| 21/10/09 – Longford News
Gillian Boyle has helped the word’s poorest people more in the last four years than most of us will in a lifetime. She has spent that time working for GOAL in some of the toughest conditions in the Developing World – confronting and tackling hunger, poverty and death head-on – but she isn’t finished yet. Far from it.
The Aughnacliffe woman happily admits that she is likely to be fighting the same cause in 10 years time. It may be another country and the faces might be different, but the work, the sacrifices and the rewards won’t have changed.
“It’s a tough career, but I enjoy it,” she says. “It was always something I wanted to do, right from my teenage years and I can’t see myself stopping any time soon.”
Gillian was first introduced to the plight of the poor in the Developing World when she helped to fundraise for the nuns working in Zambia while she was a pupil at Cnoc Mhuire Secondary School in Granard. When she discovered the scale of the problem that the nuns were dealing with and struggling against, she made a silent vow to herself that she would go to Africa one day and work with the poor.
It wasn’t an empty promise. Ten years later, she found herself on a plane to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to work as a Logistics Technician with GOAL after a successful interview with the agency’s founder and Chief Executive John O’Shea in their Dun Laoghaire headquarters.
The 19 months she spent working in one of Africa’s most dangerous countries formed part of a steep learning curve. She witnessed everything from extreme poverty and starvation to corruption and rebel warfare. She soon learned, too, that it was the most vulnerable who were always hit hardest.
“DRC is bordered by nine countries and rebel groups were regularly using the land as a base for their activities elsewhere,” explained Gillian. “Naturally that meant that Congolese families were getting caught up in the middle of the fighting. Sometimes, the rebels would come in and just destroy a village and wipe out all the progress that the community had made over the previous months.
“It is a credit to the resolve of the people that they always came back, accepted what happened and just started again. Everyone in GOAL helped them to get back on their feet. They inspired us every day.”
Gillian’s experiences in DRC strengthened her resolve to work in the Developing World and prepared her for her next role – a difficult assignment as GOAL’s Logistics Coordinator in Niger, where a famine had ripped through the country a year earlier. It was a devastating sight on arrival, but there was no time to lose.
“There was a huge amount of extremely poor and hungry people in Zinder, the 145,000 square kilometre region where we were working. As you can appreciate, that is an extremely big area (approximately the size of England and Northern Ireland combined) and we put in a lot of hours.
“The majority of people living in Niger are Muslim so on a typical day there I would rise with the call of prayer at 5.10am and go for a walk around town. I’d arrive in the office at 7am to start work. It was my job to make sure that all the materials required for each of the programme’s that GOAL was running in the country reached their destinations on time,” explained Gillian.
“It’s the same work that I am doing today in Malawi. For example, I would need to let one of the teams know how much food to collect from the store and where to deliver it to. We had a warehouse capable of holding 132 tonnes of food in Niger and we used to distribute 60-100 tonnes of food per month, so that was a big job in itself.”
Gillian left the west-African country in June 2008 and while it was her decision to leave, she was still sad to go and leave her fellow GOALies and the local people behind.
“I loved my time in Niger,” she admitted. “The weather was hot and dry and the people were extremely honest, caring and they all had a huge amount of time for you. Sometimes it is difficult to see the difference you are making to people’s lives but the people were very appreciative of GOAL and they showed it by voting us the best NGO in the Zinder region for three years running in 2005, ’06 and ’07 in a competition held by a local radio station.
“It may seem insignificant, but the winner was picked by the listeners of the station, all of whom would have been on the ground and witnessed first hand the work that we were doing.”
She enjoyed a few months recuperating back home in Longford that summer, but it wasn’t long before Gillian found herself making the long journey back to Africa again. On this occasion, she travelled a further 3,000 miles south-east of Niger to fulfil the same logistics role in the Nsanje region of Malawi, where she is currently based.
“I wanted to go to Malawi. GOAL had been there for a few years at that stage and I wanted a fresh challenge. People had told me that the country was beautiful and they were right. The scenery is spectacular, they have some fantastic mountains, including Mulanje, the highest mountain in Central Africa - and then there is Lake Malawi.
“Lake Malawi is the third biggest lake in Africa and the eighth biggest in the world. It is 700 metres deep in places and is part of Lake Malawi National Park, which is the world’s first freshwater national park and a World Heritage site. It is a beautiful place.”
A country of 14 million people, Malawi was beset by corruption and human rights abuses for three decades under totalitarian president, Kamuzu Banda. Banda ruled with an iron fist until he was removed from power in the mid-1990s, finally giving Malawians a taste for multi-party democracy.
Gillian explained that GOAL has been helping the people there to rebuild their lives and help set families and children up for the future. Malawi is still one of the poorest countries in the world with up to 65 percent of the 13.1 million population living below the poverty line of less than $1 a day.
“We are doing are best for the poorest of the poor by running child survival health, nutrition, food security, water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS and cholera response programmes, while we are also helping to strengthen the community’s capacity to handle disasters.”
Today, the long-term outlook for Malawi is relatively positive. Current President, Bingu wa Mutharika, who was re-elected peacefully in May, is continuing to implement a programme of economic reform.
“The elections were peaceful and in fairness to the president, he has built huge roads and now he is concentrating on reforming the agricultural industry. Maize production has improved so much, for example, that the country can now afford to export it.”
Indeed, Malawi’s recent 3.66 million-tonne maize harvest is being attributed to good rains and the success of an agricultural subsidy programme targeting poor smallholder farmers. The national maize consumption is about 2.2 million tonnes, which should give Malawi a surplus of about 1.4 million tonnes.
Malawi is also the second biggest African tea producer behind Kenya, while other expanding industries such as tobacco and cotton are strengthening the country’s exporting power.
Playing a part, however small, in successes like this is one of the reasons why Gillian has signed up for another year with GOAL in Malawi. The desire to continue the battle against poverty burns despite knowing that she will continue to encounter scenes on a daily basis that will test her physical and mental resolves to their limits.
“Sometimes it is very hard, there is no getting away from that,” said Gillian. “You could see a mother carrying her baby child to a clinic 30km away. The baby might be so ill that she has no choice but to walk there in the searing heat. The mother might arrive, but the child could have died along the way. This kind of thing has happened and seeing and hearing about it doesn’t get any easier.
‘Saying that, a small glimmer of hope in a situation where it seems there is little reason for optimism can boost your spirits and make you believe again. I have often gone out into the field and come across people who are sick and starving and very hard up. In a month’s time I will return and they will be glowing with health. This is because GOAL has provided them with high-calorie therapeutic food and medical assistance in the intervening period. That’s when you know that you are making a difference. The evidence is right there in front of you.
Gillian Boyle has come a long way since she helped the nuns all those years ago in Cnoc Mhuire and she admits that she doesn’t regret a minute of her decision to work in the Developing World.
“I remember I was only in DCR four months when I knew that one year was not enough to do what I wanted to do, so I extended my contract and I have been extending it ever since. Working with and helping the most vulnerable people in the world has been a fulfilling, informative and eye-opening experience and I would encourage anyone who is thinking about helping the poor to get in touch with GOAL.
“All I would say is that if someone is going to give it a go, give it one year at least. You need time to get over that initial settling-in period. Believe it or not, it can be a bit of a culture shock to some people when they figure out that there is no McDonald’s or Burger King for thousands of miles!
“It takes at least 12 months to settle into the African way of life and learn how the poor are forced to live. Only then do you realise just how lucky the rest of us are. We have everything we need and more. All the poorest of the poor want to do is live. It’s not a lot to ask.”
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