Aid workers need to be tough, resilient folks with a high capacity for hardship. But should they remain unaffected after years of sitting across from people like the young Congolese man who told me through choked tears in 2010 how rebels forced him at gunpoint to watch them gang rape and then kill his mother? If such a person exists, is that really who we want doing humanitarian work?
Rosalie Hughes
There are so many tangible issues to be worried about in these situations that the abstract issues get lost. It can even be hard to measure the impact of the work people are doing when they’re working in aid, let alone measuring how it’s effecting them or their team.