For one thing, it suffers from all the usual flaws of technology: It’s fragile, doesn’t like getting wet, you can’t use it to hammer a nail into the ceiling to hang a mosquito net, and it’s a theft target.

On the plus side, it can hold all the reference books you will ever need, but then so can your laptop, which you’re going to need anyway (and while we’re talking about laptops, I’ve been totally won over by the new MacBook Air – tiny, fast, and no moving hard drive!) So, save the hundred and fourty dollars, buy my e-book instead, and read it on your laptop!

That’s for non-fiction reference books, which play to the strengths of e-readers in my mind, then, for fiction, take real books – just a couple of them, and trade them with others.

Of course, if you want one anyway, it helps me support this site if you buy it from the link here (the price is the same for you).

This link provides a downloadable version as well as other resources from the WHO.

Thankfully, my website is now available in eBook form, which means you don’t have to labor through pages of free HTML, but rather you can browse at your leisure on the e-reader of your choice (as long as it’s a Kindle, iPad, iPhone, PC, Mac, or something else that runs Kindle software). Plus, you can pay me about the cost of a beer, which will console me somewhat about not being able to pay my rent from book sales.

So if this site was at least half as useful to you as a book you might have bought, click this link and go buy (and review) my ebook, at about half the cost of a book ($6) I think you’ll find it’s a bargain! Thanks!

Get it here.

Alanna Shaikh

We last heard from Alanna when she gave us her tips on careers in international public health, but in the meantime she’s been busy setting up a mailing list and writing e-books on the topic of international development careers. She writes a weekly newsletter in the question / answer format based on either her experience or a guest expert. The newsletter is a $2 a month subscription (although she’s candid about not minding if people subscribe just for a month to get their question answered!), and the e-book summaries of the questions are $12.99 each. Examples of the types of questions she deals with are: “How long do I have to work for free?“, “What are the best types of entry level job?s“, and “What degrees are most useful?“.

I’m a fan of her advice and approach, and if you’re looking for more thoughts on getting a job in international development I’d definitely recommend you check her out at alannashaikh.com.

Of course, there are downsides to this. It’s riskier, both in financial and security terms, and there is a real danger that for every Maggie there are dozens of stories like this that don’t work out so well.

Read the story here, and watch a video of Maggie speaking about her experiences here.

Thanks,

Nick

Tiana Tozer

Tiana Tozer is currently Mercy Corps’ Monitoring and Evaluation Manager in Sudan, she is also an elite athlete and a wheelchair user. She came to Mercy Corps after an accomplished first career in the private sector. I spoke to her about her career, how she got her first job in relief and development, and the challenges facing people with disabilities in the international relief and development world.

Nick: What made you first want to work in the international relief and development field?

Tiana: Oh I’ve wanted to work internationally since I was 16 and lived in France. I planned on joining the Peace Corps and having an international career, but my car crash at 20 changed that. I was run over by a car, and had to have 35 reconstructive surgeries. At this point I use a wheelchair but I can walk short distances. It became very important for me to have health insurance, so my career became defined by health insurance. First of all I found that as a person with a disability it was almost impossible to have a company even look at me for an international position, even though I speak fluent French, have a working use of Spanish and have lived overseas and traveled extensively. I had more or less forgotten about my overseas dream, but in 1997 I went to Bosnia on a goodwill tour teaching veterans of the war there how to play wheelchair basketball and that re-kindled my desire to work internationally. I had trained all my life for this an international career – everything I did in school, studying languages and political science, my Masters’s degree in international relations from the University of Illinois, but I got sidetracked with the car crash and health insurance. So in 1997 I started applying for a lot of positions that I had the qualifications for except for the overseas experience piece. I did this off and on for the next ten years, and in 2007 when I turned 39 I thought “this is it, if I don’t do it now I’m never going to make it” so I pulled out all the stops and Mercy Corps was the only organization who even said ‘maybe’ to me. I must have sent thousands of resumes – I applied to the UN numerous times for positions I was well qualified for and just never heard anything back. Ever.

Nick: So do you think you just got lucky at finding someone who was interested at Mercy Corps, or was there something you were doing differently?

Tiana: One of the things about the international circuit is it really is a tight-knit community, and they really think that you absolutely have to have international experience to be able to do this job. I have to say I really disagree with that. There are a lot of talented people out there and we’re missing opportunities to put really talented professionals into the field by requiring these huge amounts of overseas experience. So what I did was to begin networking, and Mercy Corps was an obvious target because I was in Portland (where Mercy Corps has its international headquarters). I worked every connection that I could think of and I actually had a fairly unusual skill set that they happened to be looking for (the people with disabilities skill set combined with program management). I became the manager for a program focusing on disability in Iraq; I also took on the gender program. It turned out to be short-lived though because they changed the focus of the funding so that the disability program went away, so I moved into a monitoring and evaluation role in Basra. I did some training and some operations management, but really I wanted to move to Africa, and when the Monitoring and Evaluation Manager position in Sudan came open I applied for it and got the job.

Nick: The Bosnia trip was obviously a huge influence on you – can you tell me more about that and how you lined that up?

Tiana: Well it was just a nine-day trip to teach veterans of the Bosnian war how to play wheelchair basketball. I played wheelchair basketball for the USA in the Paralympics in 1992 and 1996 and this trip to Bosnia was in 1997. I had retired in 1996 and so I was one of the few top-level players at the time who was not in the middle of the season and I was selected to go on this trip to raise awareness about land mines and people with disabilities. International Medical Corps, the UN, and the NATO military who were on the ground there had set it up. I guess for once in my life I was in the right place at the right time.

