Mary Hkawn Tsin loves just doing her job, helping communities in her home state of Kachin. Challenging gender stereotypes just comes with the territory.
“When you mention the word engineer, the local communities immediately think that a man will show up,” says Mary Hkawn Tsin, an engineer with the ICRC’s team in Kachin State. In this richly colorful video and article, Mary takes deep into the hills of her home state of Kachin, where she aspires to use her expertise as an engineer to help her region develop and thrive despite often great challenges.
As one of the 19 women engineers working for the ICRC in Myanmar, Mary is part of the water and habitat team based in Myitkyina, Kachin State. While Myanmar boasts near parity when it comes to the gender breakdown of engineering jobs, Mary says being a woman in this sector does confront some people’s expectations and stereotypes. But that makes the satisfaction of seeing clean, safe water flow, after long treks and difficult engineering feats, even more satisfying. “I work with total confidence and make sure to give 100 per cent and more,” she says with a smile.
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
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We explore the many challenges that have faced volunteers in Ukraine, and we talk with an artist and volunteer from Syria about the connection between art and humanity.
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