Iceland review - 2015, Qupperneq 42

40 ICELAND REVIEW
HUMANITARIAN RELIEF
CHALLENGES OF THE JOB
Hlín’s career working for the Red Cross
began in Iraq in 1999 during the financial
and trade embargo. “We were tasked with
delivering food to 20,000 children, repair-
ing health centers, as well as delivering
medicine to 21 hospitals. It was difficult
not to get frustrated, desperate, waiting for
an agreement to end the sanctions. And the
whole while I was thinking: it doesn’t need
to be like this! Do 5,000 children really
need to die of diarrhea every month?” Hlín
says in description of some of the challeng-
es of her first mission.
In 2000, after a year in Iraq, Hlín’s next
mission was at a refugee camp in DR
Congo, 175 km (108 miles) from the capital
Kinshasa. “The refugees were fleeing the
war in Angola, despite there being a war in
parts of Congo too,” Hlín recalls. “There
was never enough food—it was always a
struggle.” Again, the pace of change was
frustrating, Hlín admits. “It’s not always
easy to get things done. Often there is a lot
of bureaucracy. You always need to get per-
mission for this or that. Milk powder that
can’t be delivered because of some politics,
or it takes half a year to get soap to people
and then we find out that it was stored in
a warehouse somewhere all along. You get
furious! But this is one of the many chal-
lenges. You have to be patient and remember that you’re
part of a larger team and that you can’t necessarily direct
or manage others. Perhaps a process stops somewhere
along the line and there’s nothing you can do about it. You
just don’t have the necessary authority,” she says.
Among some of the other countries Hlín has worked
in are Senegal, Togo, Mali, Nigeria and Kenya. She says
that while cultural differences and sensitivities must be
considered, her approach is that at the end of the day it’s
vital to express how something really is. “Some families
argue, but they’re still friends at the end of it. I think
that’s important in the workplace too,” she says. While
patience is a virtue, getting straight to the point is too.
“When you start a new project you don’t have three
years to learn everything about, say, cholera. You have
maybe two days. There’s no time for dancing around.”
Meticulous planning and an eye for stretching budgets
are, by Hlín’s own admission, among her strengths. “In
Iraq, I saw immediately that the budget we were given
Running water is often not available in houses in Freetown, so showers are taken outside.
At a refugee camp in Lugufu, Tanzania.