Nick: What is your advice for people switching careers to international work overseas?

Tiana: I’ve just finished reading ‘Half the Sky’, and one of the things that came to my attention through that is that there are a lot of organizations out there who, if you can pay your airfare to get to the location, will be able to use you as a volunteer for one or two months, and I think that volunteering for an international agency can be a great way to get your foot in the door. If you’re thinking about this as a career change it will give you an idea of the kind of conditions you are dealing with. One of the things that really frightens NGOs when they look at some candidates is that some of these positions are really hardship posts – they are not glamorous at all. Sometimes when they hire people without the ‘NGO experience’ they risk losing them after a couple of months. For example I was just in Agok, which is in the middle of Abyei in Southern Sudan – there was no air conditioning, I was living in a tent, it’s a malarial area, between 2 and 4 in the afternoon it’s really hard to concentrate because the heat was so bad, you can work in the office where the flies are less or you can work outside where the flies are worse, the food is sludge – there are five types, you might get two different types at lunch and maybe two more at dinner, on top of this as you walk from the kitchen to the area where people eat there are all these hawks waiting to attack you and try to take your food! If you want to change careers, I think you have to be flexible and I think you have to give it at least a year. If you’re coming from the corporate world you need to realize you will have to take a pay-cut as well (unless you work for the UN).

Nick: There are a lot of opportunities out there that are being sold as volunteer opportunities that look a little bit more like tourism to me – what do you think about how those look on people’s resumes?

Tiana: Well one opportunity is to volunteer in a headquarters office, but you’re right that you have to evaluate a volunteer opportunity carefully. There are two really big issues for career switchers – number one is salary – NGOs think they can’t afford you, and second they worry that when you get to the field you’re going to run screaming because conditions are really not glamorous, in fact they can be really horrific. I think those are the two biggest reasons why NGOs shy away from people who are mid-career.

Nick: Can you talk a little bit about the experience of having a physical disability in the NGO world?

Tiana: To be honest, very few international NGOs hire people with disabilities. I think the UN and USAID talk a lot about it, but I’ve met very few people with disabilities in the field. The most progressive is probably Handicap International. For me, I reached the point where I started stripping my resume of everything that I thought would make someone think I was disabled. I think when someone sees ‘wheelchair basketball’ they think immediately “oh she’s in a wheelchair – she can’t go to Iraq” but even if that were true, in reality plenty of people who play wheelchair basketball can walk. For example I have an old team-mate and coach – we worked on a Sports For Life program and one of the University of Illinois athletes traveled to Gaza on an internship to help with the program. She is a double amputee, but her amputations are below the knee, so she walks with two prosthetics which meant she got on fine in Gaza. My advice is that if you’re really concerned about hiring someone with a disability, bring them in for an interview – I’m not going to apply for a job that I can’t do or try to go to a place I can’t function.

I think it’s more about attitude than actual disability. I know some people who are paraplegic who would do a bang-up job in Sudan – you need to be flexible, willing to talk about the issue and to ask for what you need. The best advice I can give to people with disabilities who want to work in this field is to start meeting people face-to-face. For me when people meet me they stop thinking of me as ‘disabled’. It takes getting over that hurdle of “oh – she plays wheelchair basketball but she walks”, or “she’s a double amputee but that doesn’t mean she can’t get around”.

I think part of the problem is right now in the States there is a 70% unemployment rate among people with disabilities – I think that employers are hesitant to hire them because they think they will have to pay a lot more money for people with disabilities, both in terms of health care and adaptations, but truth is that most accommodations costs less then $500. When I was going for an interview with a major US sportswear company I was the only person who got flown to their headquarters for a face-to-face interview. Later I found out that the reason why was that the person who was hiring had had a really bad experience with a former colleague who had a disability (the story was this woman with the disability was really angry and bitter apparently) he wanted to meet me personally to find out what my personality was like. Of course that was illegal, but it just comes from prejudice or lack of knowledge or exposure. When I went to Bosnia the National Guard and the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of our trip was talking to a Major from the Greek contingent and she said, “Isn’t it great that these wheelchair athletes are coming to Bosnia?” the Major said no, he thought it was really sad – well, he felt sorry for us for about 30 minutes, but after that he didn’t even really think about us as disabled! After you’ve met people with disabilities who are very mobile and motivated and fun to be around it can completely change the way you think about us.

Nick: Maybe you can talk about your role as a kind of ambassador for people with disabilities in places that don’t have an equivalent of the ADA?

Tiana: I think in Iraq I was hugely successful in teaching 35 young people with disabilities how to be advocates for themselves – we trained these teams in how to educate people and engage with government – within five months they had reached out to 6,000 people. After working with Mercy Corps the group of five in Sulimaniyah went out on their own and got funding to do outreach to all the schools in Sulimaniyah. Educating children is where you can really start to change attitudes. All my little cousins (who now aren’t so little) feel perfectly comfortable with people with disabilities because they grew up with me and it just seems normal to them.

For me it’s very difficult for people to tell that I am disabled unless I’m sitting in my wheelchair, or it’s been a really long day, or I have really short pants on most people probably wouldn’t notice. I don’t roll down the street in Sudan in a wheelchair – even though I use it part-time, everything here is so inaccessible that I don’t use it much. One thing that I would like to say to potential employers is that there are a lot of people out there who may, on their resume look ‘disabled’ but are well suited to the position that they are applying for.

