Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva is a podcast about global politics, humanitarian issues, and international aid, hosted by journalist Imogen Foulkes. It is produced by SWI swissinfo.ch, a multilingual international public service media company from Switzerland.
Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva's Summer Profiles: Rachael Cummings in Gaza
Rachael Cummings of Save the Children is Inside Geneva’s summer profile this week.
“When I went into nursing, I also wanted to travel, so nursing gave me that opportunity. That was sort of an 18-year-old thinking, ‘Okay, I can use this to travel with’,” says Cummings.
Since taking her nursing skills to humanitarian work, she’s been all over the world.
“I think one of the things I’m most proud of is Save the Children’s role in the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2014 and 2015. We were able to establish – literally build, together with our Sierra Leonean colleagues – an 80-bed Ebola hospital and everything that went with it.”
Now, she’s in Gaza, grappling with desperate shortages of aid.
“Nothing came in for months, and since mid-May the UN has only managed to bring in a trickle of humanitarian supplies. But in this context, people are being starved and are on the brink of famine. They’re absolutely desperate – some are jumping onto the trucks and pulling off the aid supplies. And I know I’d do the same,” she says.
Wherever she is, Cummings’s priority is always the children.
“We’re driven by humanity and the desire to alleviate the suffering of children, wherever they may be. It’s about giving them hope, because they’re living through the worst experiences imaginable, the most desperate of times, and of course, they’re entirely innocent. They’re children who have the right to a childhood.”
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Host: Imogen Foulkes
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This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Fowkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
Speaker 3:In today's programme, they unloaded the few trucks that reached Khan Yunus under cover of darkness, armed guards defending the precious cargo.
Speaker 4:Nothing came in for months and since mid-May the UN have been able to bring in a trickle of humanitarian supplies. But in this context you have people who are being starved and on the brink of famine. So people are absolutely desperate, driving them to jump on the trucks and pull off the humanitarian supplies, and you know, I know, I would do that myself.
Speaker 5:Nine-year-old Jude is disabled and, like tens of thousands of other children in Gaza, starving.
Speaker 4:We are driven by humanity to others and alleviating the suffering of children wherever that is to give children hope, because they are living through their worst lives. They're living through the most desperate of times and of they are innocent throughout it. They are children who have the right to a childhood.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen Fowkes and today we bring you the third in our series of summer profiles. Listeners will know that in some conflict zones, gaza is the most prominent. Right now. International journalists have difficulty getting access or, in Gaza's case, are simply refused entry. But international aid agencies are still present and that means their experiences, their eyewitness accounts of what the situation in a particular crisis or conflict actually is is very important. So today I'm delighted to welcome a humanitarian worker with long experience in some of the world's most challenging regions.
Speaker 4:My name is Rachel Cummings. I'm the Gaza Humanitarian Director for Save the Children.
Speaker 2:That is a very big, very challenging, very risky, very exacting on you in all sorts of ways job. I imagine Our listeners will be curious what did you want to be when you were little? What was your dream job?
Speaker 4:Well, I think I found my dream job so I became a nurse. I went into nursing after school and my mom was a nurse, so I grew up around sort of nursing. She was a health sister and from about the age of 13, 14, I thought, oh, that could be something quite interesting. I hadn't quite understood why, but I thought that would be something interesting to do. But also, I just enjoy being with people and in nursing it's a complete cross-section of society. Everyone in society gets sick, so you get to understand people's vulnerabilities. People in hospitals are very vulnerable. Communication, obviously, collaboration. So yeah, it was a great foundation, I think, for me to pursue this career.
Speaker 2:And you moved from nursing, I guess, in the National Health Service in Britain, into the humanitarian field. How was that?
Speaker 4:switch? Yeah, it wasn't. I've never had a sort of career pathway, particular ambition really. But when I went into nursing I also wanted to travel, so nursing gave me that opportunity. That was a sort of 18 sort of 18 year old thinking, okay, I can use this to travel with. But I did two years in Cambodia with VSO as a nurse tutor, having done a diploma in tropical nursing at the London school, and that was really a gateway. And there was a person I met in Cambodia working for a small American NGO who opened my eyes to the world of NGOs. I didn't know what an NGO was when I went to Cambodia and my first humanitarian deployment, if you like, was following the Indonesian tsunami. I went to Banda Aceh with Merlin as a nurse.
