Relief Groups Seek Workers With Language Skills, Overseas Experience, and a High Tolerance for Chaos

JOB MARKET

By Marilyn Dickey

As the war in Iraq began to wind down, the phone lines at the American Red Cross, in Washington, started lighting up. “People were saying, ‘I’m on the next plane over there to help you guys, ‘” says Amber Campbell, the charity’s spokeswoman. But that’s not how relief efforts work.

News reports of houses leveled by a hurricane, crying toddlers on the streets of war-torn villages, or refugees trudging along dirt roads with babies in their arms stir people’s passions and make them want to help. What goes on behind the scenes, though, is far more complex than hopping on a plane and pitching in to feed the multitudes. And despite the surge in offers to help during times of crisis, relief organizations sometimes have to scramble to find people with the skills and experience to do the work.

Mercy Corps is seeing both a surge in people applying for overseas relief work and a shortage of candidates with the right qualifications, says Jeff Mike, recruitment officer at the Portland, Ore., charity. “A lot of people are sincerely interested in helping out in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo,” he says. “A lot of people are interested in humanitarian work in general.”

But jobs in humanitarian aid require not just the talent to do the day-to-day work but also language skills, knowledge of other cultures, and a toughness to be able to live in intensely stressful, often hazardous circumstances with few creature comforts, says Roslyn Grace, vice president at International Medical Corps, in Los Angeles.

When a relief team first arrives in an area crippled by war or disaster, she says, the living conditions are horrible. For example, she says, when her group’s workers first arrived in Somalia in 1991, in the wake of its civil war, “all the buildings had been bombed out. It takes a strong individual to handle that.”

In such cases, she says, the first wave of workers typically includes a medical director, a logistician to track food and medical supplies, and an administrative finance person. Next come experts in emergency medicine — triage nurses and surgeons — then later, nutritionists and pediatricians.

Each relief organization has its area of expertise, and thus each seeks different qualities in its field workers. Mercy Corps, for instance, seeks workers who not only possess extensive experience in relief work, but also live in the country or region, and are familiar with the language as well as the culture, says Mr. Mike. “We try to do as much with local staff as we can,” he says.

Ms. Grace says she tries to hire people who don’t need a lot of training and can be dispatched to the crisis area as quickly as possible. “We want people who come qualified, because we are going into rapid response,” she says. “We’re going into war zones, the worst of the worst.”

The American Refugee Committee, in Minneapolis, specializes in areas critical to people who have been displaced from their homes. It helps them with health care and, when necessary, provides refugees with loans and training to start new professions, says Nancy Miller, the committee’s recruitment manager.

Once a crisis situation is stable again, refugees need help returning home. Often their identification paperwork has been destroyed, as well as their homes and businesses, she says. The committee’s workers help with all of those things, she says, using permanent staff members as well as recruiting paid workers — and occasionally volunteers. The committee employs 52 staff members who are not natives of the troubled countries, along with 1,500 workers who are residents of those areas. In Iraq, the group currently has two workers and is looking to hire up to 15 more, if it can obtain sufficient funds.

Some relief organizations, like Project Hope, in Millwood, Va., don’t respond to emergencies at all. “We’re more likely to come in after a period of time has passed, when the health infrastructure is being rebuilt and educating of health professionals would be needed,” says Cindy L. Marino, a recruiter for the charity.

Project Hope focuses on education, so its recruiters look for people with teaching experience within their area of expertise, she says. For example, she notes, “a physical therapist needs to be able to teach other physical therapists.” Language skills are still paramount, she says, sometimes making it tough to fill positions, even for people who have taught in their field. For example, Project Hope is currently looking for a pediatrician who speaks Mandarin to fill a post as program director at a children’s medical center in China.

Getting Experience

Finding a humanitarian-aid job presents a quandary: how to get the overseas experience that is a prerequisite to being hired. Many aid workers get their initial field experience in either the Peace Corps or in aid organizations that hire workers with more basic skills and train them for overseas work, says Barbara Murphy-Warrington, senior vice president of human resources at CARE, in Atlanta.

“If you looked at CARE in the ‘80s and ‘90s, 60 to 70 percent of overseas and program people came from the Peace Corps or other groups like International Red Cross,” she says. The Red Cross provides both its staff members and its volunteers with international disaster-response training, which makes them eligible to apply for Red Cross jobs overseas, she says. That overseas experience then makes those candidates more attractive to other aid groups.

Another way to get that experience is to start out in a developmental job — helping to reconstruct a society after a crisis has passed — rather than one in emergency response. Once a crisis is over and efforts turn to helping people piece their lives back together, relief groups consider hiring workers with less field experience who may have skills, such as in engineering or finance, that can transfer to reconstruction work, says Mr. Mike.

