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The Typhoon Haiyan Airlift and the Gap After It with Weanne Estrada · find your cause

• speaker-0: This person's not making sense, they're not consistent, they're providing very little detail. So I think I'm just gonna deny this application and then that person will consent back to the circumstances of harm. speaker-1: Alrighty, so thanks everyone for tuning in to this episode of Find Your Cause. Today we have Wien Estrata, who's a mental health specialist at Adra International. We in, thank you so much for your time today on this morning. speaker-0: Thank you for having me, Joseph. It's my pleasure to be here. speaker-1: Awesome. So per usual, we like to get started with the mission of the organizations that we're interviewing. So what is a mission of admin? speaker-0: So, Aja, our values are justice, compassion, and love. And our mission is to serve humanity so all may live as God intended. So, just based on that mission alone, you can tell we are a faith-based organization. We are the Global Humanitarian Arm the Seventh day Adventist Church. We operate in about 120 different countries and have about a thousand different projects in the fields of health, nutrition, and water, education, livelihoods, and disasters and emergency. Genesis. speaker-1: All right. That that's a a wide swath of things that you all do. And I have a lot of questions about them, but before we get into that, why you? Why is being a mental health specialist kind of your your current speaker-0: No, it all dates back to childhood, right? No, 'cause I believe it or not, growing up as a nine year old like living in the Philippines, I actually wanted to work for Aja even back then. So growing up in the Philippines, I was used to just A lot of typhoons and disasters coming each year. We're in the Pacific Typhoon Belt. So I was no stranger to disaster relief operations. And so Aja was always there. Aja was always present. If you hear someone say Aja, they'll that's the organization that helps with disaster relief. And so I wanted to work for them. But why specifically mental health? When I graduated from college, I started volunteering for some relief operations. This wasn't for Aja, this was for a government response. And Typhoon Hayan hit us, and it's apparently the strongest typhoon ever recorded that has made landfall. And so part of that response was airlifting people who had been affected from the province to Manila, the capital center, where they would be resettled, rehoused, or brought back to their relatives there. And so they took people just with the clothes still wet on their backs, they put them in military planes, flew them over to the capital. And so my role was to provide psychological first aid and also to just attend to their immediate needs. And then after attending to their immediate needs, I would help them get into vents and vehicles where they would be taken elsewhere. At that point, I was so confused. I was like, wait, what were we doing? They just came from the province when they were so affected, and now we're like, we just rescue them, now we're like shipping them off. What happens when the the entirety of their grief and their loss has settled in? What happens next? And so it was that point I was like, okay, this is the gap that I want to work in. And looking back, it all worked out. I wanted to work for Aja I wanted to work in mental health. And now I'm the mental health specialist for Aja International. So that nine year old kid would have been proud of me, I hope. speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. That's such a that's such a fun journey. And related to the mental health component of disaster relief, for Adra, is that where you are spending the majority of your time focusing mental health, or are there other parts of Adra that you see the need of the mental health support growing or added on beyond just a speaker-0: Great question because what our principle at ADRA is that mental health is the amplifier of all our work. And so we don't necessarily have a standalone mental health program of this is just what we do, mental health, but instead we integrate it into all the other things that we do, right? So for example, I mentioned we work in education, we operate schools in refugee camps. And when I say amplifier of our work, let's say we operate schools in refugee camps, but if kids are coming to school in distress. If they're feeling bullied, if they're anxious, they're not gonna be able to learn properly, right? And so attending to their mental health is gonna actually amplify the effects of what we're doing. Or let's say for disaster relief, we integrate mental health and disaster relief in multiple ways. So for example, as during distributions of food, water, cash assistance, we make sure that the volunteers that we deploy, they're all trained in psychological first aid so that as they're giving out their distributions, they can easily spot the person in distress and talk to them, calm them down, and then link them out to the proper referrals that they need. Or we'll also have Child-friendly spaces in maybe the evacuation centers or the distribution centers so that children to help their mental health, you don't necessarily need to put them in front of a trauma counselor and ask them to relieve their trauma, right? You help heal them through play. And so we provide child-friendly spaces at this evacuation center so that the kids can feel safe, can play with their friends, can have relationships with a consistent adult and heal exactly. And so that's a great question. We integrate mental health into all those other things that we're doing. speaker-1: Yeah, what is psychological first aid? speaker-0: So, psychological first aid, I love it because I know a lot of people feel intimidated by mental health. And I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a psychologist. How do I help people? I need to have specialized training. Psychological first aid, it also requires training, but it's pretty simple and you can do it online. It essentially follows the principles of look, listen, and link. And you don't have to