with a carful of corpses. Sometimes you have to drive the body of a bomb victim home to her parents. Sometimes you have to treat an illness so contagious that other doctors have already died. We discover what it’s like to be an emergency health worker… and why you should always pack a scarf in your travel bag.

Every minute is a matter of life or death when a disaster strikes or a conflict breaks out. Aid workers are in a race against time: whether to treat the ill and injured before it’s too late or get relief supplies to inaccessible locations. Our guests explain how order emerges from chaos.

This week we look at your very first mission as an aid worker: whether it’s Pakistan after an earthquake, a refugee camp in South Sudan or a tiny Tongan island. We reflect on how expectation differs from reality and how you see the world afterwards.

It’s a job you can’t wait to leave and can’t wait to return to. We look at how to break into the field of humanitarian aid work, with an honest assessment of how to survive this terrifying, frustrating, addictive job.

The Philippines has been battered by three super-typhoons in the last three years. It’s not surprising that they’ve become very good at dealing with them. Catherine Gearing unpacks the success factors that have dramatically reduced the death rate from Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 to Typhoon Koppu in 2015.

How well did our humanitarians face the big disasters of last year – the disease outbreaks, the earthquakes, the conflicts that created a global refugee crisis? Steve McAndrew, who led Red Cross responses to most of these crises, offers us insight, gruesome stories and his personal hopes for humanity.

How do you solve a problem like 85,000 people and no toilets? We ask sanitation engineer James Godbee about solutions devised in the field, on the run, to solve the unexpected challenges that can arise in humanitarian aid.

In the wake of a disaster, everything you’ve learned about child protection comes sharply into focus. In Nepal, Sally Chapman found destroyed schools, lingering trauma, forced marriage and trafficking, as well as incredibly resilient children who helped their families to survive and cope.

Your challenge: get safe drinking water to an island where a cyclone has destroyed all the water tanks and an active volcano is spewing ash everywhere. Water engineer Gordon Ewers talks about racing against time, winning a chicken, climbing towers to avoid a tsunami and why he sleeps on dirt floors.

What should you send a country that’s been hit by a disaster? Here’s a tip from Finau Limuloa: don’t send bras. In fact, don’t send anything. Finau unpacks the concept of disaster law and its vital role in making aid effective.

It's not a great time to be a humanitarian. Around the world, they're being shot at, sent home or silenced. Vicki Mau and Christoph Hensch are  'professional humanitarians': Vicki inspects detention centres and Christoph sends people overseas to provide health care in armed conflicts. We talk about what it means – and what it costs – to be humanitarian.

How emotionally healthy are people who spend their working lives in disaster zones? And if that’s your career path, how do you manage your stress? Psychologist Claire Groves, recently returned from the Nepal earthquake relief operation, offers some personal insights.

In Sydney, a massive outbreak of armed violence forced millions of people – students, doctors, artists, shopkeepers – to flee for their lives, to any place where they were no longer being shot at. No, wait. Not Sydney. Syria. But as Toni Stokes explains, the parallels are terrifying.

The Nepal earthquake changed families in profound ways. Most lost their homes. Some lost children or parents. Others reconnected with brothers or sons who left long ago. And a few special people formed their own family when no one else would have them. Jess Letch unravels  a complex web of family ties and gender politics in a country that’s been shaken hard but still standing.

Why are people still homeless three months after a massive relief effort in Vanuatu? We ask Tom Bamforth about who lost a house, who got a house, and whether any of those houses will still be standing when the next cyclone hits.

You can access any prison, any detention centre, any gulag or PoW camp, anywhere in the world … but you can never tell anyone what you see there. Katrina Elliott talks about why neutral observers are important and the personal cost of seeing all and saying nothing.

This is medicine stripped to the core: mending broken bodies by torchlight, in a tent in the heart of a swamp. Florence Nightingale Medal recipient Nola Henry describes how a mobile surgical team works in South Sudan and why a red cross on a white background keeps the bullets away.

A red cross or red crescent on a white background means ‘Don’t shoot!’ in every language. It’s meant to give aid workers access to the most difficult and dangerous places on earth: from prisons to battlefields. But as Dr Debra Blackmore explains, it demands strict neutrality. And with a recent spate of attacks on workers bearing the emblem, is it effective anymore?

Everyone wants to help when a major disaster hits: from relief agencies marking their turf to well-intentioned foreigners wanting to volunteer. Madeline Wilson, reporting from cyclone-ravaged Vanuatu, explains how disaster relief works and how order can emerge from chaos. 

Emergency shelter is a complex thing. How do you keep diseases from spreading? How do you protect women and children?  Robbie Dodds reports from Malawi, where 42,000 people are living in tents after flash floods covered a third of the country.

You don’t stop diseases like Ebola with doctors. You stop them with garbage collectors, plumbers and grave-diggers. Amanda McClelland, leader of the Red Cross Ebola response team in Sierra Leone, talks about the unsung heroes who may yet stop Ebola in its tracks, no to mention the other deadly diseases you didn’t see in today’s news.