Tim Andrews, vice president of operations at World Vision, United States, in Federal Way, Wash., got into the emergency-relief field through his work in finance. “I initially got a job in a senior finance role, doing some troubleshooting in relief countries,” he says. “After two or three years, I was becoming very familiar with the operation on the ground and began to transition to having operational responsibilities.”

Even doing entry-level work overseas can help get a foot in the door, he advises. “It’s really important to be on the ground and not be afraid of taking what may appear to be low-level kinds of positions,” he says. “Get any experience you can.”

People who have an interest in relief work should think about getting training before they apply for jobs, says Ms. Campbell of the Red Cross. “People don’t think in terms of something that might happen down the road where they can be of assistance.” Weeklong courses in obtaining and distributing aid supplies, and in other emergency-relief skills, are available through the Red Cross, she notes; graduates become part of the charity’s international response team, and their help may be requested in times of crisis.

Obtaining an advanced degree may also improve a job seeker’s chances of getting hired. Susan C. Negro, human-resources generalist at Oxfam America, in Boston, suggests getting a master’s degree in humanitarian work. Numerous institutions offer relevant programs: Tufts University, in Boston, for example, offers a master of arts in humanitarian assistance at its School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, has a Center for International Emergency, Disaster, and Refugee Studies in its School of Public Health. Some other universities with relevant graduate- and undergraduate-level course work include George Washington and Georgetown, both in Washington; Columbia, in New York; and Tulane, in New Orleans.

Screening for Stamina

Finding just the right person for humanitarian fieldwork requires careful screening, says Mr. Mike of Mercy Corps. “We look for someone who is flexible, very stable, able to shift priorities in a fluid environment — and able to do nothing while waiting,” he says, noting that one of the group’s teams of aid workers has been waiting for weeks in Kuwait to get into Iraq.

Age is not usually a factor in hiring people for overseas work. And unless the duty is too hazardous or the troubled area lacks schools, workers are welcome to bring along their families, says Melanie Myers, director of recruiting and staffing at Save the Children, in Westport. Conn.

When interviewing job candidates, Ms. Grace says, she tries to discern their motives for seeking an overseas assignment. “Are they running away from a bad marriage?” she asks. “Are they going over there to spread their religion? If they’re going to a Muslim country to spread Christianity, they’re going to get thrown out of the country.”

She tries to find people accustomed to handling crises. “We’ve hired physicians or surgeons who were in the military because they get good training there,” she says. “Or we look for the surgeon who practices in the inner city as opposed to the surgeon who practices in the suburbs. If they can handle surgery in inner-city Chicago or inner-city New York, then they can handle a war zone.”

Then there are the less concrete qualifications. “You need to have that spark, that desire,” she says. “I have to see something in the individual, that they can handle it. We don’t have the money to send you over and then you say, ‘I can’t take it. I need to come home.’”

An ability to work well and live comfortably with others is also important, Ms. Grace says. “When you put together a team, you want a team that will be harmonious, because they live in close quarters,” she says. “You don’t want one bad apple.”

Living with Stress

Relief organizations usually factor in rest-and-relaxation periods for their workers, sending them home or to other countries for relief, but the strain is still great, says Ms. Murphy-Warrington of CARE. “The sheer poverty is so broad and deep in the world,” she says. “You’re working on a project and you think you’re doing a good job and then you lift your head up and scan the world, and you see that more people are falling into poverty despite all the work. Sometimes it feels like a futile effort.”

Burnout is a constant threat for aid workers. Mr. Andrews worked in emergency-relief operations for 10 years, first during the civil war in Mozambique, then during the ethnic conflict in Zaire, then during the war in Sierra Leone.

“After 10 years I felt myself beginning to respond too slowly to important situations that required quick decision making,” he says. “I felt like I was moving in slow motion. I remember wondering if this was what burnout felt like. I didn’t want to find out, so I actually put a self-imposed sabbatical on me and my family. I had seen colleagues who had hit the wall and burned out, and it would take them a year or two to recover.”

Finding people who can not only survive the strain but actually thrive in it is key, Mr. Andrews says. “There is a grueling aspect to the job, but you also find an incredible amount of hope in these very desperate situations,” he says. “The thing that really always motivated me was you have such an incredible impact, and you can see the results of your work on a day-to-day basis. In Sierra Leone, I think we had close to 200,000 people receiving food on a monthly basis. Turning around a life-threatening situation and starting things moving in a positive direction — that’s such fulfilling work.”

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