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What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath

A Humanitarian Worker

What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath

Dan Heath

Curiosity, Careers, Storytelling, Business, Human Interest, Jobs, Society & Culture

4.9820 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Managing Ebola treatment centers in Sierra Leone, coordinating with government officials and local leaders, and advocating for the radical simplicity of cash aid with Grace Jackson, a humanitarian worker. When low-income families are given money, what's the first thing they often buy? And what is “CMCoord”? This episode is part of a fundraising effort called Pods Fight Poverty. We're teaming up with GiveDirectly to collect money that will go directly to Rwandan families. Dan will match every ...

Transcript

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0:00.0

Grace Jackson is a humanitarian worker. Right now, she works in Malawi. She's worked previously in the DRC, that's the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She fought Ebola in Sierra Leone. We'll hear all about that. But one constant in her work is cooperating with government officials, the local officials where she's working,

0:22.6

or sometimes the ministers in her home government, the UK.

0:26.4

And she said, you know it's going to be a bad day.

0:30.0

When the minister's office calls you and says,

0:33.9

the minister was watching the news this morning,

0:36.4

and they saw your country, well, crisis, and it's never good news.

0:43.8

One time this happened to me

0:46.1

and the minister had seen a news report on a refugee camp

0:51.3

that we were supporting and felt that there was too much mud on the ground and would

0:56.4

like us to do something about it, please.

0:58.5

Too much mud?

0:59.8

Yep. And so then you have to spend several days trying to figure out if there is indeed too much

1:05.3

mud or if there's a normal amount of mud and in any case, is there anything that you can do

1:09.2

about it and then go back to the minister and explain,

1:11.2

we're really sorry, but, like, mud is on the ground

1:14.1

and we're not going to do anything about it.

1:17.0

It turns out mud is endemic to the environment.

1:20.6

Yeah.

1:21.4

But you have to go back and sort of close the loop.

1:24.1

Like, here's the after-action report on that mud situation.

1:27.1

Yep, yeah. situation. Yep.

1:27.8

Yeah.

...

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