Jess Letch is a humanitarian dynamo. From connecting families torn apart by war in Angola, to supporting people to evacuate disputed territories in South Ossetia, to writing a billion-dollar plan to support Ukrainian refugees throughout Europe, Jess has had some challenging and rewarding roles during her humanitarian career.
Growing up in Melbourne Australia, Jess started her career with a social work degree, then soon landed a role working with refugees through the Australian Red Cross.
Now, with 25 years’ experience in the humanitarian and development sectors, she has worked in diverse contexts all over the globe, including across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific.
In this episode, Sally and Jess chat about the challenges of working in conflict zones, the uniqueness of the humanitarian skillset, the importance of building a strong home base when constantly travelling abroad, and the power of strong institutions to protect societies when disaster strikes.
You can join our conversations on LinkedIn and Facebook.
You can find out more about RedR Australia’s training courses here.
Host: Sally Cunningham
Guest: Jess Letch
Producer, engineer and composer: Jill Farrar
Transcript
SALLY: This Humanitarian Conversations podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, also known as Melbourne, Australia. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and we acknowledge and seek to champion the continued connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to land, waterways and skies. And we pay our respects to all First Nations people whose communities we work in across the world. Hello and welcome to Humanitarian Conversations, a RedR Australia podcast which explores what it means to be humanitarian in today's world. I'm Sally Cunningham. In this episode of Humanitarian Conversations, I’m getting to know Jess Letch—a veritable humanitarian dynamo and all-round lovely human. Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Jess started her career with a social work degree, before taking a role at Australian Red Cross working with refugees and migrants close to home. Now, with 25 years’ experience in the humanitarian and development sectors, she has worked in diverse and life-changing contexts spanning the world, including across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific in humanitarian protection, disaster management, emergency operations, monitoring and evaluation, and training. Jess’s most recent humanitarian placement saw her rapidly deployed to Ukraine at the onset of the current crisis, where she took the role of Deputy Head of Emergency Operations for the IFRC, leading the development of a 1 billion-dollar response plan. She currently works as an academic at the University of Melbourne, and is also a longstanding and much-loved RedR Australia trainer, who can often be found on our Hostile Environment Awareness Training course. Hi Jess, thanks for joining us today in cloudy Melbourne.
JESS: Thanks, it's nice to be here.
SALLY: Now we've known Jess for a while, but we want to get to know you a little bit better. So thank you so much for spending some time with us today. Now you've got a depth of experience in the sector spanning a few decades, but can we go back to the beginning? When did you start to think you wanted to work in a field that helped people? Were there signs, as a young person, that this was right for you?
JESS: That's a good question. It's been an interesting journey for me, because when I was a kid, I was from a working-class family. We never traveled anywhere further than Phillip Island. My mum, to this day, still doesn't have a passport, and I didn't have much understanding of the world that existed outside of Australia. When I was 21, I had the opportunity to go and visit a friend who was studying in China. So I went to China in the late 1990s and my mind was blown and opened up, and I suddenly realised that there was a whole world out there, and became quite fascinated by what goes on in the rest of the world. And I guess I felt that the only way to truly understand how the world works is to go out there and live and work and experience the world first hand. And so I thought I would really like to be able to get into a space where I was able to work and really connect with people on the levels that they're at, rather than going as a tourist.
SALLY: So a first visit overseas to China, that is quite a different cultural experience from growing up in Australia. So how did that surprise and influence you with your next steps?
JESS: I guess I just became interested in how the world works and understanding how different people live lives, and also with my first experience of seeing poverty and seeing the real diversity of the ways in which people live. I became interested in getting to understand it better, and I became interested in making a contribution as well. And so I started to study a little more widely. I studied anthropology. I was doing an arts degree at the time, but then eventually I made a move into social work. I took on an Arts degree in the early 1990s straight after a really harsh recession, and in terms of employment, it wasn't necessarily going to take me many places.
SALLY: I find that very relatable.
JESS: And I had friends who had studied social work, and so I enrolled in a social work course and moved across where I would have the opportunity to gain practical skills. Social work degrees involve a couple of full-time placements for three months at a time, so you get really good workplace exposure, and also just really learnt some skills that set a great foundation for me in terms of humanitarian work moving forward.
SALLY: Yeah, that's that makes a lot of sense. So you studied and practiced as a social worker in Melbourne early on. Can you tell us about the kind of work you did and how this guided into the next steps?
