Guess what job I have. I give you some hints. I worked and lived in over 11 countries across 4 continents in the last ten years. Mostly in the global south. I see my family during holidays. They live back in Germany. I speak English and French. I work in war zones but also in nice places from time to time, but still face electricity cuts or long fuel queues.
I am a humanitarian. According to the dictionary, that is a person who seeks to promote human welfare. That is my job, which gets me to countries that most people will not visit in their lifetime. I interact with people from all different backgrounds and cultures. I try to bring in my expertise to work with governments to improve the well being of their people. At times, I negotiated access with parties to the conflict.
I have seen this world in all its beauty and brutality: from interacting with people who committed war crimes to people who brought peace to entire regions and countries. What this has taught me is that the power to change the world we live in lies entirely with us. We often think of some abstract thing like “the government”, the “armed group”, the “bureaucracy”, or just politics. But this hides the fact, that there are people behind that we can talk to, can put pressure on and change the way they think. Sometimes, that is not possible. With some, we never find a common dominator because the ground rules cannot be agreed upon. But if we understand where we come from, a small tribe, hunting, gathering and killing each other, we evolved so much, and achieved higher levels of humanity. Now, peace is more and more the rule than the exception. We built nations and companies spanning across the globe, where collaboration is more likely than not. When we watch the news now, hunger and wars are not acceptable anymore. We have given ourselves more and more freedom to chose who we want to get married to and what life to live. We need to understand that these rules are our rules. Sometimes, we follow rules that are 200 years old and never question them while the world has evolved.
In the 11 countries I lived, I saw how different we are, based on how we grew up and the rules we live by that shape us. These differences can fuel wars and conflict, can polarize people and entire countries. But what I also saw, over and over again, that deep inside, we have the same dreams and wishes. We all want the same. That’s the beauty of this world. We will always evolve. We always grow. One day, we will live in a world where war and hunger no longer exists because that is the world we all want for ourselves.
