Ep17 Reflections on conflict and disability across cultures_Kate Bowen-Evans with Rumana Kabir

Kate Bowen-Evans, a Changemaker, shares her experiences in different parts of the world and how she got involved in the development sector. Growing up in Burundi and experiencing displacement, she developed a passion for helping refugees and those affected by conflict. After studying humanitarianism and development, she volunteered in Afghanistan and worked with an Afghan woman manager, learning valuable lessons about bravery and resilience. Kate's journey highlights the complexities of international development and the importance of personal experiences in shaping one's work. Hello everyone, Changemakers, hope you're doing well. Welcome to my Mars Mantra Podcast, stories from Changemakers around the world. Today I have a friend of mine, Kate Bowen-Evans, who is a Changemaker in many ways. We will hear Kate's adventure in different parts of the world, as well as how she's making a difference in the UK, as well as in Ireland. Hi, Kate. How are you? I'm well. Thanks. It's really nice to be with you. Yes. Kate and I, we go a long way. We met each other 20 years ago. We were doing Masters as students of Centre for Development and Emergency Practice, and then we went in different directions. We also met up for work in Bangladesh after the cyclone, so it was great to see you back. Yes, it's great to be back. It is fun how you make a friendship at university and then end up meeting in lots of different places. Yes. So, Kate, I know that you have worked in different international aid agencies. You grew up in another country, and now you're living in another country, and you are working in a totally different development sector now. You started as a humanitarian. So where did it all start? How did you get inspired to work in this field? I suppose because I was born in East Africa, in Burundi, I grew up straight away understanding the dynamics of being a foreigner, being traveled, being, you know, a different colour from someone else, being in a different economic situation from someone else, in a different power situation. And that really stayed with me. I found it really kind of upsetting to be white and British because I really wanted to be a Burundi boy child that could have the freedom to roam and climb the trees. Why a boy child? I think I definitely experienced some restrictions on me as a little girl early on. The majority of people around me were brothers and male, like, friends and families. How old were you? There weren't girls that I could play with so freely. And so I already noticed that difference between how girls and boys were treated early on. Then I was only until I was six that I lived in Burundi, but that was really formative for me. And then I think the trauma of leaving that place where I felt home, I felt was my place, my birthplace, and moving to England where it was assumed I would feel more at home. I didn't feel more at home. And I think that grew in the affinity with the people who had experienced displacement and refugee experiences, which I'm not saying mine was like, but I just had such an enjoyment and heart and sense of the upset that people might have experienced if they'd been forced to leave their country for whatever reason. So then I did a completely unrelated degree because I didn't really know how you got to do that kind of work without being a nurse, which my mum was, a priest, which my dad was, or an engineer or a doctor, which seems to be the four things that you have to be to do international work in context like that. And it was only after that undergraduate degree that I was working for the NHS in a temp job thinking, well, there must be something I can do that's more in line with what I'm interested in. And I found in the filing system, the Refugee Council paperwork, like a letterhead that had the Refugee Council on and I was like, oh my goodness, there's one of those in the city of Birmingham. That's where I'm headed. So I looked them up and ended up working in as an administrator for the Victims of Torture mental health team and loved it. I got to meet people from all around the world in one little crazy chaos office in Birmingham and it really opened my eyes to a delight of that, to the Islamic world, which was new to my life context and also to this idea that there was such a thing as international development that a generalist, non-technical specialist like me could do and participate and contribute in. So that's when I joined the MSc where I met you. So how did you end up in Birmingham? And you're from Manchester, right? No, I mean, I'm kind of from lots of places. So I was born in Burundi and I was educated in Hertfordshire, north of London. So I am studying in Manchester now, but I wouldn't say I'm from Manchester. So I was at Birmingham because it was a good university. They would have me with the grades I had. I had lots of family in the area and it was far enough away from home in Hertfordshire to feel like I'd got away, but it was close to get home to London if I needed to. So did you go back to Burundi after you grew up? I did, yeah. I actually went back when I was 15. My dad was now working as a sort of head of agency for the people he had been working for. And me and my sisters went back, but unfortunately that was at the exact time that they shot the president's plane down and the beginning of the coup in Burundi that then spread to Rwanda and the genocide. So it was quite a tense time and I think that added to my understanding of a humanitarian conflict and context and the complexity of that. And then my dad remained in charge of the organisation when the genocide unfolded and so... The Rwandan genocide. The Rwandan genocide, yeah. So that was very personal, very real. And so then when we got to MSC stage and people were talking about it as a sort of a theoretical case study, I found that quite complicated, quite emotionally conflicting, because for me it was quite a personal experience, even though on a completely outside or on just a heart-related level. You know, this is it. I remember as an architecture student when we went to this museum and they were showing the videos and talking about Rwandan genocide, I came to Brookes thinking that I'll be working in development and I'll use my architecture schools, but it was too much to take. I felt so depressed. I mean, tell us more, because people like me or a general