"She was held at gunpoint and taken away and we were told that unless a certain amount of money was going to be paid or a certain number of jobs were going to be allocated, they were going to shoot her."

David Shearer is UN Secretary General's Special Representative for South Sudan and head of UNMISS. He's also served in other crisis areas. David shares his career stories from the nerve-wracking negotiations to release his wife from gunpoint in Somalia, to his incredible work entering behind Sri Lankan government lines to deliver exam papers to its schools.

On COVID in South Sudan he said "if you take the experience of Ebola in West Africa a few years ago, Ebola killed about 11,000 people in West Africa. But [...] what they found was that far more people died of other diseases: malaria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, whatever, because they weren't being treated in the health centres [...] so the invisible death rate was way higher than the very visible death rate from Ebola. So one of the things that we were determined to do here was to make sure that the health centres continue to function."

:: David Shearer interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I was at Minustah’s headquarters, Hotel Christopher, and was sitting preparing myself for a meeting the next day, just before five. And there was a shaking rumble as if a large truck was driving by outside [...] I realised it was an earthquake and the shaking stopped, maybe for a couple of seconds. I decided to hide under the table to protect myself against falling debris. There was a very loud noise and the next thing I remember was that I was lying on my back, pitch dark, not a sound. I could not move out of this coffin where I was confined. I had maybe 5cm on each side of my shoulder and about 5-7cm above my nose. I was lying with bent knees so maybe a metre and a half a leg or something like that."

It’s been over ten years since Senior Civil Affairs Officer, Jens Kristensen found himself trapped in the earthquake that hit Haiti’s Hotel Christopher. Jens recounts his harrowing experience of being confined in a dark coffin-like space for five days with no water or drink, not knowing when, or if, he would be rescued. He also explains his remarkable decision to return to work after just two days following the rescue knowing that "mentally and physically I was capable and still able to help."

:: Jens Kristensen interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I often think about TB, because 1.5 million people die of tuberculosis every year, year after year. It's such a huge toll and yet, we only react when there's a pandemic, or an epidemic, where it's very dramatic [...] But to me, these new technologies now offer us the possibility to control diseases [...] through novel vaccines that we did not have before."

Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation, shares her insights on how lessons from other infectious diseases, like tuberculosis and HIV, have shaped our response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. She explains the science of the chase after an evolving virus and stresses the global nature of it.

"We've seen time and time again that products developed in high income countries take decades to find their way to low income countries. This has happened with influenza pandemics. It's happened with HIV. It's happened with hepatitis B vaccines. It took 30 years for hepatitis B vaccines to get to developing countries and that's exactly the reason why the COVAX was set up."

:: Soumya Swaminathan interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"I would go to the villages, and people will tell me, ‘On this day, we learned that we were going to be attacked [...] and then it happened.’ The question then became for me, ‘If people know that they are going to be attacked, and you don't have 911. You don't have ways of calling. The nearest policeman is 600 miles away. What do you do?'"

In this episode, we listen to the story of Alice Nderitu, the Secretary General’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide. Alice speaks candidly about her experiences mediating in areas of conflict and how her powerful storytelling techniques built a peace agreement between 56 ethnic communities that still stands today.

When she was a young girl, she had told her brother "'I'm going to be an elder, and I'm going to sit there and I'll make decisions.’ And my brother would tell me, ‘You’re a girl. Girls don't get to do that. Only men can do that.’ And so we...now it's a joke between us."

:: Alice Nderitu interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"We all need to be convinced that we don't have a plan B. We only have one plan. And that one plan is to correct how we do business around our food systems and what our environment can handle. Our planet can take care of itself. It will eject us and move on. But is that where we want to be?"

Agnes Kalibata, UN Secretary General's Special Envoy to the 2021 Food Systems Summit, shares her remarkable story of growing up in a Ugandan refugee camp with her Rwandan parents. Her father, a trained doctor, was forced to retrain as a farmer after relocating. But his passion for learning drives his daughter and she’s admitted into the best girls' school in Uganda, receiving a UNHCR scholarship to support her studies.

Agnes discusses how an encounter during her Ph.D led to her becoming the former Minister of Agriculture in Rwanda and why it’s so important to build resilience around climate change at this year’s Food System Summit.

:: Agnes Kalibata interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"No, you cannot have two metres apart from a family member who may show symptoms because it's only one room. No, you cannot wash your hands regularly because there is no tap water and the children of the woman will have to go 5 kilometres away to get some water. No, you don't wash your hands because between buying a bit of rice and soap, you choose the rice. And no, you don't stop going out to beg on the street or to have one of those daily meagre wages from daily work because the money you get in the morning is the money which allows you to buy lunch. [...] Yes, the Western world worries about the coronavirus. Yemen cannot even afford to worry about the coronavirus because we have malaria, chikungunya, cholera and dengue fever. All that. Plus, there is a famine," said Jean-Nicolas Beuze, Representative of the UN Refugee Agency in Yemen.

In a deeply personal interview about his career helping refugees and victims of torture, Jean-Nicolas describes being driven by the “denial of their human rights” and that “injustice was something I could not accept”. He also reveals fearing for the first time for his own loved ones who face the dangers of COVID-19 back home.

:: Jean-Nicolas Beuze interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director, warns that climate change poses an existential threat far greater than COVID-19. "[P]eople understood COVID because it was imminent," she said. Yet, "it's a fact that COVID is [...] a small overture to what will happen if we do not take action on climate."

Inger describes UNEP as ‘the environmental conscience’ of the world. "Our job is to tell the world honestly, without scaremongering, what science tells us and then to support countries [...] so that they can implement what it is that we are telling them needs to get done."

Science, in Inger's words "has to make its way to the dinner table, to the voting booth, to the school playground, into the boardrooms. Science needs to be understood so there is not something that only some people in a high ivory tower can deal with. But that anyone gets."

“You have more than 30 countries in Africa that have a degree of plastic bans. [...] If they can do it, then why can't we in the wealthy world? When we respect nature, and our planet, we are respecting ourselves. And when we fail to, we are in fact disrespecting ourselves, or certainly the next generation and their life."

:: Inger Andersen interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Five months after losing my son in the #BeirutBlast I have decided to start writing about my experiences of grief and trauma. I can't promise it will be eloquent, or even make sense, and it certainly won't be pretty. But I hope this process is cathartic for me."

On August 4th 2020, as Sarah Copland was working and preparing for the arrival of her second child, Ethan, she and her family were tragically caught in the vast explosion that caused devastation across Beirut.

Isaac, Sarah’s first born son, was killed.

Trying to understand her grief, Sarah started writing a blog, and in the process, her words have resonated with others experiencing loss.

Sarah Copland is a UN Officer working on women's rights and gender equality in the ESCWA Centre for Women.

:: Sarah Copland interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"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