Speaker 5:On.
Speaker 2:December 26, 2004,. A tsunami of unprecedented proportions hit the Indian Ocean coastline with waves over 35 metres high.
Speaker 6:The damage wrought not just by the speed, but also by the volume of water, exerting the power of an entire ocean.
Speaker 4:I stayed for over a year and a half in Aceh working with Merlin, which was a massive, massive learning curve but also instrumental, really, in setting me on this path for humanitarian work.
Speaker 2:So you've been trained in modern Western medicine and you went to the biggest disaster in hundreds of years, banda Aceh. I'm sure that you went into the humanitarian work and as a health professional with your eyes relatively wide open. But how was it, having worked in British hospitals, to then try and provide healthcare in a disaster zone?
Speaker 4:You're right, I went in with eyes wide open but looking back I was completely naive. No-transcript. Your role is not to be a hands on nurse. That isn't the added value. There's many, many very good nurses in all around the world, but the skills that I have in terms of the coordination, the communication, learning very quickly, the humanitarian system and how that operates and how we can sort of fit within it, that became my added value. I think not my hands-on clinical nursing or proper nursing, as I like to refer to it as.
Speaker 2:You've been in many places conflict zones since then. Tell me about a few of them. What are your standout experiences?
Speaker 4:Yes, I've been in many conflict zones, but I've also worked in infectious disease outbreaks and I think one of the things I'm most proud of maybe was Save the Children's Role in the Sierra Leone Ebola outbreak in 2014, 2015. And you know, I was a part of that extremely heavy lift for the organisation where we were to build and operate an Ebola treatment centre.
Speaker 3:It is hot, tiring work and it carries a considerable risk, but for the NHS staff who've come here to Sierra Leone, it's a calling these Ebola orphans deprived of one, or often both of their parents. They are cared for by survivors of the disease as the infection rate continues to rise in their country.
Speaker 4:This was so outside of the children's comfort zone. We had not been providing frontline clinical care in an infectious disease outbreak ever before. Yet many, many factors drove that decision. But, yeah, we were able to establish, build, literally build with the Sierra Leone colleagues an 80-bed Ebola hospital and all that went around that, including a partnership with the NHS, where we received and worked with NHS clinicians. I mean, that was taking coordination and collaboration to a whole new level working on the front line with a disease that kills obviously very quickly and very nastily, many people. So that's one of the things I'm most proud of, I think. And then during, I think, another moment again not a conflict zone, but there's oddly, some similarities, I find, between the Rohingya crisis in 2017, when a million Rohingya people were displaced into Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh in the space of weeks. It was biblical what we saw, and I think I was very lucky to be part of that team to respond to that crisis.
Speaker 6:Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh is the world's largest refugee camp and home to more than a million Rohingya. Half are children aged between 3 to 17, growing up with little access to formal education, care or support. In this classroom, rohingya refugee students hope to learn how to build a happier future, but they also know how tough it can be to escape a past and present full of sadness.
Speaker 4:And actually you know, the Rohingya population are still there in Cox's Bazaar and Save the Children, the foundations that we build, the health centres that we build, the learning, education etc. Are still functioning. So yes, we have emergency responses to act in the immediacy of humanitarian needs. But you know, we like to think and actually there are some good examples of where there is a longer term legacy and where those foundations do impact for longer those children.
Speaker 2:I think that is a point that our listeners will really welcome hearing, because the world is such an unstable place now and we hear a lot about governments cutting foreign aid and suggesting that it's not worth the money or it's throwing good money after bad and to hear you talk about things that you a very experienced aid worker are proud of and that are still working Is that the pitch you would make to people coming to you with doubts about the relevance of foreign aid?
Speaker 4:is so if that doesn't create change in your mind, then, okay, we can talk about sort of longer term impacts for children and the investment that we make as a, as a global community, to alleviate that suffering and to give children hope, because they are living through their worst lives. They're living through the most desperate of times and, of course, they are innocent throughout it. They are children who have the right to a childhood and we have the opportunity as a global community, as an organization, as an individual, to make positive impacts for change for these children, and that has to be the pitch.
