"Maybe that's what attracted me to this kind of work as well, because there isn't a script, you know, no one really tells you when you're in the middle of a crisis, what's right and what's wrong. You know, a lot of it is instinctual. A lot of it is based on sort of your principles as a human being."

Richard Ragan, the Country Director of the World Food Programme in Bangladesh, says a sense of adventure drew him to working for the UN and it also fuels his passion for outdoor sports. He says he functions better in environments, where you have to think on your feet. But with his line of work comes enormous responsibility:

“I don't want one person that I'm responsible for to be hungry. And you know, that, that keeps me up at night, for sure. But the thing that scares me, probably more than anything, and, you know, there's no vaccination for it, is climate change. ... It's like the waves or the mountains, it doesn't care."

:: Richard Ragan interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"And he rushes up to embrace his mother. At that moment, I just said, thank you. This is what happiness is, I want to do this all my life. I just want to repatriate refugees for the rest of my life."

This week’s guest is Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, which delivers education in humanitarian crises through funding investments for UN agencies and civil society organizations. Yasmine describes herself as a pragmatic idealist, who was taught by her mother not to look for success in life, but to seek to serve. Before her current role Yasmine worked for UNHCR resettling refugees.  She says that her mission now is crucial to helping people overcome crises and rebuild their lives:

“If you invest in the children, give them the tools, the education, so that they are no longer disempowered, that if you and I cannot change the world, they can do it.”

:: Yasmine Sherif interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Days go by. And you know that every single day is a day of somebody losing their lives, or their livelihoods. And so you say to them, no more time!" 

Martin Griffiths is the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Yemen, a country that has been devastated by civil war, and which is experiencing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises with famine, very little medical care, and now the coronavirus pandemic. Working to end the six-year conflict there is only the latest challenge in his long career as a mediator and humanitarian worker,  and while he admits to being impatient for results, he also describes himself as an optimist, even if only 10 percent of mediation efforts ever succeed: 

"But that priceless moment, which I can only really associate with mediation, is to die for."

:: Martin Griffiths interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"This is why exile, refugee exile is so devastating, because it is the admission to oneself, that home is not safe anymore. There are very few decisions that a human being can make, that are as difficult as choosing the path of exile. And this is what displaced and refugees do.”

Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is recovering from Covid-19, and says it's given him a sense of the fragility of life. He says the socio-economic effects of the epidemic, including  rising poverty, are especially dire for refugees and displaced people.

"We believe, for example, that 50% of the refugee girls who used to go to school before the pandemic, may not ever go back to school afterwards, because their families are too poor to support their education. They'll go to work. But it could be even worse. They could go into early marriage, they could go into exploitation and worse."

:: Filippo Grandi interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"So what we try to bring to the top level, and then at the advocacy level is that all of those things are important because they do impact on the way that women and men, boys and girls access those resources and services [...] they cannot be gender neutral, because their lives are not gender neutral. That's not how people live their lives. "

Funmi Balogun is the head of Humanitarian Action at UN Women, supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable women and girls - people who are displaced or refugees. She works to make sure that the humanitarian response does not perpetuate gender inequality.

"[M]en usually do not leave those camps [...] they stay in those camps as a security net, but the women and children have to go out, they have to look for food. So the women become very vulnerable to violence to all sorts of abuses. At the same time, they are not leading in those camps. They are not the ones who speak about what type of food, they're not the ones who are consulted, about what types of housing, they are not the ones that are consulted in everything."

:: Funmi Balogun interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"And now you have a lockdown in your country, and you don't know where to turn and nobody's there when you call the hotline. This is something that is a crisis. Even the death of a woman [...] has increased during this year of 2020 with the coronavirus pandemic [...] girls are not in school. They're accessible to random people who are in their environment..."

Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), is working to deliver a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person's potential is fulfilled.

“You really see… how important it is to have peace in the home and the ability for girl child in particular to be able to scream at the top of her lungs if she feels that something wrong is happening to her.”

:: Natalia Kanem interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"One of the things I hold on to is most people on the planet have escaped from those problems, as the generations have passed. And when you're confronting the next bleak, horrible event, holding on to the fact that it's possible to escape…is invaluable.”

Mark Lowcock, Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), leads global humanitarian relief efforts for the UN. Mark's optimism has sustained him throughout his 30-year career delivering aid to people suffering from war, poverty and famine.

