The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - On The Road in South Sudan With Samantha Nutt

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on January 30th. We ask Dr Samantha Nutt of War Child Canada to break down her most recent trip to South Sudan, basically to take us with her. So get your maps ready because this will bring you into the heart of one of the most challenging places on earth -- thousands of dead, millions of displaced .. many facing civil war and starvation.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. This is Encore Wednesdays. We'll tell you about our program in a second, but first a reminder that tonight, 6 p.m. Eastern time is the closeout date and time for your answer to the question of the week. And the question is, if you could name one Canadian book, in other words, written by a Canadian, that you think our listeners would learn from, then give us the name of that book. It doesn't have to be recent. It can be 10, 20, 30, 40, whatever number of years ago. You name the book and the author,

and you will enter into the discussion about the winning answer of the week. All right. To today's encore edition, we go back about a half a dozen weeks to the end of January. Our guest was Dr. Samantha Nutt from War Child Canada, talking about her journey into South Sudan, which had just taken place, and a sense of the situation there, the desperate situation in South Sudan. So that's today's Encore Edition. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here.

As I said, today's a special edition of The Bridge, on the road with Dr. Sam Nutt of War Child Canada. I'm going to try and break down what actually happens on how these people, and Dr. Nutt is just one of many aid workers in Canada, but she's special to The Bridge. She's been on the program many times. But we want to try and understand the situation of how

you get in a country like South Sudan. How do you actually do it? And we got to start off with, you know, I would advise people to have a map. Just Google South Sudan, map South Sudan. Have that handy or Or map northeast Africa. Have that handy so we can place where we're going on this little trip. You'll know what we're talking about. I remember when I used to be at the National, many of us had the same concern that we would talk about a place in the world, we'd throw up a map, and the map would be a cutout of the particular country.

But you'd have no real sense looking at that map. Okay, but where is it? You know, I see the shape of that country, but where is that country in relation to that part of the world it's in? And so that's what we want to do here, first of all, is where is it? How do you get there? What do you go through getting there? And then when you're there, what happens? So we're going to talk to Samantha about that. We're going to break it down into its most simplest form.

Why are we doing Sudan? Well, we've heard over the last couple of years with our focus on Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Hamas, Yemen, you name it, that in fact, the place in the world where the worst situation is, is in Sudan, in northeast Africa. But does the world care? Well, we're going to do our part in trying to at least establish what's happening there, where it is, who's involved, why we should care. So I hope you listen through on this because it's, you know, these people like Dr. Nutt are incredible in what they do. So while you're getting your map ready,

let me remind you that the question of the week this week is, if you could tell a new immigrant to Canada one thing about Canada, what would that be? We've already got a lot of entries into this since it was announced yesterday. So don't be shy. Send yours in to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. And most of the entries so far are obeying the guidelines that we established. Keep it short. Include your name and the location you're writing from. The keep it short part is important

if we're going to get as many of these in as possible on Thursday during your turn. The one deemed the best entry will receive a signed copy of one of my books and I look forward to sending that out to somebody later this week. So deadline, 6.30 tomorrow night. Okay, 6.30 Eastern Time Wednesday. Get your entry in, please. All right, let's get around to our conversation now

with Dr. Samantha Nutt of War Child Canada. This topic, On the Road with sam to south sudan here we go so listen what i've done already is i've asked our audience to have a map in front of them because you know most of us don't know these places you go to and we couldn't find them on a map you know you saw a map map of Africa with no names on it and said, point to South Sudan. People go, right. Yeah, okay.

Well, it's somewhere in there. So first of all, how do you get there? Like, what is the route you go to get into somewhere like South Sudan? Well, it's tricky. I mean, first of all, even just getting the visas to be allowed to travel is very, very complicated. You essentially have to, for us, we're a registered humanitarian organization, so you have to provide a lot of documentation. You send it down to

what is vaguely an embassy in Washington with your passport and a return envelope, and you hope that that's going to get processed at some point. But I will say that leading into the holidays in December, I was a little concerned that I wasn't going to get my passport back in time. It just disappears into an abyss, but I did. So once you go through that process, then in terms of travel, I went from Toronto to Heathrow, and then Heathrow to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. And keep in mind, there are long layovers