public, they don't know about this Rwandan genocide. Yeah. In 1994, long-standing, colonially added to tribal ethnic complexities blew up in very extreme and physically personal and violent ways with the Hutu and the Tutsi conflict. The Hutu and Tutsi are two tribal groups, right? In Burundi and Rwanda, so they're the same tribal makeup. And I think that that was so very seminal in humanitarian and development sphere because there was a lot of pondering what role outsiders had had in kind of fueling those fault lines, fueling ethnicity issues. The church had a lot to reflect on for itself in terms of its role in that and leaders of the church participating and inciting genocide. So, yeah, it was a very complicated thing and it prompted a lot of right self-reflection in the humanitarian system, which then I became aware of once I'd started studying humanitarianism and development. And I remember, I think they showed us a film about that as well. Yeah. Did you remember? Just that little snippet I remember, the priest was trying to save people in the church. Yeah. On either side, as there always is. And remember, we hosted and created the first human rights film festival Oxford Brookes. And it's still going on. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? So with Dr. Brian Phillips, who was the amnesty person for the Balkans, which was happening at the same time, the Bosnia conflict, we hosted all of these films and, you know, obviously the Balkans, Bosnia and Rwanda were part of that content that week. So that was an exciting thing to be part of as a student. I think we were really having a lot of interesting things happening when we started SENDUP. We had the first human rights film festival, the first fair trade university. Yeah. So it was amazing. And I think the first human rights field trip to Bosnia, I mean, that was facilitated by Brian, wasn't it? I went to Bosnia with him and then did my primary research for my MSc dissertation there and stayed on and did that. So that was an amazing opportunity. To see real things. Yes. I did the same. I stayed in the UK and did a regeneration work talking to Asian communities. I was so surprised that I was using my language skills in the UK. Amazing. Yeah. So now tell me what happened after you graduated from Oxford Brookes. Where did you start working? So after that, I felt I kind of encountered that complexity that often students do or newly qualified people do that you can't get the job without the experience and you can't get the experience without the job. So I thought, how do I break that cycle? And my dad said, all right, so there's only white privileged people that can do development because you get to pay to suck up the cost of volunteering for a while to get your foot in the door. And that is an accurate indictment. And that is what happened. So I volunteered for a year in Afghanistan, which was one of the two places I was really interested in. I had this, you know, Afghanistan as part of the axis of evil had begun to be named while we were at university, our massive protests on the street to go against Tony Blair going into Iraq without effect also were happening while we were at university. And so that felt for me a really exciting frontline place to be able to go. So I was thrilled to go to Afghanistan. I was posted for the first month or two in Kabul to do language learning, which is an incredibly valuable piece of any longer term stay in a place. And then I went to Jalalabad in the east, which is part of the Pashtun area. And I had this amazing possibility of accompanying and working for a new newly appointed Afghan woman manager. She was she had worked through kind of technical education for children who are blind or deaf or intellectually disabled and had become the manager of that project. And because she was a young woman and a newly married, there was a need to stabilize her credibility and her safety in a sense. So my job was technical advisor for her. But obviously, I learned an enormous amount more from her. And she taught me just a sense of calm and focus and bravery to just deal with things head on. She was so brave, obviously, just brave taking a job like that. Amazing to be called to serve these extremely marginalized children in Afghan society. And then really brave to deal with all of the men that she managed and the complexities of dynamics that come with that in a country like Afghanistan. So I did that in Afghanistan. And then came back to England after I'd volunteered for my year and looked for somebody who would pay me to do it. So I went back to Afghanistan again, and had had the opportunity to visit Kandahar in the south, another capital of Pashtun area, and really a cultural capital of Afghanistan, where the Taliban are hosted really from. And at that time, the new president, Hamid Karzai, was also from there. He's from Kandahar and his family and some of his family were still there when I was there. So then I worked as an area coordinator, a generalist manager, really, on disaster risk reduction projects, and then kind of integrated food security projects with community and child focus, sanitation and health. And that was a wonderful another 18 months. Obviously, that includes extremes when you're in a place like Afghanistan. You also have the developing international conflict around you. During that time, the British moved into Helmand, and you could hear through your pillow at night the bombardments vibrating in the soil. And if you went to your roof at night, you could see the tracer of the bullets flying around different special forces bases. And you learned to manage security incredibly well, learned to trust the senses of your Afghan colleagues. And I suppose it's something that began while I was at university, it was already something I was fully aware of from my family's context was this aspect of the mental health, both for the people who live in the conflict, and for people who come in from outside like me. And I watched that being done so badly by so many humanitarian aid workers. I feel like for me, that's always been a significant parallel passion within whatever technical area I'm working in, one's own mental health, the mental health of your team, the mental health of the people you're working with, is so important to me and such a key part of being well in life. You know, good that you mentioned about this first manager you had in Afghanistan. It's just amazing