:: Mark Lowcock interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"...[P]eople living with HIV need to go to the clinic to collect their ARVs. Now many are afraid because they think they're going to catch Corona there. Others are prohibited because lockdowns include restrictions on movement. So we had to move in quickly to help governments to know how to apply public safety measures that don't take away the opportunity for people living with HIV and are vulnerable to seek their treatments. Then there's also human rights, that when public safety measures are applied evenly and forcefully that certain groups of people whose human rights are contested tend to suffer even more. So you found gay people, you found sex workers, you found people who inject drugs, transgender people, facing particular difficulties, more discrimination, more stigmatisation in the context of Corona."

Winnie Byanyima recently became the Director-General of UNAIDS, the UN organization leading the global effort to end HIV AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Having been appointed in February, the start of her journey has been full on with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.

:: Winnie Byanyima interviewed by Melissa Fleming

As we mark five years after Europe’s refugee crisis, we revisit our episode with Boris Cheshirkov, who worked for UNHCR as a spokesperson in his native Bulgaria when thousands of refugees were arriving at the border. It was an extremely tense time, testing European solidarity to its limits - bringing out the best of humanity and also the worst.Anti-refugee feeling was running high. In Bulgaria, an asylum seeker was shot dead at the border. But when Boris spoke out against the violence, he himself became the target of a virulent online hate campaign. The threats were so severe he had to leave his country. Boris now serves in Greece, where refugees remain in limbo. 

“There were others who were saying ‘Now we’re coming to kill you. We’re organizing. You will not find a safe place in this country.’ There were others that were just wishful thinking: ‘You will get cancer and die tomorrow. Your family is cursed. We will find you. We will make you disappear’.”

:: Boris Cheshirkov interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"But doctors are afraid too, for their health. So I follow the same protocol of the country [...] it was the time for me to see if the system I helped to put in place is working. So I received the team at home they came to decontaminate my house. They programme me in the same way that they programme all other positive COVID cases, I received the psychological support too and I receive also social support, they bring me water and soap to wash my hand so I stay home waiting for the test [...] and I stay in bed. But I continue working. I was participating in all the teleconference because I didn't want to be cut off from what was doing in the country, because this time, it was very high number of cases. So we had to adapt everyday our strategy"

Marie-Roseline Bélizaire, a doctor and epidemiologist with WHO, is helping fight COVID-19 in the Central African Republic. Marie speaks about her upbringing in Haiti and how the lack of scientific and medical rigour motivated her to study medicine. She also recounts her experiences on the frontlines of Ebola.

:: Marie Roseline Bélizaire interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I grew up with the pain of poverty, with the humiliation, with the psychological and emotional impact it has to you; the lack of self-confidence. [...] So for me, poverty is one of the strongest things I'm very much concerned about because I know how it feels to grow up in poverty."

Zainab Hawa Bangura, Director-General of the UN Office at Nairobi, began her career as a women's rights campaigner in her home country of Sierra Leone. Her reasons were personal: at age 12, her father wanted to marry her off to an older man. Her mother refused and so her father threw them out. Sacrificing her own marriage for her daughter's future, she insisted on education. In this episode, we hear about Ms. Bangura's journey to personal freedom from her own abusive marriage, and about how she came to conclude "I need to be there where the decisions are made. I have to be on the table because if you are not part of the agenda, you will be part of the menu."

:: Zainab Bangura interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"[T]he SOP was if the if the bombs start dropping, wrap yourself with as much of this as you can and, and move. So I spent a few weeks sitting, you know, laying in my bed [with a broken spine] looking at this lightweight plaster cast beside me wondering how the hell I was going to get wrapped up in this in time to be able to get away from whatever was happening."

Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the Health Emergencies Programme for WHO, speaks about giving up on dreams of becoming a trauma surgeon after breaking his spine in a car crash in Iraq. He was held hostage there while working in a hospital during the first Gulf War. That experience set him on the path to WHO, with a specialism in infectious diseases. "[Y]ou were either a surgeon or a good infectious disease doctor, because that seemed to be the two things a doctor could make a difference with, in many developing country environments." Today, he is leading the team responding to the international containment and treatment of COVID.

