He says, 'saving the world, one email at a time.'

She has an exciting, glamourous role. Her organisation is on the front line, providing assistance to people fleeing the conflict in eastern Mosul. When she comes home from work, she excitedly talks about NFI (Non-Food items, not the Australian version), BESK (Basic Emergency Shelter Kits) and how many IDPs (Internally Displaced People) their interventions have assisted.

Late in the evening, when I’m half falling asleep, she’s still sitting upright in bed, frantically typing away on her computer. She and her partners in crime on the Zone 4 Coordination group excitedly Skype each other about potential programming gaps that need to be filled in the Nimrod Corridor. Like giggling school girls, they’re busy discussing a new wave of IDPs that have arrived in x Village. They need shelter, they need water and to get there they need to negotiate their way through eleven different checkpoints manned by the local security forces and several different militia. (Just in case you’re wondering, she is the best-ever at getting through checkpoints. She knits, drives and talks Arabic all at the same time, and is from New Zealand – which is somewhere near Scandinavia, which is probably why they’re too scared to stop her!?)

Yes, it’s fair to say that I’m suffering from a mild dose of job envy.  If her job is like sugar-coated Weetbix, mine is more like eating dry-cardboard for breakfast.

My job seems to be about finding different and creative reasons to say no. An average day at the office normally goes something like this;

7:51 Coffee and emails.

8:03 “No, you can’t go there until we’ve completed the rapid security assessment and tri-angulate that with the information from INSO and the other agencies that tells us that the road from Q to T is cleared of UXOs and IEDs.”

9:17 “No, you can’t stay overnight, because to stay in location A we need at least three expatriates and at least two of you need to be pre-approved drivers who actually know the route between Lima Kilo One and Echo Lima One.”

10:15 “No, you can’t take leave because person x will also be on leave and that will mean that person y is left to manage two MMU (Mobile Medical Unit) and one SMU (Static Mobile Unit) by themselves.”

11:21. “No, we can’t charge the cost of the warehouse to ECHO Project PR 130 because the grant ended on the 31^st of March and the last time I checked ECHO don’t charge retrospectively and you don’t have written pre-approval for the next grant. I know this because I’ve been managing ECHO projects for longer than you’ve been alive.”

12:30. (When HQ finally comes on-line). “No, we can’t place person J, K or Z that you suggested in the Iraq programme because they have no previous field experience and haven’t worked in a conflict situation before. What about the 3 actual candidates we told you we were interested in?”

13:46. “No, you can’t do that because I haven’t had lunch and now I’m hangry.” (For those of you not in the know, that’s a combination of being hungry and subsequently being angry at being hungry and having spent the whole morning saying no to things.

14:56. Respond to more emails, primarily saying ‘No’ for various obscure reasons hidden away in Security SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) #1-14.

15:02. “No, you can’t go and climb a mountain on the weekend because you didn’t submit a clearance before Tuesday and expatriates are not allowed outside urban areas after 4pm.”

16:17 “No, we can’t help the IDPs in the camp by providing aqua tabs and water-trucking because the organisational WASH strategy, that you didn’t ask my input into, says we only work out of camps and where we can see a clear exit strategy.”

17:30 “No we haven’t procured the drugs we urgently need for the camp clinic because the logistics manager at HQ wants you to have three separate quotes from WHO approved Quali-med suppliers. (Even if it takes 5 months to get them delivered here, like it did last time, because the process is more important than saving lives. God forbid if we failed an audit, right?)

So, if you compare our two roles, she’s like Superwoman, saving the world and I’m more like the fat controller from Thomas the Tank Engine.

So that you don’t completely get the wrong impression, my organisation does do some good stuff, somewhere, somehow. I   t’s just that I’m often too busy saying ‘No’ and saving the world, one email at a time to go and spend time in the field. (There’s also the small problem of SOP #9 that says expatriates should only spend <60 minutes in remote field locations to reduce exposure.)

If I was to set a KPI for the next few weeks and months, it would be to start turning some of the NOs into YES’. Working for a risk adverse organisation such as mine , the challenge is to find creative ways of working within the myriad of rules, regulations, procedures, strategy documents and standard operating procedures to achieve something!  Being Australian, of convict origins, with a strong-dislike for overly authoritarian rules and regulations, I’m probably just the person they need for the job.