Delivering humanitarian training just days before the Pakistan flooding

Justine Tordoff, RedR HR & Recruitment Services Director

As I arrived in Islamabad at the beginning of last week the rains were exceptionally heavy. Most of the roads were difficult for us to use.

The last time I had been in Pakistan was in March. I was there helping to identify a new office for RedR in Islamabad when the new programme was just getting started. It was great to be back again, only a few months later, seeing the office up and running, and meeting the new team.

This time I was there to deliver RedR’s training course, Essentials of Humanitarian Practice. The training lasts five days and gives participants an overview of the humanitarian sector. Sessions include: motivations in relief work; humanitarian principles; legal frameworks; the Cluster system; and working in teams in disaster relief.

Perhaps the most important and enjoyable aspect of the course is the two day humanitarian response simulation exercise. This is the practical aspect of the course, where participants respond in real time to their given disaster scenario.

For this training session we asked the participants produce a coordinated disaster response plan for a large scale earthquake response. Pakistan is a country that has been plagued by disasters in recent year, the most devastating of which was the earthquake in 2005 which killed an estimated 80,000 people.

During the simulation participants had to deal with the media, Internally Displaced People, government officials, representatives from donor organisations and international NGO’s – all roles played by RedR staff in Pakistan.

It was wonderful to see the participants, mostly from local NGO’s, throwing themselves into the exercise and applying the knowledge they had learnt in the previous few days. 

After a successful training session I returned back to the UK. It was then with great sadness that I learnt about the scale of the heavy monsoon rains and the impact of the flooding; an estimated 1,500 lives lost and more about 3 million people affected.

But this morning I received an email from one of the participants from the Essentials of Humanitarian Practice course informing me that he was travelling to Peshawar to work on the response to the floods. Before he arrived there he wanted to let me know that he had found the course so useful and would be putting into practice a lot of what he’d learnt.

Read more Justine's last visit to Pakistan.

Read more about our programme in Pakistan.

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