KEY POINTS:
Tony Wrightson OXFAM
After 10 years of killing and destruction in Bougainville, Tony Wrightson was one of the first of the aid workers sent in to build peace. As programme manager for Oxfam, the Hawkes Bay teacher co-ordinated projects helping villagers to make money, such as poultry farming and market gardening, against a backdrop of tension between factions who had fought for a decade.
The small-scale projects funded by NZ Aid gradually instilled goodwill and trust in people who had been on opposite sides. Workshops helped the process of reconciliation.
This is what New Zealand does well, says Wrightson.
"We do it pretty well because we do it small, supporting organisations like Oxfam and Save the Children," says Wrightson, who has worked for various aid agencies for over 20 years in Africa and the Pacific. He is in Napier, extending his home over summer for therapy before his next assignment.
Troublespots attract Wrightson like a drug: he's done five years in Uganda, six in Sudan and 13 in the highlands of Papua New Guinea; each an alluring cocktail of isolation, extreme conditions and tribal warfare.
"My love of development work has been working in marginalised communities in remote locations with true indigenous people.
"It's at that level you can see the most productive impact."
In Bougainville, his role involved helping locals to take leading roles in Oxfam's development programmes. That led to the formation of Osi Tanata (Custodian of the Land), an independent agency which has become the key non-government organisation in central and southern Bougainville. Its work includes literacy programmes, conflict resolution, training, business and community development and helping local organisations to gain skills and confidence.
New Zealand attracts criticism for its small aid budget which at 0.27 per cent of gross national income is well below the OECD target of 0.7 per cent. Wrightson says that's missing the point.
"We're traditionally good at spending small amounts of money but very well directed with high impact.
"It goes against the cynical side of aid, which is building big bridges and roads which quickly collapse through lack of operational support.
"Often it doesn't take money; it takes organisational skills."
He says New Zealand is most effective at working with small indigenous organisations in marginalised communities.
"Indigenous people know how best it should happen. What they want is someone to just be with them while they develop the confidence and skills, plus a little bit of resourcing.
"It's amazing what $500 can do for an individual family in the provision of tools and support to get a small business up and running."
He contrasts our approach with Australia, which has adopted a regional leadership role, particularly since September 11.
"Australia tends to come in and stand over - New Zealand people have an ability to sit on the ground with Pacific people, listen, hear and respond.
"Five thousand New Zealand dollars can be incredibly well spent in the Pacific compared to 100,000 Australian dollars in some respects because Australia has tended to go in and be big.
"In the Solomons, I saw the Ramsi (regional assistance mission) approach and thought 'my God, they're doing it wrong here', and they've had to change their approach."
In PNG, where Wrightson is Oxfam's programme adviser, successes have included Kup Women For Peace, which has engineered a downturn in tribal bloodshed in a remote highlands district.
In Uganda and Sudan, Wrightson was involved in educational projects. He taught for two years in Hawkes Bay before he was hooked by the "adrenalin rush" of a visit to PNG as a Commonwealth volunteer. "I left the classroom because I could see a real need not so much for formal education but vocational training."
A love of tramping and cartography, developed as a schoolboy in Hastings, have helped.
"Anywhere I've been has involved remote exploration. That's possibly a New Zealand thing - you find New Zealanders in the most extraordinary nooks and crannies, we do explore geographical frontiers."
They are also dangerous frontiers. In northern Uganda, as the Lord's Resistance Army was abducting children to train them as soldiers, Wrightson was running a distance teacher education programme in isolated villages.
"I left my base to drive to a small town close to the border [with Sudan] in a little Suzuki with two Ugandan colleagues. We must have passed over a landmine and been too light because there was a Land Rover with 17 people on board about 500m behind us and we heard this boom. We turned around and went back and it was just complete wreckage - all 17 were killed.
"We had another 100km to reach the town but had passed the point of no return. I almost went mad looking at every lump or mark on the road thinking we were going to hit another one.
"That whole landmining thing remains a blight on fighting zones."
The risks plainly are not enough to deter Wrightson who worked fulltime overseas until easing back slightly five years ago.
These days he spends several months at his beachfront home in Napier and six to eight months on assignment.
"I rationalise it in the respect that we are very precious partners and guests of indigenous local communities.