In Sudan it’s really not my role, but as M&E Manager I have insisted that we count people with disabilities, that we acknowledge that it’s a problem, and that we identify beneficiaries who have disabilities. The UN, USAID, all of these large groups are never really going to address poverty if they don’t start addressing disability issues – these people really are the poorest of the poor.

Nick: What other tips would you have for people trying to find their way into this line of work?

Tiana: When I turned 39 I thought “well I either have to go international now or I’m never going to” so I just really put my mind to it and made it a goal. I started networking with everybody that I knew and told them that I was committed to doing this, I applied for all sorts of jobs that I thought that I was qualified for, I asked people I knew to introduce me to other people who they knew. Determination is a big part of it. People say to me all the time that I have a lot of determination. When I was a student I had just finished college and I was making a commercial against drinking and driving and in one shot I had to roll my wheelchair up a really steep ramp. Now I’m considered an elite wheelchair athlete (or at least I was in my glory days!) but it took me 42 attempts to make the shot. 42. When I said I wanted to be on the US Paralympic team a friend from a news station involved in the commercial said she didn’t think I was going to make it, but you have to write down your goals and you pursue them with passion and don’t ever give up. Tenacity and hard work will serve you far better than talent or a huge long resume.

We spend a lot of our lives being told by other people what we can and can’t do. I try to tell young people “don’t ever let someone else place limits on your abilities.” You are going to place enough limits on yourself without letting other people tell you what you are and are not capable of.” Even today I get people who say “gosh Tiana when you said you were going to work internationally I thought it was never going to happen”. You really have to believe in yourself. When I look at a lot of the most successful people in the world I don’t think they’re the ones who don’t fail, they’re the ones who just never give up.

Once you get your first job in this business you just have to be really flexible. You have to be able to laugh, and deal really well with uncertainty. Grants come and go, positions change, you need to be willing to go anywhere – my first post was Iraq, and there are people who are not willing to go to places like that, but I was. If you are only willing to go to places like Kenya or Thailand, those are plum countries – it’s much easier to get your first job if you’re willing to go somewhere no one else wants to go.

Nick: So what’s next for you?

Tiana: Well actually I’ve just finished writing my memoir – the motivation for it was reading all of these books about disability with titles like ‘triumph of human spirt’ which made me want to gag, as though there is something glorious or noble about being disabled, and I just wanted to point out that I’m no different to anyone else. Everyone has a disability of some kind, mine just happens to be visible. I have all the same issues as anyone else, I have a mortgage, I have a job, being disabled is not the biggest thing in my life. I just wanted to write a very straightforward account of what it’s like to go through a life-changing event and come out ok on the other side.

Someday I want to go home to Portland, but right now Mercy Corps only sends me to the nice places, Iraq and Sudan, which means that Afghanistan will probably be next!

—-

You can watch a 2008 interview with Tiana on KATU News here.

Nick: You deal with a lot of people in your role who are starting out in their careers, thinking that they might want to work in international relief and development – how do you select people who you think have potential for your program?

Esker: Well lots of folks have potential to do the job, but CARE is very competitive – we only have a very small number of internship and fellowship opportunities available annually, so we put some thought into our philosophy of recruiting, especially at the junior level of interns and fellows. We have to look at what the ‘win’ is for CARE in developing this program – one of the main reasons for us to do this is to develop a pipeline of future talent who will be future leaders in the field of international development and humanitarian aid. With that as our philosophical starting point we realized we are best off investing in people who really do have this as a career track. There’s a ton of folks who just want to do good stuff, and that’s great, there are a ton of ways that you can support CARE’s work, there are a ton of ways that you can get involved with international aid efforts without being an international aid worker. You need to make that distinction with young people who are interested in this field. We’re looking for people who are serious about being on the track to being an international aid worker – you look for people who have worked for other international NGOs, if they haven’t worked for international NGOs then they have done significant travel in developing countries, or worked in developing countries, lots of people we take are returned Peace Corps volunteers. Some people haven’t had an opportunity to work in developing countries, but have demonstrated a commitment to working with international populations here in the US – for example here in Atlanta we have a significant refugee population – there are a lot of NGOS focussed on refugee health and services, so I look for an indication that this person is really serious about setting this as a career path. Previous INGO work, at least three months experience in a developing country are a starting point, and language skills are very important too.

Nick: That covers some of the intent, some overseas experience and language, what about the characteristics of people you look for, are there particular types of people or attributes you are looking for?

Esker: I divide the competencies I look for broadly into two categories – soft and hard. Hard competencies for me are things like analytical skills, proven research skills, program and project management skills would all be good. I look for people with quantitative analysis skills, SPSS or Epi Info if it’s health related. Grants management is another hard skill that is essential for a person who wants to get into project management.

Softer skills are things like an ability to work with diverse cultures. Flexibility – the ability for a person to adapt to changing environments. Changing priorities and changing contexts that happen pretty rapidly when you work in an organization that is so spread out and that has so many different programmatic or sectoral focuses. One of the things that I think is a shortcoming of the American education system is that it doesn’t train everybody to work with people from different cultures.

Nick: Do you have any tips for people on choosing a graduate degree or a graduate school?

