Dan: 0:00

Grace Jackson is a humanitarian worker. Right now, she works in Malawi. She's worked previously in the DRC, that's the Democratic Republic Of The Congo. She fought Ebola in Sierra Leone. We'll hear all about that. But one constant in her work is cooperating with government officials, the local officials where she's working, or sometimes the ministers in her home government, The UK. And she said, you know it's gonna be a bad day.

Grace: 0:29

When the minister's office calls you and says, the minister was watching the news this morning, and they saw your country or crisis, and it's never good news. One time, this happened to me, and the minister had seen a news report on a refugee camp that we were supporting and felt that there was too much mud on the ground and would like us to do something about it, please.

Dan: 0:58

Too much mud?

Grace: 0:59

Yep. And so then you have to spend several days trying to figure out if there is indeed too much mud or if there's a normal amount of mud. And in any case, is there anything that you can do about it? And then go back to the minister and explain, we're really sorry, but, like, mud is is on the ground, and we're not gonna do anything about it.

Dan: 1:17

It turns out mud is endemic to the environment.

Grace: 1:20

Yep.

Dan: 1:21

But you have to go back and and sort of close the loop. Like, here's the after action report on that mud situation.

Grace: 1:27

Yep. Yep.

Dan: 1:28

Oy. I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a veterinarian, a massage therapist, a life insurance agent. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Grace Jackson what it's like to be a humanitarian worker. We'll talk about what it was like to be in the middle of an Ebola outbreak, why fixing a roof can be a life changing thing for a low income family, and we'll also hear about a chicken that was tragically in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stay with us. Years ago, Grace was hired by the UK government to do economic development work in Sierra Leone. But then the Ebola outbreak happened there, and all of a sudden, she was asked to be part of the Ebola intervention team. I asked her how she felt about that.

Grace: 2:36

I didn't mind, to be honest, because I think and I guess maybe this speaks a bit to why I like this kind of work. When you're in the middle of a crisis, you wanna be working on the crisis. You know, the crisis is happening, and you kind of want to be working on the most important or live thing and not to be around the edges.

Dan: 3:00

I asked her what a normal day was like during that time.

Grace: 3:04

A typical day for me, honestly, was in some ways quite mundane. And I think a lot of people think about humanitarian work and they jump to the news headlines and they think you must be being shot at or, like, you know, treating Ebola patients or dodging cyclones 24/7 because that's what people think of as a humanitarian crisis, but it's it's not like that. You know? It's you have these bursts of kind of stress and crises. But actually, you know, most of the time, you're going to meetings, lots and lots and lots of meetings. You're, like, sitting at your desk doing emails.

Dan: 3:42

And the meetings were because there's so many players involved.

Grace: 3:46

Exactly. Yeah. There's so much coordination involved because there's so many different bits of any crisis, really, whether that's Ebola or something else. There's so many different pieces of the puzzle that all have to work together. And that means people, and that means different, like, timelines and delivery and all of that.

Dan: 4:08

And what was your piece of the puzzle?

Grace: 4:10

So I was the program manager responsible for the treatment centers that the UK was building. Initially, just one, and then expanded to five more. And what the program manager job is is basically running around trying to coordinate everyone, looking at lots and lots of spreadsheets and Gantt charts. And, you know, you've got that NGO that's contracted to run the treatment center, and then you've got the procurement people who are trying to get the stuff that you need to run that treatment center, and you've got the people who are building it, which is a, you know, local construction company and UK military engineers. And then you've got a bunch of NHS staff also coming in to help staff it. And somewhere between all of those people, you've got to have a single plan and a single timeline and someone who's tracking all of that.

Dan: 4:59

And what are your memories from that era? When did you feel most hopeful that things were turning in a positive direction?

Grace: 5:07

Oh, I don't I'm the one that sticks with me is almost the opposite.

Dan: 5:11

Okay.

Grace: 5:13

This sort of real low point, it was towards the end of the outbreak, but the end was really long because you can't just rest on your laurels when it's like, oh, well, you know, it's only ten cases a month. It has to be zero.

Dan: 5:29

Yeah.