JESS: So when I was studying social work, I took electives in international social work, and I did my second placement in Manila, working with urban refugees who had found themselves in the Philippines for one reason or another. And then when I came back to Australia, I was really fortunate to get a role with Australian Red Cross, working with migrants and refugees. At the time it was called tracing and refugee services. And so our work at that time was helping to restore contact between family members who were separated because of disasters and conflict. So we were working a lot with refugees who were newly arrived at that time from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka. I mean, really, I often think that our files at that time were like rings on a tree in terms of the history of the world's conflicts. Because, in fact, we were working with people right back to World War II who had lost family members in the concentration camps and were still searching for answers. And it's a long-standing program of the Red Cross. And so we worked with people living in the community. And I was also visiting detention centers at the time and providing services to refugees and asylum seekers and other people who were in detention who were seeking answers around their family members abroad. And also, in the detention centers, we were doing advocacy on humanitarian conditions.
SALLY: Yeah, I remember that time as well, and I can imagine tracing and restoring family links is challenging because it's really unknown how successful you're going to be. But when links are restored, that must be a really rewarding and valuable experience for everybody.
JESS: That's right. And it was a different time. We would have people who would contact us who were missing family since the iron curtain closed on Eastern Europe, and they had no idea—they heard that their sister had moved to Australia, and they had nothing else. And at the time, literally it was as easy as opening up the phone book and finding the person and knew we could restore contact between people who hadn't seen each other for 30, 40, 50 years. Times have changed, because technology actually enables us to maintain contact much more than we could have before, but there still are pockets of need. And in particular when it comes to sudden-onset emergencies, there's plenty of opportunity actually to work with people in terms of putting people back in contact, reuniting families who've been separated during these crises, and also clarifying the fate of the missing.
SALLY: Yeah. So would you consider that your shift to the humanitarian sector? You were with Australian Red Cross for more than 20 years, so spanning several programs and deployments in overseas locations. Can you share some of the roles that illustrate this amazing period in your career?
JESS: Sure. So after I'd worked a few years in Melbourne on restoring family links, there was a demand for people to work in different parts of the world. And that was with the ICRC—International Committee of the Red Cross—who are the sort of well known international organisation who you see out there, with big aid convoys. They're the neutral actors who work in conflict zones. And so I went out to Angola in 2004 and I was working on quite a large program. We had what was called the Red Cross message service. So this was something, again, in the days where people didn't have the technology they have now, people could write a paper message from one refugee camp to another, or from a place of detention or a prison, and they could communicate. They were never put in an envelope so that they could be read. There was nothing that would be secretive. It would be family news only. And at the time in Angola, we were distributing 35,000 messages a year in a country that had no postal service or any other avenue for people to remain in touch. Most of the places we visited didn't have electricity or anything of the of that nature. I was also working with children associated with the fighting forces who'd been demobilised in the conflict which had just recently finished and ran for decades. At the end of the conflict, the battalions essentially laid down their arms and they walked out of the bush, and among them, a lot of the battalions had children with them of all different ages, actually. A lot of these kids had been picked up when the battalions had moved through villages, and they picked up children to work for them. So they weren't called child soldiers. They were children associated with fighting forces. They might have been carrying munitions or doing domestic chores or herding small animals. For example, there were girls sometimes in those battalions, who would have been doing domestic work, possibly also sexual work. And so our role was to identify these children, try to understand where they came from, travel across the country in order to actually locate their original families and then transport them to be back in touch with their families. I've actually brought in a photo that I took from that time. So this would be 20 years ago. Now, actually, I'm starting to feel nostalgic, old...
SALLY: Experienced.
JESS: This is a picture that I took in a small village in southern Angola, and it's a young boy. He would be about eight years old. I call him Eduardo, you know, for the sake of this story. And he's wearing some lovely corduroy pants that we bought him, and he's wearing a nice, clean pressed shirt. He would have been probably dressed in rags for most of the years before that. And we drove up to this village, and there was no communication—these towns had no telephones or electricity. So this mother would have known that her son had been found, possibly some months earlier, before we were able to actually drive for days across the country to drop him off. And we'd brought him for a couple of days with us. We would have been camping in the Savannah, sleeping in tents in order to get to these remote parts of the country. I remember she was working out in the fields when the car drove up and she saw us, and she had this hoe in her hand, and she dropped the hoe, and she ran crying. And Eduardo, he was just eight years old, and he jumped up on his mom's back as if he was a baby again.
A mother and child are reunited in southern Angola after conflict tore them apart. Photo: Jess Letch
SALLY: Oh my goodness.