Speaker 2:You're in Gaza now, perhaps the most challenging assignment. You seem to be there really most of the time, and most aid workers go in for a few weeks and then they come out and perhaps they go in again, but there's not too many that I see who are popping up on our feeds, on our screens, and they're basically always in Gaza, but you're one of them. Did you hesitate at all about taking on this assignment?
Speaker 4:No, no, I wanted to get to Gaza from the beginning of the war. On October the 7th, so towards the end of October I went as a deputy team leader for Save the Children to Ramallah to work in the West Bank with our country office team supporting our team and our partners in Gaza. And then in late January, the first internationals were able to come into Gaza, and I was. I came to Gaza in February 2024. And I've had various roles, but mainly team leader and now the humanitarian director. But I know what I'm good at, I know where I become very energised and motivated and it's very much working in these environments and in Gaza, working in this environment with my team who are on the front line every day. So I didn't hesitate at all.
Speaker 2:And what does Save the Children actually do in Gaza, because this is a confusing picture for people, maybe outside our beltway, of the aid community. It's hard to see who's doing what and what it's achieving.
Speaker 4:For sure, and it's obviously very, very hard to deliver here and you know we can talk about the blockade on any supplies that have really come in since the mid-March. But Save the Children, you know we are a large, ambitious organisation and I value that within the organisation we challenge ourselves always to do more for children. So in Gaza we're running one of the largest humanitarian responses across the whole of Save the Children. We're now running two primary healthcare centres, one in Dera Bala, one in Canunis, seeing between 200 and 300 people a day. We're running 10 nutrition centres, again in Derebela and Canunis. We're providing education services across 16 communities, child protection, we're running child-friendly spaces and we have a team of social workers to manage very complex cases of case management.
Speaker 4:And we're also doing water trucking to over 20 communities every day, latrines, handwashing, hygiene promotion and then providing cash and e-vouchers, e-wallets to hundreds of thousands of people. So we are trying always to push at scale what we can do. And all of this is with quality and accountability to children and their families here. So our standards do not drop just because it's hard. And I always say in Gaza anything is possible. In Gaza it's just bloody difficult. So this is where our starting point is yes, we can, and then we just have to navigate how we can.
Speaker 3:In Nusarat, every family had sent a young man to see if they could get bread. During the ceasefire, 600 trucks of food entered Gaza every day. Fewer than 100 after an 11-week blockade is nowhere near enough.
Speaker 2:How's your relationship with Israel then? Because obviously, the UN agencies have got a very challenging relationship with Israel and seem to be saying that their movements are severely restricted. They can't get their supplies in and out. Save the Children you have more flexibility, you get more permits to move.
Speaker 4:No, we have no additional permits. We work within the UN humanitarian system. We are completely reliant on the UN for the movement of our own supplies through the logistics cluster. We also have received supplies nutrition, health supplies through WHO and UNICEF. We call them gifts in kind. So no, we have no bilateral external relationship with Israel. We work within the UN and the humanitarian system and mechanisms.
Speaker 2:So it is more restricted than it was, say, during the ceasefire up to the beginning of March.
Speaker 4:Oh, hugely. It's incomparable actually what we're having to deal with now. You know, during the January to March pause in hostilities, 600 trucks a day were coming into Gaza and that was meeting the basic needs. Through food distributions, through hygiene kit distributions, through shelter tents, people were able to receive humanitarian supplies in a safe and dignified manner because the supplies were available. Now nothing came in for months and since mid-May the UN have been able to bring in a trickle of humanitarian supplies. But in this context, bringing in any supplies into Gaza is extremely risky. It's dangerous. There is organised criminality, there is a breakdown in law and order in Gaza.
Speaker 2:At one of the few soup kitchens still serving meals. The growing desperation of Gaza's population of more than two million is clear as day.
Speaker 3:In Khan Yunis, children rushed to a place where they'd heard there was hot soup. They scrambled for the scrapings.
