 In 2003, I was in Nairobi in Kenya, and I was staying at a hotel called the Jakaranda Hotel, now some of you might know the Jakaranda Hotel. The Jakaranda Hotel is a cut below the UN, so it's where the NGOs, I NGOs used to go and stay. And so I was staying in this hotel, I was working for concern at the time in Burundi, and I was sitting in the lobby, and a tall Irish gentleman approached me and he said hello, I said hello. And he said, are you, who do you work for? I said I work for concern. He said who he was and he said I'm recruiting for a new scale-up that's possibly happening in Darfur. And I said, oh, that's interesting. And he said, so what do you do? And I explained that I was involved in the Burundi. And there there was also a humanitarian and he said, oh, so you're a disaster tourist too. And so I am what they call a disaster tourist. So my way of looking at the lessons learning and future challenges is to take you a tour of some of the disasters that I've been on since then. So going back to Burundi where I was country director in Burundi and there was a civil war going on. Basically it was really dirty civil war. The rebels effectively were at the top of the hill and the military were at the bottom of the hill and they used to exchange fire. I used to stay in the middle. So you got a mix. And what would happen is there was the story of cattle. So what was happening is that cattle in Burundi are very valuable in terms of cultural but also in terms of assets, financial assets. So people love cows and Burundi is just next to Congo, which is next door. So they were really close together. And what would happen is that the rebels used to come from Congo and steal the cattle. And then the military in Burundi would go back into Congo and steal the cattle back. And every time they were stolen, the AIDS disease in the two countries would have a program for vaccinating animals because they knew that animals were really important. So these cows were getting vaccinated in Burundi and then they were getting stolen back into Congo and getting vaccinated again and so forth. So they were probably the most health resistant cows in the world. So moving on. So then in 2005 I was sent to Darfur. And Oxfam used to run the camps, two of the biggest camps in El Fasher and Nyala. And what we did was water and sanitation. And in El Fasher the camp was just on the outskirts of town. And Oxfam had a huge water tank, what they call a T90 for those who like technical details. It was a T90, which means it held 90,000 litres. And so we had a well or a borehole down below, a huge pumping system and we'd pump water up to there. And I think the camp was something like 230,000 people. So we were supplying water at spear standards, so I'm sure you all know that is 15 litres per day per person. And this was chlorinated water, we would chlorinate it, we'd test it. We were pumping roughly 500,000 litres of water a day. It was enough to basically keep a small town going. And when I got down to the camp I used to go and look around and there was always a massive queue of what they call bidong, which are the 20 litre containers where people get the water from. And there was like 200, 300 of these containers sitting in a row. And I'm thinking, oh there's something wrong here. If we're supplying enough water, how come there's a queue? So I went back to our PHEs, they're called public health engineers basically. They deal with the water supply. And I'm like, so what's going on here? And they're saying, well we don't know. We're supplying enough water, we've done all the calculations, we don't know. So I'm like, okay. And I went to the other people and I said, what's wrong? And they said, we don't know. So I said, okay, I think you ought to all get together the public health engineers and the rest of you, the nutritionists, everybody like camp management, go and have a look around the camp and see what's going on. So they all got in the car and spent the day having a look around the camp and when they came back to me they said, okay, I think we've seen what's happening. And what's happening was that the men of the camp had realised that Elfasher was growing at quite a significant rate and there was a huge need for mud blocks. So they were using Oxfam chlorinated water to make beautiful mud blocks so that they could... So again, we had lovely blocks, you could probably eat them because they were healthy enough. But that was where the water was going. So obviously we had to look at different ways of doing stuff. Okay, let me jump forward a bit. I've got a long bit actually. I'm now based in West Africa in Dakar. I'm the regional humanitarian coordinator for Oxfam. And I usually get sent off to do scale-ups or to get involved in scale-ups. So I was asked to go and be the lead for the Ebola that was happening in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And this was a completely new type of emergency that Oxfam were there. And I had... In Liberia I had been up to a place called Nimbocanti. Nimbocanti was kind of the epicenter, one of the epicenters in Liberia where we had been responding. And on the drive back we were just getting into Monrovia and we had been kind of chatting as you do in a car in a long journey and then suddenly the driver turned around to me and he said, you see that green house on the right? Just up the hill there. And it was a kind of middle-class area, it wasn't a poor area. And I said, yes, what about it? He said that house was isolated. Nobody was allowed in it. All nine members in that house died. So that was quite shocking when you realise that you're an aid worker or whatever they call them and it's real, it's actually happening right in front of you and it's shocking. And sometimes you can be quite... You're not involved in it, but when somebody says like that, you suddenly realise actually this is quite shocking. But also some good stories came out of Ebola. So one of the things that Oxfam did, we realised there was maybe a change of emphasis in how you do stuff. So what happened was that we were looking to find gaps where we could