in between and lots of uncertainty around flights. And then you go from Addis into Juba, which is the capital of South Sudan. Is that a flight, Addis to Juba? That's Ethiopian Airlines flies there. And well, it certainly flies there now. It hasn't always been the case. And then from there, you have to, again, overnight in Juba, and you have to take special United Nations humanitarian flights that effectively only humanitarian organizations and their staff are allowed to take, that you then would take the next day or the day after, and that takes you into these very remote locations. And sometimes those planes are reasonably big 24 seaters that kind of thing plus and then sometimes i've been on planes that are tiny six seater world food program planes and you're landing in a in a strip

in the middle of the desert where they actually have someone employed to clear the goats off the runway and sometimes you have to do a few passes to make sure that there's nothing in your way before you land, which was certainly the experience in places like Somalia. So getting around internally when roads are insecure or just non-existent with giant holes in the middle of them and that kind of thing, the only way you can really travel is by flying. And the only way you can fly is on these specialty humanitarian flights. Okay, let me back you up just a sec. You're in Addis.

You've flown into Addis from London. And is there any issue about flying from Addis to Juba? Like, do you have to have special, do you have to show your visa? Are there border checks or what's involved in that? All of that. So you have to make sure before you're even allowed on the plane that you can demonstrate that you have your visa for South Sudan. Sometimes if you're stopping in Ethiopia, you need a visa for Ethiopia as well. And then, of course, keep in mind, Peter, when you land in places like South Sudan at the airport, you don't know what you're going to get. You have to have not just your visa,

you have to have letters of invitation that have been approved by different members of different governmental departments. You have to have your humanitarian registration. You have to have your identification card. So there's, on top of your actual visa, there are probably half a dozen to a dozen pieces of paper that you have

to produce every time you fly, including permissions from the United Nations flight operators and all this kind of stuff. And if any one of those pieces of paper has something that even looks remotely like what it's not supposed to be, an incomplete stamp or an incomplete signature or anything along those lines, then that can be an invitation for you to be stuck there for a very long period of time trying to negotiate access because people are destitute and desperate and government public sector workers are not paid very much. And so they'll exploit any opportunity that they can to try to generate some extra revenues and so you have to be very very patient because obviously when you're part

of the humanitarian sector you will never pay any kind of incentive to be allowed access to enter so sometimes it's a game of chicken and you're hot and you're tired and you're exhausted and you're hungry and they know that and uh it it's it's a bit of a production it's not easy it's not easy um what is the juba then is the capital of south sudan it's in the kind of southern end of the country you're heading north eventually on on one of those un flights but you may have to spend a day or two or more in Juba. Is Juba a civilized modern city? It's not bad by the standards of a country that's been at war for 30 plus years. So, you know, they have, certainly if you stay at a locally run hotel, they'll have running water. You can easily get meals. The security situation

in Juba, though, can be touch and go. And particularly in 2016, 2017, they've had some armed insurrections, there's an election taking place later this year. So I anticipate that the violence will accelerate again, at least in Juba, you just you't know. It's a powder keg. And so at any point in time, someone can do something to one of the armed groups or within the political power sharing arrangement that they have. It can hit a point of disagreement and then suddenly things are difficult. But when we arrived, our local team made it very clear that because of the holidays having just concluded,

because again, this is January when we left, because the holidays had just concluded that they had reinforced the security perimeter around Juba because they had been anticipating that there would be some military activity. So we were very, very glad that we didn't see any of that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there had been great hope that South Sudan was going to be the future for places like that in Northeast Africa. But then things went wrong. What happened? It was a series of things. The original leader, John Garang, who emerged from the separation of Sudan and South Sudan and the peace process, he died in a helicopter crash.

And after that, that created a bit of a power vacuum. And there's been a lot of jockeying for position between the different tribal leaders ever since. And so it is a country where there are very strong alliances to different tribal and ethnic groups. And the power sharing has been and the revenue sharing around that, particularly when you're talking about a country that has significant oil resources and oil revenues, has been very, very complicated. And then on top of that, you have standards of education and a public service that is not as strong in health, education, academia, or even business development, economic development, as it should be. And so as a result of that, you have a number of different tensions that are playing out, ethnic, tribal, economic, educational, gender-based, that can create this ongoing insecurity and ongoing attacks between one group and the other.

