German-based AlertNet member Johanniter International has its origins in the Order of St John of Jerusalem, founded during the crusades 900 years ago. Birgit Spiewok, its head of emergency aid, told Celestine Laporte about the organisation’s disaster relief work and why limited staff makes responding to emergencies difficult.AN: What are the origins of Johanniter International and how long has it existed?BS: It goes back to the Order of St John, so we’re talking about an organisation that has the same foundations as the St John Ambulance. The difference between Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe and St John Ambulance, if I’m not mistaken, is that St John Ambulance focuses on the ambulance service, whereas Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe also does work with elderly people’s homes, meals-on-wheels and things like that, and has a foreign aid department, though the basis of the work is in Germany. Johanniter International is a part of Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe and is the foreign aid department. Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe started foreign aid at the end of the 1950s but it didn’t become structured until 1972 and Johanniter International came into existence in 1993.AN: Johanniter has close links to the Evangelical Church in Germany….BS: We’re not a member, though.AN: So what links does it have?BS: We are an associate member with the Diakonie, which is the part of the church active in social work.AN: Does the church have any bearing on the type of work that you do?BS: No, it doesn’t really influence our work at all.AN: How do you decide whether Johanniter will take part in any given emergency? BS: Basically we’re very pragmatic -- (we look at) how much capacity we have. First of all we have a look at where the emergency is. Is it anywhere that we already have a project running, which would make it easier for us to get involved, because we’re very small? We only have seven members of staff at our headquarters here and they cover everything: development assistance as well as emergency aid. A good example is Goma. We have a long-running humanitarian assistance project in Congo, in Bukavu, so because of the closeness, we decided we’d get involved in the Goma volcano eruption. If the volcano had erupted in Burundi, we probably wouldn’t have got involved.AN: What assistance did you give to Goma? BS: We delivered emergency health kits to a local partner that we’ve been working with for a long time in Goma. We got a request from them because the hospital that they’d run was destroyed in the course of the outbreak.AN: What problems do you face when you respond to emergencies?BS: I think if we have a structure in the country then it’s OK, we can do it. If we don’t have a structure then it’s nearly impossible because we wouldn’t know where to start. This is one of the problems that we have now with Afghanistan, so we need to send out an emergency team or an assessment team, but if there are only seven members of staff that’s very difficult. It’s very difficult to respond to large-scale emergencies on top of your normal day-to-day activities.AN: Can the volunteers registered with Johanniter not help out in times of crisis?BS: They can and they do and it’s the declared intention of Johanniter to get as many volunteers involved as possible. We have a lot of volunteers involved in Germany but if you’re looking for somebody to go out into a chronic crisis or emergency you, of course, need somebody professional. Lots of people want to go but to find people who really have the skills and the experience is always very difficult. AN: What are your main projects at the moment?BS: In humanitarian assistance and emergency aid, the main programmes are in Angola. There we do work with internally displaced persons (IDPs). We deliver non-food items to IDPs and deliver drugs and consumables to basic health care units. We have one person there but with a large team of local staff and we’ve been out there for 10 years so it’s got a lot of structure to it.Then we have a fairly large project in eastern Congo where we support the local health structure with a team of two ex-pats and we’ve been there for seven years or so. Those are two very large projects. Then we have a project running in India where we run mobile clinics as a response to the earthquake (in Gujarat in 2001). We’ve brought in the clinics, we’ve equipped them, we’ve done some training with the local medical personnel, we’ve built some houses for the medical staff and we pay their salaries.AN: Do you find the people in need of assistance respond better to local staff?BS: Absolutely. I think the key is always how long you’ve been in a particular situation. Every time you arrive somewhere new you have to build something up, build up trust, build up confidence and build up experience on both sides. So, for example, the projects we do in Angola are very large, but that wouldn’t be possible without a very good local staff team and that we have because we’ve been in the country for 10 years. (The staff) tend to spend a very long time there -- the current project coordinator has been there for six years.AN: Do you concentrate on any particular countries or parts of the world?BS: I think we’re willing to go everywhere but, as we said, because we are so limited we will most likely try to concentrate a little bit more on the areas either regionally where we are already present, or where our particular expertise is something that we can use. And of course, to be honest, if there is a big emergency, for example, Afghanistan, with a lot of press and media attention then, yes, we’ll look at it. We’re no different from other organisations in that respect. AN: So are there any areas or situations that you wouldn’t become involved in?BS: Of course you always check the security situation but we work in places such as Congo where, if we weren’t working there now, I probably wouldn’t go there, but as we are already there then it’s different. Or the example of Burundi or Somalia where, because of a lack of resources, because it really is very work intensive to go there, that’s not something we can provide at the moment.AN: What proportion of Johanniter’s work focuses on long-term development, rather than emergency assistance?BS: I would have thought it’s probably around 70 percent going into emergencies, but that includes chronic crisis countries, such as Congo -- an ongoing crisis, which are long-term projects, but they’re not typical development projects. We have some typical development projects in Latin America, in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, probably taking about 30 per cent of the total budget. They’re also medical projects -- they support local health structures and send out specialists in certain areas. We’re supporting local NGOs working in the medical field.AN: How would you like your organisation to develop over the next few years in terms of disaster relief?BS: To focus on our strengths as in the medical sector and really focus on that, because it’s quite easy to get distracted by other projects, and to get a clearer idea of what our expertise is and try to focus on our expertise.AN: The problems that your organisation encounters seem to be connected to size. Where do you think you need to expand?BS: I think (we need) to have more experts in the field and expand within our projects in the field, definitely. If you’ve been somewhere for such a long time, then you have a lot of really good information and really good connections and you get experience that you can build on, but because of a lack of capacity here we can’t really. We could be doing a lot more in Angola, for example, or the Balkans, because of long-term involvement. So if we could send out more staff I think that would be definitely something that would be good.AN: What are Johanniter’s plans for the next year?BS: I think really working towards this strategy of building up our teams, focusing more on our medical expertise and streamlining our projects.It sounds very peculiar because in Germany we are the second largest welfare organisation, but in terms of overseas work we’re very small, which at times makes it a bit difficult. In a funding sense it’s very good, because we’re quite well known but, in terms of implementing projects, it’s very difficult.
