Blessed

This week has, to be frank, been fairly horrid. In my position, there are weeks when I feel like I am constantly having to face up to issues, problem solve for my teams in difficult circumstances. I am regularly having difficult conversations with senior members of other agencies, donors and local government staff. I have frequent internal issues to deal with, staff to challenge or defend. Difficult decisions to make. This week has felt like a treadmill of this kind of thing. For obvious reasons I can't list things here but I have had multiple internal and external conflicts to mediate. Believe it or not, I used to be someone who would avoid conflict to quite an extreme level. I think I still tend to be the peace-maker in my personal life, but I have had to learn to be assertive as a professional. I have had to learn that it's possible to be a woman of faith who is strong and feminine and a leader. And by the end of this week, I was being a complete girl and crying over the latest HR issue that crossed my desk and wondering if this was really the right job for me (don't worry - I'm over it already!)

But this weekend as I've been thinking about these issues of gender in the workplace, I have been thinking back to interviews I conducted in our Kirkuk office recently. One of the candidates was a lady who looked to be in her early 40s. During the course of the discussion, she talked about how she could apply for this role as she had chosen to stay single. Her siblings had married, her friends had married, but she had decided that should would prefer to remain single in order to be able to work and travel. To her this was a simple statement of fact. She knew that in her culture she had to make a choice, she couldn't have both a job and a family. She couldn't have a family and be free to travel. And that choice is not really an acceptable one to many people here. In our livelihoods interventions, including women requires real innovative thinking in order to find roles that are culturally acceptable.

I know that gender imbalance is still an issue in the UK. I know that I am in the minority being female working at this level; out of my agency's most senior managers in Iraq there are currently only 2 women out of 7, and as of about a month's time we'll be down to just me. I have had to bite my tongue when told I'm being over-sensitive - not something that I think many men are accused of when they are challenging decisions. However, the very reason that I have been able to pursue my career, with the blessing of my family, is that I was born and raised in a culture where it is acceptable and encouraged. Yet again, I am reaping the benefits of where I was born. When I have a tough week like this, I need to remember women like the one I interviewed; who have had to sacrifice so much to simply be able to choose to work. And the many others around the world who don't even have that freedom. I am in the incredibly privileged position of having an education, doing a job that for the most part I love, and being able to be financially independent. All with family and friends cheering me on. I am blessed indeed.

Perspective

Disclaimer: I am well aware that there are people living in real poverty in the UK, including in Surbiton. This post is not me being blind to that, or suggesting that a few pounds do not make a real difference to those people.

I had one of those times this week where my separate worlds collided with a great big emotional jolt.

I spent the early part of the week doing assessments of new areas for my teams to work in. In one town, the river runs through the middle. One side is ISIS, the other side has been re-taken from them. On the re-taken side every single family is hosting people displaced from the other bank. Every family is sharing the very little they have with another family, often with multiple families. And they are not complaining. They know what it is like to live under ISIS rule, and so when their neighbours risk their lives crossing the river under the cover of darkness to escape them, they open their homes to them without question. I sat on the floor in a house bare of furniture and listened to stories of ISIS torture, of escape, of return to the remains of property that had been looted by ISIS. It’s been 2 and a half years and yet I’m still shocked by the brutality of ISIS. I asked what conditions were believed to be like on the other side of the river. As we heard the bullets in the distance, they talked of how the people who had been smuggling food across to try and ease the suffering of those caught on the wrong side have been stopped by the military and so they are no longer able to provide that small assistance.

Later in the week, back in the office, I was reading a report on the conditions in Western Mosul. The army is making good progress to re-capture the city, but as they do so, the poorest neighbourhoods are facing siege-like conditions. Food is scarce, prices are rising daily, safe water is unavailable, and ISIS are going house to house carrying out 'inspections' where they take what little food people still have stored. It's a bleak picture, hard to read about; imagine how much harder to actually live in those conditions. Not only are you in fear for your life, but you also can't feed your children.

About an hour later I was on facebook and came across a video from Tescos in Surbiton (my old neck of the woods). They had done the daily price reductions and there was the most horrifying scrum for the bargains. Watching it, I just felt so sick. There's nothing wrong with a bargain. There's nothing wrong with avoiding food waste by reducing prices. But when people in Surbiton (one of the wealthiest parts of England, and therefore the world) are physically fighting over saving a few pounds, there is something very, very wrong with our perspectives.

I don't know what the answer to this is. This kind of sense of entitlement seems to be the poison of my generation. Where is the tipping point between enjoying the good things in life but not at the cost of other's? We can't, and shouldn't, live our lives in continual guilt about what we have because of where we were born. But we can live our lives intentionally informing ourselves about the circumstances others are facing because of where they were born. We can make decisions which go some way to re-balancing the world. We can choose to give our time, money, skills to make a difference to someone else. We each have to find that sweet spot where we live life to the full; but where part of that fullness of life is brought about by serving the needs of others, standing up against injustice, looking after this amazing planet, showing kindness and generosity.

Fasting from indifference, feasting on love

One of the things I have realised about working in the humanitarian sector is that I can quite easily drift in to ungenerosity. When you spend your days working to alleviate suffering, it's easy to end up feeling that this ticks off the generosity box in your life without even realising it. The reality is that personal generosity and kindness is a choice, it has to be intentional. And if I allow myself to think that my job covers it, then I am gravely mistaken.

This week, entering lent, I read this article summarizing Pope Francis' Lenten Address from 2015, it was so helpful for me; I clicked through and read the full address. So often people discuss what they will 'give up' for lent. I understand how this is helpful, and I don't want to disparage it at all, but it is quite an individualistic way of thinking. Instead Pope Francis encourages us to fast from indifference. As the article states 'whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God's voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades...we end up becoming incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own.'

Ouch.

How easy it is, to tick that 'compassion' box through my work and allow myself to think that there is no need for more kindness, more generosity. Or even, to go further, and allow myself to feel entitled to other people's kindness towards me because of the hard job I do. How easy it is to see our direct debits to charities or churches exiting our accounts each month and think we have it covered.

So this lent, I am following Pope Francis' advice and trying to fast from indifference beyond my job and my direct debits. The '40 Acts' movement is another wonderful way to do this - using lent to actively demonstrate kindness to those around us.

'When we fast from this indifference, we can begin to feast on love.'

If you would like to read the articles I'm referring to, they can be found here:

http://time.com/3714056/pope-francis-lent-2015-fasting/

and here:

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/lent/documents/papa-francesco_20141004_messaggio-quaresima2015.html

'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.