Okay. So you're in Juba in southern South Sudan, and you're heading to northern South Sudan on a UN flight. Now, are those who control movement within South Sudan okay with you being there? Or are they helpful to you being there? Do they understand why you're there? What is the issue or is there an issue between you and the governing forces in South Sudan? No, I think, look, you need to consult with local government. You need to make them aware of what you're doing. We've been operational in South Sudan and Sudan and other parts of Africa, certainly in war-torn countries, for more than 20 years.

And so we have strong relationships. We have a fantastic local team. 99.9% of our staff everywhere in the world are local. Our country director, Emmanuel, in South Sudan is Southern Sudanese. And so that helps in the sense that we follow their lead. They manage a lot of these relationships. They engage the government in conversation. And they recognize that the work that we're producing is having an outcome, a very positive outcome for communities.

So, for example, in some cases, if I'm going into a community where we have been doing food security work with women, teaching them how to farm, teaching them how to preserve their food, to provide for their children, to get income from those activities. Sometimes we'll have a government representative who will come, who will even introduce the organization to the community, and we'll talk to them about the work that we're doing. So it's not the case there where you feel as if government is hostile to your intentions. They're very much welcoming those intentions. Where the tensions come is that their priorities may not be your priorities. They may not even be the population's priorities because they may have strategic reasons and votes they're trying to earn and this kind of thing for telling you where you should go and what

you should do. And that's where you end up in places of tension that require a lot of patience and a lot of diplomacy. So up to this point, when you get on the plane to head north, you still feel safe? You're safe at that point? You're not under some threat? I mean, Peter, I'm the wrong one to ask. Safety is a relative term. I mean, compared to Yemen, yeah, I felt really safe because in South Sudan, they're not kidnapping aid workers or in Iraq or in Afghanistan. And being a woman in those environments, running an organization in South Sudan is a lot easier than it is in Afghanistan, for example.

I can meet with officials and have conversations and there isn't this overlying tension that exists. So, yeah, I feel as safe as possible under the circumstances. Okay. So you're on the U.N. flight. You're flying into the north of the country where your concerns are helping those who are living there. What's the situation as you get off the plane? It's not like you're landing at Pearson. You're landing on probably some airstrip in the middle of nowhere.

You are, and it depends. So I was in two different locations along the Sudanese border for this particular trip, and one of those locations called WAU, W-A-U, if your listeners do have their map out, that is relatively safe and secure. There have been some armed incursions in different locations. There's a strong UN peacekeeping presence. And so in that situation, going out to visit our programs, especially because they're in agriculture in that location. They're in very remote spots, an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes two hours on really hard, bumpy, challenging roads. I certainly felt there as if it was,

there was significant progress compared to what I had seen previously. Things have been relatively stable. People are farming. We're seeing the effects of climate change and that kind of thing, but we're not seeing a lot of armed violence and destruction. Having said that, when I was on the opposite side in

Malakal, again, close to the Sudanese border, the last time I had been there, that was a functioning city for 50,000 plus people with a thriving industry. And people had jobs and there were markets and this kind of thing. And landing there, it was unrecognizable to me. There is nothing left of that town.

They have gone through a significant amount of upheaval over the last five, six years. They had some armed, really intense fighting in the camps for internally displaced people there. About eight months ago, they've received more than 100,000 returnees from Sudan and refugees from Sudan as a result of that war. So you've got a mass migration of people living in the most abhorrent conditions that you can imagine. You have an underfunded humanitarian, drastically underfunded humanitarian response. You've got a town that I think is inconceivable for most, certainly Canadians, to even imagine.

Were you, I mean, obviously you'd been briefed, you had some sense of what you were getting into, but you sound like even you were surprised by what you saw. I was surprised by what you saw i i was surprised by what i saw i i knew that there had been fighting in in malakal from the time that i had been there previously but i didn't expect it to just be rubble and uh squalor and open sewers everywhere and a level of destitution that I have not seen in many parts of the world, partly because under normal circumstances, when you have this mass migration of refugees and returnees because of the war, for example, in Sudan.