how people thrive in these kind of really difficult places. And also now there are so many bad news out there. And you also worked in Palestine as well. So how do you end up drawing towards all these difficult places? And you are so up, you know, very cheerful and always full of energy. How do you do that? I mean, I think some of it is the extremes you grow up with. I'm not saying that there are extremes of trauma, but I grew up in two different, quite different contexts. I had to emotionally navigate that as a child. When I was 14 and he was 16, my brother broke his neck in a rugby accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. So straight away then I was experiencing disability in the family and processing the extremes of what that meant for his value and his quality of life and walking with him as a close friend and brother and how you come to terms with that massive change to your life trajectory and your body's function and things like that. And then working with people who had been tortured in my very first administrative job, you really learn the extremes that are present in life. And yet the amazing thing you learn at the same time is that human resilience is enormous and human relationship is incredibly healing. And if you are able to be caring for somebody in the midst of the chaos and the agony, there is something incredibly powerful about that. So I feel like really early on in my humanitarian practice career, I learned that it really, I wasn't going to be doing any amazing life-saving work. I really wasn't going to change the world in any enormous recognizable way. But just to be present and accompany somebody and people through the time that I was with them was part of my role and part of a gift I could offer and I could receive from them in that process as well. I think that that changed my sense of, one, the need to burn myself out. I don't feel that. And two, the admiration for the humans who are in these extremes and yet still able to love each other, care for each other, forgive each other, choose not to be enemies of somebody who has hurt them. Lots of incredible things in humanity that come out when you are extremely hard-pressed and in horrible situations. That's so true. So tell me more. What are you doing now and what happened after your work in Afghanistan? You've done a long journey, very interesting and adventurous journey. Yeah. So I had a period in between the two kind of stints in Afghanistan, I did lots of short-term emergency response, which was wonderful for a single woman in her 20s to be flying to Bangladesh, where I saw you, to Myanmar, to Kenya, Liberia and India and just capacity building and working with people who are suddenly, quickly in the midst of a disaster and trying to help respond and recover. And that was really valuable and enjoyable, like such a pleasure and a gift to me. Then I had the delight of bumping into an Irishman in a cafe in Kabul who turned out to be my husband in the end. And he had an existing passion for Palestine in particular, so he had already done his development masters in Jerusalem and the West Bank. And we did long-distance relationship from Kabul to Jerusalem. I once did the journey from Kabul all the way to Jerusalem in one day and they closed the Jordan-Israel border crossing behind me at night, having been interrogated about where I had just come from. And in the end, I got engaged in the Jordan Valley and I then decided to stay in Palestine with him. So he was working for a church in East Jerusalem and I got a job as the Deputy Country Director for the West Bank in Israel for Oxfam GB. So it was a really educating job to be in. Oxfam in general is a very strong believer of the political dynamics of complexity and conflict. They don't shy away from recognising that and that was an education for me. And they use the tool of advocacy so powerfully in every programme. So the approach of recognising the policy-level impact you're trying to have to make changes at the kind of root cause and the systemic level is an incredibly important part of dealing with the issues and nowhere more complex in political terms than Israel-Palestine. So I had that conflict dynamic in my programme set, so I was managing the West Bank programme and the Israel programme. So right in my set of work was that conflict and I then occasionally covered Gaza and loved that. But yeah, it's probably one of the more complicated jobs I've ever done, as you can imagine. And watching things unravel at the moment is agonising and heartbreaking. And the fact that the government's position to follow hate with hate, violence with violence, and it is the people who are civilians who are the ones that are massacred and damaged by this, just continues to tell me that there is political complexity to this. And it is naive to think that there isn't. And our role in humanitarian and development work is part of that, whether we like it or not. I remember when beneficiary accountability first started coming up after the tsunami. And I was in the UK doing the kind of educational training job for the head office and lots of the emergency response short-term stuff. And I remember thinking, if beneficiary accountability were truly able to filter through every single level of the development project, the human rights project, the humanitarian response project, that could be absolutely revolutionary, and it really could change things for the better. And I'm not saying it didn't change for the better. It definitely is a really, really important contribution. The resistance to change at power-holding level is always high, and the need to change enormous institutional practices is enormously high. And so I feel that there's always an important time to take a break from humanitarian practice. You need to be able to debrief and reflect on the bits that you do not want to perpetuate and participate in, the bits that you want to stand up against, and the bits that you want to focus on and give your life to, really. You have articulated it so well, Kate. I just launched the sixth episode about how I feel about the whole sector, and my purpose why I got drawn to this sector. And it is so true that you cannot make all the difference in this ideal world, but you have to keep on trying, and do what you can from your own position. So I understand that you have changed your position, and you are doing a totally different work now. Tell us more about