JESS: And you can see in the picture, you know, the look on his face—just how happy he is to be back in his mum's arms after many years, and just how important it is to be able to provide that support. And in this case, it's not just about the happy feeling that comes from being with your family, but for these young people, it's actually about their survival. People are living very, very tough lives, and if you're not with your family, and you don't have people who are going to put you first, you know your future is very uncertain.
SALLY: Yeah, that is absolutely wonderful. Just looking at that photo, you can see the power. And as a mother as well, I can 100% appreciate that's very, very valuable. It's a great memory to carry. Thank you for sharing that story. So I get the feeling that you've spent quite a bit of time deployed to Africa.
JESS: I spent a year in Angola, and then came back to Australia for a short time, and then went to Liberia in West Africa. In Liberia, I was doing more capacity building and preparedness for restoring family links, and protection work in disasters. It was a post-conflict environment, and that's where I moved more into program development, capacity building, training, needs analysis, that type of thing. And then I kind of moved more into a bit of a management line after that, I would say, but also started to do more rapid deployments in different spaces—so that, that was the two years I spent in Africa. One of the next really interesting ones was South Ossetia in 2008—that was a Russian-Georgian conflict. That was a rapid deployment. And it was a very short conflict, but it was extremely intense. And I landed there just a couple of days after it ended, and there were large numbers of people who were unable to evacuate themselves out of this hot zone of conflict. A lot of them were elderly; people with disabilities; and where their families might have been living and working over in Tbilisi and Georgia; or they might have evacuated themselves or been able to get themselves out. Maybe their elderly mother might have been unable to move herself, or she might have refused to go, as well. There was a lot of people who actually were determined to stay. And we were visiting these people and at times, the villages were literally burning down around them. Sometimes they would insist that they were fine, and all they needed was a little bit of support to stay in place. And it seemed like sometimes they were okay, you know, like there was a little bit of what we would call traditional humanitarian law that somehow protected some of these elderly people who'd lived in these homes for all of their lives, where they were not being targeted, but any house that was vacant was burnt to the ground. At other times, people realised that it was just untenable to stay. They might have been receiving threats. And so literally, we had the situation of sort of driving into a town and having people just beating on the windows of the car, just begging us to take them away. And so we were working across the line to Georgia, where people were concerned about their family members, and we could relay news about what was happening, transport them, if required, and also unfortunately identify the remains of some people who weren't able to make it through.
SALLY: Can I ask you, what are your biggest learnings from working in different conflict zones around the world? Because that context that you started with and then the one you've just shared with me, it's still conflict, right? But what's the learning that you've got from that experience?
JESS: Well, I think that the first one's really a personal reflection, but also quite an obvious one. I would say just that when you work in these contexts, you realise just how lucky we are. Most places that I've lived that have been so disrupted by disasters and conflicts were safe, happy, connected places before things erupted. And you know, it could be any of us. From that, I think we should always be grateful for the lives that we lead, and also we should work to sustain and uphold the institutions and the systems that promote peace and prosperity in our own communities. Unfortunately, when we look at world events, we can see that things can turn on a dime, and we should always try to support those institutions that are working for peace and connectedness. I think the other thing, I guess, from a professional perspective and personal perspective, is around the importance of balance. It's extremely hard work, it's sometimes gritty, sometimes emotionally taxing. Needs will almost always overwhelm supply and your ability to provide. It's important to find professional balance in your life as well, to make sure that you are also coming home, making a home, making connections with family and friends, doing work where you get to do mid-term and long-term planning, developing up your soft skills and all of that type of thing, where you're not constantly working in crisis mode or under the pump. And I think that's important in terms of retaining balance in your professional skill set, as well as remaining a balanced person.
SALLY: I agree, I think that's very important. So what do you do to restore that balance when you come home? And you were in Ukraine recently as well. I mean this contact with crisis and conflict zones spans your career. So how do you ground yourself when you come back home?