And South Sudan has accepted about half a million refugees and returnees from Sudan just in the last nine months, which is a massive number of people. And so normally what you see are makeshift shelters, and you see tents, UNHCR tents, and you see plastic sheeting and corrugated metal siding, and people have started to erect temporary structures. But in this case, because, again, the humanitarian response has been so constrained, largely as a result of a lack of attention, conflict in Ukraine and Gaza is sucking up a lot of those resources. Keep in mind that South Sudan and Sudan, the humanitarian response, the global humanitarian response for both of these crises is less than half of what is required of the global humanitarian appeals.

And so everything is in short supply. And so you don't see those food distributions. You don't see those tents being set up, you see a lot of people just living out in the open in tents on plastic sheets, being moved around the country all over the place to try to accommodate them in different locations. And they are arriving incredibly desperate, starving. If women and girls having experienced mass atrocities, terrific sexual violence, and there are very few services available to them. And that is among the worst I've seen in almost 30 years. I mean, it is on a level I haven't witnessed since Somalia.

It was heartbreaking. Who's in control? I mean, is the heartbreaking. Who's in control? I mean, is the government of South Sudan in control? Is it the UN who's trying to control things? I mean, you talked about UN protecting aid groups. Who's in control? This is always the question in any war zone. Is anyone really in control? If anyone

was in control, would it still be at war, right? If the peacekeeping forces were able to really enforce peace, you wouldn't have a situation like this. So, in a place like Malakal, it is a negotiation all the time between

the humanitarian actors, like the United Nations and UNAMIS, which is the United Nations mission inAMIS, which is the United Nations mission in South Sudan, the peacekeeping mission, and then local government as well. And sometimes those priorities are, they don't align. So for example, the government may not want those returnees who had fled South Sudan to go to Sudan previously and now are coming back. And some of them are from different tribal groups. They may have had different military, political affiliations, which is why they fled in the

first instance. And now they're coming across. And then you have Sudanese who are coming across into one of the poorest countries in the world. Four-fifths of the population of South Sudan lives in extreme poverty. So the government is trying to deal with these arrivals who are extremely vulnerable, who may also represent a threat to peace and stability for their own country, and trying to figure out where to put them and how to contain them. And yet these are groups that also have tension between themselves.

And so some of those groups don't want to be put together because they feel that it makes them, they're locked in and at risk from one another. And so then the UN is trying to figure out, it's like a massive jigsaw puzzle, right, or chessboard, where you're trying to figure out who's going to go where and where it's safe and where you can provide services and what makes sense. And sometimes that doesn't work, which is why last summer there was a major uprising in one of the camps and a number of people were slaughtered and several thousand of them fled to a different location. And now the government's trying to relocate them. And to do that, they're cutting off services so people are becoming more destitute and more desperate. It's very complicated. There are many layers to it.

So you're there now. You're with your team, and you're trying to help. So what do you do? Well, in places where it's stable and we have a presence that's very straightforward. So this is a country that is at tremendously high risk of famine. And the answer there is not short-term food distribution programs that will work again in the short term. But when you have an underfunded humanitarian response and when the World Food Program's budget has been slashed and so they're not able to provide ongoing regular sources of food,

you have to look at other means. And so that's why we have been doing work in the area of food security, actually funded by Global Affairs Canada, called the FEED Program, which we do in conjunction with CARE and World Vision here in Canada, and a terrific program. So we're providing seeds and tools and training around farming and they're harvesting their own food and that's providing revenue and stability for families and allowing those communities to recover.

At the same time, we're doing catch up learning for kids who've been out of school and they're able to get back into school and to envision a different future for themselves other than amongst those armed groups. So in those environments, that's been very successful. In places like Malakal, where we have also been operating, again, we're within the camps. We're looking at child protection work, women and girls, education pieces. What becomes challenging is what to do with the new arrivals because it's an ongoing tension.

You've got a government that wants to send them to specific locations that they don't want to go to. And the government, because they don't want them to remain, they don't want international humanitarian organizations directly providing services to them because then they will not move. They will not stay. They'll stay to continue with those services. And so then this is a negotiation.