:: Mike Ryan interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"[O]ccasionally being naughty with my friends, we would stop in town and roam around and sort of walk around and I was less than 11 years old, but with other friends. And we were very clear that if there's a white kid coming, walking in the opposite direction on the curb, you don't get out of the way for this person. So those kinds of small defiances. So by by the time I was 11 leaving South Africa, I knew there was something very wrong with the society we live in." Dr. Matshidiso Moeti talks to Melissa about her childhood in Botswana and aparthied South Africa, and her fears about the effect of COVID-19, especially on women ”The impact economically is going to make them even more vulnerable to many things, not just to COVID itself."

Dr. Moeti is the first female Regional Director for Africa for WHO. Now she’s the face of the COVID-19 fight in Africa, but she says facing the pandemic is easier than where she started her career as a doctor - fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s.

:: Matshidiso Moeti interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Neil Walsh, Chief of Cybercrime and Anti-Money Laundering for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, describes the horrific surge of criminals exploiting and abusing children online while they are in lock-down and what he is doing to stop it. He speaks about his belief that “COVID-19 is the great reset button.” He also describes the scene he witnessed of a deadly terrorist bombing as a child in Belfast, Northern Ireland and how “that was the moment where I decided I’m going to do something to stop this stuff.”

He also speaks candidly about his continuing 14-year battle with bowel cancer and why he is so vocal on social media about his struggle with the disease. There were four occasions where he was told by a doctor, ‘you may not survive tonight.’

:: Neil Walsh interviewed by Melissa Fleming

In this opening episode for Season 3 of Awake at Night, host Melissa Fleming speaks with David Beasley, Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme*, about his own experience being sick with COVID-19 and why people should listen to the science. He also explains why the pandemic is causing an spiraling epidemic of hunger. In Mr. Beasley's words, should the world fail to come together and invest in people everywhere, we may face "famines of biblical proportions."

From his home in South Carolina, to Yemen, to Sudan and Ethiopia, Mr. Beasley shares candid moments of his journey in the world of humanitarian work, and his thoughts on why the UN is needed now more than ever.

*UN WFP is the 2020 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

:: David Beasley interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I went to a rehabilitation centre, supporting and helping the women who had been sex slaves and who managed to survive with their children [...] They had just managed to escape. I’m coming and holding all this pain with them, and they were physically and mentally sick. And we had to take them to the hospital." Adiba Qasim is from the Yazidi minority in Northern Iraq. In August 2014, her village was stormed by Islamic State militants who killed and enslaved thousands of Yazidis. Adiba and her family managed to escape just before the militants arrived. She was 19 years old.

:: Adiba Qasim interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Often for people who get on boats, it’s not the first point of trauma. They’ve experienced starvation. They have been shot at. They have travelled miles without any medical aid. Their children are at their wits’ end, already traumatized, when they get on the boat. These are not ill-informed, unintelligent, reckless individuals. They are doing this, because they are thinking profoundly about their children’s future. They are the people who are being washed up on the beaches. Just think about that, as you’re drifting off to sleep, you know." Cate Blanchett reflects on how meeting refugees has profoundly altered her perception of human suffering and the capacity to hope.

:: Cate Blanchett interviewed by Melissa Fleming

“There were others who were saying ‘Now we’re coming to kill you. We’re organizing. You will not find a safe place in this country.’ There were others that were just wishful thinking: ‘You will get cancer and die tomorrow. Your family is cursed. We will find you. We will make you disappear’.” When Boris Cheshirkov spoke out against the shooting of an Afghan asylum seeker in the border between Turkey and Bulgaria, on Bulgarian territory, he himself became the target of a virulent online hate campaign. The threats were so severe he had to leave his country.

:: Boris Cheshirkov interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Maybe I say that now, as a nearly 50-year-old, but I think we underestimate maybe the importance of making the children part of the process that you’re going through as a parent, when you’re going into exile." Shahrzad Tadjbakhsh, an effective and tireless advocate of human rights, a lawyer who holds a senior position working on refugee protection, carries in her heart the legacy of her own experience as a refugee when she was just 10 years old.

:: Shahrzad Tadjbakhsh interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"There is a level of need, which goes well beyond our standard ability to deliver psychosocial counselling. So as a protection agency, we have been facing this dilemma: How far can we go to make a meaningful contribution, beyond the individual compassion that you feel and you show and you share when you meet these persons?. " Even in the middle of a war zone, Bruno Geddo manages to light up the room, make people smile. He may sound like he’s just been on a long and magical holiday, but Mr. Geddo has been helping the victims of conflict in the world’s most dangerous places; his most recent posting: Iraq.