"While they're prepared to take the risks, indigenous people themselves don't want to die.
"We can become as street savvy and as careful as them: when they run, we run and when they don't move, we don't move.
"We just tune in to the level of care that they have.
"When you work with them, the sense of accomplishment and achievement far outweighs any sense of danger."
Tim Sutton UNICEF
Perhaps it was because there were no vacancies in Dunedin band the Verlaines at the time Tim Sutton graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from Otago University.
The son of a South Island sheep farmer jokes about a youthful exaggerated belief in one's talent, but it's more likely the paucity of opportunities to make a living from a training in classical music that led to his current line of work.
Sutton, 42, is Unicef programme manager for the Pacific Islands, has a Masters in leadership studies from Exeter University and a jet-setting though unglamorous working life. Bangladesh, Bhutan, in the foothills of the Himalaya and Iraq are all stamped in his passport.
It's a career that flopped into his lap rather than one he sought. "I don't know that you make these sorts of decisions, they just happen. I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing and I love it but I don't recall making an active decision."
The life-changing moment came when he was communications manager for Unicef's New Zealand committee. He'd not thought of moving beyond Wellington until "people from head office" began asking whether he'd thought of working overseas. Application forms followed.
Next, he was in Bangladesh, with what seemed to be everyone else on the planet. "If you think there is a population crush in India go to Dhaka," says Sutton.
He wrote donor reports and fundraising proposals and was the office senior by the time he left four years later. "As New Zealanders we tend to get our hands dirty and try to get things done. In Bangladesh that was appreciated, so I found myself getting more responsibility."
Next post Iraq, as Unicef's communications officer. It was in the last years of Saddam Hussein's regime and Sutton worked on the release of an influential child mortality survey which showed the impact of sanctions on Iraq's children.
"I'm still very proud of that bit of work because we managed to come out with a strong position on children."
As a result, many items such as high-protein biscuits and standard medicines were excluded from the sanctions. "We were able to track the difference it made. We saw an improvement in the nutritional status in under-fives."
The bottom line is often measured in lives. Sutton and his colleagues were able to compare population growth with the growth expected in normal times. "Given the first Gulf War and the following sanctions, there was a gap of 500,000 kids. That's what we showed."
Life in Baghdad then was markedly different from now. "We felt safe, so long as we didn't go down certain streets. There wasn't any petty violence and the Iraqis were extremely friendly. You would go into a shop and be welcomed like an old friend. Next time you went in you would be their brother."
"[But] for Iraqis it was a terrible time. No one would dare mention Saddam Hussein's name for fear someone was listening. There was an amazing system of control. Every 30 households reported to a [ruling Baath] party member [who] controlled everything for those households."
The work has given Sutton and wife Prue an international family - 6-year-old Max, born in Jordan, 16-month-old Tash was adopted in Bhutan, and Lizzie was born nine months ago in Suva.
In Dzongka, the language of Bhutan, Tashi means "good luck" and in many of the places Sutton and his colleagues work, it helps a child to have luck riding on their shoulders.
Bhutan is a tiny kingdom of 600,000 in the Himalayas, north of Bangladesh. The landscape is rugged and tourists are rare.
"It's much more vertical than Nepal [to the west]. It's the steepest part of the Himalayas. People walk everywhere. There's one road across the country and that takes three days to drive and it's a small country."
Bangladesh? "Wow, what an amazing place ... so full of life and colour. There are horrendous problems, awful nutrition problems, awful water and sanitation issues and education issues but when you look back at what Bangladesh has achieved since independence [1971], in terms of social indicators it's made more progress than Pakistan."
Much of that is because of the work of a big NGO community rather than its politicians, who haven't served the country well.
Its people are enduring and practical in the face of disasters such as the periodic floods which strike the delta region to the south.
"I was there during the 1998 floods. They are different from New Zealand, where our rivers run very fast and floods come quickly. In Bangladesh you watch the water creeping up day after day and it comes slowly up the street towards your house.
"People just get on with it. They would pull rickshaws together and put planks across them and that would be the bridge to get from one building to another. People just get on with it, this is part of life."
