'So what do you actually do?'

'So what do you actually do?' - this is a question I get asked a lot when I come home. My world is so different to most of you, my work so foreign that people can't make a mental leap to it.

To help I thought I would attempt to document an average week in my life for you. Then I realised after a while of trying to do this that a) there's no such thing as an average week in this work and b) it would probably be a very boring read. So instead, I'll just give you the general headlines of my work.

To set the context, my role is a management role - I manage the work of my charity (the Danish Refugee Council) in multiple locations in northern Iraq. There are 3 of 'me' in our charity - one further north than me, me, and then one in Baghdad. Above us is a Head of Programmes (otherwise known as my non-boss-boss) and a Country Director (otherwise known as my boss). Around us are multiple experts to support our teams in things like Protection, Water & Sanitation, Shelter, Camp Management, Grant Management.

In my job I manage both project teams and what we call support functions - finance, HR, logistics and safety. I currently have 3 bases to manage, with another in the pipeline. They vary in size but each of them has both projects and support functions. I currently have 11 direct line reports across the locations, which means that a huge amount of my time is spent supporting them in their roles. Each week I will have a mixture of office days and field days. I love field days, and they're incredibly important - I need to see how things are going in reality, keep up to date with the context and spot check our work. But field days back fire in the sense that they leave me behind on other work. I also try and make sure I get a day simply based in the office in the other locations regularly, so that the staff get to know me, and feel part of the wider team.

So the kind of tasks I cover in any given week are:

• General trouble shooting. With this many line reports, a huge amount of my time is spent simply answering their questions, helping them process issues and problem solve. (One of my favourite bits of my job).
• Reviewing project proposals and reports to donors such as the EU, US Government, Danish government, German government, UN etc.
• Reviewing actual spend against budget on any of the projects in my area - currently I have 18 different grants open of varying sizes and durations. But sadly that means 18 separate budgets to track.
• Meeting with donors to give updates on project progress and context. Many donors are not able to visit the field regularly as their security restrictions are often tighter than ours and so they are reliant on us providing continual updates to ensure their strategy remains relevant.
• Meeting with contractors on high level contracts to ensure things go smoothly. Examples are the contractor who provides our vehicle fleet, our cash transfer agent, construction contracts etc.
• Meeting with government officials to keep them informed about our work.
• Processing access permissions through various security agents to ensure our staff can travel freely to field sites.
• Attending external coordination meetings - meetings generally arranged by UN agencies and designed to encourage coordinated work, so we don't all descend on a single village with mattresses for example.
• Signing paperwork - this takes up a lot of my time. I am the main budget signatory for my areas, meaning that anything above a certain value, or a certain type of purchase comes to me for approval. My signature is needed multiple times within any procurement process so there's a lot of paperwork. Plus my signature is needed on staff contracts, staff pay slips, leave requests, sick notes etc, etc. I also have to sign a lot of cheques. I try and do paperwork processing once in the morning and once in the afternoon, but inevitably someone will turn up with something too urgent to wait.
• Reviewing security - desk assessments, field assessments, writing 'standard operating procedures' etc.
• Answering text messages - staff have to message me at certain times when they're in the field and I need to respond. I must send 20 'thanks' messages a day.
• Spot checks on paperwork in logistics and finance, and spot visits to our warehouses - a kind of pre-audit audit to make sure procedures are being followed properly.
• Cash counts - ensuring what we have in each safe is what we should have in each safe.
• Staff meetings - I have a weekly meeting with my wider team, a weekly expat meeting, a weekly meeting with the staff working in our newest base, a monthly senior management meeting, a monthly individual meeting with each project manager, a monthly support services management meeting and a bi-monthly Iraq senior managers meeting. It's a lot of meetings. 
• Strategy - I need to continually assess new areas, both geographically and sector-wise to see if I think we should be positioning ourselves differently or if we are ok as we are. 
• Emails - I get over 100 emails a day. I don't have to respond to all, but I do need to read all of them.
• Skype - people in this line of work use skype A LOT. I am in no less than 7 security skype groups for different areas of Iraq, various team skype groups for different functions, plus individual skypes. It's a lot of traffic to keep up with.
• Recruitment - with a staff this size, there are constant recruitment processes. I don't get involved in the detail of them all, but I often have to join interview panels, write job descriptions, review references or agree offers.