Esker: You have some schools that are more highly ranked in certain areas than others, but just because a person went to one of those schools doesn’t mean that they are going to be a good fit for CARE, actually I often find it to be the opposite. I often find that people from some of the smaller programs can be more involved in their research interests and get more direct input and mentoring from someone who can really help them develop their research interest. It’s case by case though – my goal is to not let the school itself be the driver of whether or not a student is selected for an internship. Having said that though, I do look at what school you went to – for example, you went to Johns Hopkins School of Public Health? I know automatically that you probably have a pretty good background in global health just because they are a good school. To pick another area, Washington DC has a group of great schools that focus on international affairs, but Seattle also has a lot of expertise in certain areas. It’s case by case. Any student at any school has the potential to develop their CV and to develop themselves in a way that makes them an attractive candidate. I just think that the tracks are set up better at some of the more notable schools. If you look at resumes from Hopkins for example, they all look alike, they will all have done some clearly focused research around global health and development and they will have had a practical work experience around one of their research interests for about three months at the minimum in a developing country. The reason is that the program is structured to take the student through a series of development experiences that help them to mature as a professional, whereas in smaller schools its not always as structured and so the student who stands out at a smaller school will have done that themselves.

Nick: So to get an internship with CARE someone already needs to have at least three months interning overseas during their graduate studies – how do people get that first opportunity overseas?

Esker: It’s very difficult, and honestly, the people with more resources tend to have better shots. It’s something that bothers me professionally and personally that that is the case – the truth of the matter is that the person who comes from a wealthier family and went to a school with a larger endowment will probably have an advantage getting into the field of international development. With many of the opportunities out there to build a resume you need the resources to finance yourself getting to a developing country. I think Peace Corps is probably the thing that is most often suggested to people because it is a way around the Catch 22 that you need some international experience to get accepted to any program. Peace Corps is one of the few places that takes folks who have no prior overseas experience, trains them for a little while, pays a stipend, and by the time they return they’re pretty comfortable and confident in their abilities to live and work in developing countries.

We’ve created and piloted a couple of exposure programs that target both undergraduates and people from minority backgrounds, just trying to expose more people to the field of international development but those are pretty small initiatives. I often encourage people to get involved with organizations that focus internationally but don’t necessarily involve travel internationally – there is a lot of work that can be done from the US in international development.

Nick: Where do people go after their internship with CARE?

Esker: I’d say about 5-10% of interns go on to work in some further capacity with CARE. It’s a small percentage. Outside of CARE though I’ve noticed that people go on to do very well – some go on to work with smaller NGOS, the CARE internship experience is very very valuable for a person who is entering the field of international development. Because the technical services available here at our headquarters in Atlanta are relatively small, the interns actually do some very high level work at CARE. There are really no typical internships, but people do a huge range of things, an example might be someone who works with our economic development unit working on value chain issues, helping small farmers or entrepreneurs create value chains to get their products to market – they might do some research, case studies, data analysis, human interest stories, monitoring and evaluation, its very broad. Analytical skills are very important – we’ve had interns who have gone out to the field to do assessments, monitoring and evaluation, resource development, you name it. Another example of a program interns work on is our clean water program in Latin America – interns there go out and work with communities, help raise resources, do research, it’s very broad – literally interns support any function that CARE has. We have about 8 program sectors we focus on, but then there are the areas that interns typically don’t think about, we have this entire team of people who do program support – the back-office functions of HR, procurement, finance, IT, all of the things that would occur in any business. We often have difficulty recruiting in areas like organizational performance management for example, or working with our finance team. Students with those skill-sets generally gravitate to for-profit work.

Nick: How do students typically fund their internships?

Esker: In the US our internships are paid, abroad they are generally not, although it does vary. Most of the people we recruit are funded through their university – they have funds that are set aside for international non-profit internships. Unfortunately this means that students at Ivy League schools, or schools with larger endowments are at a real advantage. I look at a certain school on a resume and I know that that student is going to be applying for a grant of between $2500 and $5000 to support them. That will probably cover most of their costs for a three months assignment overseas. My goal then, even if the student is getting money is to figure out how CARE can offset any in-country costs in addition to what is covered. There is a value to CARE in hosting interns, and there is a value to the intern – we’re trying to make that exchange as equitable as possible. We work with some foundations to provide scholarships sometimes, particularly to minority students, but it’s not a large number. Here in Atlanta its become a bit easier because students don’t have to worry about travel if we can recruit them locally.

Nick: We’ve been talking mostly about graduate students – do you have any advice for mid-career folks wanting to make the switch to international development?

Esker: I do run into these folks at career fairs, generally its about figuring out what the transferable skills are that you’ve developed earlier that can be used in the international development world. I would consider myself to be one of these mid-career switchers, although I didn’t go too far down the path of for-profit work before realizing that this was what I wanted to do, so I went back to school, re-tooled, and was fortunate, to be honest. What I would say is that it is difficult to make the switch. The people who I’ve seen make the switch most effectively, honestly, are in the program support functions, for example, one of our Senior Vice Presidents worked for Bell South most of his career. We have a lot of need for auditors, that and risk management – those really hard business skills that people develop in the for-profit world that area as useful and as applicable to the not-for-profit world.

When you start talking about technical program areas though, that’s where it gets difficult – when you’re talking about someone who maybe has worked in a commercial bank for five or ten years and now they want to work in international economic development? Just because you have expertise in business banking doesn’t make you an expert in economic development – its literally a whole different world. It can be a hard transition – often it involves going back to school, or enrolling in the Peace Corps, even later in life, and that person also needs to be willing to take a really major pay-cut and most people frankly aren’t willing to do that. I’m not sure that I would advise most people to do it – those people who have a real passion and drive to do this will make the transition, but for many people there may be better ways for them to support global development than by becoming an international aid worker.

