Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters like you who make our work possible. Now, in our last episode we spoke to Caroline Brennan, our director of emergency communications, about the resilience of children in emergencies … and about the work we do to help families rebuild their lives after witnessing violence and fleeing their homes. This month—in honor of World Humanitarian Day—we’ll be talking to one of our great humanitarians. Donal Reilly is CRS’ director of humanitarian response, and he is going to give us a peek behind the curtain … to see how we’ve built on 75 years to become a leader in emergency response and recovery. Donal, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Donal Reilly: Great to be here.

Nikki Gamer: Donal, tell us how you got into the emergency response business. I understand you came to CRS in 2000.

Donal Reilly: I’m a civil engineer, and I was at a time in my life where I’ve always wanted to do this type of work. I always felt like, you know, a desire to get involved in it. A moment that sort of triggered it for me was I was at my old company’s private sector annual golf tournament and they were giving out clocks to people who are retiring, and I just kind of felt if I kept going the way I’m going, I’ll get a clock at the end of the day. And that might be all I get out of life. So, I decided I wanted a bit more than the clock. Now I’m sure CRS might give me a clock as well someday but …

Nikki Gamer: If you’re lucky.

Donal Reilly: If I’m lucky. But at least if I look at that clock, I think I can say I made some contributions to helping people when they were most in need.

Nikki Gamer: Donal, so you started working in Haiti about 10 years before the big earthquake that hit there in 2010, right? What was your impression at the time?

Donal Reilly: Well, I will always remember when I got the job offer, I wasn’t even quite sure where Haiti was. And I went to my ma, because I was thinking Tahiti, actually.

I’d been to Jamaica, but it was nothing like Jamaica. It was just so different. So underdeveloped. Security was quite an issue at times. At the same time, I really fell in love with it and, you know, I’ve been back a few times for different emergencies. I just find the people fascinating. They’re so resilient. CRS had a large feeding program in Haiti at the time, distributing food to about 1,500 different centers, hospitals, schools, clinics, orphanages.  And I took on the job as commodity manager overseeing that work. It wasn’t quite emergency work, but it was very much operations and logistics. And then from Haiti I moved to Afghanistan in about 2002.

Nikki Gamer:  Nothing like going from Haiti to Afghanistan.

Donal Reilly: No, that’s true. Two completely different environments. But Afghanistan was very interesting. I was there for about 31/2 years, and that was emergency work ‘cause we’re dealing with a lot of people that have been displaced …

Nikki Gamer: From the fighting?

Donal Reilly: … from the fighting, yes. Then there was a couple of isolated winter emergencies as well that we dealt with, you know, just extreme cold and people being isolated by large snow falls.

Nikki Gamer: What was the biggest change for you when you started this new career?

Donal Reilly: I think the big change was from being a civil engineer and managing construction sites, and being the guy in charge and making, you know, decisions. The change was really about involving communities and having to understand that I could make all the decisions that I wanted, but nothing mattered unless the community were involved, unless it was something that they really wanted.

Nikki Gamer: You know, “emergency” is our middle name—it’s at the root of our history and our work. Can you tell us about CRS’ core emergency work?

Donal Reilly: We have a response department that’s made up of different types of staff, but we have one group that works on technical areas like shelter, water and sanitation, protection, disaster risk reduction, market-based response, food security—and I supervise that team.

Nikki Gamer: Okay, let’s say, like an earthquake just hit, you’re the head of this emergency team, what are our emergency responders doing?

Donal Reilly: Well we’re, first of all, looking at what capacity exists on the ground ‘cause normally it’s our partners and our country programs that lead the response first. And they’ll see, they’ll tell us or we’ll be communicating to them where are the gaps, what’s happening, how big is this response, how much additional support do you need to be able to respond. And, based on that, then we start to mobilize team members, based on where the gaps exist within the country program or the partners.

Donal Reilly: In Haiti there … so you’ve got the 2010 earthquake. That was a massive response that required global mobilization on the part of CRS. Our local partners did a lot of work, but it was beyond their capability to be able to respond to all the needs. So, we mobilized ourselves alongside our partners. We’d go out to the regions and country programs, and find what we call temporary staff to come in and fill positions until we could staff up for the longer term.

Nikki Gamer: Okay, so you have staff. What else do you need in that type of emergency?

Donal Reilly: A lot depends on who’s on the ground and what experience they have, where we fit in. We always try to build that local capacity and work alongside it. Sometimes we have to take a more of a leadership role if, say, for example, the people on the ground were not that experienced in emergencies. And then if you have a CRS country program office there, I mean, 95% of the employees are local staff.

Donal Reilly: Most countries we work in, we have the Church and they are already involved. They’re been involved perhaps in development projects or some form of social welfare or helping the most vulnerable. They know the context much better than we do. They know who would be the political leaders. They know the social context. They just have a deeper knowledge of the environment.

Donal Reilly: An example was in South Sudan about 4 or 5 years ago.  And there was aerial bombardment right between Sudan and South Sudan, an oil field area. And we sent a team up there because the Church had called and said, we’ve got a local father up there, so we’ve got some issues over here. We need some help. So, we sent a small team up there and they got there. And the other NGOs, international agencies are there, said, “Why are you here? There’s no need to be here. We’ve covered all this.”

Donal Reilly: And the Church said. “Well, hang on.” They took us out … I wasn’t with … it was a team that went out … they went out into the field, and in the bush there was 5,000 people that were being missed by everyone else, but the Church knew where they were. So, there’s this local outreach and knowledge they have that many other agencies can miss because they don’t have that connection to the people on the ground.

Nikki Gamer: Now, at CRS I know we like to talk about the three Rs of our emergency response cycle: rapid, response and recovery.

Donal Reilly: It’s this idea of saying that we’re going to get there quickly, we’re going to do our response, it’s going to be an appropriate response. And then we’re also there for the recovery side. We’re not just there to dish out emergency …

Nikki Gamer: … food or water …

Donal Reilly: … food or whatever. We’re there actually to help you recover as well.

Nikki Gamer: Can you give us an example of what a recovery would look like?

Donal Reilly:  A recovery would be helping people recover their livelihoods. So, it could be agricultural crops were damaged. So how do we support people to replant and recover that livelihood? It could be shelter. For example, during an emergency shelter straight after the response. Now we need to find—how do we get you into a place where you’re going back to your permanent shelter?

Nikki Gamer: Right. So, if your house was destroyed by an earthquake. We help that family or that community decide, okay, well maybe this isn’t the best place to rebuild. Maybe we go, maybe like 100 yards this way. Is that kind of the idea?

Donal Reilly: Now you’re getting into disaster risk reduction, which is when we do work with people to recover and rebuild, it is about trying to make communities more resilient. Like so, yes …

Nikki Gamer:  We love resilient, but what does that mean?

Donal Reilly: Well, how can they be better prepared for the next cyclone or hurricane or earthquake. So, for example, if we build back shelters, we want to make sure they’re stronger and more resistant, and in a better location maybe might have been some of the initial reason why it got damaged so …

Nikki Gamer: So what does success then look like, and how long does that recovery take?

Donal Reilly: It can take a long time, and often recovery goes on for y