Stories and Humanitarian Action

Hawa Sabriye works for UNICEF Somalia as an Education Specialist. She has over 7 years of experience in education/teaching, humanitarian aid and international development. She holds a BA in English Literature and Human Geography, a BA and MA in Education, and Graduate Diplomas in Refugee and Migration Studies and Post-Secondary Education: Community, Culture, and Policy. Hawa is also a doctorate candidate at the University of Toronto in the International Education Leadership & Policy program. Her research focuses on trauma-informed teaching and learning in Somalia. Hawa's interests include Afrocentric education, reading, and water painting. She says: Fiction can offer a great escape, introduce us to new ideas and knowledge, and allows us to practice empathy. Often, the contexts we work in are foreign to us, and stories, through characters can help to better understand these contexts.

Doug Mercado has worked in the field of international humanitarian assistance and post-disaster recovery over the past 32 years on assignments with the United Nations, USAID, OAS & NGOs. He currently holds the position of visiting lecturer at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. He says, “Works of fiction have their part in helping the world to understand what's going in a land far away. They bring the reality of a humanitarian crisis to others who may not experience that situation. Fiction is a personal account of the characters.”

Ms April Pham is a Senior Gender Advisor and the Head of Gender Unit in the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She has over 25 years of experience in social justice, human rights, gender equality, and the prevention and response to violence against women/gender-based violence in development and humanitarian settings. Twitter: @MynameisApes She says, “People need to make visible the experiences and voices of women and girls and be their champions given that this is half of the population of the world. All humanitarian workers should have menstrual hygiene as their first order of business, if we all did this, this'd be a really good start.”

Matteo Fraschini Koffi is a freelance journalist who writes, photographs and produces documentaries for radio and TV. He works for Italian and foreign media focusing exclusively on Sub-Saharan Africa. He has won the Premiolino award and published a book-diary, “Fields of red gold," about his experience in the ghetto of Rignano (Apulia), and his autobiography, "The black elephant calling, confessions of a journey in search of one's own identity."He says, “Be curious. People have to be curious about what is inside and outside of them and their surroundings. If you just don't care, it's easier for war to continue. Try to understand the context, the people, the history of a certain situation by talking to people. Sometimes it reaches to the higher levels and this dialogue could end a lot of suffering.”

Delphine Vakunta is a Cameroonian-American communication and public relations professional in the international humanitarian and development affairs field. Her work spans the African Development Bank, the United Nations, NGOs, and the private sector.She says, “We should all strive to prevent humanitarian crises by thinking about what we can individually do at our respective levels. For me, this has a lot to do with making investments in organizations and projects that center youth and young people. Why? Because we know that when youth, young people, and women thrive, societies and communities can really soar.”

Aida Mengistu is the Deputy Head of the Inter Agency Standing Committee's Peer-to-Peer Support Project which provides targeted support to humanitarian leaders in country operations. She is a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a mother of three kids.She says, "It's important to understand the day-to-day life of people caught up in these difficult situations. With fiction, you can incorporate their realities into the story in a way that's more palpable. You can imagine yourself in that situation and have more compassion and empathy for the people affected by a crisis. I think that's incredibly powerful. I know it's fiction but it's based on people's lives and it can communicate to the rest of the world what's happening, what are some of the concerns and important for these communities.

Sébastien Trives is a French national currently working for the NGO ACTED in Paris. He for the Humanitarian Advisory Team to the Famine Relief Fund, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNRWA, UNAMA and OSCE. He holds a M.A. in international relations, a B.A. in international affairs and history, and a diploma in European studies. He says, “99 Years in Logar, describes life through the eyes of a child. It describes family life, the tension between tradition and modernity. The conflict is there, but it's never central. It provides this background of Afghanistan in a very endearing light. We have this tendency in humanitarian action to see people as beneficiaries of aid, victims, people without agency.

