In season one of our popular How Aid Works podcast, Australian Red Cross aid workers speak to us about the challenges of providing aid - in the crises that make the news and the ones that don't.
You don’t stop diseases like Ebola with doctors. You stop them with garbage collectors, plumbers and grave-diggers.
Emergency shelter is a complex thing. How do you keep diseases from spreading? How do you protect women and children?
Everyone wants to help when a major disaster hits: from relief agencies marking their turf to well-intentioned foreigners wanting to volunteer.
A red cross or red crescent on a white background means ‘don’t shoot!’ in every language. It’s meant to give aid workers access to the most difficult and dangerous places on earth: from prisons to battlefields.
This is medicine stripped to the core: mending broken bodies by torchlight, in a tent in the heart of a swamp.
You can access any prison, any detention centre, any gulag or PoW camp, anywhere in the world… but you can never tell anyone what you see there.
Why are people still homeless three months after a massive relief effort in Vanuatu?
The Nepal earthquake changed families in profound ways. Most lost their homes. Some lost children or parents. And a few special people formed their own family when no one else would have them.
In Sydney, a massive outbreak of armed violence forced millions of people to flee for their lives, to any place where they were no longer being shot at. No, wait. Not Sydney. Syria.
How emotionally healthy are people who spend their working lives in disaster zones? And if that’s your career path, how do you manage your stress?
It’s not a great time to be a humanitarian. Around the world, they’re being shot at, sent home or silenced. We talk about what it means – and what it costs – to be humanitarian.
What should you send a country that’s been hit by a disaster? Here’s a tip from Finau Limuloa: don’t send bras. In fact, don’t send anything.
Your challenge: get safe drinking water to an island where a cyclone has destroyed all the water tanks and an active volcano is spewing ash everywhere.
In the wake of a disaster, everything you’ve learned about child protection comes sharply into focus.
A simple road trip means negotiating safe passage with militants. A child’s stuffed crocodile contains his only hope. A soldier comes to understand what the red cross really means.
How do you solve a problem like 85,000 people and no toilets?
How well did our humanitarians face the big disasters of last year – the disease outbreaks, the earthquakes, the conflicts that created a global refugee crisis?