Grace: 5:29

And that takes ages. And we were in that process of it taking ages. And I remember getting the news that there had been a guy in Freetown who'd become sick and, you know, being scared and and worried, He went up country to his village, his home village where he got treatment from a traditional healer and then he had he died and then they had the funeral. And traditional funerals in Sierra Leone involve a lot of physical contact with with the deceased person. And that's the moment at which you're most infectious after Ebola.

Dan: 6:04

Oh, really?

Grace: 6:05

And as a result of that funeral, sixty people were infected, and suddenly there's another huge cluster. And I just remember the feeling of, you know, you feel really angry, but you also feel guilty for feeling angry because you can't be angry at the poor guy who died and who who behaved in a way that is completely understandable. And now all these people are are also sick, and you just have this sense of both, like, completely impotent anger and frustration, and also just feeling like it's never gonna end, and and you're never gonna get there.

Dan: 6:38

The danger and anger and frustration can lead to an appreciation for dark humor. You have to find ways to laugh. Grace shared one of those stories that rides the borderline between horrific and hilarious.

Grace: 6:55

One of the first treatment centers in Sierra Leone had just opened. And, obviously, everyone's quite nervous about how it's going to go. And I get a call from one of the people running the treatment center to explain that one of the patients had come in. And in Sierra Leone, when you go into hospital, there's no meal service. You bring your own food or your family come and bring food. And this person obviously assumed the same thing was true. And once you go into the treatment center and you're in the red zone, you're a biohazard. You might have Ebola on you, and you have to be really careful about anything leaving the red zone. And it turned out that this patient had brought with her and somehow managed to smuggle in a live chicken. And so this chicken had got free and was now running around the red zone and was now an Ebola biohazard and could not leave the red zone. And so the staff were trying to figure out what to do, and then eventually they figured what they were gonna do is they were gonna chase it into the incinerator. And so I don't know if listeners would have heard the Benny Hill theme tune, But in my head, I always think about these people with full Ebola PPE, you know, the full hazmat suits running around chasing this chicken and trying to get it into the incinerator. A sad end for the chicken, sadly.

Dan: 8:21

The Ebola outbreak began in Sierra Leone in May 2014. The country was declared free of Ebola in March 2016.

Grace: 8:30

The sort of unusual thing about working on an Ebola outbreak is that there is an end.

Dan: 8:36

Yeah.

Grace: 8:36

Apart from all those moments of feeling like we were never gonna get there, we did. And I remember one of my colleagues saying to me on that day when we hit zero, you really need to savor this moment because this doesn't happen in our sector. This isn't gonna happen again. Like, you probably will never have this feeling again where you actually win.

Dan: 8:58

Oh my gosh. That's depressing.

Grace: 9:00

Yeah. I think about it a lot. And, yeah, I think it's true. It's very rare that there's an end to the crisis, like a defined measurable end where you can sit there and think, yeah, we we fixed this, we won.

Dan: 9:17

That's a great point because you're dealing with poverty and crises caused by war and famine and health problems and things where there is no defined ending.

Grace: 9:27

Yeah. Exactly. And I think most humanitarian crises are the result of conflict. They're political. Because, you know, sometimes it is a natural disaster, but the biggest crises that the world is facing at the moment are all conflict driven and and politically driven, and there's rarely a neat solution or an end point.

Dan: 9:50

Grace remembers the celebrations in Sierra Leone when it was declared Ebola free.

Grace: 9:56

There's this great video on YouTube, which is a Sierra Leonean artist repurposing one of his songs, and it's called Bye Bye Ebola. It's amazing. And the music video is all different people involved in the Ebola response dancing along to this video. And it just gives a sense of the joy and, you know, a whole country celebrating because it had been the whole country for a year and a half.

Dan: 10:40

I can't imagine how good that would feel. I mean, what could be a bigger deal than to eradicate a disease like Ebola, not not only for Sierra Leone, but also for the world? I mean, you know, it's not like it was gonna stop at the country's borders. That. I mean, that must have been such an incredible experience.

Grace: 11:01

Yeah. I think I mean, you're sort of mixed with exhaustion. Right?

Dan: 11:06

Yeah.

Grace: 11:06

But yeah. Yeah.

Dan: 11:22

When you picture a humanitarian worker, you might picture someone like Grace who comes from the West to do work in the developing world. But she said, actually...