So, hopefully that gives you a better idea of my work. It's probably not as hands on as most of you would expect, and it's highly stressful, but for the most part I love it. I'm constantly learning new skills, working with people from all different cultures and backgrounds, and I get to see the impact of the work I manage regularly. 

Brave

So often people will tell me how brave I am because of where I live and what I do. There are so many reasons I really struggle with this statement. I don't live my life in continual, imminent danger. I have a pretty decent life to be honest. For the most part I enjoy my job. There are people all over the world who are through circumstance showing themselves to be so much braver than me. There are definitely people doing this work who are far braver than me. And of course, here, I hear stories of bravery on a daily basis. Last night I heard about a restaurant owner in Mosul who tackled a suicide bomber in the street in order to protect the customers in his restaurant. He literally sacrificed himself. And around here, these stories aren't exactly hard to come by. Go and sit with someone who has fled their home and you will never cease to be amazed by their stories of bravery. It will humble you. So, no, I don't feel brave.

But I came across this quote the other day and it brought me up short:

'Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.' Mary Anne Radmacher.

When I read that I realised that sums me up a lot of the time. This work is draining. It's emotionally exhausting and I often feel like I'm running on empty by the end of the day. I have ideas in my head of all the things I need to do in order to make my offices run better and our projects have a greater impact, but all I end up doing is fire-fighting issues; and there's no time left to make the big changes. I miss my family and my friends. Some days I miss them A LOT. Especially my utterly gorgeous niblings - they give me literal heart-ache. Sometimes I lose my temper with my staff. Sometimes I'm impatient with them. Some days I leave the office before some of them and feel guilty that I'm not the first one in and the last one out. Occasionally I'm somewhere where I can hear the indirect fire and I'm momentarily afraid. Sometimes my thoughts run to what might or could happen and the fear creeps in. Other weeks I'm worried that being here, choosing this life and this work, has cost me a different life and I get worried and sad about that. To be frank, I'm not exactly displaying a 'roaring' bravery on a day to day basis.

But 2 and a bit years later, I'm still here. Still getting up every day and trying to make a difference. I'm not here because I'm brave, but I'm realising staying here, sticking it out, does take courage. For me, my courage is born out of my faith - it's not my courage, it's His courage in me. I believe I'm where I should be, and on the tough days it's that knowledge that gives me the courage to continue. On the easy days, it's this that allows me to fully enjoy where I am and what I'm doing. And I'm grateful that for the most part, this feels like a glorious adventure. 

No peace, no war

The first time I came to Iraq was August 2014. ISIS had just swept across the country and Mosul city was their new 'capital' within Iraq. The sea of people who had been displaced from Mosul city and it's surrounds was overwhelming.

For the next 2 and a half years, periodically the discussion would come up around the re-capture of Mosul, the 'Mosul offensive'. Dates were bandied around, we all kept our eyes on the frontlines and for 18 months they barely moved. A huge trench was dug and it was a bit of a stand off between the two sides. Then Sinjar was re-captured and people celebrated such a historic moment in the streets. But after Sinjar we faced almost a year of very little movement of the frontlines again.

And then, in August 2016 the Mosul offensive finally started in earnest. Political wranglings took place as different groups weighed in with their money, their soldiers, their expertise; and demanded the right to influence the control of land re-captured. Finally something was happening. The areas around the city took a long time to re-capture, and are still not fully 'clear'. But in-roads to the city were made, and a few months ago the assault on Eastern Mosul began. A couple of weeks ago, Eastern Mosul was declared fully re-captured, and the offensive on Western Mosul began. This is expected to be the toughest part of the campaign.

This week I went on my first visit to Eastern Mosul. Two and a half years after my first encounters with those who had fled, I was able to walk the streets of this city that has become a bit of a legendary word around here. To say it felt surreal is an understatement. Not a single building is unscathed. The fight had clearly been literally street by street. As we drove and walked through streets I kept having flashbacks to the early news segments coming out of this crisis when we would see pictures of ISIS walking these same streets as they laid claim to the area. 