So you've got these different clusters of humanitarian organizations grouped around themes, education, nutrition, child protection. And as a group, we try to negotiate with the government to be able to provide services to those who are most at need or most in need, rather. But it's difficult because the things that you know need to be done and that you want to do, you can't just go ahead and do them because then you risk being kicked out of the country you risk being offside of the entire humanitarian effort there because you're providing services to a group that you're told needs to move even though those same recipients are sitting there digging in their heels saying there's absolutely no way we're moving because if we move we'll be killed so this is the kind of delicate situation that we confront and i guess the short answer to your question is

we do as much as possible under the circumstances, recognizing that there can be unintended consequences. And you have to be able to look ahead and understand what the impact of those efforts will be and make sure that you negotiate both with the broader humanitarian community and the government, as well as those people who are in incredible need to find the best path forward. And sometimes it's incredibly frustrating. I want to take a short break. I've got a couple more questions on this. I really appreciate you talking to us about it and trying to place us there because that's the hardest thing about stories like this is for those of us who live comfortable lives

on the same planet but in a different space. It's awfully hard to understand that. Be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Tuesday episode of The Bridge. Dr. Samantha Nett from War Child Canada is with us, talking about her recent trip just back a couple of days ago from South Sudan. You know, as you said, it's a war zone that you're in.

And did you ever, you know, obviously, I mean, I've seen some of the pictures you took and the video you took, and it certainly looks like a war zone and the aftermath of, you know, a terrible displacement of people and buildings and et cetera, et cetera. Did you ever get caught in what you thought was a war zone on this trip? Yeah. It feels, you're, you're in it.

I mean, you're, you're, when you're in Malacal, you're in it. I was staying at the United nations, a peacekeeping mission. So I'm surrounded by 250 soldiers.

I was one of maybe maximum three women that I saw in the entire camp. And I was 60 feet from where the UN helicopters are all taking off and the troops are doing all of their drills and you stay in a tiny shipping container. So you really feel it. You really do feel it. It's a place where things can turn on a dime.

And I've been in those kinds of UN mission spots before, multiple times, actually. But, yeah, there's no question when you're in that situation that you're actively in a war zone. And then of course, every day you hear from people and you hear their stories and then you're reminded of just how terrifying

and horrific war is and how it's just destroying so many millions of lives throughout the world. And people never fully recover from that. They just put time and space between what they've endured and where they are now. Can you share one of those stories that you heard from this most recent trip? Yeah, I think, well, there were a couple, actually. The hardest moment for me, certainly, was going into, we've been active in the Darfur region for 20 years now, of Sudan. And last summer, our staff were in hiding. They were from, some of them were from the ethnic minority that was being targeted during

that conflict, which is still ongoing. Many of them have had to flee. Some have fled into South Sudan, the Central African Republic, up into Egypt. And it was a very, very tense and difficult time. We've been in West Darfur, Al Janina, like I said, for a very long time doing youth programming and education. So there I am, just not even, actually a week ago tomorrow. And I go, I'm trying to go to the location of the Darfurian refugees who have arrived. And there are several hundred of them. And so we're directed towards this bombed out, almost completely destroyed mosque in the center of Malakal.

And they're camped out in the gardens, in the mosque itself. It's dark. The conditions are horrific. They're really struggling. They don't even have any kind of tents or anything at all. And so we're met by these several hundred Darfurian refugees. And this one, after some introductions and explanations, this one young woman stands up and she says uh and she starts explaining how she had just written her final medical school exams and she's from El Janina in Darfur and she doesn't

even know what the results were because she had to flee and so she was never able to receive them and all those records have now disappeared and as doctor myself, I can just imagine all that time and effort and energy. And you write your final exams, and then you're left with no proof that you did any of it. And she stands there and she's, you know, it's clear that she has a very high level of education to have gone that far. And then she says that she remembers Wartel Canada and she remembers our team in El Janino because she'd been part of our youth leadership program and she was so happy and so grateful for that.

