Human Security.
"I feel the pull of being alone, of answering to no one, the safety of being unknown and far away."
Evie Wyld, After the Hedland
Background 1980-2007
I liked reading and writing from a young age, it was something that was always accessible and free. From old National Geographics to school libraries and unread newspapers I’d inhale stories to escape my own reality. We moved around a lot because my mother fled an abusive relationship with my father on cattle ranch and we were ehisked away to the nearest town where we lived in community housing and ate from the foodbank. My mother was not around very much when I was young and by the time I finished high school I had attended thirteen schools while we followed around her latest love interest. I was a bit of a bully and introvert, having to save an obnioxious little brother all the time made me admire stories about soldiers and that was what my career goal was while everyone around me wanted to make money. I was not academically inclined and worked about 30 hours a week on top of playing soccer all year round, when I was 14 mother got married to my step-father who left the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry after a tour in Cypress as a tank gunner to join the police, i finally had a parent instead of being a parent. He warned me off of the CAF citing rampant sexual assault and corruption and mentored me towards a career with him in policing and by the time i was 16 I was joining him on ride alongs as a sargeant to scope out my career. in grade 12 when i was 17 i was diaganosed with epilipespy and those dreams were dashed. After a year of snowboarding, i enrolled in the police foundations program in college anyway, hoping i wouldn’t have to disclose but a Model UN course pulled my attention towards diplomacy. Having never left Canada/the US, i signed up for a student work abroad program in ireland where i mostly starved and cleaned hotel rooms made me apply for political science programs of which one school took me, University of Lethbridge, back near my place of birth and in the same city where i could live with my younger brother who wanted to get into broadcasting.
One of the best decisions I made in my career was to chose to move to the other side of the country to attend Dalhousie University. It changed my life in a lot of ways by opening my mind to a lot of different ways to live and to be part of the world. It was something I had craved back home and once i got a taste of the wider world, I couldn’t go back. I was the first person on my mother’s side of the family to finish high school, let alone enter a big time university - it was a steep learning curve. I was resolved to keep my head down, not make any friends, keep at least 2 part-time jobs, keep my GPA up enough to keep my scholarship, volunteer to improve career prospects, play rugby and party exactly 2 times per year. I managed to stick to the plan, except I did end up making a lot of friend for the first time in my life.
In my second year I participated in a study abroad semester in Uganda where I stayed in a school and taught some classes as well as taking classes in international development studies with a cohort of Dalhousie and MUST students. this expereince really turned me towards soladiarity and capacity building work. My goal was to get a job with the UN when I finished. By the time i was in my third year, I was elected Chair of our WUSC Refugee Sponsorship Committee where we would work with WUSC and faculty advisors to bring 3 refugee students to live and study and become Canadians. By my fourth year I was honing and my application letters for a myriad of NGO internships that never came to fruition.
By the time I graduated with a Double BA in International Development Studies and Political Science, I ended up with a job as a Business Manager at a YMCA Camp in Parry Sound, which hosted refugee children from inner city Toronto to explore Canadian nature. I instructed the mountain biking and yoga classes too.
After taking a term off to work and apply for career focused jobs in government and abroad with NGOs I saved up money waitressing. In November I got a job offer to teach English in Khartoum, Sudan and accepted it. I figured I would be in the right place at the right time to get a job with the UN, while I learn some Arabic and get international experience on my resume apart from the European hosteling work I had done as an 18 year old.
When I left Sudan, 6months later than intended, I had picked up other jobs with my work permit as a travel agent focused on UN foreign staff holidays, admin support for a Canadian company managing logistics for the African Union, editing DDR documents for government ministers and working part time as an editor for the Khartoum Monitor. I had learned some Arabic and cooking skills too.
When I returned to Alberta I started applying for NGO and government jobs again and was offered a position in rural Ethiopia, a place I had always wanted to go to as the model for never having been colonized. in the meantime I worked as a temp for a provincial energy regulator and then in construction with my uncle and cousin in Edmonton while volunteering to translate and offer advice to newly arrived South Sudanese refugees.
The nine month CIDA internship started in Shasemene in the south along a busy trade route towards Kenya and I was moved to Addis Ababa for safety concerns where I had a chance to work on sexual and reproductive health initiatives and grant writing in a marginalized neighborhood of mostly teenage sex workers. When I returned to Canada I was focused on applying to a graduate program with experts in post-conflict reconstruction in rural communities, like the ones I had lived in in Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan. I ended up choosing the War Studies programme at RMC
Early Career 2008-2017
I had 3 MA offers: Gulph, Birmingham and Royal Military College. Having lived in a coutry with a war, I wanted to learn from people who made decisions during wars, so I chose RMC. I had a lot of opportunities in my 2 years there in the War Studies program. I was the civilian student rep, so I was the one who helped civilian students feel more comfortable on a military campus where there can be a lot of rules.
There were many Research Assistant opportunities that I was able to take advantage of and started working on a 7 year IDRC grant on Global Citizenship as soon as I was accepted int the program in April. After tht more RA opportunties came including working on research on Public Affairs through DRDC & CORA, UN Peacekeeping research and UN Security council decision coding during the ramp up to the Iraq invasion.
