from the horizon

One of the perks(?) of the job are the houses we live in. Although my house in Aceh was a relative normal size, many of the expat houses there were virtually mansions.
The Humanitarian Housing process seems to go something like:

1. Disaster strikes
2. NGOs come in and want to rent huge houses (which haven’t been destroyed) to use as offices and to house their staff (in the initial phase of emergency, the office and house are usually the same building)
3. Anyone owning a big house, moves out, and makes a small fortune renting it out.
4. The property market booms, Rental prices sky rocket.
5. Rich people build more mansions to meet the demand for housing, making more money, and using up the construction capacity of the area

And somewhere along the line NGOs also build houses for the people who have lost everything in the disaster.

(I should mention that although the UN takes up some of the best real estate, they also come prepared, and also run whole offices out of shipping containers, and ever the deluxe living containers, complete with hot showers and plasma screen TVs.)

The case seems relatively similar in Pakistan. My house is huge, 2 stories with 8 bedrooms. Earlier this week there was me and 6 women staying in the house(!) However with the transient nature of the business, now it’s down to 2 of us in the house, so the house feels kinda extravagant.

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I’ll be honest. I spend a lot of my time stuck behind a computer. Part of me wonders how much value I am here, the other part reassures me that the procedures I’m drafting and the systems I’m setting up are important for everyone to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. But there are times when I don’t know if I’m really needed here, I question whether the work I’m doing is actually of any value, and I wonder what on earth I’m doing over here, away from my family, friends and all the comforts of home.

Then there was an issue in the one of our field offices, and I got to go into the field.

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I arrived in Pakistan at 3am-ish in the morning, grateful that my bags had turned up and even more grateful that there was a driver there to pick me up.

It was great to see Jo again. She’d gone to Pakistan a month before me, so it was good to have someone to show me round (ie. Drag me to tailors while she picked up the outfits that she’d had made)

OK, so she wasn’t the only one shopping.

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