As a rookie, I had no idea the size of
this venture, and it has taken me 10 days to get my mind around it. The
Samaritan's Purse DART team I am with is composed of 30+ people working in various areas of need:
Shelter
Medical
Food
WASH (that'd be me)
NFI (non-food items)
To make the
above work happen, you have very essential support staff:
Program Lead
Logistics
Security
Transportation
Human Resources
Inventory
Every time a new person arrives here, they seem to
already know a handful of other folks, essentially from previous assignments. SP has a large group of people working
in Haiti and South Sudan, among other places. While only a few people
here are full-time SP employees, the majority have dropped their jobs and left home, be that:
Canada,
the States,
UK,
Australia,
Cambodia,
Niger,
Uganda,
Ethiopia,
Myanmar
Many of these young’uns here have spent the past 4+ years bouncing from assignment to assignment, spending a
few months back home with the parents or bumming a couch at a friend’s place
waiting for the next call. If they were in just about any other profession, I
would likely label them as ‘flakes’ who need to find their place, whatever that means.
Here, after working alongside people who
have traded their roaring 20s to live in tents and take bucket showers, I have
learned that not all Flakes are flakey.