be a specialist. Look, just meaning when you see a person scan their surroundings, are they safe? What are their immediate needs? Make sure they're safe. And then second, listen. So in this course, in this training, you'll be taught skills and how to listen effectively so that you can actually hear what the person is saying and what they're needed. And then the last step is link and that is putting now this making referrals for this person. And referrals, it could be anything from, okay, this person actually right now just needs food and water. Or this person right now just needs to be reconnected back to their family. Or maybe they just need information about where the services are, or maybe they actually need a mental health referral. So the beauty of this is that you don't have to be the person providing the psychological treatment. You don't have to provide that psychological relief. You can just help them in the moment and then bring them to someone who can provide that advanced care. speaker-1: Yeah. No, absolutely. What would you say somebody that has never seen or experienced, whether it's even seeing in the news or in person, the impacts of these disastrous events and the psychological impacts it has on people that you were like surprised, like you didn't realize that that this has this kind of side effect. You mentioned, I think briefly that kids in schooling might be distracted and not able to focus. So that was one that to me is like I would never have thought of that. Before you maybe got into disaster response space and after you did, what do you think are some of th those moments where people don't maybe realize that haven't experienced it? speaker-0: I think what makes the mental health needs unique in these humanitarian contexts is that they're not a one-time event. It's not like here you experience trauma and then you heal it. These people, they're still living in it, right? It's continuous, it's cumulative, it's compounding, it's consistent. So they've experienced a traumatic event. Yes, they lost their family, maybe they lost their house, but now they're still in situations of so much uncertainty. And that gets to you psychologically because uncertainty is not good for our brains. Our brains want a simple start and a close to problems. But uncertainty, you don't know where you'll be six months from now. You don't know what you'll what their situation will look like in a year. There's people in Yemen, we work a lot in Yemen, and that crisis there has been going on for more than ten years now. And so there's children who have grown up in that setting knowing nothing else. It's just that. And then I think one thing that might be a misconception among people who are not working in this field is when we hear about disasters and when we hear maybe no one died or only a few people died people are like okay that that means like there wasn't it wasn't too bad that it's okay. But like grief isn't just about like death, right? Grief and loss can also mean people losing their culture, their community, their neighborhoods maybe they've lost a sewing machine. It's not just the sewing machine they lost With that they've lost their livelihood, they've lost their income, they've lost their friends at the market, they've lost their maybe the money to send their child to school, they've lost their identity. So it's all these other things that they're grieving and losing that we might not immediately see when we think about it. speaker-1: Yeah. For the mental health focuses that you have or styles or practices that you enact with people that have been impacted by this trauma. It might be age dependent, but for maybe starting with the youth, you mentioned heal through play. Is that a a a strategy that has worked versus like addressing exactly what happened, say a child lost their home or a child lost their family healing through play versus like addressing what happened for a child and then we'll go to adults. But what are some of the mental health strategies that you enact when working with youth that have ex speaker-0: Play definitely I think is the most important with regards to like asking them questions. There's just some challenges that come with that. Number one is that in the context that we work in, we don't really have a lot of maybe trained psychiatrists or psychologists who would have the ability to approach those questions sensitively. So that makes it difficult. Another thing we want to avoid is re traumatization. A lot of these people they've told these stories A lot of times the to authorities, to the people helping them, right? And each time they tell us the story of the most difficult day in our life, to us it's just another story. It's them they're relieving that trauma. And so we also want to stay away from that. So instead we just do it through play, where they learn, they connect with their friends and also play the child friendly spaces. It's a great way for adults to be able to spot safeguarding concerns to see, today this kid seems different. Or today he has injuries that are unexplained. And so we're better able to connect these kids to protection resources. So yeah, it definitely play is great for kids. speaker-1: And then as we get older, as adults, what's the different strategy for mental health in the healing process? speaker-0: So with mental health it's a whole spectrum, right? That's a challenge too, is that there's a variety of needs. Sometimes people just need their basic needs met 'cause physical safety sometimes translates to psychological safety. Sometimes they just need their peers. So we have like peer groups where they are taught to like talk about their struggles and share with about it with each other. And then on the other spectrum is you have like the clinical approaches for people who actually do need more specialized mental health care. And so it's this whole gamut. One thing that we especially do, as I mentioned, one of the challenges that we encounter in these settings is the lack of specialist psychiatrists. In the context we work at like Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, I think the ratio is one psychiatrist to every five