Humanitarian work: The untold story | Gísli Ólafsson | TEDxReykjavik

[Applause]

48 hours ago I was in a disaster

Zone 48 hours ago I was still breathing

in the dust unsettled by an earthquake

that killed over 10,000

people 48 hours

ago the smell of dead bodies was still

lingering in my

nose and 48 hours ago the earth beneath

my

feet was still trembling from

aftershocks for the past decade I've

been jumping on

planes whenever a large

earthquake tsunami

hurricane or flood

hits this last fall I even jumped on a

plane when a deadly pandemic broke out

in West

Africa but when I tell people what I do

for a

living most people tell me they would

love to be

humanitarians I mean come on who doesn't

want to help children in

need or flying a helicopter with relief

supplies but before you go online to

search for a job in the humanitarian

sector then I wanted to give you a

little bit of an insight into the part

of our work we seldom talk

about it's the fact that 48 hours ago I

was in a total toally different world

than I am

today that it makes it really difficult

for us to

express the

emotions and the

feelings and the

experiences that we

encountered in our

response I come back here to my home

country and all I hear are complaints

about first world

problems yet I was seeing things and

experiencing

things that I feel are a lot different

and maybe in my mind a bit more

important

this is maybe why a lot of humanitarians

jump from one crisis to another and

never settle in one

place because in the

field they can find people with similar

stories to

tell people who also use dark humor as a

way to diffuse

stress

people who also have lived experiences

that keep them up at

night how do you explain to your family

and your

friends the

smell of dead bodies rotting in the

heat how do you explain the desperation

you saw in the eyes of a Dying Ebola

patient and how do you EXP expain that

you are willing to put yourself In

Harm's Way to help others in

need and how do you explain extreme

poverty to someone who lives in a

country with the highest standard of

living in the

world it's difficult

because even our loved

ones we are not always able to connect

with and they don't always understand

why our mind is somewhere

else and not present at the place we

are and when they ask you to help make a

decision such as what color should we

have this wall painted

that question becomes

insignificant to some of the life and

death

decisions you had to make just a few

days

ago and your answer often

becomes I don't care you

decide but we don't only have to live

with those difficult memories

and those

decisions often wrong decisions that we

have to make in the

field we also have to live with the fact

that nothing happened as fast as it had

to

happen the relief supplies that we were

trying to bring in get stuck because of

logistical problems or Customs

nightmares while the people we were

trying to help

starve to

death and

sometimes your frustrations with the

overall humanitarian system boils over

and you

think why am I doing this

job many of us come into this sector

with an ideal of saving the

world but we quickly have that ideal

crushed when we realize the

enormity of the task at hand and the

little we can actually

do but when that feeling of Despair

comes over me and it does at times I try

to remind

myself of the fact that every little

thing I

do is one step closer to relieving

someone's

suffering and I remind myself about the

story of the starfish and some of you

may have heard it about a man who was

walking close to a beach and he sees a

woman dancing on the

beach but when he gets closer he

realizes that the beach is littered with

starfish and the woman is not dancing

she is is reaching down and throwing one

Starfish at a time back into the

ocean and he comes to her and he says my

dear why are you doing this this is

hopeless it will not matter you can

never ever save them

all and the woman bends down reaches for

yet another

starfish throws it back into the ocean

and says it matters to this

one because we have to remember we can't

save the world but we can

save one individual or one person at a

time and this reminds us of why we

actually went into this field

why we wanted to do something it's that

deep feeling of helping others something

that

is in

here and we remember the smiles on the

faces of the children that we have

helped and the gratefulness and

thankfulness of the villagers you have

provided assistance

to it is by taking those positive

feelings that act like an injection into

your heart

that you are ready to

continue and phas any

hurdles that humanitarian system places

in front of

you you don't really have to be a

humanitarian to face difficult

things we all have

experiences that Haun

us we all face hurdles in our Our

Lives we all face bureaucracy in our

lives we all have issues explaining to

others why those feelings are so

difficult but there is

hope there is hope for all of

us that if we

focus on those positive

things if we

focus on the things we're able to do and

not on those we cannot do if we focus on

the small victories instead of the big

challenges that we

face if we allow those positive things

to

drive what we think

about then we are a

to do things because we are what we

focus

on and if we focus on the children we

have been able to help and not those

that we haven't if we focus on the

things that went well and not on our

failures then we are able to change the

world one person at a time

thank you

[Music]

[Applause]