how that happened. Yeah, so I suppose after, I guess, a certain amount of post-traumatic stress in Afghanistan, and then my experiences there, and then just the political complexity of working in the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem and Israel, I really needed a break. And that coincided with being pregnant with my first child. And then interestingly, I thought, for me, this time I could use as reflections on the kind of the faith crises that had come. I come from a Christian background, and I claim that faith for myself, too. But my crisis experiences in Afghanistan and Palestine meant that these easy pat answers were not working for me anymore, that there were some theologies I felt incredibly uncomfortable about, and that had to be wrong, if the God I believed in was a God of love. And so I actually decided to do another Master's in Theology, and really look at those sort of questions of faith for myself, to see if I could keep standing on Christian ground that I had come from. And while I was in that course, I did part-time with kids, and in that process, I had a new child every time I did a new module. And my second child was born with a massive brain injury. So she was not expected to live. And in the end, amazingly, she did live. She just turned eight last month. But she was then expected to live with very complex disabilities. So she has quite severe epilepsy that has put her in hospital many, many times, seizures that people can't stop. And she needs to be put in ICU to try and stop them. She is blind, and she's cortically visually impaired, so her eyes work, but the brain doesn't receive that area, because that's part of the area that was damaged. And with all of that comes severe physical and intellectual disability. So when I was in the phase of study, I decided to train my thinking and reflection and research on disability. And so I really started looking at, one, how to say, like, the social aspect of disability, why disability is still so marginalized in social context, in architecture, in built environments, in so many places, the world is built for an unreal norm that is able-bodied. And all of those things become much more apparent to you. They had begun to become apparent when my brother became a wheelchair user, and ever more apparent when my daughter was a wheelchair user, amongst other things. So yeah, I wrote my MA thesis on using the lens of disability to interpret a particular passage in the Bible that is about bodies. And that seemed to be very resonant with things that were going around in the philosophical and social and church space, and in the humanitarian and development space, too, there's an increased recognition of the disability lens with which you have to look at things, and the extremes of marginalization that come when you don't get yourself, or don't speak, or don't advocate for yourself, or don't follow the sort of normative pathways that the world is so often built around. And the deep contribution that our worldviews, faith-based and otherwise, have towards the marginalization of people with bodies that fit outside this imaginary norm. So now I'm doing a PhD in the same, and I'm adding in the aspect of LGBTQ bodies, so bodies that are on the margins because of their gender or orientation. And I will be looking at biblical texts through that lens as well. So I'm doing that research a couple of days a week. I'm also working for the theological college connected to Manchester University, trying to increase the quality of programming for online students, that's the Nazarene Theological College, and that's doing really well, too. I think there's accessibility possibilities for people that might have struggled to get to university before, that online, fully online theological education could add to. So that's incredibly positive. That is amazing, Kate. I think you should write a book. I think there's lots of people that should write books. And you know, there's a lot of people I know who have written books, some of them shouldn't have been written. That's why we need to write the right book. I know. So, Kate, it is amazing how you moved on. And I remember when I first met you as a student, you were a very typical, cheerful, don't care, you know, I can do everything type of Western woman. But when I met you in Bangladesh, you were a totally different character. Interesting. I never told you that, did I? You just looked so different. I don't know. How did you transform yourself to blend in to a different culture? How did it feel inside? Because you know, you grew up in a very free society, and then you have to blend in in a different culture. How was it for you? I think because I grew up in Burundi, I was already straddling two cultures straight away, multiple languages, so three languages, English, French and Kirundi, and then two cultures. And then moving back to England, although I looked like I fitted in, interiorly, I didn't feel like I fitted in. And so I'd learned that cultural sensitivity and chameleon-ness straight away. My parents would have been encouraging of continued cultural, you know, flexibility and appropriateness. And then I felt that the first agency I worked with in Afghanistan was incredibly, they really valued that, which is why they put you in language school first. And I really enjoyed, you know, in a way, to be honest, the white privilege, the westernness is still there. And to be honest, there's an aspect of it that's kind of the fun, exciting exoticism of being able to drop into another culture. And I accept the complexity and the negatives of that, because I can walk away and go back to my other culture again. But yeah, I mean, there's so much richness in other places, to be able to enjoy it, and be a part of it, and be allowed to drink from it, is such a pleasure, so I enjoy that. What is your mouth mantra in one sentence? One is always to set good boundaries for yourself, because I don't think any organization, however wonderful they are, and however much you like them, will ever do that for you. An organization will always take more from you than you can give. So you have to know yourself, and know your boundaries. And the other is learn to be a good manager, because bad management is everybody else's personal problem. And bad management is a problem everywhere. Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much for having me, it's such a delight for me to be part of it.