“What Makes a Humanitarian” | Erin Kilborn | TEDxUniversityofGlasgow

[Applause] whatever you do will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it somebody wants famous called Mahatma Gandhi use those words once and if you want to take those words and apply them directly to the humanitarian sector nobody would ever do any work what would be the motivation what would be your drive to go and work in a challenging environment leave behind your family your friends be in a really difficult situation I'd like to talk to you today using some examples for my own experiences about what I think defines a humanitarian worker and what makes a good humanitarian the dictionary says that a humanitarian is somebody who works for the betterment of the human condition somebody who works for the welfare of humanity I think that definition is a good definition but I think that it lacks depth and so I'm gonna explore that a bit I was a teenager when I first heard an interview with a doctor and a nurse from MSF Doctors Without Borders and it was like a lightbulb moment I didn't really know what I wants to do with my life and at that point in time I listening to that interview and I'm hearing these people who are using skills and knowledge and they're going to exciting places in the world and they're treating people and they're going into places that you can't go you can't go there as a tourist and they're coming across cultures and languages so so fascinating I got so excited I thought yes that is what I want to do I want to be a doctor I want to have an adventure I want to be a vegetarian I didn't really know what that meant yet how many of you guys in the last day week month have come across images of suffering and injustice maybe images of war everybody to a person in this room is putting it because we see it all the time it's in the media it's all around us it's on the news and the newspapers it's the magazines it's on our television on the radio to see it on websites and we have is momentary flitting moments of empathy that go as quickly as they come as soon as we click as soon as we turn the page as soon as we change the channel but it is very difficult to do that when you are faced with it directly at 17 I went out to Sri Lanka to work in an orphan care center and I was really struck by the number of young people in this orphan centre who were really severely disabled by medical conditions conditions like polio clubfoot and measles conditions that are largely preventable or treatable if you have access to vaccinations clean water good quality medical and surgical services and that inequality really really felt unfair to me and at that point it really cemented this idea that I really wanted to do something about it so fast forward seven years later and I finished medical school my junior doctor rotations and I'm going to Belgium to learn tropical medicine and words like leishmaniasis and malaria and colors are are floating around in my head and I am getting so excited because it's so fascinating it's such an interesting area of medicine and I really am so thrilled to start my real career not just as a doctor but as a humanitarian I want to go to the place and I've been very lucky I've had a very exceptional journey so far and not just in humanitarian work but also an expedition I've been to primary jungle in Borneo I've been to post earthquake Haiti I've been to the Peruvian Amazon and to the war zones in Central African Republic and even the battlegrounds of the UK's NHS system all these environments have really taught me that there are certain key aspects that will make or break your experience not just as a doctor or as a humanitarian but just as a person who's trying to make impact a positive impact on their environment and those are good communication skills flexibility and creativity the power of your own resilience and understanding your vulnerabilities and your weaknesses my first mission was with MSF in 2013 and I went to Haiti and I was sent to work in a burns unit and I was absolutely terrified I have never seen a burns patient before I didn't really speak that great French but luckily I arrived and I had armed with the MSF protocols and a team of national nurses and doctors who were incredibly experienced and skilled we managed to collaborate together and do some really great work and I learned a huge amount from them but one of the things that I really learned about there was certainly communication and not just about language but also about crossing cultural barriers and understanding the social and cultural context in which you work and if particularly as a doctor that can be very very important especially when you want to mitigate mistrust and misunderstanding with your patients burns and Haiti are complex injuries and there's a lot of reasons why people get them but primarily if you think about it it's down to poverty domestic accidents are very common and one such accident resulted in two patients coming into the hospital on Christmas Day after a gas bottle exploded in their kitchen a couple in their late thirties were covered in more than 30% of their body with burns their arms their legs their chest their faces and they were across from each other in their medical high dependency unit and they used to say to each other in the mornings 7:00 on a movie Shelley Sarah how are you my darling yes my love I'm fine and they were adorable they had a very very challenging route to recovery infections operations the skin grafts nutrition is very challenging you need to eat a lot of calories and protein to get better but they made it and two months later they were able to be discharged home the same day and I spent a lot of time talking to them about the medical care physiotherapy compressive bandaging making sure they have a good diet but something was missing from the consultation they left and two weeks later I got in a phone call from the outpatient department and one of the nurses said the couple had come back to speak to me really urgently and I took the call and I said what's the emergency and the husband spoke to me and said no no doctor and we're fine but when they I make love to my wife again so I'd really miss something very important and that's really essential when you work not just as a doctor but in any job in the environment that you're in it's really essential that you understand what makes people tick and that helps you to communicate with them so I was so focused on having the best interest of my patients really centrally but actually I totally missed something that was even more important to them we work in a poor resource setting so yes MSF meets on some frontier is one of the richest organizations in the world when it comes to delivering high-quality medical care but that doesn't mean that we always have everything at our fingertips sometimes you're forced to be creative and to get flexible with the way that you treat your patients and you have to remember that although there are protocols patients are not protocols and occasionally you're forced to go off protocol and treat them in the best way that you possibly can with whatever you have to hand imagine trying to be the logistician in a war zone getting materials and drugs across a border where there's active fighting going on or that there's been flooding and the river that you normally get over is an impassable so sometimes you have to get as I say flexible and creative and we discovered that using surgical abdominal compresses works really well when you have a large area of skin that you need to cover with a burn for a burn in addition if you run out of nutritional feeding that comes in a packet you can send a friendly logistician to the market to buy bananas some kind of bean and some milk powder and hey presto you've got a high protein high carb feed that's ready to go and it works you just have to think outside the box a little bit but the high highs of getting over the odds and treating patients that you thought we're never going