Episodes
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Nuran Higgins knows how hard it can be to live from hand to mouth, not knowing where the next meal is coming from. Once homeless, she is now helping to improve the way aid is delivered from Nepal to Afghanistan.
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No matter whether you’re on a remote Pacific Island or in Syria’s largest city, toilets are critical to any humanitarian operation. Sanitation expert Pete McArdle gets to the very bowels of the matter.
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Missing episodes?
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Just once, try this: Walk a kilometre downhill, fill three buckets with water and carry them back home. Then you’ll have the faintest sense of what clean water means to millions of mothers and their children around the world. Celeste Swain talks about the things that change once people get access to water: from everyday things like avoiding snake bites, to life-changing things like the opportunity to go to school or get a job.
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To run an Ebola treatment you need big piles of cash. In this age of plastic cards and electronic transfers, providing aid costs money. And while you’re handling the finances for a multi-million dollar recovery program for a whole country, where do you find time to teach yourself to swim and compete in a triathlon? Meet the Red Cross iron woman of finance, Patrea Ryan, who helps explain where the money goes and how it helps.
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One minute you’re in the Himalayas of northern Pakistan helping communities recover from devastating floods. The next minute you’re in an outback Aboriginal community in Central Australia helping Aboriginal women give birth. How do you switch realities and cope with the culture shock? Nurse Yvonne Ginifer shares her secrets.
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Every day, silent plagues of mosquito-borne diseases are killing thousands around the globe and Kym Blechynden is leading the charge to beat them. Working across the Asia-Pacific, how do you take on the mighty mosquito to stop killer diseases like dengue, malaria and zika in their tracks?
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What’s it like having an aid worker for a father? How does that change the way you see the world? In this special discussion, veteran aid worker and humanitarian legend, Bob Handby passes the baton to his son, water engineer Mark. They reveal how a love for humanity is handed down the generations.
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Why the hell does cholera still exist? Libby Bowell, who’s been tackling preventable and horrifying diseases for several years, explains the perfect storm of conditions that come together to cause an epidemic.
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Is it time for more intelligent aid? Red Cross International Director, Peter Walton, reflects on his days in the field and how we can turn aid on its head; from using drones to help in disasters, to using local Pacific businesses to supply relief goods to their own communities.
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Imagine facing thousands of people needing shelter after an earthquake. Then imaging trying to coordinate shelter arrangements in three languages at once. Shelter specialist Leeanne Marshall shines a light on the challenges of delivering one of the fundamental necessities of life; a roof overhead.
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Modern day Florence Nightingales explore the big questions in emergency health: how do you provide medical care with minimal equipment? How do you keep your cool when people are dying around you because there aren’t enough doctors, nurses, medicines or time? Why are children still dying of hunger? How do field hospitals work?
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Three Florence Nightingale Medal recipients reveal what it means to follow in the footsteps of the woman who inspired the international Red Cross Movement. Cath Salmon shares a story of binding shattered limbs in a war field hospital, Ruth Jebb cares for a man whose his wife was washed away in typhoon floods and Anne Carey talks about how local volunteers beat Ebola in West Africa.
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The mission’s over. Time to catch up with your mates and a season’s worth of Game of Thrones. Except that people treat you differently after you’ve worked in an Ebola zone. And you’ll never watch the news in the same way again. Aid work leaves its unique stamp on you.
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Learn to manage risk, because someone will shoot at you. Stop being so damn idealistic. Sit back and listen. There are no heroes, least of all you. Our guests share advice they wish they’d heard when they started their careers in aid work.
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What could possibly go wrong on a relief mission? Well… border disputes, power outages, strikes, random epidemics, natural disasters, insurgencies, rains shutting down roads and governments being overthrown. You’ll see why aid work needs an indomitable spirit.
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Listen up, Humanitarians of Tinder! It can be hard to maintain relationships with family, let alone find love, when you’re going from mission to mission in high-security zones. We talk honestly about the birds, the bees and the precautions.
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How do you feel watching families flee in an apocalyptic sea of people? How do you cope with an Ebola nightmare sweeping before your eyes? And what passes through your mind when you witness an exploding donkey amid drought and violence?
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Sometimes you’re faced with a carful of corpses. Sometimes you have to drive the body of a bomb victim home to her parents. Sometimes you have to treat an illness so contagious that other doctors have already died. We discover what it’s like to be an emergency health worker… and why you should always pack a scarf in your travel bag.
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Every minute is a matter of life or death when a disaster strikes or a conflict breaks out. Aid workers are in a race against time: whether to treat the ill and injured before it’s too late or get relief supplies to inaccessible locations. Our guests explain how order emerges from chaos.
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This week we look at your very first mission as an aid worker: whether it’s Pakistan after an earthquake, a refugee camp in South Sudan or a tiny Tongan island. We reflect on how expectation differs from reality and how you see the world afterwards.
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