Nick: What about people transitioning from the armed services into relief and development – is that something that you see a lot of?

Esker: Well, the one area where I do see some of that is in security management – CARE has regional security advisors in each region of the world who think about security of our staff as we operate in increasingly insecure environments. On the whole though, I don’t see a lot of transition – the two seem to be pretty separate worlds.

Nick: One of the more controversial pieces of advice that I hear in seeking experience overseas is for people to simply show up in a developing country and look for experiences on the ground there – how would you see that option?

Esker: I look at tons of resumes, and it works! From what I’ve seen it’s not as far fetched as it may sound. I’ll tell you why I think it works – I think that a person with a bachelor’s degree from a good school and some really good analytical skills, and good writing skills is an asset in development work. The pool of people who are available on the local job market varies significantly from country to country. Right now for example in Haiti it’s very difficult to get qualified local HR, finance or IT staff. A person with good finance skills who wants to do some good and lives in Haiti, or shows up at an NGO office in Haiti, that person has a pretty good chance of getting hired. I see young people doing that all the time, I get calls and emails from CARE country directors about this all the time, and they love this. I might get an email from a country director in East Africa for example saying “hey I met this great student who is taking a year off from her studies at Harvard and is going to be in the country for a whole year and wants to work for CARE, can you help me put her on payroll for nine months?” If that same person had tried to get that same opportunity by writing from the US, well, it’s a really competitive world, there would be a lot of hurdles. By showing up at the front door, handing the country director their resume, seeming smart and saying “I’m here anyway for a year, I live down the street, you don’t have to pay for my travel here, you don’t have to pay for my house and I want to work for you” – my country directors love that – it works. Its risky though. I guess it seems more risky if you have family responsibilities.

Nick: Any other tips you have for people looking for work?

Esker: One thing I would say is be clear about your career trajectory as early as possible. A lot of this field is based on technical expertise, and if you want to be a technical expert in some field making that determination as early as possible is helpful. You need a long track record in a field like logistics, girls education, whatever it is in order to become a senior technical advisor. Another track in this field is those people who want to be project managers – again, as early as you can you need to begin honing that experience, becoming a project coordinator or program assistant, getting experience. The clearer you are in your long term career the easier it is to build you resume. I’d also emphasize the huge need for support functions in international relief and development – HR, finance, IT, all those things are needed.

Jolynn Fisher, Afghanistan

Jolynn Fisher has worked for Mercy Corps since 2005, and has been in Afghanistan since Spring of 2009. Currently she is in charge of providing programmatic support functions to Mercy Corps‘ activities in Afghanistan. She has a background in communications and journalism, and I caught up with her as she was starting her day in Kabul. Her blog Lost N Words describes (amongst other things) her experiences in Afghanistan. Here she talks about her career start, and some of the challenges she has faced.

Nick: Jolynn – you made the difficult move from working in a headquarters office to being an expatriate – how did you first decide you wanted to become involved with humanitarian aid work? How did you get your first job with Mercy Corps then make the transition overseas?

Jolynn: I was exposed to the world outside the US by my family from an early age – in the winter of 1972 my grandparents drove from Washington State to Costa Rica. They went to help friends who were building a bakery at a university there. They passed through Managua, Nicaragua shortly before the earthquake that destroyed much of the city. They returned with food and water to provide what assistance they could to the earthquake victims.

These same friends founded an orphanage in Costa Rica. When I graduated high-school I decided to work for a year, before taking on student loans, but I was worried that if I got a job in the US I might not go back to school. I called my grandparents friends and offered to volunteer at their orphanage. A couple of weeks later I interviewed with their son, who was running their operations in the US, and a couple of weeks after that I was on a plane. The orphanage didn’t pay me, although they did provide room and board and some expenses – I think my parents ended up bankrolling some of it by sending me a little money every couple of months!

I stayed for a year, and did end up coming back to the US to study Communications, History and Journalism at Walla Walla University (a small liberal arts college in Washington State). When I graduated I didn’t have a serious job lined up, and at the time (1994) the university was sending graduates to Russia to teach English in universities (this was just after the collapse of the Soviet Union), so I signed up and was posted to St Petersburg.

It was a really interesting time in Russia – little markets were springing up everywhere and everyone had a kiosk selling something, but the flip side was that every time you saw a line, you still jumped into it – it didn’t matter what it was for – you wanted it! There were still shortages, and occasionally the government would block certain commodities, I remember at one point it was butter – no one had any!

I came back from Russia to help deal with a sick family member, and started to put out feelers for jobs. I ending up going back to a magazine I had interned with the previous summer. I did that for seven years, but the more time I spent with it the less happy I was.

While living in California and working for the magazine, I got involved with a local high school, taking kids on trips overseas to do things like help rebuild schools after Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998. In 2002 I was offered a job there teaching English from a journalism perspective. I did that for a couple of years, but still felt restless. I ended up moving back to Oregon, nearer where my family has its roots.

When I got to Portland, the first thing I did was to find a place to live, then I started to look for a job. While putting out CVs and going on interviews, I started volunteering at Mercy Corps (who have their global headquarters in Oregon) for about 20 hours a week. A friend of mine worked there, and I ended up doing some proofreading, editing and generally support for Balkans support team. I didn’t know anything about the NGO world and it was culture shock to be sure! My first shock was the acronyms & industry jargon – everyone spoke a language I didn’t understand… but the work absolutely made sense.

