âWhat did you expect?â After a stressful 6 month deployment (and first deployment, I should add, in a difficult context only 5 months post-conflict breaking out) I was coming to the end and was relaxing in preparation for returning home. In the last few weeks of my deployment there were 3 relatively serious security incidents of which I was indirectly involved or affected (emotionally/psychosocially). The reality was that I wasnât traumatised, not even nearly, and although I didnât notice a direct impact on my work I am sure that the loss of trust and faith in the system and my colleagues and senior management would have definitely distracted me and affected my concentration and therefore effectiveness at work. The first incident was outside our office. There were 10+ people waiting for a car for a colleagueâs leaving party. A motorbike drove passed and mugged one of our female colleagues in front of all of us. The audacity of it was shocking in and of itself, and the colleague was brought to the ground. Some staff chased the perpetrators and others went to her aid. Once she was picked up, dusted off and had a cigarette, people moved on and went to the party. I stayed with her and we spoke with security, and she then said she needed a minute to compose herself. She was clearly, understandably, in shock. I was shocked by the lack of support once the âemergencyâ appeared to be over. The second incident was 20 minutes after Iâd left a local restaurant on my own, in the dark, on a route Iâd felt relatively safe on for the previous 6 months â especially given how vigilant I always was. After 10pm, when I was in bed, nearly asleep I got a concerning call from a colleague, calmly asking where I was â alarm bells rang and I went out to find them sitting in the living area of our guesthouse, with my colleague bruised and battered, blood all over her face. This incident had a little more gravity and senior management went with her to the hospital â although protocols were outdated and the medical facilities were not open late at night, so she had to go home. I supported her the next day to go to a health facility, when everyone else took the Sunday off â the only day of the week that we had a break. Once the emergency was over, it seemed no one wanted to spend time supporting her. The third incident was outside our guesthouse and was an armed robbery of something that I was supposed to be carrying later that day. It felt a bit to close to home, and I felt a bit guilty although knew it was irrational. No one was hurt it was just a shocking situation for all involved. I wasnât traumatised, I wasnât particularly emotionally affected by any of them, not to the extent that they fully compromised my work or caused me recurring worry or upset â but I was jumpy for the remaining time, I was hypervigilant and I didnât sleep amazingly well. The day after the armed robbery, Security Director (who also has oversight of Safety, I should add) came to me and asked me to fill out a report. I asked if he meant regarding my wellbeing and the impact on myself as a person. He said no, the security aspects. He didnât seem to detect my sarcasm. Months later after returning home, debriefing with friends & family & one informal debrief in my home country a few days after returning (which was very good), I returned to the country with a different organisation. I met with one of the senior staff who I had a good relationship with and explained this situation to him, and how I was pissed off that not one person had asked how I was, or how any of the 10 people who saw the mugging were, or how the guy who was at each individual incident and physically helped the individual involved or had a gun waved in his face was⊠and that the only people who were attended to were the people who âcould have been traumatised directlyâ. He said âbut youâre okay now though?â â this to me signified the complete lack of awareness in this sector about indirect, secondary trauma or even cumulative stress. When I mentioned that these things actually annoyed me more than cause me stress, and that it was the daily stress, the long working hours, the macho attitude, the judgement of emotions as âweakâ and other negative aspects of the humanitarian sector that actually caused me stress, he looked blank. After potentially traumatic experiences is the only time support is required, apparently. More than the lack of top-down support, the peer-to-peer support was most upsetting, or the lack of it. I was totally incensed by the reactions of staff to each of these incidents. They were very, very good in the moment, at the emergency or in the chaos and adrenaline-fuelled hour during which it was happening. As soon as that passed, there was no real follow-up, no continuation of care, and even sometimes a judgement about the time taken to process the incident in the individualâs own way. This upset me the most, that the attitudes around mental health and psychosocial issues in response to either acute or cumulative stress were so negative. One close friend saw that I was frustrated by the lack of support provided to my colleague, and to myself, and to all of us, and let me rant. I explained my stance and said that I felt humanity was lost in humanitarianism, which seemed like a crazy contradiction in terms. He told me, âBut, you came to a warzone, a humanitarian crisis, what did you expect?â
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