hundred thousand in group of people. And so which is the solution can be either see a psychiatrist or you don't get mental health care at all, right? Because you're never gonna see a psychiatrist. And so our strategy for that is the World Health Organization has a program called Mental Health Gap Action Program. So we train general providers. So those are non-specialists like general doctors, clinical officers, or maybe nurses. And we train them in how to assess manage and refer the most common mental health conditions that they're likely to experience. So for example, if a patient were to come to their clinic and the patient says, I've actually been feeling, I've been crying a lot lately. This program, it gives them an algorithm, if you hear this, ask these next questions. If they say yes, do this. If they say no, do this. So it's more straightforward for that provider who hasn't had specialist training to just be able to treat that and refer it out. Now that also just comes with its own challenges, right? Because how how do you then refer people to if there's no referral people to refer to or if the they're too far away? And so that's another challenge in itself. We do give emergency relief referral vouchers to the people that we support. And that essentially covers like their transportation, their caregiver, their food for when we refer them to psychiatrists that are outside the community. So that's just one way we try to address that. speaker-1: Going back to y'all's mission, serve humanity as God intended. How does God intend you to serve humanity? What do you believe God? speaker-0: So God's intent is for us we basically we were create the agile was established just because of the mandate of the church to love your neighbor as you love yourself, right? To be the hands and feet of Jesus. And so while we're a faith-based organization, we do not proselytize and we also serve anybody regardless of age, gender, religious or political affiliation. And essentially we believe that God wants people to live holistically. So that's physically, that's emotionally, that's socially, that's economically. And so That's where all our different programs come in. Livelihood, education. You mentioned it's a whole gamut and it is. And initially I was wondering, we do so many things. Why do we do so many? And then I guess the answer to that is in the situation that we work in, people don't experience their needs by sector. It's not just, I I need shelter and I'm okay. I need the Because of the way they're living, like the hospitals have been destroyed. They're also not gonna need healthcare, right? Their livelihoods have been destroyed. They're gonna need some type of way to look something to look forward to in the future, a way to support themselves in the future, and that's where we bring in livelihoods. There's children in these situations and they're gonna need continued education. And so we bring that emergency education in. And so we just that's why we try to do it as holistically as possible and why we're all in these different sectors. speaker-1: that makes total sense. Now usually I I ask the question of impact, like what is the impact that you see you guys bringing? But I also feel like reframing it and doing the opposite of if all of a sudden Adra was no longer a thing, what would the world be experiencing and people in maybe a disaster response era be experiencing and how would that be different? What wouldn't they be experiencing? A different way to reframe impact is what would yeah, what would they not be able to do? speaker-0: That's a great question. I want to speak specifically to my sector of mental health, right? If we didn't have these mental health interventions in place, one other than the clinical risk that we'll be missing, there's different ways to think about it. One is the children that would have received this treatment and the danger of them growing up with creating with this carrying on this trauma, and especially in the situations where if they're resettled somewhere, this children and if they don't deal with their trauma, they often become the cultural brokers of their family where the one it's reparentification they believe where they're the ones dealing with adult things on behalf of their parents. It's a lot for children to carry. And so that can create resentment, anxiety, role confusion for them in the future. But one thing that I especially there's two other things that I wanna point out. One is for example, we have an anti trafficking program in Thailand. And so it prevents girls, young girls from being trafficked or retrafficked, it wouldn't treat their mental health condition. These untreated trauma is going to exacerbate things like poverty, things like discrimination, the things that will just make them more prone to going back to their life before, to going back to a life of trafficking, to going back to their traffic. So there's that risk. And then the last thing that I think is a big risk, especially in the refugee populations we serve, is this thing called overgenerali overambiguous overgeneralized autobiographical memory. And that's essentially where people who have trauma, their brain protects them so that if they're asked to recall certain parts of their memory, they will only be able to say it in better general terms or they'll forget certain things. Now if that's untreated, if we don't provide care for those people, they're gonna go to the resettlement interviews. Those are legal interviews that determine whether or not they are sent to a safe place. And when they're interviewed by someone, that person's gonna say, this person's not making sense, they're not consistent, they're providing very little detail. So I think we I'm just gonna deny this application and then that person will be sent back to the circumstances of harm. And so it has very real effects on people and their safety. Maybe these are extreme situations, but they are very real and they can happen. speaker-1: Yeah. So in the mental health space, as you mentioned, y there are so many different areas where you are supporting ADRA. How has your measurement of the impact of that organization evolved over time and what are you hoping to continue tracking or start tracking speaker-0: I love this question because mental health specifically it's so hard to measure. speaker-1: Yeah. It's like you ask a survey before and after and hopefully the data improves. There's gotta be yeah. speaker-0: You can measure the number of latrines you you've built or the the food packs you've distributed, but how can you measure whole? How can speaker-1: How can you measure the brain? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. How happy somebody is overall, like how secure some maybe if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you could probably measure like they had access to housing or food or clothing and they didn't and now they do. So but like the mental health component of that, that's speaker-0: Maslow because I have beef against Maslow because he placed mental health needs like distumptions around that. We can discuss it some other time or after this. But yeah, so to your question, yes, so it's very hard to measure it. There's ways to do it through like surveys, right? Before and after, there's skills for coping, there's skills for functioning. But the hard thing about that is that the people we serve are always mobile, they're constantly moving, so it's hard to do a before and hard to do one after. One way we try to measure our impact is just through proxies. So for example, we train community health midwives in a program called Thinking Healthy Program, where as they're doing postpartum visits to mothers, as they're taking care of the mother's health, as they're taking care of the baby's health, they're also giving her mental health counseling. And so when that baby comes into the health center and then they get measured and we see that, this baby's thriving, they're gaining weight, they're developmentally appropriate, this baby is thriving. We can see that, this must mean that their mother is also a high chance of being mentally healthy due to the intervention. Because we know that mothers who are mentally well are able to have children who are also mentally and physically well. Our children have children who have thriving. So that's one way we can see the impact in the work that we do. But also I think the best way we can just do it is through stories, right? And it's not necessarily someone saying, my hope before was three, now my hope for life is ten. It's not necessarily that. It's them saying, I laughed today or, I actually asked someone else for help today. And so those things tell us, this person is gaining trust in their community. Or they can say, yeah, I enrolled my kid in in the school the classrooms you have yesterday. And so that tells us, they're giving education to their kid. That means they know their kid has a future. And so that means they're looking forward to their future. They have hope. They have optimism. Yeah. So those are just some ways that we look at it. Going forward, I would love if we were able to do more of these qualitative assessments more systematically. There's always the challenges of time and funding, but that would just be like ideal in how we measure impact. speaker-1: Right. a couple of questions I wrote down here while you're talking about that. The positive from your opinion and then maybe in the disaster release maybe in all the spaces that you work in, how have you seen technology and media been a positive or a negative of you working with youth and adults through their mental health periods? speaker-0: Great. Very great questions. So the media, positive, negative, positive, we always see that if there's media coverage of the disasters of the things we do, we see a surge of support. We see a lot of donations. But of course the negative of that is media is fickle. It's only gonna cover something for what like a couple weeks at the max. And so once that's that has died down, then we we that support also dies down. Another way that media helps us or does not help us is in the time. Of stories that are being told. I think when the people we serve, if they're told in the light of we see pictures of malnourished children or children that are sad, which it's not like that as much anymore. But if we see that, it reinforces the image of these people are just recipients of aid, they're just overly dependent, they're just reliant. But if they're being depicted, if we see pictures of community members helping each other, of them smiling, then the community, you know, people around the world get to see these people as the survivors that they really are, as people who have the ability to help themselves and are not just dependent on our aid. So I think it's the type of storytelling that's out there in the media. I think let me try to say if I remember this quote correctly, it says the goal of storytelling should not be to feel sorry for another person, but for us to see ourselves in the other person. And so I think that should be like the ideal that we see in the media. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. And this is something I've struggled with having interviewed two hundred plus NGOs and nonprofits now is like their media for clicks and to spark controversy or like to polarize versus media to share a story and hopefully drive donations. And I I wish there was an easy way to delineate that or to filter that out. Because a as you mentioned, if a disaster has been shared in the media, you guys see a surge in support, which I think is so important on so many levels. But at the same time that that same story could also have an intention, depending on the outlet, to try to drive a Republican or a Democratic agenda. Right. So it's like really unfortunately I wish there was a way to audit that and to enforce I don't know, that storytelling in a way that it's like the intention here is just to drive support and awareness. So yeah, that's something that I've definitely struggled. speaker-0: Find out the answer to that, please let me know you have my email. I'll I'll send it to my marketing too. speaker-1: Yeah. Awesome. And another thing that that I was thinking about was a lot of the organizations that we interview, like their goals are