Ani Kazarian is a writer and professional development coach, both of which, she believes, come down to clarifying our vision and following our intuition. Her publications include book reviews, essays, and short stories that have been featured in Consequence Magazine, Agni Online, Sampsonia Way, Aster (ix) Journal, and the Tishman Review. She says, the conversations that take place because of literature could be the catalyst to action. The best action we can take is to become aware when we're filling in the blanks for people and just ask questions.

“A poem can change you; A powerful short story can literally change your brain chemistry. At the individual level, the teaching of compassion, of love of community, these are the ways that I think literature probably moves us most effectively, but they're very hard to discern, I think. And you never know what that kind of reading experience is going to result in, what sort of emotional capacity it'll create in readers. Fiction is its own kind of displacement. It takes you out of yourself and temporarily puts you in a different world. If there's any positive relationship there, it's a good way of leaving yourself, leaving your home for a little while, leaving your comfort zone, and that's what displacement is.”

In this episode, Anna Macdonald, a Communications and Campaigns consultant and currently Human Rights Practitioner in Residence at Columbia Law School says, “In humanitarian work, there's a tendency to think that because it's a serious subject, we have to start with data, statistics, facts, and figures. These are important to provide the evidence, however, they're rarely the thing that gets you hooked. No one tends to feel passionate because they've heard a compelling piece of data. It's normally someone's story that you've heard, that's moved you in some way that gets you interested.”

In this episode, I speak to François Batalingaya United Nations Resident Coordinator in Comoros. He says, let's use the story of these women, Chika and the unnamed Hausa Woman, Halima's mother, in A Private Experience, and say to ourselves, the other person out there isn't an enemy, not at all, and you don't know when you may end up in a situation where you'll need each other. Trust the person, and if you can assist, please do assist.

In this Episode, I speak to Askold Melnyczuk, an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels, What Is Told, and Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows and Excerpt from Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature.In his essay, Why My Favorite Characters to Write Are Often Unsympathetic and Unforgivable, he says, “I've felt my understanding enlarged by fiction whose charge isn't to soothe readers by providing exemplary characters as “models for emulation” but rather to quicken them to a heightened awareness of the imagination's, and by extension life's, vast range, and so bring us closer to reality. Fiction should use its singular devices to disillusion us, lest we be deceived by placebos and lies. The best fiction tells lies that lie deeper than truth. Indeed, disillusionment is one hugely positive side effect that arises from reading the very best fiction.”

In this episode,Raksha Vasudevan, an Economist, Writer and former Aid Worker whose essays and reporting have appeared inThe New York Times, VICE, Guernica,and I,discussThe Story of a Brief MarriagebyAnuk Arudpragasam. She says,“The best way for me to answer this question is thinking about it in terms of contribution rather than attribution. I haven't been able to draw a direct line between reading a novel about a humanitarian crisis in a country and direct action beyond making a donation, perhaps, which is still significant, of course, but when you think about it in terms of contribution and an ecosystem of factors that can motivate action, certainly stories have the power to do that and they have done that in my life. Just like the media has a role in telling us what's going on in the world and potentially motivating action, fiction can do that by bringing us into the lived experiences of people and not just in western societies having a personal or existential crisis, but people living through serious external events.”

In this episode, I spoke with Alison Turner about her essay, The Autological Archive: Appraisal, Institutional Motives, and Essentializing Identity in Refugee and Asylum Seekers Narratives, In and Out of Fiction where she argues that fiction can expose parts of archival/application processes that impact who is and who is not granted asylum in the United States. She says, “So, the autologic function that I'm pointing out here is that as bureaucracy builds, as people apply for asylum and refugee status in the United States, those who are accepted for asylum create an archive of accepted people to resettle that then informs who is accepted later. It's responding to this fact that less than one per cent of the refugees who apply for asylum in the United States are invited to resettle. I'm asking what about those other 99 per cent, and how does the way the stories of the one percent are told on paper predict the kinds of stories that will be selected in the future to be invited to resettle.”

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