to get out of hospital are sometimes completely countered by the most terrible low lows and in the resource setting that is difficult and challenging it's not just about the materials but also about the space and we are accountable not just for our actions but also for our in actions imagine here if you were told you couldn't get a GP appointment for the next two weeks who here's had that before pretty frequently right and the NHS is always in the headlines isn't it Charlie weights and long term that waiting for appointments and three months or more for your operation but you will always be treated and it will be good treatment that you will get but imagine that two-week wait was a two-week walk to get to your doctor and imagine if you came to the hospital and they said oh sorry there's no more room come back in a month in some contexts where we work we are it and the NGO sector is the only thing that is upholding any kind of health care for services that exists in the country and that can be really challenging and sometimes it forces us to make very very difficult and painful decisions three o'clock in the morning in Haiti I got a phone call from our project coordinator asking if we had space and at that point we did not we were full to capacity we were bursting the next day I discovered that we had turned away a father with two young children with severe burns two days later he came back his daughter had died and the little boy also died even though we made space for him because of complications from his injuries we cannot feel guilty for that though as individuals because we are so stretched sometimes but we have to remember that our responsibility is for the patients who are already under our care and that can be really really painful but you have to be strict when Europe but you only have limited staff and you only have limited materials in Central African Republic we ran a trauma center it was purely looking after victims of violence victims from the war victims from road traffic accidents and also victims of sexual abuse and it was challenging because we didn't always have the space for everybody and we didn't know we couldn't treat everything that came in the door one of the things that you learn when you're in the field is also as I said about resilience and also your vulnerability and your weaknesses nothing could have prepared me for the emotional roller coaster that was awaiting me when I went to go and work with the team looking after the victims of sexual violence you know in six months we saw more than a hundred and sixty patients under the age of eighteen and I'm not even talking about the adults here and some of them were as young as two years old and one case in particular will always stay with me an eight year old girl and her grandmother came for a consultation both of them had been victims of a really horrendous attack I'm not only that but they had witnessed the murder of their mother the grandmothers daughter and this little girl's mom and the grandmother had somehow filmed it and because she didn't have the words to express the horror of what they had experienced the video was put before us in the consultation room and I don't know how we got to the end of that consultation but we did because the priority was our patients and they needed care but I left that room and I went into the office afterwards and I totally lost it I have never cried so hard in my life and I have never felt so frustrated and my colleague a Congolese nurse came and asked me my sister what's wrong and I told him what had happened and he put his hand in my shoulder courage my sister that's part of life part of life I have never been so angry I have never been so frustrated I've never felt so helpless and hopeless in my entire career and not only that but I was disgusted at humanity I was disgusted that anybody could do that to anybody else and that somebody else could normalize it and on top of that I was angry at my colleagues why were they not as frustrated as me why weren't they a shocked but you have to remember that in these contexts our colleagues our staff our friends they are just as much victims of the circumstances in which we work and they have had to learn to steel themselves and we can learn from their power from their ability to carry on faced with such horror and with such challenging circumstances and they do it with grace I spoke to the midwife about it afterwards and I asked her Sylvie why weren't you so angry and she said of course I am I have a mother and this is my country and these are my people but I am also a midwife I am a nurse and that it's my responsibility that when they come to me I must care for them I cannot cry for everyone and it's true you can't feel everything with such deep empathy because you would break that day that I saw those patients my project coordinator sent me home because I wasn't functional anymore and he said it was a Wednesday so don't come back to on Monday at least I'm very glad he did that because one thing that we need to understand is where our limits are when we pass them we stopped being functional we stopped being able to care for our patients and as a clinician that's very very important to understand where your breaking point is and to stop before you reach it but the thing that really amazes me about our national staff in these places really is their is their resiliency it still amazes me and I have such respect for them because they work in really challenging environments imagine coming to work through an active war zone where people are shooting at you imagine coming to work because you have to raise money because your child has been kidnapped them you have to pay a ransom imagine coming to work and treating patients with earn injuries to their hands two days after your house has been set on fire and you have become a refugee and you know that these guys were very likely to have been involved in destroying your home and you're gonna treat them with the same respect as everybody else how do you do that it's very difficult and it's much easier to do it as an expat coming into an environment where there's war or their strife along religious or tribal or political lines because we're coming in from the outside and we have that distance but our staff don't they are in it it is their everyday existence and we have to remember that but at the same time an organization like MSF has really really strong values and we must uphold those values to treat all of our patients with dignity and respect regardless of what color they are what religion they are what they eat for breakfast it doesn't matter they deserve to get treated equally it is this complexity that drives me it is the fact that I learned so much about how to be a good communicator in these environments that I have become really creative and flexible that I've learned where my vulnerability is and where my weak points are and I have learned to be resilient and I have learned to be strong and this is the thing that drives me forwards and this is the thing that drives many people forwards so I'm sorry Gandhi but I'm gonna partly disagree with you because whatever you do will not necessarily be insignificant we do not know what the future holds and what about that couple with the burns and what about that little girl what will they go on to do we don't know what I do know is that at that moment on those days those patients were treated they got to go home that they survived and that's what keeps me going so whatever you do may be significant and it is very important that you do it thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 40,719

Rating: 4.910522 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Global Issues, Activism, Adventure, Compassion, Culture, Decision making, Empathy, Exploration, Global issues, Health, Learning, Life, Medicine, Philanthropy, Public health, Self, Self improvement, Struggle, Volunteering, War

Id: FFPB5qjhHgo

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017