support particularly in water and sanitation and public health promotion. So public health promotion involves utilising the community and working with the community. And then one of the really poor areas called West Point, which is a slum basically and a very bad slum at that, they had community mobilisers who were young guys. So these were kind of like 21, 22-year-olds. And one of the problems was that even during Ebola, the people in these kind of places were not using the health centres. So they knew there was Ebola, but they were not using the health centres because they were scared that if they went there, they'd be stigmatised or even worse, that they might never come out. So a lot of rumours and myths had come out to say that these places were not good. And what these kids did was they did very really good peer-to-peer stuff where they worked with their own age group and their own age group were able to go back to their families and persuade their families to start utilising these clinics with saying things like, you know, if you go there and you have Ebola, you've got a much better chance of surviving than if you come back here. So it was a really effective way of doing stuff and the referrals to these clinics increased dramatically. So it was a really cool way of doing it. And Oxfam realised in Sierra Leone in Liberia in West Africa that working with the community and getting them to be the people that are reacting to the humanitarian crisis is really important. So let me fast-forward to now. So actually to get to Helsinki, I had to get... I came from Diffa. And Diffa is in the far east of Niger right beside the northeast part of Nigeria where the Boko Haram crisis is happening. And so Diffa is two days driving from Niamie, which is the capital of Niger. And to get here I had to get WFP Plain, which is a little beachcraft plane, and it takes two and a half hours. So you can imagine the distance the same two and a half hours takes to get from Paris to Helsinki. But I didn't do that in a WFP plane. But anyway, I came from Diffa, and then afterwards we came down here. So Diffa is the centre of where it's happening in terms of the response to the Boko Haram crisis. So it's really interesting because the pictures behind me, they're very redolent. I look at them and I could be anywhere that I've been in the last 10, 15 years. So they actually... I decided not to have any pictures because I thought they do quite a lot of talking for me. So when you land at Diffa airport, which is not really an airport, it's an airstrip, the waiting room is a tree, and when you land there, you see automatically, the first thing you see is two attack helicopters sitting in the runway with a couple of drones. And you're thinking, OK. So then you get the car and you drive into Diffa. And as you're driving into Diffa, you'll see massive earthworks going on to protect places. And then you'll start to see heavyweight military, Niger military and joint forces military around with their sitting in the pickups with the 50 calibre machine guns on the back. And they're all wearing heavily armed. And then you move into town and you start to see fullers. Now fullannies are the kind of nomadic tribe. And fullers are just wandering around with their donkeys. You also start to see camel trains. And the camel trains are the people that are bringing things in and out of Diffa. And then you go into Diffa, you start to see a lot of temporary shelters, just bits of plastic. And that is the start when you realise that there are refugees and IDPs around. And then you come to the market. And you see in the market soldiers lazing around, having coffee, smoking cigarettes. There's also people around just getting on with their daily business. You see a lot of NGO vehicles around. And you realise that this is the kind of environment I've become used to where it's basically something of everything going on. There's military, there's rebels, there's normal life going on. And people have to cope with all of that. Let me give you another example. Outside of town, around 100 kilometres out of town, there's a place called Tumur. Tumur is a small town, maybe 10,000 people. And now, because of a trustee's happening in Chad, because of military pushing people out of Niger, because of people running away from the Boko Haram and military in Nigeria, even as far as Cameroon, it's now got an extra 40,000 IDPs, refugees, returnees. So that means the town of 10,000 people has now become a town of 50,000 people. And these people have come there, have nothing. They've got no water, no sanitation. They're just starting to get food. But also the people of the town, they're what you call the host community. They had even less than the people who've arrived. And there's a lot of talk about refugees all the time and refugees going to Europe and the emphasis on stopping refugees going to Europe. The vast, vast majority of refugees don't go to Europe. They just want... There are 30 miles displaced from their home, or 100 miles, and they're staying with host communities. The host communities are the ones looking after them, not people in Europe. So finally, and kind of in conclusion, I want to talk about one of the things that I least like doing, because I'm not academic at all, and that is writing proposals, and sadly you have to do it. And I'm always trying to remember what is the goal, what is the objective, whether it's a process indicator or an activity indicator. But anyway, one of the things that you do in proposals is that you are basically trying to convince donors that you have the solution to the problem. So, you know, they have no water. We're going to provide water. They have no food. We're going to provide food. But when you actually come down to think of it, I don't think we are the solution. In fact, I think we have to start seeing ourselves not as a solution, but more like the problem, or at least part of the problem. And if we can start doing that, then I think we can start looking at how to actually respond in terms of future challenges much more positively. So thank you very much.