Grace: 11:31

Most humanitarians are people who are working in their own communities, in their own country, and who are responding to the crisis that's unfolding right in front of them. And I think the people who really stick with me that I've met in this work are those people who are you know, it might be people volunteering for their local Red Cross. It might be people working for an NGO or it might be local government officials and people who are really doing their utmost to respond and to support their own communities often with very little, like, resources or funding. I think about when I was in DRC, I visited a town called Pinga, which is in the hills above Goma in Eastern DRC. And it was right on the front line of the conflict between these armed groups and the government, and it kept changing hands and things kept moving around. And we met the hospital director who was showing us around the hospital. And if you imagine the hospital building, no electricity, no glass in the windows, you can see a few sort of bits in the wall where it's taken a direct hit. And he's showing us around the facility and the whole area, the whole grounds is just full of families who've taken shelter there, who are sleeping on the ground at night, there's no tents or anything. But that's the safe place that they can try to shelter in. And at the same time, this director is just trying to keep the show on the road, trying to keep the hospital going. And he and his team showed us around their maternity ward. And I say maternity ward, it was one room and it had one maternity bed in it. But they were so proud of it, and they were so proud of what they'd been able to do to keep treating patients. And that is what really sticks with me is that people are really trying often in the most difficult of circumstances.

Dan: 13:24

I'm just thinking about you must have been in in your twenties when you were in the DRC, one of the most dangerous countries on Earth, and you see these kind of overwhelming, you know, snapshots of of poverty and and war and destruction. I mean, did you ever question the choice you had made of careers?

Grace: 13:48

Weirdly, no.

Dan: 13:50

That is surprising. I mean, I obviously, you liked it or you wouldn't have stuck with it, but I figured you would have at least a few moments of of panic.

Grace: 13:58

Definitely moments of doubt and moments of, you know, is this quite the right thing to be doing? But I think what I really enjoy about my work and what has always drawn me to it is the problem solving aspect. Like, that's what I that's just what I really like doing. That's how my brain works. And what is, you know, in in many ways, the biggest problem of all of, like, why are some people so much better off than others? And what can anyone do about that? And working on humanitarian crisis is really the most extreme end of that spectrum.

Dan: 14:31

Mm.

Grace: 14:32

And I think that's always been the problem that I've wanted to work on. And then from that, yeah, I've definitely questioned, is this the right organization to be working for? Is this the right kind of work? How can we do this better?

Dan: 14:46

This yearning to do humanitarian work better led Grace to a nonprofit called GiveDirectly. It's animated by a very simple idea. A lot of times, Western efforts are about trying to get developing world people to do some thing. Use a different approach to agriculture or educate their kids in a different way or change their health behaviors. What GiveDirectly believes is refreshingly simple. What the poorest people on Earth lack more than anything else is money. So let's give them some money and trust them to do the right thing for their families and their situation. So paint us a picture of the average person who might get cash transfers from GiveDirectly, like, what is their life like? Paint a picture of the village that they live in, just show us what it looks like on the ground.

Grace: 15:42

Yeah. In Malawi, where I am right now, the average person receiving a cash transfer is living in a small village, maybe a 100 or 200 people, 200 households. And they're living in a house that is kind of mud brick walls and probably grass thatch on the roof. And the grass thatch has to be replaced every year. It leaks. It causes illnesses because of the rain and because of the mosquitoes and the damp. And doing farming. Farming a small piece of land to grow your own food and rarely enough food to last you the whole year from the harvest.

Dan: 16:26

And water, how do you get water?

Grace: 16:28

Sometimes from a borehole, but sometimes from a stream or another kind of open source. And yeah. I mean, most of the children, you're kind of in and out of school when the family finances will allow.

Dan: 16:44

Because you have to pay to go to school?

Grace: 16:47

Yeah. Primary school is free, but there are fees involved in taking exams, in uniform, in school, in books, in the equipment, stuff like that. So a lot of the time, it is a struggle for families to be able to put their children through school.

Dan: 17:03

So sometimes they're in, sometimes they're out, just depending on the the how the money is coming in?