By my second year, I was able to work on a confidential workshop on data collection in non-permissive environment where a professor was interested in my ability to speak Arabic and the time I had spent working in Khartoum, this later turned into a big opportunity in the new South Sudan. But first, I was granted an Association of Universities Canada fellowship to work with the African Medical Research Foundation in Addis Ababa.
The fellowship was an amazing opportunity to interview staff and community members around the country, some in very remote parts of Ethiopia only accessible by dry riverbeds and a land rover. The sometimes 10 hour long road trips were something that really got me interested in human security for people on the margins, in Ethiopia mostly cattle herders, a community I came from in Canada.
By the time I came back, I was included in an application to conduct a baseline and gender assessment for a World Vision project in South Sudan. Despite being the junior RA on the grant I was the lead data collector on the ground and was flailing with no help on practical methodology on the ground - lucky for me, my Arabic and Amharic helped me with the local and regional staff to understand what the modus operandi was. I asked my own questions about gendered perceptions of security for my MA project as well - because no one had ever uttered the words “research ethics clearance” to me at this point. I was a real researcher.
The we moved to Johannesburg with my research assistantship jobs. There was a lot of human security research being done in South Africa at the time but the work restrictions were the same as Canada so I couldn’t apply for anything.
In the new year, with degree in hand I started to apply for government jobs with no luck. by the spring I was working on small training projects in PEI, where my mother was staying with her new boyfriend. No interviews. By the summer I was offered a job, through the professor I met at the workshop the year before, as an sampling advisor for a new public opinion poll project in South Sudan funded by USAID. The project lead out of Princeton was so impressed with my work ethic and ability to step up to the challenge that I was eventually promoted to Field Coordinator and sent to lead the team out of Juba.
My 2 month contract turned into 3 as we ran into significant, weather, gender and translation delays, as well as research permissions. They were grueling 12+ hour days going over stats and checking in with teams deployed in every district round the clock with daily Skype calls with my beloved toddler, even during surprise field visits to Rumbek and Wau. Despite the conflict, snakes, bats, scorpions and malaria I encountered, South Sudan is a beautiful country full stop.
In a flash it was over, aside from a series of government official briefs in back in South Sudan a few months later and a job interview in DC that resulted in nothing. with the pull of this contract I was able to sublet a great place in Kingston and leverage it for 2 more contracts on UN Peacebuilding efforts. i would work from 5am to 5pm, take a break for daycare pick ups and drop offs (+QT with my hilarious toddler) and back grinding from 8 -11pm. By spring, i decided it would be best to relocate to Nairobi and manage the South Sudan work from there, so my boss at Pechter let me take the lead on setting up an office in Nairobi.
My admiration for police was fuelled by the terror my mom mother felt at being a single mother with an ex-husband who suffered from untreated schizophrenia. the RCMP and sometimes city police were a regular fixture in our lives after my brother overdosed when taking some of our father’s medication on an unsupervised visit., my mother was quick to call. My mother wasn’t around very often and outsorced domestic labour to me while she pursued her dreams of being a wife. we would be at school from 7-7 as well as the entire summer for “camp” and eat most of our meals there. I was kicked out of school at 14 for breaking someone’s ribs, I had very few friends and often ran away from home only to return frustrated at the lack of other options. when I was told I may have a brain tumor I spent a lot of my days during and after graduating thinking about the purpose of existence and decided on learning how other people live, since my parents were miserable I couldn’t use them as an example. I still was responsible for my slightly younger, but much less capable brother and made plans around keeping him safe from our mother and the world. he was also very friendly so we lived, worked and hung out together. He was my best friend but i needed to see the world after this brush with death.
During the first month in Nova Scotia, I stayed with my mother’s old book keeping boss and her family, they had just returned to the maritimes after making money in Alberta. I got a crying phone call weekly from mother telling me about he trouble my brother had gotten into and to find out what was wrong with him. One of the reasons I chose Halifax was for the cheap rent, the irish weather and it was the furthest point from Alberta so I could focus on my self and my career for once in my fucking life. but here this asshole picks fights to get my attention while im away.
During my second year my stepfather left my mother and she tried to get him fired then took his paycheck and moved to PEI so she could have a farm with horses and come party with me on the weekends. she ditched me on Christmas one year and after the 1st year I could afford the $2k flights back to Alberta so spent holidays working, volunteering or visiting my step relatives in Kingston and crashing at friends places across Ontario.
In the summer of my third year my brother came and stayed in my 7 person group house. I joined a queer, anarchist burlesque collective. He started dating a Newfoundlander and was thinking of moving out to Halifax once he finished his radio broadcasting program at college in the spring. we were living our best lives and I never saw him again.
A month before my final exams, a Halifax cop left a business card at my door to call him. I thought something had happened to my step father who was a cop in Calgary but it was my brother who had been found dead at the bottom of a coulee. My professors were kind enough to cut me some slack and I wrote my finals after flying back to plan his funeral with my now ex-step relatives. My step dad came to my convocation, my mother threw a fit because her new boyfriend wasn’t invited and didn’t show, she then tried to sue me over how i stored my brothers few belongings.