And then she said that she had arrived with absolutely nothing. She had to leave her family behind because she couldn't even get home to flee with them. She was with another young woman whose baby she had delivered at the side of the road who fled with her, who was pregnant. And they had been through horrific things, absolutely horrific things. And at the end of the conversation she was having, she turned and I mean, it was. It was hard. She turned and she said, we've been waiting for you. We knew you would come. And it was, and I was with my all African

team and they just started crying. I mean, cause they're ref, they were refugees at one point as well. And, and all of the refugees, when she said that, and they translated, they stood up and they started applauding. And her story is incredible. And what makes it so heartbreaking as well is that in my head, I hear this from her. And I know that they're starving. I know that they haven't eaten in weeks. And I also know that that is a deliberate policy, because they don't want those Darfurian refugees to stay there. They want to relocate them to Maban, which is the recognized refugee camp, which many of them had come from from but they had fled because they were

part of the same Darfurian minority group that was being slaughtered in in Janaina so so this is a group of people who are being told we're not going to provide you with services because you're not allowed to stay here and they're saying to us we're not going to that camp because we'll be raped and we'll be killed and we we know this we've experienced this and then they're looking at you to say we waited for you to come and the the the weight of that and the expectations around that are um are the things that keep me up at night there it's enormous it's it's enormous and there are no easy answers we we did some short-term stuff while we were there to provide them with support and to make sure that they had at least

enough food for the foreseeable future and and we're trying to negotiate with some of the other um organizations on the ground and to get them relocated to perhaps different refugee camps where they would be safe. But there's no long-term solution there other than hopefully the peace process in Sudan will eventually be effective and they'll be able to go home. But most of them have no homes to return to and they don't even know if their loved ones are alive.

So it's hard. It's hard. I bet. Not only is it hard, but it must be awfully hard or difficult to square it in your mind. You know, we've known each other for quite a few years, and you know, where I see you, it's in, it's in, you know, Southern Ontario or somewhere in Canada and we live a good life and we're very lucky. And, you know, we have all the, the benefits of being Canadian and living in Canada. And then suddenly within literally, I guess that's why I wanted to hear the story about how you got there. Cause it's literally within a matter of hours, you're, you're you're in a very different place a very dark place on the other side of

the world but it's still the same world and somehow you've got a squarel this in your mind and i'm not sure how you do that i think that it comes from experience for sure. But I also think that what drives you in the end is seeing progress. So in the same way that Malakal was challenging and devastating and difficult, and these solutions seem to be elusive, not that far away where we've had other programming going on for a while. And some of those Darfurian refugees would like to go to WOW. And so that's the kind of thing that we can help expedite and sort of and try to figure out. We've had longer term programming where people are turning their lives around and their kids are able to go to school and they're thinking very differently about the future they're not holding on to the scars of the past and getting people to that

place i mean that's really what war child does right is it's it's that it's that bridge between dependence and independence between hopelessness and hopefulness and so um by investing in that and seeing that progress that's what makes it all worthwhile. And that's when it's that's the stuff that I try to hold on to. One of the other things that another young woman said from Darfur when I was talking to them in that mosque, she turned around and she said, those who wage war come to kill us. And those who are indifferent to our suffering want to destroy us and and and that's what it is right it's it's if we can whatever little bit we can do to restore people's sense of of dignity and and the space to recover and to rebuild, that's when you transition from this

place of chronic conflict to something that actually will lead us all to more peaceful societies. It's just, unfortunately, we invest too heavily in the arms and war side of that equation. And we invest by comparison, so little, less than one 12th of military, global military spending is, is, uh, spent on humanitarian aid. I mean, by comparison, you know, humanitarian aid is, is one 12th of global military spending. Um, getting that balance right would actually promote a more peaceful world. It's just, it's a longer term strategy. And we tend to think in very short term ways around these challenges. What's the right balance?

Is it one for one? I got to be honest, when you said 112th, I was surprised. It's that high. Yeah. Well, you know, these days with everything that's been going on in Ukraine and Gaza, it might be far less than that, especially with a lot of the cutbacks that are taking place. Look, it doesn't cost a lot. It doesn't cost a lot to educate a child.

It doesn't cost a lot to provide clean water and access to food. These kinds of things are pennies, dollars, compared to what we spend on our vast armaments throughout the world, our weapons of mass destruction. And you can certainly argue around the need for a fulsome defense budget in order to promote global peace and security. And I don't want to get into all that stuff right now, but what I would say is that we look at aid as something that is wasteful. It's usually the one thing people think that they can just dispense with.