Grace: 17:08

Yeah. Exactly. And and most of your life, you're probably spending within about an hour's walk of your village. You're not traveling that much. Maybe you'll go to the nearby town, like, rarely. But really most of your time is within that village and maybe the surrounding villages.

Dan: 17:26

And what might be the amount of money that they earn in a year in one of these villages?

Grace: 17:31

I think it's about between 4 and $500 on average for your annual income.

Dan: 17:39

So, you know, a $1.50-ish a day, maybe a little less.

Grace: 17:44

Yeah. About 75% of the population in Malawi live on less than $3 a day.

Dan: 17:51

I think sometimes when people hear these numbers, they think, oh, well, that must mean something different over there, like, because it's absurd to live on a dollar or 2 a day, it may be, you know, a square meal for your family costs 25¢ in these areas or something. But that is not the case. Right? These are not different dollars that we're talking about.

Grace: 18:12

No. Exactly. The way that the World Bank do this is trying really hard to make it equivalent so that you are comparing the same thing with the same thing and you're not trying to compare apples and oranges.

Dan: 18:24

And so what would be a typical amount of money that the people in these villages might get from GiveDirectly?

Grace: 18:31

So in Malawi at the moment, it's about roughly $550 per adult. So that might be if you've got two parents and some kids in a household, then that would be $1,100 roughly.

Dan: 18:45

So that's a massive amount of money. I mean, that's basically a year salary all at once. Yeah?

Grace: 18:50

Exactly. Yeah.

Dan: 18:51

And what happens after they get that money? What do they spend it on?

Grace: 18:56

A lot of people, their first priorities are improving their home. And particularly, I mentioned the grass thatched roofs earlier, particularly buying iron sheets for their roof. And it might seem like a small thing, but if you've had to spend money that you don't have every single year rethatching your roof, and even so, it's still leaking, which is a risk to your maize, which is also your only form of sustenance for the whole year. And if that gets rained on, you're in big trouble, and it's causing damp and illness in the household, then having a dry place to sleep is really an understandable top priority. People are also investing in livestock, livestock being an asset because obviously you can breed livestock, but you can also sell them or eat them or keep them for the long term. And then investing in some kind of business even if that's just like growing enough food or different types of food that you can sell at the market or setting up a tea shop in town or starting your little corner shop. That's what a lot of people tend to do with the money.

Dan: 20:06

So let's dive in a little bit more to your day to day work. So you you're the country director in Malawi, and in a big picture, it's your job to make sure a lot of people get the cash transfers that that you're funded for. But what what does that look like on a day to day basis? Like, are some of the key challenges that you're combating?

Grace: 20:27

Yeah. I mean, on a day to day basis, we have field teams going out into each village face to face, talking to people, introducing us as an organization, and then signing people up, gathering the information that we need, and then that goes into our system.

Dan: 20:45

Let's just let's let's pause there for a sec because I'm just imagining what it would be like to have someone come into your village and say, good news, you're all gonna get like a year's income for free. Like, do those feel like Christmas Day or are people skeptical of that message?

Grace: 21:05

People are sometimes quite skeptical, and I don't think people really believe it until it happens, you know. People are most of the time enthusiastic, but a degree of skepticism. And then what really feels like Christmas Day is when the first payment comes through and people suddenly realize, oh, wow. They're good for it. This is gonna happen.

Dan: 21:24

Have you been in one of the villages, like, when when the first payout comes? What is that like?

Grace: 21:29

Yeah. Usually, most of the payments go out at the same time, you know, you're kind of pressing a button on the system, and so you hear the sound of all the phones going off.

Dan: 21:40

Oh. Oh, man.

Grace: 21:42

And people are starting to realize this is coming through. They're seeing it on their phone, and then there's the excitement. And then you're seeing people go and, you know, make purchases and go to the market and do the things that they've been thinking about and they've been planning and the excitement of either, you know, getting the cash physically or going and buying the thing that you've been you wanted to do.