Despite seeing intense fighting, ongoing suicide strikes, drone explosive drops and indirect fire hits; there were a lot of people still in the city. Children were playing among the rubble in the streets, and shop keepers were beginning to pick up the pieces of their shops and put them back together, re-laying tiles on the floors and re-stocking items. Fruit and veg stalls had already re-opened and we saw sandwich shops up and running. These are all the signs of a city coming out of hiding. On the outskirts of the city an open air market was swarming with people purchasing all sorts of goods. I say purchasing, really it's more likely to be a credit-based system at this point - there is reported to be very little physical liquidity in the city.

Seeing Mosul City with my own eyes this week was a milestone for me and my work in Iraq. It took me literally days to recover emotionally from that single visit. I cried a lot in solitude this week. The media is portraying this as a fight between good and evil. But it's so much more complicated than that. And there is so much work to do, and an unknown future ahead. It's easy for us to fall for the lie that once ISIS is defeated, life will go back to normal. Yes, this is an extremely significant point in this crisis, but we would be naive to think that peace will automatically follow. The retreat of ISIS will not magically mean that things go back to 'normal'. Power vacuums must be filled, and the underlying ethnic tensions in these areas pre-date ISIS. For the last 2 and a half years there has been a common enemy to fight. Once that enemy is defeated, or at least, not as present; it is likely that old issues will re-surface. Not to mention the fact that the country is in economic crisis, the main infrastructure has been destroyed by years of war, and people are likely to remain displaced for a long time to come. 

There's a saying here 'no peace, no war' - people are so used to living in a state of limbo between peace and war. Everyone has a story, everyone has experienced displacement, persecution, violence. Our external security trainers last year, who travel around conflict zones training NGO staff, said they had never experienced training people who are so used to living like this, who when they asked if anyone had ever experienced indirect fire, were immediately shown multiple shrapnel wounds among the staff. When they asked if anyone knew of anyone who had been involved in an abduction, there were several staff right there who had first hand stories. I am so blessed to have been born in a country that in my lifetime has been peaceful. I can't imagine how an entire nation heals from these wounds. And yet, when I think about my friends here, the people I work with, the people I meet through our projects, I realise how resilient they are. This history of no peace, no war, has taught them survival skills that I simply don't have. 

If you want to make a difference for people here please pray for them, give to one of the charities working here that you feel some affiliation to (I'm happy to recommend where to give if you're unsure), and then pray again.

From the British People

I wrote this piece earlier in the week and have spent the whole week debating 'do I post, don't I post?' I'm worried about offending people, or being misunderstood. In the end I decided to go for it, and I hope you can read it knowing that I have struggled on this and honestly don't want to offend.

I don't normally get too in to politics. I have my own views but I do not enjoy political debate, and in recent years I've found it incredibly intimidating the way social media has controlled the conversation - when you're on the other side of the fence as it were, it's suddenly safer to keep quiet than to be ridiculed and ostracized by those who are genuine friends. The popular social media messaging around hot topics in the UK has left me feeling fairly gagged when I often disagree but can't face the fall out of owning up to my opinions.

But then this week has been so mental in terms of crazy politics. I can't seem to get my head around how utterly awful Trump really is. I am so angry that so many are aligning themselves with him in the name of faith. A faith that I supposedly share with them. It has got me thinking about the importance of politics and advocacy on the issues that I would consider black and white. Like the right to claim asylum, the right not to be discriminated against because of race, colour, religion, ethnicity, gender.

The rhetoric coming out of the US this week has been so shocking; rhetoric of fear of our neighbour, unwillingness to share the global burden of the effects of war, poverty and power imbalances. The abuse of power, and the hiding behind the old classic of 'security' in order to pursue racist and selfish policies at the cost of so much. It has been deeply concerning for so many of us to watch as the new administration enacts policies that are so divisive and so horribly offensive, not to mention short sighted. It is easy to allow ourselves to think that American politics speak for the western world and to feel hopeless.

But then, this week in our camp, I noticed that our tents have new donor signs sprayed on to them. And given the messages Trump has been touting, I was pretty proud to see 'UK Aid - From the British People'. So in other words, a teeny tiny part of my government's overseas aid funding had bought these tents which are offering some refuge to those who have fled their war-torn homes. And I am reminded that Trump doesn't rule the world; yes, we must speak out against his unjust and biased policies, but we must also remember that he is just one of many global leaders; many of whom are as horrified by him as we are. Let's keep petitioning our own governments to stand up for what is right. Let's keep using our collective voice to speak for those who have no voice. This is not a faith issue, it's not a security issue, it's a humanitarian issue.