Speaker 4:And, of course, on top of that, you have people who are being starved and on the brink of famine. So people are absolutely desperate. So there is people, many, many examples of people's desperation, driving them to jump on the trucks and pull off the humanitarian supplies. And you know, I know I would of controversy about it, but I get their press releases every day and they say that they are reaching out to other humanitarian organisations to work with them.
Speaker 2:Now they do seem to have more freedom of passage, let's say in and out of Gaza. Would you consider working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?
Speaker 4:No, we've said very clearly there's nothing humanitarian about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Speaker 6:For weeks now. Images like these grimly familiar Food distribution by GHF, the Israeli-US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Figures released today by the Hamas-controlled Gaza government say 549 people have been killed in the first month of the foundation's work, 4,066 injured.
Speaker 4:They're an Israeli-American-backed organisation working for providing distributions of food in the most chaotic and dangerous way within militarized zones in Gaza, and people, again, who are desperate and desperate to feed their children. And we've spoken to people who've made this decision, knowing that they are risking their lives literally to receive some food in a chaotic and dangerous way. There is no safe and dignified distributions happening at the GHF. It is literally the survival of the fittest. And I've seen, you know, with my own eyes, driving through Can Yunus, I witnessed groups of young men. Through Canunis, I witnessed groups of young men and it was all groups of young men coming back from a GHF point. Some had bags, some had boxes, some were carrying one bag of flour, so it wasn't sort of fair and equal distribution. It was very much what you could grab and run with. And these young guys were carrying this food but also carrying knives. Carrying knives so that they could fend off people who were going to attack them for the food and also potentially attack people for the food. So the situation that people are sharing with me my women team yesterday was sharing with me they are deeply concerned about the shifts that is happening within the population of Gaza, driven by the desperation.
Speaker 4:But no, in answer to your question, say the children will not work or operate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. We predicted that this would happen. We knew you know as humanitarian organization. And say the children are the partners, the UN, we know how to do distributions. Say the children have been working in Gaza for decades and critical to safe and dignified distributions is the relationship that you have with communities and the conversation and the information, the accountability that we have to communities to inform them of what is coming, when it is coming. How will we prioritize the most vulnerable? Women-headed households, child-headed households, the disabled, the elderly these are people that are most in need and this is how we will coordinate and communicate with communities. Know that you will receive food, you will receive the distribution, but we are prioritising based on need and people understand that. But we are prioritizing based on need and people understand that.
Speaker 4:But what our added value is in a very complex environment right now is services for children, because it's not only about trucks, it's not only about stuff, it's about services. It's about health care, it's about nutrition, but it's also, you know, education, child protection. This is what gives children an opportunity to be children in that moment and this is what they share with us when they're in our boiling hot tents, where we're working with very little resources, some paper and pens, exercises to get them to draw, to share their emotions and what they appreciate, what they, what they share with us is this is the time I feel safe and this is the time I can be a child. And then, outside of the tent, they have to go and find food, they have to go and find water, they have to care for their younger children. And the parents share with us.
Speaker 4:You know they're desperate for their children to go back to school. They want their children to be educated. It's very much a valued part of society in Gaza to be educated. It's very much a valued part of society in Gaza. And we know that what we do is a drop in the ocean, but we have to continue to do as much as we can for as long as we can and to give children hope for the future.
Speaker 2:International journalists are not allowed into Gaza and we regularly I mean I report out of the UN in Geneva and we report on UN reports or what the World Health Organization has seen or the UN Human Rights Office, and we're often criticised for that. You're an eyewitness to this, which makes you, in some ways, quite important. I'm just wondering what do you tell your closest friends, your loved ones, about Gaza?
Speaker 4:To be honest, I don't really talk about Gaza too much. If people want to talk to me about Gaza, then that's great and I'm very happy to share. And people do ask questions how do you move around, how do you get to communities, where do you live, how do you eat? You know these are questions people ask and that's great. People are showing an interest.
Speaker 4:But I think I'm quite good at compartmentalizing, because my home time is so precious and my time with my family, my partner, my son, my sister, my brother, you know it's such a precious time. You know it's such a precious time and of course I can talk about it, but it's not something I want to spend my headspace in. I'd much rather be enjoying the time sitting in a pub, having a cold beer, having nice food. You know all the things that you think about when you're here, that you want to do when you're home. It's not particularly intentional, it's just the way I think I sort of separate these significant parts of my life and I think although Gaza is, of course, an extreme example of a breakdown in humanity, I guess, but I guess that's how I've always managed bearing witness to the atrocities of the world and then separating that with my time with my family.
