Experiences from the Field

Sian Cowman talks to Dug Cubie about his work in refugee camps in Nepal; tsunami relief with the Red Cross; and challenges in the field.

It will be no surprise to students of international development that luck is a major factor in getting that all-important first position. When I interviewed Dug Cubie, currently a PhD candidate at University College Cork, he told me that after his law degree in the 90s he was lucky enough to walk straight into an internship with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in London. A key part of his job was to document the conditions detained asylum seekers were being held in: “I got to go with my boss to visit places like Wormwood Scrubs and Rochester Prison, [it was] fascinating but scary stuff to go into these old Victorian prisons, all red brick and door clanging shut behind you sort of thing...” It is no longer so easy to get these positions: “Now the application procedure is through the Headquarters in Geneva....and to be honest I imagine that there’re very few undergrads now who’d get an internship [at UNHCR] before having done a Masters.”

After completing another 6-month internship in the EU, and his Masters in international law, Dug’s first job in a developing country was in Nepal with the UNHCR. Kathmandu was as lively as expected but the village where he was posted had only 200 inhabitants despite being a government administrative centre. The work itself was in seven long-running refugee camps, inhabited by over 100,000 Bhutanese refugees, and at the time the camps were embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal. The situation sounds difficult: “The key issue was how it had been dealt with, the refugees had been dealing with the allegations internally rather than going to the Nepalese authorities and UNHCR hadn’t been informed by the refugees they were doing this. UNHCR at all levels had probably taken their eye off the ball... but then staffing levels, and so the level of monitoring going on, had been cut, as the camps had been there 10 years.” Certainly it was an eye-opening first job.

After more fieldwork with UNHCR, and later project management with the International Organization for Migration, Dug landed a job with the Red Cross in Dublin as a desk officer for the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions. It was 5 years after the Indian Ocean tsunami: “It was a question of how do we wind projects down, hand over to the local Red Cross, accept that you’ve moved beyond the emergency phase into the development phase.”  While Dug was there, they undertook the scheduled shut down of Irish Red Cross offices in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, a difficult but necessary task.

The story about the Nepalese refugee camps and the criticisms I’ve heard of the Pacific tsunami relief prompted me to ask about the challenges facing the humanitarian sector. Dug’s answer is relevant in some of the situations we see in the news today: “One of the biggest things [is] the consistency of response, especially at a political level, [for example] if you compare Libya and Syria...” Money, of course, is a deciding factor in the level of response – the tsunami received huge amounts of funding, but other disasters can become “forgotten crises”. Humanitarian response must also ensure consistency in minimum standards of protection and human rights. For example, in the case of sexual abuse, standards must be in place for prevention of abuse in the first place, rather than just responding to the problem.

  

One positive change Dug sees in the humanitarian sector today is the increasing recognition that ‘we’ don’t always know best. For example, the Indonesian Red Cross sent workers out to Haiti, who of course were very experienced in earthquake relief: “The local capacities are increasing and that’s the way it should be. We need to defer to their knowledge and experience [by] working in partnership with them.” Encouragingly, there is a move away from the hierarchical mind-set of ‘we know best’ and toward collaboration with organisations in developing countries.

I asked Dug what students can do to prepare for the challenges of the development working world: “It is important to know yourself; know your limitations, strengths and weaknesses. I was in Nepal at the time Iraq was kicking off, and I knew I did not want to work in the middle of a war zone. Some people are able to work well in those situations; others work at a higher level of capacity in more secure situations.”

Understanding why we do what we do is important too: “What do we mean when we say someone has a right to health or a right to food... at a basic level, why are we doing this? Additionally, understanding how you do it - project management, the tools you need to ensure that at a practical level the work you’re doing fits in with the funding you’ve got. ” Really, the degree is just the beginning - building up the skill-set is what matters. There is no replacement for field experience - as well as the all-important luck, of course!