to like go out of business because their services that they're providing is no longer needed. For example, in trafficking, like hopefully there's a world where there is no human trafficking, in which case some of these anti trafficking organizations are no longer needed, which would be like the goal. But I think the disaster response part of your organization will always be there because we can't like control mother nature. And so if you were to envision a world where at least in a disaster response space, the mental health response to that disaster is efficient and immediately is able to serve every single person that needs it, like what would have to happen for that to be the case? Is it a capacity thing where you need more people on the ground? Is it yeah, like what what are some of the things that would A week after disaster response, everyone that has the trauma has the support that they need. Like what would that perfect word? speaker-0: Because I think even though that might seem idealistic or impossible, I think it's something that we should be like starting speaker-1: Something that worked away. speaker-0: Something to do now and like there's three to let me see how much I can say, but maybe two or three things are needed. And these are things that we're doing at Aja. And then one is to not create parallel systems right now as they're responding to disasters. And what that means is so for example, we're operating like health facilities that have mental health services. We don't create our own health facilities, instead, we adopt health facilities that were already standing before we came in and that maybe they don't have any more money right now to operate those. So we operate Those. That way, even when we leave and then future when disasters come, that facility is still surviving. It's still there. It wasn't abandoned. Another thing is you had mentioned this, and I think the biggest one is capacity, right? Task shifting. That is just training the next local cadres of health workers in things that specialized. people are trained in but can't do right now. So like whether that's the mental health gap action program, whether that's counseling. There's an example of our program in Myanmar we did where the providers, the healthcare providers came to us and said, we have people coming here. They don't necessarily need medications, but they need counseling. And so what can we do? We're all busy and we're not that trained in these things. And so what we did is We gave them recordings of like short mental health exercises. And then what they do is when people come needing some sort of counseling, they just go to a corner of the room, they wear their headphones, and then they just listen to the recordings, giving them grounding exercises, tips on how to create to improve their mental health. And so I think, yeah, one task shifting training people to do it, and then coming up with this more novel ways, maybe using technology. To reach more people. speaker-1: Yep. And I'm glad you mentioned that because I just listened to a recent interview that Bill Gates did about the concerns of AI. And I think on that interview was the first time I had heard of it's called Limbic Access, which is a government backed Gen AI mental health tool that is i i in some aspects controversial. But in other aspects, some of the data is showing that people might rather interact and speak with a chat bot than a human being. Which is so interesting. It's exciting and scary at the same time. It's exciting because if that's the case, you could just like automatically scale this certain mental health issues. Obviously, probably not all, hopefully. But an example of what you mentioned, the technology to help scale. How have like what's your view on that? Do you see that like proceed with caution, but like curiosity and hope speaker-0: question again. Great questions. Well I think one, AI can be very helpful, right? Especially as you mentioned, like with stigma. That's something that we encounter a lot in the work that we do, the people that we serve, they're already trying to preserve dignity and social standing in a very difficult circumstance, right? And so anything that can be seen to threaten like their social acceptance, their dignity is stigmatized. And so mental health conditions are stigmatized. So if could be something private, they just had to chat with someone, no one has to see them. Then it's good. The more people get mental health, the better. I think the tough thing about AI is one human contact is good for the soul, right? Mental health care, especially building a trusting relationship with another person, consistent trusting relationship, that's what's good for mental health. So I think that's like the danger in it. And then second, in the areas that we work, we do struggle with connectivity a lot. We do struggle with not having cell phone signal. We even struggle with people not having phones in general. And so there could be some limited uses to applications of this technology in the field. speaker-1: Yeah. And also language, that was one thing that also came up. Like some of these AI tools, there's only a handful of languages where it is very proficient at. So I could see that maybe some of these areas that have different languages that aren't common could be a current blocker. But yeah, connectivity, cell phone access, smartphone access. There's a lot of technology out there that are helping to close that gap. But but yeah, no, it's just such an interesting speaker-0: Because for example, even for technology, I think some some might use like Starlink, which I guess helps with connectivity. But then also in some of the situations we work because of that very tense security situation, even that's like forbidden if we can apply that as well. So yeah, I'm sure we'll work towards that future. Hopefully we'll have the right safeguards in place at that point. Yeah. speaker-1: Yes. Yeah. I'm hopeful. But also I totally agree with what you mentioned of it's important for a human to human interaction. I I think it's hard to feel a part of something bigger, a part of like humanity. when the only thing you're