"There, you are constantly exposed to poverty on such a scale that it's pretty unimaginable," says Sutton, who outside his work would help get huge tubs of rice to hungry children.
"You have to figure out ways of dealing with that," says Sutton. It helps to feel that you are making a practical contribution even if it's "often in ways that aren't that sexy".
"It's a policy changed, it's a new code of practice introduced in a hospital, it's a revised curriculum."
Their bolthole is a house by the sea in the idyllic Banks Peninsula bay of Little Akaloa.
"Normally we are in big dusty, dirty, noisy, horrible cities. We wanted an escape in New Zealand which was quiet and by the beach and here we are in Suva, in a nice quiet place by the beach."
Sutton manages Unicef's work in 14 Pacific nations, focusing on the least developed the Solomons, Vanuatu and Kiribati.
From Suva, they organise programmes involving such things as child protection and adolescent life skills programmes, which include issues such as safe sex .
Compared to the Solomons, Fiji is well off but there is poverty, particularly in rural villages. The coup its fourth at the beginning of the month will have an impact.
"The fear is enormous, the actuality it's a little early to judge. But there has been a big drop in tourism. How long that takes to recover remains to be seen. Already a lot of workers have been laid off so that impacts on families."
He predicts a financial crunch when school starts, with families having drained reserves to ensure a good family Christmas.
The location is something of a concession for a family with a baby. Home is just a three-hour flight away. Come Monday, the Suttons will open their presents in Christchurch their daughters' first New Zealand Christmas.
They plan to settle in New Zealand by the time their oldest reaches secondary-school age. After all, there is no place like home. "That's where we want our kids to think of as their country."
Dr David Friend Medecins Sans Frontieres, SIM
Dr David Friend looks out of place in the Queen St Christmas rush but his walking boots, denim shorts and pale blue checked shirt give a clue to his shopping list. He's in an arcade stocking up on drugs to ward off malaria, dysentery and giardia.
I want him to talk about his life-saving medical and surgical work in appalling and high-risk conditions in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe but I've been warned he's not one to talk-up his exploits.
His hesitant reaction is not encouraging: "This is taking me way out of my comfort zone."
He agrees on the basis that it's not about him and that talking about conditions in impoverished, conflict-riven countries is part of his work. Hoping he might find it easier to talk over a coffee, we meet in a cafe, where he says water will be fine.
I needn't have worried. He is softly-spoken and each answer is prefaced by a disturbing pause. But his measured response is always revealing, if devoid of self-importance.
Friend has spent most of the past 20 years working abroad, mainly with Medecins sans Frontieres. His most recent assignment was the toughest yet, operating in southern Sudan from tents or huts with a dirt floor and a thatched roof. Before then it was Sierra Leone, a population "recovering from a brutal civil war with forced amputations and abducted child soldiers".
Quite apart from the dangers of armed conflict, he is at risk from infectious diseases including HIV. But his all-round skills place him in demand for everything from paediatrics and obstetrics to adult medicine and surgery.
Sometimes, confronted by mass casualties from tribal or ethnic fighting with little surgical back-up, he feels very alone.
"But most times we're in a team situation and we all have to help each other out.
"It doesn't always go well - despite our best efforts there are disasters. Mortality is still very significant, even in a hospital."
A surprising number of patients present with "just general body aches and pains" resulting from trauma or harsh living. Delayed presentation is common, particularly among women after childbirth.
But the biggest workload is "the bog-standard infectious diseases like malaria and diarrhoea, and malnutrition and epidemics like meningitis."
Almost since returning from Sudan in September, Friend has been raising funds for his next trip, to Zambia, with Christian aid group Serving in Mission. He leaves early next month, bound for Mukinge Hill Mission, where he'll "look after mainly the surgical side of things for a year, then see how it goes."
Is he looking forward to working in a country relatively free from recent conflict? "The needs are just as great."
"If you lose an African mother then the health of the other children in the family is put at risk.
"If someone working in the fields loses the ability to work, through a fracture or something, it compromises their ability to survive. They don't have the safety nets of our system.
"The idea is to strengthen things, try to pass on what we know. We're never going to be there forever."
Growing up in Queenstown, Waiuku and Devonport, Friend set his sights on becoming a doctor and graduated from Auckland Medical School in 1984. But it was always a means to an end.