Part of my support was to enter data into a fledgling on-line database. I asked so many questions about the system – and made so many requests for upgrades… it turned into a job. The Program Department finally decided that they would expand the information management system – and as I had experience doing database development work they hired me. Initially is was on a four-month contract to develop a system to better track grant proposals people were working on and projects they had won.

I never thought of it as a career, but the more time I spent around NGOs the more of an affinity I felt. My contract kept getting extended, until I ended up having to pass the project over to an outside programmer for a month in September 2004, leaving me with nothing to do for a few weeks. Again I was in the right place at the right time and willing to jump in when Hurricane Katrina hit. I initially worked on organizing events in Portland, then on setting up the logistics for assembling the ‘Comfort Kits’ that we were handing out to children in New Orleans at the time.

A few weeks later I ended up being sent down to Louisiana for a couple of weeks, initially to work with some of Mercy Corps’ partners there – one thing and another I ended up helping the Hancock County Emergency Operations Center set up a database to match local needs with offers of assistance. When I got back from Katrina I completed the original database project, and right as that was coming to a close I was approached to join the Material Aid team – the team leader had worked with me during the Katrina response and liked my work.

I focused on supporting emergency response programs and pre-positioning material for emergencies on a pilot project that partnered with DHL. I was also involved in some emergency response projects including shipping pharmaceuticals to North Korea and Iraq. I seemed to get pulled into emergency response related stuff because I had gotten to know one of the key emergency staff in Mercy Corps during my time in Louisiana. The last thing you need is someone you can’t rely on or you can’t depend on.

I had been talking with various people at Mercy Corps about looking for work in the field for about six months when I got the news in 2009 that because of the economic downturn ‘my position was no longer available’.
My first reaction to being laid off was nearly to burst out laughing – I was so surprised. The transition to unemployment was really emotional for me – I don’t think you can work in this industry and not be personally invested. You’re not in it for the money, short work hours, and long weekends – you put a lot of your self into the work.

My last week was disorienting, I was emotional at random times, and that’s frustrating, especially when you’re trying to make a graceful exit. One thing I did learn from this was that even though it’s incredibly personal, it’s not personal. I decided not to take it personally and not to burn my bridges – being laid-off didn’t have anything to do with me or my work. That truth played on in fact when in a strange twist I was brought back on as a consultant to finish a project I’d been leading.

I asked for a meeting with the Vice President of Programs at Mercy Corps, gave him my resume and said “I know I don’t have the experience for a lot of the jobs in the field, but you know my work and you know me – what do you think?”

“What do you think about Afghanistan?” he asked.

I just laughed out loud, but he kept a straight face, so I said, “If you’re serious, and if you would be comfortable sending me to do this then I trust you – I’ll do it!” … three weeks later I was in Kabul!

All I knew about Afghanistan was what I’d heard on the news – I didn’t know anything about the country except the violence and the Taliban – embarrassingly I couldn’t have pinpointed it on a map! The job description fit me though – Program Manager for a cash-for-work project employing Afghan people to do public sector construction work. It was a lot of management – so much of what I did in setting up a new office, hiring staff, building capacity was shockingly similar to the work I’d done in communications trainings and even in teaching.

It helped a bit that I knew a couple of people working in Afghanistan who I had met when they came through the office in Portland. Still, I really didn’t know what to expect. Funny thing was that I was more concerned about what I would wear than anything else!

I knew enough to know I would have to dress differently, but not enough to know exactly what that meant. There was no orientation about what to expect as an expat woman in a conservative Muslim culture. So I was flying blind. I ended up purchasing some crazy linen long shirts in Dubai before I arrived in Kabul. I looked like I was wearing gunny sacks for the first thee months I was here. My first R&R I went to visit my cousin in New York – by that stage I knew what I could wear that was appropriate and was also ‘me’ so I came back looking like a culturally-appropriate version of myself. .

When I first got to Kabul we couldn’t walk anywhere for security reasons. Not being able to walk drove me crazy. Fortunately we were able to go to the German school on Fridays and walk and run around their track – I would go and do that for hours.
I spent three weeks in Kabul planning the program before moving up to Mazar-i Sharif in Northern Afghanistan. There I had about two weeks of having expat colleagues with me before everyone split and went to the locations where they were going to be posted, leaving me as the only expat for Mercy Corps in Mazar… and one of only a handful of foreigners in the city.

Marzar is a small town, and it was my first international post. Not meeting anyone I could relate to was difficult – it took a while to get into the swing of things. I have a pretty high threshold for being alone, but it was a bit much! The first three weeks were so intense – I worked all the time – evenings, weekends – you name it. I was implementing a 12-month project in just over 7 months and all of us were under the gun. We had to spend $10.5 million in Mazar, Pul-i-Khumri and Kunduz.

The work was crazy, but what was worse was when the program began functioning smoothly and I didn’t have to work nights and weekends. When you’re that busy you don’t pay any attention to yourself. When things slowed down I realized how isolated and lonely I was – this was made worse by the local customs that don’t allow any physical contact between men and women.

There’s no pat on the back, or slap on the shoulder for a job well done, let alone a hug. It wasn’t until one of the friends that I’d finally made, gave me a hug that I realized – I haven’t been touched for something like a month. It’s not something that I’d thought about at all, but it was a huge shift for me. I come from a very demonstrative family and my group of friend is that way as well – so to have NO PHYSICAL CONTACT had made me feeling even more isolated and lonely.

One of the hardest things was how lonely I was. Mazar was the most difficult in that respect, though I had a staff of about 55 Afghans most of them were men and I didn’t feel comfortable socializing with them after work.