If they're trying to cut budgets, it always seems to be like, why would we send our money to other parts of the world? And what good does it do? And we have enough problems here at home and that's the kind of stuff that we hear all the time the stuff that i've heard for 30 years but the reality is that when you're facing a global refugee and displacement crisis 110 plus million people the worst since world war ii when you see all of these crises popping up all over the place. And you need to recognize the interconnected nature of these outcomes. And so by investing in the humanitarian piece, it actually invests in all of our peace and security. And so as much

as humanitarian aid, we like to position it as something that is altruistic, it's also in our best interest. And so we need to shift some of the thinking around that. And if we did shift that thinking, then however much money we spend, we wouldn't see it as being wasted or unnecessary or not something that is relevant to us. We would see it as completely the opposite. Okay. We're almost out of time. You did mention earlier Yemen, because that's often on your mind, having been there yourself and dealt with some difficult situations there. If our listeners are still looking at a map, it's all in the same orbit here. I mean, Yemen is not that far from South Sudan, sort of across Ethiopia,

across the Red Sea, across the Gulf of Aden. It's right there. And it's in the news in a way it hasn't been before as a result of the Houthi attacks on shipping and their involvement really as part of the whole Israel-Hamas thing. Have you given Yemen much thought as a result of everything, your own background there and what you're witnessing now? And if you do, give us your thoughts before we close this out for today.

Yeah, well, you and I have talked about Yemen a lot over the last year because I've been there three times, including twice to the Houthi control areas just in the last 11 months. And I was there two months ago. I was in the southern part of the country. So it's always on my mind. We have programming in Yemen. And look, the reality is it's an extremely vulnerable country.

The Houthis are seeing, for them, the incentive around participating in Gaza is that they are effectively a proxy for Iran and are supported by Iran, both militarily and financially. And so for them to do Iran's bidding in the Red Sea, which keep in mind with the Red Sea as well, that 12% of global trade and about 30% of all shipping global container traffic, 30% of global container traffic goes through the Red Sea there. So even though we don't think about Yemen, when the Houthis decide to flex militarily like this, the impact on the world and the world economy is pretty significant. So this is really about them trying to

curry favor with Iran. They've had their own political instabilities. They've been at war for almost a decade. About 377,000 people have died in that conflict. They're out of money. The Houthis can't even pay their public sector workers. They're not paying their teachers or their police, and they've had trouble even pay their public sector workers. They're not paying their teachers or their police, and they've had trouble even paying their own military. So this appeals to them for domestic reasons. It gives them a level of credibility within the region.

It gives them a level of power. The extent to which they represent a meaningful threat to world militaries like the united states or the united kingdom not really but what it does represent in terms of drawing all of these other actors into a broader regional conflict and we saw some of that today as well with with uh iran affiliated attacks on u.s soldiers in j, of all places, right? Previously, we'd seen that in Iraq and we'd seen it in Syria, but in Jordan, which is a strong U.S. ally. This is where just by creating friction, uncertainty, disruption, blocking the movement of goods and this kind of stuff, frustrating, particularly the United States and other Western powers, that's where Iran sees it has an advantage without engaging directly with, for example, the United States, because that would be a point of no return. So when I think about Yemen, this is what I think of. I think of a population that is

starving, that is broke, that is in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. And now on top of it, they are pawns in this broader geopolitical game between various powers to try to achieve an advantage that is unclear at this moment. Dr. Samantha Nutt, Warchild Canada. Sam, thanks very much. We're all glad you're home. We know that you'll be going back because that's what you care about. And, you know, obviously you care about things here as well,

but we know that that's your mission in life, working on these kinds of things. and we're proud to know you. So take care. Thank you, and thanks for having me again. I'm sorry I'm always depressing. I don't mean to be, but it just always works out that way. Well, that laugh makes us feel better. Take care.

Thanks. Take care. Dr. Samantha Nutt from War Child Canada. With an inside look of what it's like to go on one of these journeys to help, to aid. Now, Dr. Nutt mentioned a number of other Canadian-based aid groups that are involved in work in Sudan and South Sudan. If you feel so, you know, they all take donations. They all need your help. And if you want to go to Sam's organization, it's warchild.ca,

and you can find out everything you need to know there. And we hope you enjoyed today's Encore Edition with Dr. Samantha Nutt. That's from January 30th on The Bridge. We'll be back tomorrow with your turn, your answers to the question, what's your favorite Canadian book? What do you think the other listeners could learn from? Name the book and the author must be a Canadian. And you just might win the prize of the week. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in 24 hours.