About the author

Lending a Hand

By Matthew Bolton
This article was printed in Abroad View fall 2004
Also, read Bolton's "Becoming an Aid Worker"

Parts of the text of this article are adapted from Matthew Bolton’s weekly column for The Examiner. They are reprinted with permission.

I have an incredible job. Initially as a volunteer and later as a consultant to international nonprofit aid agencies, I have worked in ten countries, including Bosnia and Iraq.

I have worked alongside a former Marxist guerrilla, arranged financing for landmine clearance, helped organize relief convoys to conflict zones, talked with some of the poorest people in the world, observed international diplomats dancing to folk music in a garden surrounded by minefields, and hitched a ride on a fish truck in order to eat dinner at a nunnery with former government ministers.

International aid work is a great opportunity for people who don’t want to spend their whole lives pecking at keyboards in cubicle farms. However, be warned: it is not a traditional career path. Being an aid worker requires an ability to adapt to intensely challenging situations and can be very emotionally straining.
It is highly unlikely that you will get a well-paid position with significant responsibilities straight out of university. However, if you invest time and effort into shaping yourself into an ideal candidate, you will start getting good job offers two to three years into your career.

The following are elements that I have found most important for beginning a career in aid work:

Know your Motivations
It is said that in job interviews for the International Committee of the Red Cross, one of the world’s most important humanitarian agencies, applicants are sometimes asked, “What are you running away from?”

Indeed, one has to have pretty strong (and perhaps strange) motivations to want to leave one’s home, family and friends to live in war zones and situations of poverty. In Helen Fielding’s great satirical novel about aid workers, Cause Celeb (her debut work before she became famous for Bridget Jones’s Diary), one of her characters wears a T-shirt “set out like a multiple choice questionnaire for relief workers” about their motivations for taking up such an odd profession. It reads:

Missionary?
Mercenary?
Misfit?
Broken heart?

It is surprising how accurate this portrayal is. The missionaries’ earnestness can be a sustaining factor but can be damaging when they impose their ideology onto a program of assistance. While the mercenary types are often talented and pragmatic, it feels morally uncomfortable to see people exploiting human suffering for material gain. Misfits think outside the box but sometimes an inferiority complex, or just plain weirdness, can get in the way of a successful team. Finally, broken hearts may be willing to take risks and and are often harder to fool, but others grow tired of hearing about their relational or emotional issues.

In reality there are good humanitarians with all kinds of motivations. I think it is more important to “know thyself,” be self-reflective and try to understand one’s motivations, thinking carefully about how these motivations might be a hindrance to one’s work.

Have Something to Offer and Market It
This may sound obvious, but it is important to have skills, knowledge or abilities that aid agencies need. It is not enough to have ideals—ideals cannot feed people.

Engineers, agronomists, environmentalists, logisticians, linguists and medical professionals are always in high demand due to their highly technical knowledge. People with other less obvious niche skills are also hired regularly. Nonprofits have computer networks that need maintaining and so hire IT specialists. As they are large organizations handling enormous amounts of money, they also look for business and accounting professionals, as well as experienced and skilled managers.

That said, social science majors and liberal arts students need not be discouraged. I was a history and religion major, which on the surface seems rather unhelpful. However, the skills that got my foot in the door were writing and research.

The big nonprofits are usually funded by government or U.N. agencies that require reams of documentation, reports and proposals. Someone has to write these. Moreover, projects and programs need the support of social research to measure their impact and appropriateness.

Finally, it is important to offer your skills to these agencies. If you never tell them, they will never know. Get your resume out there and begin talking to people on the inside.

Attributes
Aid workers come in all shapes and sizes and have varied personality types. However, there are some attributes that are common to the best humanitarians. For instance, integrity and accountability are very important, as many aid workers handle large amounts of money and commodities. At the same time, an ability to compromise and adapt to challenging situations is essential. The world is never perfect, and plans rarely predict the future with 100 percent accuracy.

It helps to be tough and adventurous. Being able to roll with the punches and live in poor conditions will take you a long way. Whiners are rarely appreciated in a field office.

Finally, savvy and quickness to learn reduce the time spent trying to grasp the situation and enable one to adjust rapidly to new cultures and languages.

Connections
For better or worse, the old cliché, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” is just as true for aid work as it is in any other profession. In fact, it is probably even more the case. Working in complex and stressful conditions of poverty and conflict, aid agency administrators want a team they can trust—thus, there is a tendency to hire people they know well and have seen in action. Therefore, it is important to network and build up contacts. Go to conferences, ask friends to make introductions, and save business cards. Most importantly, gain good international experience.

International and cross-cultural experience It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of experience in obtaining good positions in humanitarian organizations. Employers want to hire people with a positive track record—someone they can trust. Experience in a wide range of cultures and contexts displays that one is able to adjust and perform in difficult circumstances.

Of course, this brings to mind the paradox that you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. With humanitarian work, one usually has to start from the very bottom as an intern or a volunteer. Programs like the Peace Corps and Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) are the best, because they are well known and provide good training, language classes and support. In addition, they provide a post-assignment network of contacts—returned Peace Corps Volunteers tend to look out for each other.

My start was a little unorthodox. A friend of mine helped me arrange a stipendiary volunteer assignment with a nonprofit in Bosnia. This route was a bit more difficult than a structured volunteer program, but it taught me to be a self-starter.

If you have difficulty getting into such programs for medical or other reasons, study abroad—or even local cross-cultural experience (for instance working with immigrant communities or teaching in a multicultural school) can be a good start. AV