Speaker 1: 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 fly in 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 totally 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 explain 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. 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 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 face 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 haunt us. We all face hurdles in 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's 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 able 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.