JPO Stories
Motivated by the marvellous in the mundane
Laura Vinha, a Finnish JPO, shares with us her experience with UNFPA in Vietnam.
My fascination for the United Nations began when I was a kid at the International School of Kuala Lumpur where UN Day was an annual excuse for the celebration of diversity and unity - and for indulging on food from all over the world. I've always loved the powerful symbolism of the UN, the ideals of peoples and nations working together towards peace and understanding. As a result, many of the memorable aspects of my JPO experience relate to the very small and rather insignificant symbolic details of my assignment: receiving my light blue UN passport; being picked up from the airport in the white UNFPA Land Cruiser (just like on TV!); seeing the flags fluttering in the wind in front of UN headquarters during the New York JPO training. The little details that somehow confirmed: I, Laura Vinha, a JPO from Finland, am part of this amazing - and, yes, sometimes frustrating, slow and incomprehensibly bureaucratic - global system.
I'd been working as a reporter for about five years when I saw an ad for a communications JPO post in Vietnam. My academic background is a mix of journalism and development studies, and the job seemed like a good opportunity to combine the two. I applied, and in June 2006 I was on a plane on my way to Hanoi.
Beyond the symbolic nostalgia, the people I encountered during my two years there made my assignment to Vietnam special. I was the UN Population Fund's first communications officer in Hanoi, which gave me a lot of freedom to define the job. I drafted press releases, talking points and speeches, helped organize events and taught colleagues about media work. I also tagged along on missions to see parts of Vietnam that are otherwise difficult to get to, to meet people I would otherwise never have met, and to write stories about the women and men whose lives have changed because of UN efforts.
On every trip, I was heartened by the generosity and the ordinary but somehow amazing stories of the people I met: the ethnic minority woman whose stilt house I was the first foreigner to visit; the farmer who gave birth alone at home - twice!; women who had suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of traffickers and marriage brokers; young people who were leading their communities in raising awareness about HIV and fighting to reduce stigma and discrimination.
A harrowing tale of human trafficking (left) Youth in Hai Phon bring contaceptives to the catwalk (right)
The bare medicine cabinets and the iron beds of the clinics were a shock. The willingness of young people to discuss sex in front of their parents at community meetings was a surprise. And it was embarrassing to realize that the chance to spot the foreigner from Hanoi was sometimes the reason for the crowds at village gatherings.
A place to rest - the maternity ward of a small clinic in Hai Phong
A bit of stardust sprinkled on UNFPA Vietnam at the end of 2006 when Joshua Marston, director of the award-winning film Maria Full of Grace, agreed to participate in our week-long film festival organized to launch the Fund's flagship State of World Population report. The cinema was packed, and Joshua related his film about a Colombian drug mule beautifully to UNFPA's report on women and international migration. An inspiring end to weeks of frantic arrangements and hard work.
For me, one of the biggest initial surprises was that the UN is anything but one unified system. As a journalist, I'd never paid much attention to which UN organization was sending me media releases: the UN is the UN. But I soon realized that the acronym whose mandate you work under determines everything from the IT system you use to the protocols of your daily work. Vietnam is a pilot country for the One UN Initiative, an effort to make the UN more efficient and improve coordination among organizations. Working there gave me an opportunity to see the wrangling over agency territory firsthand. Even with a lot of goodwill and great efforts, harmonizing systems that have grown their separate ways over the past decades is tough. This made seeing the steps taken in a shared direction encouraging.
Rice fields of Yen Bai
A joint-UN communications team with an integrated annual work plan and a unified approach to dealing with the media was created as a "pilot within the pilot" at the end of 2006. After the Christmas break - and my wedding - I moved from UNFPA to a shared office provided by UNICEF. All of a sudden I had an entire communications team to work with! My job evolved to include internal communication among the UN Country Team, especially about the One UN Initiative. I had the chance to contribute to other organizations' communication activities and team members contributed to those of UNFPA. It was exciting, fun and at times exasperating to be involved in trying to make this globally unique team work
For my third and final JPO year I moved to UNFPA's new regional office in Bangkok. I have been here since August 2008, and my current role involves media relations at the regional level and working to strengthen UNFPA's network of communications focal points in Asia and the Pacific. So far, I've managed to fit in one reporting trip to Thailand's predominantly Muslim south. Once again, I was reminded of how motivating and important it is to meet the people whose lives we are trying to improve.
My JPO assignment ends in eight short months. While there is still a lot to do, the future is already on my mind. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that "To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there."
Living and learning as a JPO and contributing, in a small way, to the big UN reform process, have been eye-opening and enriching experiences. I've learned a lot about myself, and I look forward to figuring out where next and why.
Laura Vinha, Bangkok, November 2008
