KEY POINTS:
The diminutive woman sipping a latte in the sun looks relaxed and carefree, her face younger than her 59 years. In conversation she is animated and quick to laugh. She talks of family - her immediate priorities include visiting her sons in Melbourne and shopping for her grandchildren. But with one cellphone call she could be whisked to the world's troublespots: a natural or man-made disaster in Africa, Asia or the Middle-East.
When carnage erupts in the world's flashpoints, Judy Moore, ex-street kid from Christchurch, is among the first to go in. After the Pakistan earthquake, after the tsunami, in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and a dozen other hotspots, Moore, a grandmother of three, was calling the shots for World Vision.
She forms the advance guard which sets up a base camp, liaises with local and UN officials, and reports back to the aid agency on what's needed and where. Among indescribable chaos and constant danger, her job is to make sense of the situation as head of a small rapid response team of specialists.
"World Vision has warehouses [of equipment, food and clothing] and can mobilise with relief items immediately. So I have to make sure we have the right staff, and we know about the areas we're going into."
Yet unlike the engineers, doctors, finance and security experts in her team, Moore's only qualification is enthusiasm. For the past 20 years she has followed trouble around - from Cambodia through Bosnia and Rwanda to Iraq and Afghanistan, the world's most volatile frontlines.
It's quite a leap for a kid who ran away from home and left school at 15 before finding God and marrying young.
Now divorced and based in Cyprus, she has spent the past fortnight on a rare New Zealand visit to attend the centenary of her old primary school, Wharenui - which proved an excuse to get together with her three sisters for the first time in 30 years.
Her parents divorced when she was 12, a rarity in early-1960s Christchurch, and the six Booth children were spread from pillar to post. She went with her father "but I didn't like it, so I left. I ended up staying with friends - different ones would take me in. I was a bit of a street kid I guess."
Her mother died, aged 42, not long after and she left school at 15 to work for Kodak "so I could earn some money". She had little contact with her siblings until her father's death in the early 1980s, when she decided "family is important."
Her troubled childhood coincided with an era of sexual liberation, drugs and rock 'n' roll - if she hadn't become a Christian, she says, "I could have been in the gutter."
Raising three boys in suburban Melbourne brought stability but, with her children grown, she reverted to risk-taking behaviour. She has dodged bullets and walked through minefields in Bosnia; had her house surrounded by tanks in Kosovo; been carjacked by a drunk soldier demanding money; seen a colleague killed when Sudanese rebels burned down a medical clinic in Darfur; worked in Mosul, Iraq, in an office hidden behind concrete blocks to lessen the impact of car bombs, and where the escape plan involved abseiling from a three-story building.
"It cost me my marriage, I suppose, because I didn't want to come home. I felt I was making a difference.
"I wouldn't risk my life and health unless I felt I was making a small contribution to address injustices."
She plays up to the galloping granny tag given to her in Albania in 1991 - but it is far too genteel a description for this Kiwi/Aussie battler who doesn't take no for an answer.
Those who've worked with her say her can-do attitude, fearlessness, unflagging determination and ability to get alongside strangers under stress make her indispensable.
Actor Aaron Ward of Elmo the Clown fame was invited by Moore to Kosovo in 1999 to help children in refugee camps.
"Nothing fazes her - she's in there in the snow with food packages and medical supplies. She just keeps on going," he says.
"When it's called for, she doesn't back down. She puts her foot down if she wants to, but not to the detriment of people. She has that rapport with people when she first goes in there, it makes it a lot easier for the organisation to get things done.
"She's been doing that in so many countries - going in, setting up then moving on to the next place."
Moore has seen terrible carnage - in Banda Aceh, Indonesia after the tsunami where, with thousands dead or missing there were no local agencies to mobilise the relief effort, and after the Pakistan earthquake.
"Disasters take a much harder toll on developing countries since they do not have the resilience of rich countries ... they take a lot longer to recover."