"I saw some film footage when I was about 11 of a refugee camp. I always had a bit of a dream and a calling for that sort of thing."
He spent his elective year in a Zulu camp in South Africa and a few years after qualifying was in Zimbabwe with Volunteer Service Abroad.
"Certainly, there's a Christian faith which drives it along very strongly. But I wouldn't do it unless I enjoyed it."
What he enjoys is "just pushing yourself to the limits of what you can achieve".
He says a handful of his medical school colleagues followed a similar path and the Zambia invitation came from one, Middlemore Hospital physician John Griffiths.
"I can't imagine why more aren't doing it really - you get so much back in return. It's not all one-way traffic, it's the experiences and relationships you build with local people, their friendships and their trust.
"The people may be poor, but they have a kind of dignity. They just want you to do your best for them."
He will typically spend nine to 12 months on duty before a short break. "It doesn't seem long to me. What I'm doing isn't long term - there are [aid workers] who've been living in these places for years."
He is saddened but not discouraged when progress is set back, as in Sudan where an upsurge in violence has prompted most aid agencies to withdraw or in Sri Lanka where government forces and Tamil separatists are again at war.
"Some people get frustrated and burnt out; I never have. The needs are great but it doesn't actually take a lot to fix a lot of things.
"We don't have any control over the big picture but we can do what we know."
James Gray UNICEF
When we phoned, James Gray was on the road headed to a conflict zone in the deep south of Thailand. The trouble involves various insurgent groups and is across three Thai states. "Schools have been burned and people are being killed almost on a daily basis," says Gray in a matter-of-fact tone.
His calmness is because he's seen far worse. Gray, a Victoria University graduate, has spent 21 months in Darfur, a region of mayhem in the west of Sudan that is among the world's worst disasters.
Darfur represents the deep end of the field in which Gray works. Within Unicef such places are referred to as "non-family duty stations". It's no place to take a family.
Since school, he had wanted an international job, although it wasn't until Victoria University that he focused on child protection and became aware of Unicef's work. Gray studied "child soldiers" for his Masters degree in Political Science and "knew then what I wanted to do".
He joined the organisation on graduation and spent 18 months in Cambodia and the next 21 months in Darfur.
Gray is 27 and single and doing what he wants to do. "I don't see myself stopping. It's something I really enjoy. I love the international environment, I love working for Unicef and the work's fascinating."
If he has a family, he will likely continue. There are "nice locations to work in, like Bangkok", where he is now posted, probably as a reward for his time in Darfur.
"Darfur was what I had wanted to do. It was real hands-on emergency work, right in the thick of things, so I learned a huge amount there."
Refugees continue to flood into IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps after their villages have been attacked.
Causes of the violence are many. "It's racial, ethnic, religious. The people of Darfur have been marginalised by the Government of Sudan and as a result of years of very little money being put into the area there is a high-level poverty.
"Different groups formed, such as the Sudanese Liberation Army, who are fighting for some sort of succession from Khartoum or more recognition and support from the Khartoum Government. And the Government has reacted [with force] to that."
"Often [the refugees] fled with only their lives. I remember driving through a village and seeing the remains of the burned-out huts. Valuable things like buckets and metal cooking pots were left on the ground and those are expensive commodities. It shows the chaos in which people had fled.
"Initially, it's a bit overwhelming but you do just get on with it. You are still shocked by the situation, but you are working with a lot of people from around the world so there is a good social support system, and it is an important job. You focus on what you are trying to do and try not to think too much about what other people are going through and how awful their situation is."
Gray hesitates when asked whether he sees solutions for Darfur. Occasionally it improves to a state of "relative stability" and he dares to hope, he says, but the situation now is dire, with a 4pm curfew and agency workers unable to travel to the camps from their base in the town of Al Geneina.
When they do travel they are targets for armed robbers. "We were lucky. No UN vehicles were attacked during the time I was there but a lot of NGOs were stopped and sometimes their belongings and vehicles were taken."
Living in Bangkok couldn't be more of a contrast, though his work is just as needed. Gray tends to the needs of children in nine camps along the Myanmar-Thai border which contain 140,000 refugees affected by ethnic tensions and Myanmar's military Government.