:: Bruno Geddo interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"You hear the stories. And it is this 'survivor guilt' that you feel when you go back." Monique Sokhan fled from the terror of the Khmer Rouge and the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s, when she was just a child. Many family members who stayed behind did not survive. "I felt like having a responsibility somehow to do something that would make them proud of me." It’s that feeling that drove Ms. Sokhan to work for refugees. But her first job for UNHCR was in Thailand, as a Protection Officer in camps for Khmer Rouge refugees – while the Khmer Rouge were the very people responsible for the killing of family and friends.

:: Monique Sokhan interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"And then, I plucked up my courage, because I was so ashamed of how I was feeling, I thought I was literally going crazy and felt full of self-recrimination, and I saw a British Forces doctor, who told me that, yes, I had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that was the first time I heard of it." Fabrizio Hochschild felt invulnerable and impervious to danger, but the savagery he experienced in the 1990s during the Bosnian war brutally stripped away all his mental defences. Rising to the position of UN Assistant Secretary-General, he is now committed in helping others to fight the stigma of mental health problems.

:: Fabrizio Hochschild interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I remember one night we had, we were a few months in the US, and we had friends over and there was a knock on the door and we opened the door and this these boy scouts and this guy from the Salvation Army rolled in with canned food and clothes and gifts and a tree. And we were all kind of bewildered. What was going on and they came in and they put the tree and they wished us merry Christmas and give all they gave us gifts and so on. They were grateful, but it was also so strange that there roles are reversed now. I remember going to the grocery store with my mom and she would pay for food with food stamps and that was so mortifying for her."

:: Khaled Hosseini interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"So I was in the car I was reading, I was preparing my mind intervention with the Minister of Foreign Affairs I remember, and at a certain moment an incredible bang! The car rocked right and left and like like a ball of fire in the air… the car stopped. Smoke started coming into the car and with my colleagues, because we were four, I said “Are you all alive? Are we all alive?” And we had this, we were incredible readiness, if you want, to position ourselves into the brace position when you go “Brace, brace” and to realise to touch ourselves if we had all our pieces in the right place [...] Everywhere, everywhere one can touch. I tell you the truth. To check if we had blood, and checking on each other. But then this smoke started to come in the car and the car could not move."

:: Alessandra Morelli interviewed by Melissa Fleming

“[S]omebody said to me once to be a real humanitarian you need to be a bit of a lawyer, a bit of a cowboy, a bit of a nun, and a bit of a nurse. And I really think that is true you know because you cannot be just a charity person. You need to be strong enough and stay solid enough and look after yourself as well in the middle of crisis to be able to respond. But of course globally it is traumatizing. You know we are in the 21st century, we’re getting into the 22nd century whatever it is, time passes and the atrocities that you see in war, the numbers of refugees around the world it is something that still shocks me.”

:: Felipe Camargo interviewed by Melissa Fleming

“I always say that the doctors, the surgeons, the nurses, they saved my life physically [...] My family was there to support me. But everybody, everybody questioned me whether I could work again. Nobody believed it. I was supported to finally go back and do the story in Lebanon of the Syrian refugees [...] They didn’t look at me and think 'he can’t do his job'. They trusted me with their stories [...] When that work was published is when people started commissioning me again to work. So I always say it was those Syrian refugees [...] They were the ones that gave me my life back [...] without them I would not be able to be a photographer.”

:: Giles Duley interviewed by Melissa Fleming

“What keeps me awake is my staff that they will perhaps suffer more than what they have suffered so far. The Syrians that have gone through this, may have to go through more pain and more suffering. [...] It has to stop somewhere. We have been saying enough is enough, but even enough for Syria has a new definition. What is that enough? And these thoughts make me angry, make me sad because at end of the day I see people dying in Syria. People are losing their lives in Syria.”

:: Sajjad Malik interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I’ve worked in worse situations, for example in Sri Lanka and in Somalia but maybe this time around because I am part of that community, it was really so difficult for me – and we’ve been trained as humanitarians to try and control your emotions so that you could be able to think clearly and be able to give support. But in this situation I actually began to doubt myself."

:: Fatima Mohammed interviewed by Melissa Fleming

“[I was] handcuffed to a metallic cable that is tied to a bed so that gives me little margin of movement around the bed on one side of the bed. Enough to make four footsteps and you get used to that. It was dark. Darkness was more difficult to cope with than limited freedom of movement. Darkness is something that is oppressive.”

:: Vincent Cochetel interviewed by Melissa Fleming