But there are rewards - like seeing an 89-year-old Cambodian man shed tears of joy when a tap was turned on, bringing piped water to his mountain village for the first time. Or the cleaning woman she befriended in Cambodia. She gave her a typewriter and the woman taught herself to type. The woman became head of IT at World Vision Cambodia.
"Just because one person took some time to listen to somebody else, it changed their life completely. It happened to me. I was given an opportunity and was able to make a difference."
THE first time she listened it was to Mary Edlin, an adult colleague at Kodak in Christchurch. Moore was yearning for the bright lights of Auckland.
"I was a bit of a rebel I suppose - I could have been a rough kid. But Mary befriended me, invited me to her home and said 'you have to come to church with me' and I heard the story of Jesus for the first time. I saw people were happy."
It's a faith she doesn't ram down others' throats but says: "Something happened - it changed me."
She did get to Auckland, on a work transfer, and stayed with some Christian friends of Mary. She went to Hong Kong to work with missionaries for a year but returned to marry Peter, a nurse she'd met through the church. By age 24 she had three sons and some foster children before the family moved to Perth when Peter took a job to be close to his parents.
Life in Australia for the former teen rebel could not have been more "normal". "I didn't want the children to be latchkey kids so I stayed home."
Moore's second lifechanging experience came when the couple were happily ensconced in suburban Melbourne. Their two oldest had left home; it was time to go to work. She answered an ad for a part-time clerical worker in the local World Vision office. " I didn't know who they were or what they did."
The job was to last five weeks. Within days she was asked to stay permanently and became PA to the chief executive.
There was famine in Ethiopia and when World Vision staff learned of Peter's medical training, they persuaded him to go there.
"He came back and said I needed to get some overseas experience in case this is what we want to do."
In 1989, she was sent to Thailand for six months, which became one year.
"I found this is what I was meant to do. I was basically a street kid since I was 12. I felt like an internally displaced child myself - I'd found my calling."
The director of the Cambodian office invited her there; she agreed to if she could take her husband and their youngest son, Clint.
"After that Rwanda blew up and I was there for a year, then the Bosnian war happened.
"It's just sort of gone on from there. There are so many injustices in the world; if you can save just one person it's worthwhile."
But aid has an understandably high burnout factor. For most, one or two years is enough before the sheer magnitude of the poverty, the working conditions, the political frustrations - and the dangers - overwhelm. Not Moore.
"I just have endurance. I haven't got cynical. I'm not sitting behind a desk seeing the mistakes others are making. I go and learn for myself and learn from my mistakes."
There have been a few - such as giving tractors to Cambodian farmers. "One of them said to me: 'We have bullocks. Will the tractor give us manure?"'
But there have been far more triumphs - programmes bringing water to remote mountain villages, helping Albanian families make cash from farming, housing gypsies, help for disabled people, rebuilding schools, providing playgrounds.
But it is exhausting and she has thought about retirement. "When you first go to a disaster you don't eat properly, you don't get enough sleep, you survive on adrenalin."
Iraq was to be her swansong - one more adrenalin rush in a war zone before returning to Melbourne to be with the grandchildren, she told a reporter. That was in 2003. Since then, there have been assignments in Iran, Darfur, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon and, this year, Russia and Afghanistan.
Her second son Brad is ex-Army and is well aware of the dangers she faces. "My sons have tried to persuade me they need me at home for the grandchildren - but they do understand."
Clint, her youngest, wrote to her recently recalling an incident in Cambodia when a dying man who'd stood on a mine grabbed her by the arm and said: "You are the only one who can do something."
The Wharenui Primary School reunion was a hoot for Moore. When she left school, her family splintered by divorce, she must have seemed the one least likely to succeed. She took little interest in schoolwork - "I never thought I was bright enough."
The reunion brought her in touch with "all my old boyfriends" and what she describes as their boring lives. "They are mechanics, freezing workers, a petrol station owner ... One of them said 'you are the best thing that has happened to the school'. I felt really honoured."