Dan: 22:09

Hey, folks. Dan here. I can't stop thinking about that moment when in a particular village, everyone's phones start ringing at the same time, and the wave of delight that comes as people realize this is real. I can finally fix my roof. I can finally send my kid to school. And my question to you is, do you want to create a moment like that? What I mean is this episode is coming out on Giving Tuesday, and we volunteered to be part of a fundraising effort called Pods Fight Poverty. We're joining with other podcasts ranging from Freakonomics to Ologies to Revisionist History and we're raising money for hundreds of families in Rwanda. Now, sometimes donations can be so diffuse. It's like you give 50 to some huge aid organization and the money trickles through a bunch of bureaucratic layers and then later you get a 100 pieces of direct mail asking you for more money. GiveDirectly is not that. You give $50, well, 42 or 43 of those dollars are going to be beamed directly to the phone of a Rwandan family. And I know in the West, don't think a dollar goes very far anymore but let me tell you, it goes far in Rwanda. By the way, I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is on this. I'm gonna match every dollar that you put in plus give directly has another donor that's gonna do a 50% match. So if you give $50, that's like a $125 that will actually get to families in Rwanda. So let's do this. You can go to givedirectly.org/whatitslike to donate, and you can find that link in the show notes. Let's show these other podcasts how generous our tribe is. Let's make those phones ring in Rwanda, folks. Givedirectly.org/whatitslike. And now, back to the show. We talked about how part of Grace's work is signing up villages to receive the cash transfers. I asked what the other important parts of her job were.

Grace: 24:37

I mean, for me, I spend a lot of my time meeting with government, meeting with donors and other partners, and just talking to the government about what we're doing and how we're working together.

Dan: 24:50

What is the government's typical reaction to GiveDirectly's presence? Or I mean, are they happy you're there? Are they skeptical? Like, what is the nature of that relationship?

Grace: 25:01

I mean, I think it's the same the world over where you're trying to convince a policymaker of any government that giving people money is the best thing that you can do for a whole range of things that they might be interested in. And people are skeptical all over the world about that for lots of different reasons. And so it is about bringing people on that journey and bringing people with you. Sometimes it's about getting people out to the field, getting people out to a village and seeing what it's like on the ground, kind of building that relationship over time and convincing people that this is the way to go. And sometimes people are on board straight away and sometimes people are skeptical. And I think that's true whether you're in Malawi or DRC or London or the US.

Dan: 25:50

That's interesting. I wasn't anticipating that the government officials that you might have to put on a hard sell for them. What what is the nature of their skepticism when they are skeptical?

Grace: 26:02

Sometimes it's that, you know, typical aversion to giving out money. You know, what will people do with it? What if people spend it on things that we disapprove of? What if people don't use it wisely?

Dan: 26:14

Like they're just gonna go and have parties or something and blow the money?

Grace: 26:17

Yeah, exactly.

Dan: 26:18

Okay.

Grace: 26:19

And I should say that, you know, we've obviously looked into this a lot and the evidence really suggests that actually spending on things like alcohol and tobacco actually goes down in many cases.

Dan: 26:33

What kind of personality traits do you think are are key for this work?

Grace: 26:38

Well, I don't know. I was gonna say a relatively high level of kind of energy. You're often spending a lot of time interacting with people. You know, you're not spending eight hours a day doing quiet work in front of your desk. You're talking to people. You have to be good at communicating and talking, and you have to enjoy, like, you know, getting into it and negotiating and trying to convince someone to do what you think they should be doing. And so I don't know if that's extroversion or if it's just the energy of enjoying, like, the people side of it.

Dan: 27:12

Mhmm.

Grace: 27:12

I think that's a big one. I think maybe a slightly weird relationship with risk. Like, ability to sort of suppress some of that risk aversion and anxiety in particular situations.

Dan: 27:28

What are you thinking about?

Grace: 27:29

Well, I'm thinking a lot about being out in the field in DRC. And most of the time, I was surrounded by lots of peacekeepers and lots of security. But still sometimes to go once I was in Beni, I was tagging along with a UN trip. And the day before, about thirty six hours before, the ADF, which is a very, very violent and scary Islamist group that operates in kind of jungles of Northeastern DRC, had mounted a prison break and had gone to the prison and and released people. And 36 hours later, we show up because

Dan: 28:14

Oh.

Grace: 28:14

A few people on the visit thought it'd be interesting. And you're just there looking at the tiny padlock that they had had no trouble breaking through and thinking, well, this was waiting to happen. You know, I'm not sure that everyone would want to show up to this prison 36 hours after this very scary prison break had happened. I don't think that our security people were very happy about it either.