JESS: In 2022, I was the deputy head of emergency operations for the International Federation of the Red Cross. That was a massive task. So I came in as the deputy head, and my responsibility essentially was to write the plan. We were based in Budapest, we had this situation unfolding in the weeks that the Ukraine crisis had kicked off in 2022 and we had a situation unfolding in nine countries. We didn't know whether Kyiv was going to fall any day, and I had to work with a team of technical specialists, as well as Red Cross organisations and other organisations who were mobilising around the world, and we wrote a plan that was worth about a billion dollars in the space of a couple of weeks. It's a huge undertaking. And from there, came home to Australia. That was my last big deployment. I've got a young family, so when it comes to balance, I've had to really find a way to find that balance as well. And I got some good advice very early in my career from someone who'd been working in this field, and she said, Keep a home base, you know, make sure that you've got somewhere you can call home and come back to it and nurture it and sustain it. Because I think you need to stay grounded. And it's very easy if you're constantly on the move for work to lose that sense of home, especially, not so much for myself, but some people might be 'third culture' kids, where parents might be from one country and they might have been raised in another, and they may not have a sense of home if they don't nurture it. And so I think that's been really important lesson for me. So I've always made sure that personally as well as professionally, I have another line running as well so that I can keep strong. Also, I think, well, playing a musical instrument's also a nice thing to do. A musical instrument can travel with you.
SALLY: What instrument would that be?
JESS: Well, I do have a ukulele, and it's gone all over the world with me. One of them still lives somewhere in Liberia that I left, I left with a friend when I left there, many years ago. You know, I think that it's good to nurture your personal interests. It's very easy in this sector for your work and your personal life to become very enmeshed and for your identity to become very caught up in the work that you do. A lot of adrenaline, a lot of stress, and it's important to make sure that you nurture those parts of yourself that exist separately to the work.
SALLY: Yeah, the language of music.
JESS: That's one thing and it connects people. And people love it.
SALLY: That sounds like really good advice—the balance of your work—because it can be very consuming, and you transport yourself to such a different context that to have that touchstone back home and know that you can return is a gift, but it can raise a little bit of guilt as well, I find at times. But some really good advice in there. Thank you for sharing that.
JESS: That's right. I think, you know, the humanitarian skillset is different to other types of development work. Often, people who work in development, they have very long-term connections to a place. They'll learn the local language, they'll get to know all of the community. They'll get to know people who are working in civil society, and they'll have these very long-term engagements, and they'll work on slow progress and within communities, and they'll support that. The humanitarian skillset is about being able to be dropped into a context, to think on your feet, to be able to make sense of what you see, and find a way to get things working. It's not uncommon to be working 20-hour days, and it's intense, it's all consuming, and that's essentially what aid workers are required to do—at times. Not all deployments are going to be like that. Some of them are going to be comfortable and relaxed when you're working on different parts of the machine. But essentially, you know, if we take Ukraine for an example, if you've got a massive operation—at that time, we had 2.2 million people who'd left Ukraine in the space of a few days—and then you've got partners who literally are mobilising billions of dollars—and your job is to get that machinery working so that the good intentions of the international community can be connected to the capacities of local organisations and local people, and that can actually be connected with that need. It's not an easy job, but that's what you're hired to do.
SALLY: Absolutely, that sense of urgency is definitely there. So I'm going to shift now, because, like most of our favorite people, you're also a RedR Australia trainer. So you've been a trainer with us since 2009. What do you love about being a trainer, and what surprises you most when you're on course.
JESS: I really love RedR trainings, and I'm not saying this because I'm in RedR company, but I do think that it's among the best training I've ever seen or experienced in my professional life, and I've drawn a lot of inspiration from the things that I've seen in RedR courses. I love that the trainings are so immersive and there's so much thought and care that's gone into them. You've got literally decades of thought that's gone into fine tuning certain aspects of these courses. And when I first started, I used to train on the Essentials of Humanitarian Practice, and also on another course called ProCap, which was on protection capacity building. And these days, I train on the HEAT, which is a Hostile Environment Awareness Training [course]. What I really love most about the trainings is that we get such a sensational group of trainees together, and I've always found that I've learned so much from the stimulating discussions that happen. Now as a facilitator, I've got slides, I've got particular points that I want to cover, I've got material that we need to get through, and I want to make sure that the key learning points come across. But there's so much to be gained from that cohort experience—people learning from each other—and we as trainers learn from the participants every day as well, because these are mostly mid-career professionals who already have experience under their belt and who are wanting to take the next step, or make sure, in the context of the HEAT, that they're doing everything they can just keep themselves safe in an emergency.
SALLY: Yeah, and I get the feeling as well on the training, everybody seems to have a very unique experience.
JESS: Yeah, I agree.
SALLY: But it's really valuable stuff and definitely very memorable, which is the point, right?
JESS: You know, I often tell teams when I'm supporting them and briefing over the time, I say, you know, you're familiar with the stages of group formation: forming, storming, norming and performing. Well, now you're all feeling nice and polite and happy. You're all forming. The storming will come, then you'll work out each other, and then you will really perform. And you know, I've never seen a group that hasn't been so elated to finish a course and see everything that they've achieved, and they really do go through that experience, and it's so fantastic to see that process.