I thought I’d make friends with other women in the community, but communities here aren’t open. As a woman you can live next door to someone your whole life and never meet them. So, though I did visit community project sites, I didn’t really meet anyone I could spend time with.

Also, I was careful not to spend too much time on the project there because I wanted the communities to see my staff as the project implementers, not the foreigner. I tried to stay in the background, but on the occasions when I visited villages I was generally introduced as this great benefactor – it was a role I wasn’t really comfortable in.

I did finally meet a few expats in Mazar. One of them has become an incredibly close friend that I don’t know what I would do without him. One of the things that has really surprised me is how quickly you get to know people here. This extreme environment really enhances or exacerbates existing personality traits… including your own. You know pretty quickly if a person you meet is someone you want to spend more than 20 minutes with….ever!

This world attracts people who are attracted to the drama and adrenaline. It really is the wild west, and the cowboys are the ones that really scare me – the adrenaline junkies – I avoid them at all costs. I did come here with some preconceptions about security personnel – mostly because of stories I’d heard in the NGO world. As it turns out two of my best buddies here work in security – they are rational, level headed, really insightful guys. I hate to admit it, but that surprised me – I expected them to be guys with no necks who packed guns, curse and swagger! …not that they aren’t prone to a good curse or swagger from time to time!

Knowing how women can be treated here, I thought I wouldn’t feel very safe. But, one of the strange things is that I never felt like I’ve been treated as a woman. As an expat woman you’re not quite a woman – you’re certainly not a man, but given that you are managing so much money you are kind of in the role of a man.

In terms of feeling safe here, the first thing that really helped me make the transition was when one of our drivers started looking out for me. I don’t know why – I never asked him, but he just took me under his wing. Whether it was that I looked lost and bewildered, or whether he just thought I was a good person I don’t know, but knowing that someone was watching out for me made me comfortable in a way that hanging out with random expats didn’t.

The transition between Mazar and Kabul has been difficult. I felt more comfortable in Mazar than I feel here in Kabul. There I could go shopping, walk, and travel in the evenings without getting stopped at random checkpoints… a lot of things that I can’t do, or that I can’t do easily, here in Kabul. Then there’s the dirt.

Kabul is a huge dirty city with partially paved roads that belch smoke and dirt into air that hangs over the city. The trade-off is that there’s always something to do. There’s a huge expat social scene, and in a weird way that makes it more difficult to engage with. When the Mazar Social Club held an event everyone would come – Kabul is much bigger, everyone is in smaller more closely knit groups. There’s a big UN contingent, different government groups, NGOs, everyone breaks out into their own social groups.

Nick: Do you have any tips for people wanting to work there?
Jolynn: Having people around you that you can trust to give frank feedback about how you are doing is vital. You can get really lost in yourself, in your work. You need someone who can say “hey, you’re losing touch – you need to take a break!” I have a couple of people who I can be really open with and bounce ideas off of. It’s easy to get a little lost in yourself.

You have to love this work – it has to be completely about that. It’s really unlikely that the work you do will be recognized outside the people who have been impacted – it can’t be a career move or about professional recognition. You do this work because you love it – that’s the only thing that makes it worthwhile.

Nick: After reading your blog post on being a woman in Afghanistan I wonder whether you have any other tips for women wanting to work in these kinds of environments?
Jolynn: You have to tread carefully as a woman, particularly in conservative cultures – you can’t expect to be able to live like you live anywhere else in the world and for that not to have consequences. I would never in a million years come home drunk or ask one of my drivers to pick me up drunk. I see a lot of women who do that though, and it’s crazy! That level of disrespect for local norms absolutely puts a woman at risk and the consequences here are very real. The same is true of women who flaunt their sexuality – you have to be respectful of the culture you are living in. It doesn’t mean you have to shut down your femininity, but you have to be careful.

Afghanistan isn’t a place for everybody and if you get into at place like this and it doesn’t fit you should get out – you’ll figure that out pretty quickly.