Dan: 28:39

Does your family think you're nuts to be doing this kind of work?

Grace: 28:43

I think they're used to it now. When during Ebola in in Sierra Leone, I was really trying hard to give my mom a sense of normal life. So I would send her lots of pictures of, here is a pizza. Here is a beer. Here is the sunset. You know?

Dan: 28:58

That is so sweet. Just conspicuously censoring all Ebola mentions from the communications.

Grace: 29:04

Yeah, well, I think I overdid it because quite soon afterwards, she was asking me about coming to visit. And then I had to sort of confess that it really wasn't safe for her to come and visit. Yeah.

Dan: 29:16

So Grace, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Let me fire away here. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Grace: 29:31

I'm gonna say CMCoord.

Dan: 29:33

CMCoord?

Grace: 29:34

CMCoord. Yeah. With Okay. CMCoord, which means civ-mill coordination. So when you're in a conflict zone, you've gotta have some level of coordination with the military so that you know what they're doing and they know what you're doing so that bad things don't happen.

Dan: 29:55

Like what give me an example of something bad that might happen in the absence of that coordination.

Grace: 30:01

Well, if you're on the road going from, I don't know, like, Goma to Beni and the Congolese armed forces about to mount a massive sort of operation, and there's a high likelihood of you getting caught in the crossfire or you're being mistaken for

Dan: 30:22

The rebel forces or something. Yeah.

Grace: 30:24

Yeah. Then you don't want that to happen.

Dan: 30:28

That makes sense. That makes good sense. What's an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

Grace: 30:35

I think it's, you know, the people that you're working with, oftentimes that's people in local government or people local community leaders and who are really, like, oftentimes doing the work. They're the ones who are actually on the front lines of making something happen. And your opportunity is to really sometimes you can feel like you're really able to support them in what they're trying to do. And when that pays off, that's a really great feeling. It's those moments where you feel like you've got that partnership and you've been able to help someone deliver what they're trying to do.

Dan: 31:12

What is the most insulting thing you could say about a humanitarian worker's work?

Grace: 31:18

I think a bit what we talked about before that you're just a Band Aid, and you're not really making any difference, and you're not really solving the underlying causes. And I think in many ways that is true. Like, you're not gonna be fixing the underlying crisis, but you have to be realistic about what you can do and not, you know, let the perfect be the enemy of the good, not not do anything just because you can't do everything. And, you know, I think that is what got me thinking about what is gonna be most effective, what is the best way to approach this, and what led me to cash thinking about, okay, we've got limited resources. The needs are huge. What is the best thing we can do with this?

Dan: 32:13

Grace Jackson is a humanitarian worker. She's currently the country director for GiveDirectly in Malawi. I was thinking about that moment when she realizes she's not going to Sierra Leone to work on economic development. Now it's Ebola, and she's happy about it. She said, when there's a crisis, you want to be where the crisis is. Doesn't that feel like a good diagnostic for whether you're in the right job and the right field? When something is really complex and hard, do you gravitate toward it or away from it? I was thinking about this one time when I was a little boy, maybe 10 years old playing baseball, left field. This one time, it was at night, tight game, late inning, pressure's on, and I was just praying that the ball was not hit to me. Baseball was not my jam. And the work you do right now, do you want the ball hit to you? Do you wanna do the hard stuff, the complex stuff? When there's a crisis, do you want to be in it? Or are you more like me in left field hoping you can stay out of it? Grace certainly found her place, scrambling to get the number of Ebola cases down to zero, tracking a 100 moving parts on a Gantt chart, coordinating with government officials, and finding ways to transfer money to the people who need it most. Folks, that's what it's like to be a humanitarian worker. And let me make a second and final appeal for you to help us make those phones ring in Rwanda. Right now, while you're thinking about it, please go to givedirectly.org/whatitslike and donate. Give generously. And remember, this is not speculative aid. It's not maybe something good will happen someday. No. It's putting dollars directly into the hands of people who need it the most. What could be better than that? That URL again is givedirectly.org/whatitslike. Thanks for your generosity, everybody. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.