SALLY: Yeah, definitely. So I'm just going to circle back now to your work in protection, gender and inclusion. What do you see are the big changes across humanitarian practice, either from a field perspective or from a programming point of view?
JESS: In the last decades, I've seen a much greater emphasis from donors on compliance, and they want to see that there's certain safeguarding in place. For example when it comes to child protection, or the prevention of sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment. And that's often been in response to some high-profile failures within the sector and some low-profile failures as well. And so there has certainly been that element which has also provided a bit more impetus as well. Because I think, you know, once upon a time...there's this term they refer to as 'truck and chuck'. You know, people often have in their mind when they think of humanitarian work, they think of boxes of food aid falling out of an airplane and people sort of scrambling to pick it up. And in reality, things are not done that way anymore, and it's actually really good that they're not done that way anymore, and that we take more care. We see the whole person, and we're looking at those particular vulnerabilities, and we're trying to see the gaps where perhaps people might be falling through the cracks.
SALLY: Yeah, I think that's fair. So we've spoken to a number of people about having a humanitarian career, which can be all consuming and a family. So as someone who regularly travels for work, how do you balance your family life and this career?
JESS: That's a tricky question, and there's no easy answer to it. I think perhaps in the early days, I made the mistake of seeing families that were living and working in the humanitarian sector, people who'd made it work, thinking that it was easy. And I would say, it's not easy. And I think it's important that people are well aware of that before they enter into a humanitarian career. If you want to have children have a sort of a traditional style of family arrangement, it's really important to go in with your eyes open before you invest the time and the years that it takes to develop a career in this space and talk to people. Talk to people who are aid workers who have families, talk to people who have been aid workers and are no longer aid workers who have families, and just have a little bit of a sense of what your pathways could be. Make sure you have a plan as well—if you find that it's difficult to travel with a family and make it work in that way. Because one of the challenges is that when you are in the beginning of your career, you usually go to what are called hardship posts. So you often end up in those sort of difficult and sometimes dangerous places where it's harder to put people. So, you know, when you're young and enthusiastic, they'll put you into some of those tough roles, but as you develop more professionally, you're more likely to go into regional positions or global positions, and they require a lot of travel. So there's no place in your career that's necessarily easy on a partner and kids. So it's really important to be aware of that, I think, and just think about your own personal position—what your skills are, and you know how you can apply those skills in the humanitarian sector, or if you need to, when you come back home,
SALLY: Yeah, I think that's really good advice, because we know that there are family postings, or they're considered family-friendly postings, but just because you can do it doesn't mean it's going to work for you, either. And the stress and the strain is not just yourself, it's multiple people involved in the unit. So to cap it off, what is next? What more do we need to do, apart from more of the same?
JESS: As I mentioned before, I think it's important to retain support for our institutions. I think we're at a time when people—there's a lot of skepticism as a society. We tend to be drifting further apart and we're losing trust. And actually, it's really important that we can mobilise as a community when we're affected by disasters and crises, and also when we're supporting others in solidarity. There's been a much stronger focus on localisation, supporting local organisations to help themselves, and that's certainly been a strong shift over the years, and that's the direction that we really should be moving in. So the number of people who are deployed into an emergency situation is actually very small. The people on the ground doing the work are local people, but they draw upon our support. And I mean, a lot of these people have never had experiences of disasters or conflict. I mean, yes, we know that earthquakes strike the Pacific regularly, but they will not strike the same community over and over again, and so that's where we need to be really supporting people to learn from each other, so that they can be really ready and know what to do in those situations, and then have the resources that they need to just get on with it and get things done.
SALLY: Well, once again thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate the sharing, and I've learned a little bit along the way as well.
JESS: Thanks, it's been really nice to take a bit of a walk down memory lane and tell a few stories. So thanks. It's been lovely.
SALLY: We'll see you at training.
JESS: Yeah, see you there.
SALLY: You’ve been listening to Humanitarian Conversations, a podcast by RedR Australia. You can learn more about our work at redr.org.au and we invite you to join our conversations on LinkedIn and Facebook. If you’d like to see the photo that Jess mentioned in this episode, you can find the link to it in the episode’s show notes. If you enjoyed this episode of Humanitarian Conversations, I encourage you to rate, review, subscribe and share it with your friends, family and colleagues. This podcast episode was produced and engineered by Jill Farrar. I’m Sally Cunningham. Thanks for listening.