Speaker 2:I think it's the only way to stay sane. I would say and my much more limited experience of that is exactly that I think you're absolutely right and I think you have to.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's exactly what I do and again, it's not intentional but it's working.
Speaker 1:What does it mean to be a child in Gaza?
Speaker 6:It's become a daily sight, over 655 days of this war, the endless march of parents burying children.
Speaker 3:She stumbles through the flames Five-year-old Wad Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil, her whole world collapsing beneath her.
Speaker 5:Well, UNICEF says that nearly all of Gaza's 1.1 million children need mental health and psychosocial support.
Speaker 2:It occurred to me when you were talking there you work for Save the Children, so you work with children in Gaza and you have a son. I'm just wondering, because I'm a mother. When I see the news I just think how are these children going to survive mentally?
Speaker 4:No, it completely resonates, of course, and you can't help but think about I. Well, I can't help think about my child and how lucky he. You know he's very lucky, privileged, but knows what I'm doing and that's important to me and I think it's important to him. He, he's only 10, so nearly 10. Yeah, the sort of immediate impact of this war on children that we see and they share their experience with us in our different services, but the medium, longer-term impact and children are very much.
Speaker 4:I think the whole of Gaza is actually very much in survival mode to survive this day and it's very difficult for people and they've shared this with me to plan, to have any plans for the future.
Speaker 4:But I think you know we run case management services, so children who are the most vulnerable that have become lost or abandoned or unaccompanied, abused, the most difficult times for children and I will be honest, I can barely listen to some of the stories that the teams share with me and some of the experiences children are having to go through, because it's unbearable, it's unthinkable what's happening to children. So I think you know we're talking about not even a whole generation, a whole population, 2 million people who will be deeply traumatized by what they've seen firsthand, the loss that they've experienced firsthand, and how to rebuild, I don't know. I mean, we will obviously hope to be part of that rebuilding and building hope for the future, but what that looks like I don't know. You know, this is literally the worst it's ever been for us now and we can't hope. We can't pin our hopes on. We need to manage our expectations because they've been dashed so many times.
Speaker 2:You are very much as you say. In the moment it's the only way you can be, I think, doing the work that you do. But I've talked to many aid workers and some senior UN officials who said clearly you know the world should not be standing by here. So I'm just wondering what do you think the history books will say in a few years about this conflict?
Speaker 4:You know, history will judge us as a global community. There will be shame on us as a global community. I believe that the inaction of member states is extraordinary to think about. To consider the lack of punitive action on Israel. They are operating with apparent impunity and they have never made a secret of their intentions. It's all out there and yet, as humanitarians, we continue to navigate the complexity. We are committed to staying and to deliver for as long as we can. But history will judge us harshly and it should judge us harshly.
Speaker 2:And that brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. Huge thanks to Rachel, who took time out of a very busy day to join us direct from Deir al-Bala in Gaza. We wish her and her entire team at Save the Children all the very best with the incredibly important work they're doing. Join us again next time for our fourth profile, which is, in fact, not a person but one of Geneva's best-loved museums.
Speaker 5:In this museum we ask a central question, which is what does humanitarian action have to do with me in my life here and now? And to establish this connection on a personal level, we really bend over backwards to explain humanitarian principles, international humanitarian law and to show that there are embodied experiences we can all relate to.
Speaker 1:It's an exhibition that was thought as an exploration of the sound archives, in particular the humanitarian sound archives preserved here in Geneva at the ICRC and the FIRC and also at the museum.
Speaker 2:That episode will be out on August 19th. Don't miss it. And a reminder our profiles from last summer are all still available. Hear from Chris Lockyer, secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières, or Esther Dingemans, of the Global Survivors Fund, which supports people who have suffered sexual violence in conflict. You can hear those and more wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Imogen Fowkes. Thanks again for listening. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss Info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening.