Nick: Alan, tell us a little about your background – how did you find your way into this line of work?
Alan: I had a close family member who worked at World Vision while I was growing up, and I guess I always thought that I would work for a non-profit after I made my millions in the corporate world! (laughs). I graduated from university in International Business and got a job in the corporate sector, but I realized after a while that it really wasn’t what I wanted to do – I just wasn’t happy. I made the move to the Marketing Research department at World Vision, part of the team that works on raising money, and was with them for about a year. This was in the mid-eighties, a hard time at WV because of the ‘Ethiopia Crash’ – we really ramped up to respond to the drought emergency in Ethiopia, and then it came to a screaming halt. My job was eliminated as part of that process, but at the same time a position came open in what is now called the International Programs Group, and I made the move to that department. I held a number of positions in International Programs and then left World Vision at the end of the 1980s to pursue other interests. I came back though, in the early 1990s to help contract-manage a three-year USAID grant in Romania from the US, and then moved to the regional office in Austria, working with a range of things including HR, gifts-in-kind, and the administration function of the office.
During that time in Austria, the World Vision U.S. office moved near Seattle, so when I returned I came to work on domestic programs, focusing on rural programs and relief activities in the US for about 18 months. I then moved into Human Resources as a business partner. I spent a couple of years in Seattle then two years in DC, then came to Monrovia in 2002 to be the benefits manager in the HR Group, looking after benefits for our expatriate and US-based employees. In 2008, I moved over to our relief group HR function. World Vision divides emergencies into three categories – category three is the most serious the largest disasters. My job is to identify people to staff these responses. We’re looking mostly for existing World Vision staff who have experience in these kinds of situations, or, increasingly, people who have less experience (perhaps they have worked in smaller emergencies) but have the capacity to step up.
Nick: So what are the main differences for you between working HR in the corporate world and for World Vision?
Alan: I think one of the main differences is that we work in places that most corporations don’t. Because of the places where we have offices, our compensation and benefits schemes are quite different. International for us is not London and its not Frankfurt, it’s Darfur and various points in between. HR is probably an easier place to shift over from the corporate world though – we have people in different places – risk issues are more front and center, but there is a lot of similarity overall in terms of the systems and procedures needed.
Nick: What are the key skills that you look for when you are staffing your emergency teams?
Alan: First I look for good references. Then I look for a cv that shows someone has had a lot of experience in writing, it’s one of the key things that people need to have along with communication skills – good places to start are to be able to write proposals and do all the Program Officer type support stuff. Even Project or Program Coordinators need to have great writing skills. Then they need program design experience; I want to see project management skills and experience that demonstrates that on a resume. Even if it is managing some sort of project even in a building sense, if they’ve had that step by step approach to getting something done, that’s good.
Cross cultural skills are crucial – but clear thinking and adaptability is probably the biggest thing that makes someone successful. Probably the hardest challenge is to know whether you can drop someone somewhere and they can live in ambiguity – that is critical for success in a field assignment. We look for that using scenarios and behavior based interview techniques. Asking people what they would do in a particular situation is one thing, asking for an example of a time they DID display that behavior is another. I talk to people about their experience, particularly overseas – what were their first impressions, what did they notice that was different? What did they do when people acted differently or were perhaps not as flexible in some ways as they themselves are?
Nick: What are some of the characteristics of people you select? Are there any things they have in common, what about educational background?
Alan: The field is quite different now to when I was first getting into it – it has become much more professionalized over the years. People are coming out of university with much more experience much earlier in their careers. They are much more plugged into the world outside, with more knowledge of what’s going on around them, and more engaged. A bachelor’s degree is an absolute minimum these days, but most of the time we look for master’s degrees. Obviously, qualifications matter in the sector specialties like health and engineering, but increasingly for generalists too. Historically we saw a lot of international relations, international management, these kinds of degrees, but it seems even NGO management seems more specialized now.
Nick: Do you have any tips on picking a school?
Alan: We get a fair number of people from the Stanfords and the Harvards and Dukes – those places draw attention to your resume, but my advice is to pick a school that gives you practical experience in a work setting – a chance to go overseas or part of a thesis that relates to a practical application in what you learned. Ultimately that’s more important than a big name school.
Pretty much every year the proportion of people with graduate degrees increases. It seems that the majority of people have master’s degrees now – a lot of the Program Coordinators even. What I keep trying to tell my son though is that you’re better off trying to get some experience before you go back and get your master’s, you get more out of your degree that way, I think. That’s not always what people do though. I think people who do that tend to be more clear about what they want to do – there’s also a danger that with no experience in between a bachelors and a masters they can price themselves out of the market in some respects because their debt load means they can’t take entry level positions.
Nick: What about the support professionals who don’t work on international programs – where do they come from?
Alan: Most of our HR people come from other HR roles either in other non-profits or from the corporate world. We’re seeing that the aid world is getting more business oriented – within HR support functions I think we’re getting more people who are from a business for-profit background. I think within World Vision International all of our HR people are from external for-profit businesses. Even out President is now. On the US side in Seattle and DC its probably the same – someone who has come in from outside. We’re getting larger and there’s more to manage. We have some MBAs in some functions, but MBAs don’t tend to translate really well unless it’s an MBA in non-profit management – we’re getting more and more of those.
Nick: World Vision is a large Christian organization – what tips would you have for someone in figuring out whether that is a good fit for them?
Alan: One of the interesting areas for us is that as we’ve gotten larger we’ve gotten more ecumenical and broader – it’s probably easier to fit now than it has been previously for a broader number of people. One thing people need to be comfortable with is people at World Vision act out of a faith-centeredness – you hear a lot more of calling, purpose, those sorts of things, than maybe you would in other organizations.
In terms of you as a person of faith, you need to recognize within yourself if that’s what you are – like any organization it won’t flex to fit you – you generally have to flex to fit it.
Nick: Do you have any other career tips?
Alan: Well, my career hasn’t been very intentional – I don’t really think of it as a career path – I’ve been led by interest and passion and what God has called me to. In many ways there isn’t a ‘career path’, you have to forge your own path. Having said that though, I think that career pathing and workforce planning is something we will see more of in the future.
I haven’t done a lot of international assignments, but if that is what you want you can step out and do it – it takes getting to know someone who sees the value in you and is willing to step out and make the case for you. One of the key things is having a cross cultural experience – even though mine was 15 years ago it still has value that people recognize and that I draw on.
Those international field experiences are highly esteemed – you really do have to put in your time – get that assignment that enables you to see what other parts of the world really have to live under and through. That enables you to have other opportunities I think.
How you get that can be a challenge – just showing up may be dangerous and may not be wise, but when I’ve been to responses I see that we always hire some people locally. Even now in Haiti, Haitian Americans who were there or international staff who are there looking for a job, they come across the border and we hire them if they seem capable. It happened in Bosnia, Kosovo, the 2004 Tsunami – people just showed up – they were there and they showed they had the skills – writing skills, a willing heart. It’s not as safe, and it’s not as smart, but it happens.