Below is an article I wrote earlier this year for InterAction's Monday Development's magazine. It was published by them in April, and I'm posting it here for you ConversantLifer's who are interested in aid work and the price tags that can come with that calling (the case study on conditions in Sudan and Chad looks at an assessment conducted by the Headington Institute late last year).

Thanks for stopping by,

lisa

By Lisa McKay, Director of Training & Education Services, Headington Institute

Images of desperation and need in refugee camps are familiar to many: row upon row of tents covered with blue tarpaulins, people lining up to receive the food being measured out to them, children whose menacing bravado far outstrips their physical size casually handling AK-47s. They are scenes from Sudan, Chad and many other places. And in and behind these scenes are humanitarian workers trying to help meet those needs.

I'm never quite sure what will happen when I walk into the office on any given day. Tuesday there was a very... enlivening... earthquake. Earthquakes, I learned, are a more effective stimulant than caffeine! 

Yesterday I spent a big chunk of time planning for a trip to Kenya and Tanzania in October. This, unfortunately, falls two weeks after my fiancee moves from Papua New Guinea to LA. We thought it would be nice to spend more than the six weeks we have so far logged in the same city getting to know each other face to face before we get married next January. The same city thing will also help with pre-marital counseling, although if we make more than half of the 10 classes together I'll be impressed. As it stands I'm going to have to attend the first two alone in September before he arrives, he'll have to cover for me for two weeks in October... and I haven't told him yet that it's likely that I will have to go to Washington DC and South Africa in November. 

I’ve been writing this last couple of weeks. Not just putting down a hundred words here or there, but sitting here for hours at a time. Hours when I don’t feel like sitting here. Hours when I’m not sure what needs to be written next. Hours when I rather desperately want to be... anywhere else, really. I’m aiming for five thousand words a weekend which, for me, is an extraordinarily ambitious goal that I couldn’t even hope to meet if my mother wasn’t rather busy in Australia at the moment planning my wedding.

Unreasonably, though, she has refused to make every decision. Yesterday we had a conversation that went like this:

"But muuuuum. You asked me last week what you could do to help me with this next book, and I said you were already doing the best thing possible by planning the wedding."

I’ve been in love with reading since before I can remember. Our family photo albums are peppered with photos of me curled up with books – in huts in Bangladesh, on trains in Europe, in the backseat of our car in Zimbabwe. Recently my parents went on holiday to Northern Australia, and I got a postcard from them not of Ayers Rock or Kakadu, but of a little girl propped up against the side of a sleeping calf, reading.

I can’t remember my parents reading to us before bed, although they swear they did – sweet tales about poky puppies and a confused baby bird looking for it’s mother. No, my earliest memories of reading are solitary, sweaty, ones. They are of lying on the cool marble floor of our house in Dhaka. An overhead fan gently stirred the dense heat while I chipped away at frozen applesauce in a small plastic container, book in hand. But it’s from around nine, when we moved from Bangladesh to the States, that my memories of books, just like childhood itself, become clearer.

I’d always wondered how someone is caught by surprise by a marriage proposal in this day and age. I mean, if you’re in a solid relationship, you’re both good communicators, it feels right, it feels easy… surely you’d have some idea if one party in that equation were scheming to pop the question, right? I mean, how dumb are people?

So, yeah, apparently I’m dumb.

Well, it’s one possibility. Another possibility is that Mike is crazy.

Or Mike could be both dumb and crazy. Or I could be. Or maybe we both are.

I’m still undecided and after the last week they’re all plausible options as far as I can see.

So let’s set the scene here – because setting the scene is a valuable life skill that should be exercised during the shaping of all excellent stories and, the last week suggests, quite possibly in advance of all major life-altering decisions.

The second half of the interview I did for Canadian public television in Vancouver last year took an unexpected turn. It veered away from the psychological impact of aid work and touched on pedophiles and proselytizing. Didn't think the two topics naturally went together? Neither did I - until questioned on live national television :). Anyway, here's the six minute clip...

Last December I went up to Vancouver to be interviewed by The Standard on Canadian public television about work and writing. They've recently started posting these interviews online, and here's part one of my 15 minute interview. It's a seven and a half minute clip that looks ever-so-briefly at the psychological impact of aid work on humanitarian workers and some of what the Headington Institute does.

Cheers,

Lisa

On Monday I was up at 5am. This was partly because my body was convinced I was still in Michigan (where it had woken up on Sunday) instead of in California. And partly because I needed to be at work at 6am.  

In my opinion 6am is practically an obscene hour of the morning. It’s an hour when no one should have to be at work unless it’s for an exceptionally good cause. But although I grumbled a bit to myself as I left the house in the dark, I did have to admit it was for an exceptionally good cause.  

How it all came about is a long story that starts in January as I was planning for workshops in Kenya. We’re trying a new thing this year at the Headington Institute called regional training - the idea being that we run free workshops on understanding and coping with stress and trauma for humanitarian workers in different cities around the world. In January we were well into organizing our first regional training for humanitarian workers in Kenya. 

If you had seen the three of us yesterday morning sipping lattes around a small round table adorned with blue and yellow print, eyeing the pastries while the trams rattled past, you might have thought we were in Fontainebleau or Melbourne. Either would have been a good guess. The dark-eyed waiter spoke with a French accent. And all three of us spoke with Australian ones. Not much about the scene spelled San Diego, but that’s where we were.

Two traveling husbands spelled girls’ weekend away. And girls’ weekend away spelled breakfast out. And while you might have thought a Saturday breakfast would spell sleepy chatter about our families, our men, or our plans for the day, it didn’t. It meant focusing on the one topic we all needed to debrief before we could wander along the marina, or through Little Italy, or into Victoria‘s Secret (where I will later dust myself and whoever is standing nearby with body glitter - something that never fails to amuse - and then find the scented candles and wonder how I can go about getting paid to come up with phrases like, “the spicy allure of warm blackberries suggests languid summer love in the grass").