Q: This is not your first go-around with the IIHA, correct?

A: I taught in the Institute during its first couple of years. I knew Dr. Cahill, because I had been in international work my entire career. From time to time I had visited him for my own illnesses, which were usually parasitic in nature.

Q: What have you been doing recently?

I’ve been working as an independent consultant since 2009. Prior to that, I worked for organizations such as CARE International, the International Rescue Committee, Academy for Educational Development, the United States Agency for International Development, the UN World Food Program, UNICEF, and the UN Development Programme, UNDP among others. I’ve done a lot of work looking at gender-based violence. Most of the countries that I’ve worked in have been either in conflict or post-conflict.

Q: What will you be doing for IIHA?

{I’ll be} participating in the development, management, and implementation of the Institute’s academic and training programs, along with responsibilities for teaching and coordinating the academic aspects of the Institute’s undergraduate and graduate curricula at Fordham. I’m making sure that our courses are meeting the students’ needs in this area, and also that there’s a compatibility with other programs. For our new graduate program, which we’ll be launching in the fall, I’m ensuring that we have course descriptions and professors identified to teach the courses. I’m also teaching humanitarian affairs, which is a prerequisite for some of the more advanced courses. I love to see the excitement and enthusiasm among students; they’re hungry for information.

Q: Tell us about your hands-on experience.

A:  I lived for a year and a half in a refugee camp in Western Tanzania. People were fleeing genocide in Rwanda resulting in a massive movement of people into Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was a director of a HIV AIDS and reproductive health program that was funded by USAID. I lived in the camps, supervised, hired, and trained outreach educators who moved through the camps to train and educate refugees about HIV AIDS prevention. The camps kept expanding and expanding, until there were nearly 500,000 people. I originally agreed to stay for six months, but ended up remaining for a year and a half. It was quite challenging.

Q: What is the most pressing problem facing the humanitarian assistance community?

A: I’d have to say lack of sufficient funds to do what we need to do. It has also become increasingly insecure for people working in this field. I have a number of friends who have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Then there is a growing number of refugees who are internally displaced within their own borders. Their situations were initially meant to be temporary, but for some of them, the displacements have lasted for many, many years. That was certainly the case with the Afghan refugees who were settled in Pakistan. Multiple generations grew up as refugees. There’s a frustration and hopelessness among the young people in these camps.

Q: What draws you to this work?

A: I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It seems natural to want to make a tiny bit of difference. I’m not going to change the world, but if I can make the lives of other people just a little better, that’s inspiring.

That was one of the conclusions of “Global Migration and Cities: Urban Governance, Migration, and the Refugee Crisis,” a panel discussion held Friday, Feb. 9 at the Lincoln Center campus.

The panel, which was part of conference organized by the Fordham Urban Consortium, featured

-Els de Graauw, P.D., associate professor of political science, at Baruch College

-Jennifer Gordon, professor of law at Fordham Law School

-Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies program at Fordham

Judy Benjamin, Ph.D, the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, moderated the panel, which touched upon everything from the plight of Syrian war refugees to the estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in New York City.

Hinze noted that although refugees are no longer confined to camps, and immigrants in the United States no longer only settle in “gateway” cities such as New York City, cities still offer a level of integration that a nation states can’t offer.

“There are already communities in place that provide immigrants with an intermediary, rather than being plunged into a new national context with different customs,” she said.

She said it’s also important to remember that immigrants are also settling in places like Alabama and North Carolina.

“This is an important conversation to have, because in a way, it takes away this dichotomy between the large metropolis and rural areas, because rural areas are increasingly feeding immigration,” she said.

De Graauw agreed, noting that immigrant affairs offices are springing up around the country.

“Ten to 15 years ago, you could probably count on one or maybe two hands how many cities had those offices. Today, we have over 40 of them, and they’re not just in the expected places like New York City. They’re also found in much smaller places, like Memphis,” she said.

“Cities are trying to figure out what they can do, because they are responsible for creating productive, healthy and stable communities. They know all too well that if you alienate or drive underground big segments of your population, it’s going to have ripple effects in many different ways.”

Local context is still important, as a place like Detroit is more amenable to the notion that immigrants are a demographic lifeline than say Atlanta, which de Graauw said is seeing greater immigrant population growth in the suburbs. But issues such as municipal I.D. cards, which New Haven first unveiled in 2007, bring together cities into groups such as Cities for Action, which a coalition of over 150 mayors and municipal leaders.

Gordon said Amman, Jordan, is a good example of how a city can ally itself with an international non-governmental organization to push its national government in a progressive direction. The European Union and the United Nations promised aid to Jordan if it agreed to make it possible for 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally. In August, the national government agreed, but it restricted that employment to specific work, such as that in garment factories, and it set aside 20 desirable occupations to Jordanians. Amman officials have pushed back hard though, and have tentatively received exceptions for jobs in construction.

“That to me is a potential positive story about cities, and international human rights organizations combining to successfully put pressure on the national government,” Gordon said.