The job I do isn’t one most counsellors have heard about… they don’t tell you about international roles when you’re in training. Perhaps they should, because I think it’s one of the most meaningful therapy jobs you can have and I love it!

I work as a Staff Counsellor for the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) in Nairobi, Kenya, where I’ve been based for over two years. My role involves overseeing staff at eight other locations in Kenya, including three offices that are areas of hardship. These locations mean staff have to live on a compound, away from their families, due to security issues. It’s richly varied and deeply rewarding work; I provide one-to-one counselling for staff and their dependants, facilitate teams, and deliver training workshops and webinars. I also respond to critical incidents, flying out to offer support when something serious happens, such as when staff were attacked at one of our field offices a few months ago.

But times are incredibly tough in the humanitarian world right now. Earlier this year, funding cuts hit hard when USAID, which provided a significant amount of our budget, scaled back dramatically.  The impact has been devastating; in two of Kenya’s largest refugee settlements that WFP serves, Kakuma and Dadaab, food rations for the most vulnerable families dropped as low as 30% of what they should have received at one point in the year. Multiple other NGO and UN programmes have closed and been scaled back there and across the country.  This has created a ripple effect far beyond hunger; local shops and markets have collapsed, protests have erupted, security has deteriorated, and there’s growing distress both in the refugee camps and the pressures on our staff who look after their communities.

Working here, you see how news and donor fatigue shape reality. Chronic crises rarely make the headlines, yet their human toll is enormous. Kenya hosts a large number of refuges, estimated at around 850,000, and over 300,000 are in Kakuma alone. With International Migrants Day on 18 December, I hope we can remember the millions of refugees worldwide (whether in the news or not) who deserve our compassion, attention, and support.  The staff I care for face a shortage of food to distribute, cancelling programmes, and witnessing distress they can’t fix.  This is really tough to have to deal with, so alongside my counselling work, I’m collaborating with York St John University on two research projects: one exploring how to better support staff who work long term away from their families in hardship locations, and another conducting a systematic review on moral injury in humanitarians. I hope these can influence policy and practice and improve conditions for our staff who do such amazing work. We really cannot do without them, and for me it really is a privilege to serve the people who serve the people.

 

Read more...