interacting with is t even if the AI is so human like, I feel like in the back of your brain you're still gonna know like this is not really human. So like it doesn't really connect you to humanity. So I think there's always gonna be that. But so interesting. The future. The future of Edra. Looking forward ten years, what do you hope to see speaker-0: I mean, I hope to see as again just speaking for my field mental health. I hope to see more and more of our approaches being integrated. I think before mental health wasn't such a priority for funders. Maybe mostly because again, mental health is hard to quantify and donors want to see numbers and that's what they want to fund. But I think more and more this is becoming evident to people that there this is a need. And so yeah, I'm hopeful that we'll gain more funding to do more mental health programs in the future. As for Audra, we're also trying to expand more into the development field. One program that we're expanding right now is a mental health program for adolescents. We had one In Mongolia, now we're doing Indonesia. And it's exciting because we're teaching youth in mental health skills, but then we're also teaching their parents on how do you respond to your kids, how do you provide social support to your kids. So we're not just teaching the youth, but we're also enabling their environment to support them. And so yeah, those are just some things we're excited about. speaker-1: Well that is very exciting. People that are listening and are inspired and want to get engaged, what type of engagement do you and Desadre look for and how speaker-0: I guess in humanitarian work, resources are always needed. So we always welcome donations. If people want to support maybe an emergency response that's going on right now, or want to just do more continuously in the future, we were very thankful for those. On our website, adra.org, there's a tab there that says ways to give that people can click on and that they can donate. But also, yeah, money is not the only resource that you can give us. We welcome if you would engage with our content, share our post, share this podcast, share it with your friends. You can also engage with our work. We have a program called ADRA Connections. And what essentially is, it is like a short-term trip to some of our ADRA projects. And I know there's some critique around short term trips and I agree with those critiques, but this one is different because we're bringing you to an already existing long term program that we have. So you're not creating something new. It's led by local staff, so you're not displacing local staff. And it just gets you exposed to the work that's being done out there and what you can do at home. speaker-1: I think that is just so valuable and I really hope people do that because hearing it and seeing the stories on the news and the YouTube channels and the posts and everything, I think it's good. It's a good first exposure and education and awareness. But it's really hard to feel things without seeing it in person. Without interacting with the people that have been impacted and the people that are working with the people that have been impacted. So I think that program is is extremely valuable that you have that ability for people to do these short term things. 'Cause I think one, it gets in person, which is good. And two, it's not that long term of a commitment it sounds like. People don't have to feel like it's a long term commitment. Which I think is one of the reasons why people maybe aren't as engaged or don't take that first step is because they assume that they have to commit their whole life for forty hours a week for a year to something. So yeah, that's a good th speaker-0: Humanizes the people that we serve and speaker-1: Yeah, it does. Yeah. We need to do more humanization. Yes. And technology is not I don't think it's helping. It's making it too easy to sit here at my desk. I'm guilty as well, 100% of this. Yeah. This is amazing. Also, random question. So disaster responses, those are things that are hard to plan for, but need a a very large response, immediate large response. Do you have programs where if a disaster response happens, somebody could sign up for a psychological first aid course and like on the flight to helping the disaster response? response, like get certified and like land and it have immediate impact. speaker-0: Not on like the international level. So in the international level, we do trainings beforehand. So we do like what we call emergency response team trainings. And so what that happens is we invite people to attend those so that they're familiar with the process. They're familiar, it's a whole week of training so that when an emergency strikes, we call up on this roster of people that we have who have already been trained, who know what to do, who have kind of some sort of professional background matched to the needs in the community. And then we deploy them. And then at the local level, the local offices, country offices, they also have like their own pool of volunteers that they activate in times of this emergency. So yeah, I guess in in a way we do actually have it here. People sign up for this emergency response training and then if we need them we call them and we send them over. speaker-1: Amazing. Amazing. Is there anything that we missed or you want to leave us with before we wrap up here? speaker-0: I think if there's anything I want people to take away from this conversation is just to lead with curiosity and empathy, right? Please learn more about these causes, learn more about the world around you, learn about what's happening in Myanmar, in Sudan, in Yemen, and reach out to a neighbor, to a friend, to people in your community who might need support. speaker-1: Ian, thank you so much for your time. I love this conversation and how positive and hopeful and optimistic and driven you are in the work that you're doing and have been doing is truly inspirational. So thank you so much for your time in the work that you do. Progressing humanity. speaker-0: That that's very generous of you to say, but yeah, thank you for thank you for having me to professional.