I moved to Parry Sound to think but it kickstarted my grief process and the alone time was torture. I quit the job and moved in with the only person who would let me sit around and cry - my ex-step-grandmother, GG. I hung out with GG and her sisters at casinos and buffets or binge watched daytime TV while I applied for international NGO jobs, worked at a pizza place and partied to ignore the incessant phone calls from my mother who wished it was me instead.
By the time i got to Khartoum i had developed a bit of a cocaine and drinking problem, it was a good place for a sort of rehab break to learn how to deal with my grief from other people with dead siblings. Before I left i was summoned by estranged fathers family to break the news to him personally about my brothers death, i did but his schizophrenia was so bad that he couldn’t absorb it). It was the first time I had seen him since i was about 5 years old. I was heavily influenced by Sufism as a result. I lived with a Sudanese family who fed me when they saw I was surviving of the 3 ingredients I knew how to say. I moved in with a Filipino family when the female led Sudanese family were accused of running a foreign brothel by their neighbors. I left Khartoum after a year to get an abortion back in Canada because it was illegal in Sudan.
I stayed with my ex stepdad and his new girlfriend and kids while i manically applied for jobs, paid him back the $500 he lent me for an abortion (my health care expired while i was in Sudan - who knew?) and avoided fights by working and crashing with old rugby friends because I had a hard time going out by myself at night (adjusting) after a year living under shari’a law. I visited my father in the hospital on the other side of the city when he had to get his leg amputated after life back on the streets left him with Hepatitis and a now infected and rotting limb, he often mistook me for a nurse with his kind eyes and smile.
I had sex once the whole time i was back home with triple protection at a rugby tournament and despite a physical exam before leaving found out I was 4 months pregnant in Ethiopia. Research later (too late for me) confirmed that my anti-convulsant medication to treat my epilepsy negates the birth control I was on. I stayed as long as I could because i had no where else to go and my intern stipend was $600/month, unliveable in Canada, but giving birth in Ethiopia was and unacceptable as an intern, so I had to return.
I also chose RMC because GG let my now 8 month pregnant ass stay with her until 3 months after giving birth. I needed the student loan money to survive and RMC offered work opportunities. Despite my insistence to keep my baby, I was so desperate for a family, GG arranged adoption visits behind my back, this was still the best offer after my parents both, but separately told me I’d be the worst parent and they would never help me. I was 28 with more education than either of them had.
A professor from Dalhousie I had asked for references offered me 30 hour a week work on a new grant when I met with her in Kingston, as she had just been hired at RMC. I started working one week after my daughter was born for $800/month. The birth ws a difficult recovery for me. I had so many seizures, I once fell down a flight of stairs, hurting my back as I curled into a ball to protect my newborn on the way down. the professor insisted I move in with her and her family when my roommate was hauled off to jail in the middle of the night for kicking the shit out of his partner. She charged me $300 instead of the $500 I was paying for rent. I would run back to the house inbetween classes to breastfeed, while i left my perfect little newborn withthe professors sweet Mennonite mother in the basement suite of the house. I’d return to our little room to work, study and breastfeed.
By the second year the professor had a new baby and I was to help out with childcare and chores. I had been in touch with my baby’s father who was now back in South Africa and I bought him a flight back to Canada to meet his daughter for her first birthday. I wanted him to stay and for her to grow up with him around and I desperately needed help as my seizures got worse. We moved into a townhouse close to campus and I supported us on $1500/month in research contracts by subletting out the basement to teaching students. He was miserable and couldn’t work, I still needed to hire childcare because he wasn’t reliable about feeding or entertaining her while I was at work or school and he would spend a lot of the days at the gym or at rugby. Ethiopia was a much cheaper option and so we moved there, he hated that too. At the end of the fellowship I got robbed after getting malaria and we went back to Kingston, he flew back to Johannesburg and we ate dinner over skype for a year.
The professor who sent me on their research trip to South Sudan took the money from the contract, leaving me about $1000 as the junior consultant. I came back with a lung infection from breathing in bat feces at the UNICEF compound in Tonj East. While I worked on my courses, recovered from two infection, the second one was a bone infection from getting my wisdom teeth pulled on the base, I was pleading with my MP to overturn the Pretoria High Commission’s decision to reject my co-parent’s visitor visa application, claiming that because he had a girlfriend and child in Canada with no property at home he was too high risk. I needed help to get through school with a 2 year old. after months of begging, they let him back in for 3 months, so I proposed and we got married. By December when seasonal depression hit and his visa was about to expire, we decided to move to Johannesburg where I could finish my courses and work remotely and he could get a job and work on his PR.
The professor I worked for was upset about losing a nanny and withheld my pay for three months, starving me as my child ate meals at her pre-school. I couldn’t afford to wash clothes or electricty in a suprisingly cold South African winter. My husband was focused on rugby which only paid him in transport, food and gym time and we were forced back to Canada.
Going to Juba for 3 months was the biggest opportunity of my career. With no husband around and no way to bring her back to South Africa, I had to pay my mother $50/day to watch my daughter plus daycare fees while I was away.