Red Cross worker: 'Helping people kept us going'

DW: How did January 12, 2010, unfold for you?

Astrid Nissen: It was a pretty normal working day in the office. When the earthquake struck, most of my colleagues were in the lower level in our office building in a training session. I realized what was going as soon as the building started to shake. At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the shaking was quite heavy. I knew immediately that we were dealing with an earthquake. I had experienced a quake a few years before in Guatemala, with a magnitude of 6.3, so I knew it was more than that.

What happened in the minutes after your building began to shake?

At first, I jumped from my desk to the floor. I was on the first floor, with one other colleague. We were just staring at each other and listening to our colleagues screaming from downstairs. And between two big shakes we decided to run down the stairs, which is usually not recommended to do, but time was of the essence, and fortunately we got down to the lower level. Our colleagues were frozen and shocked, and they couldn't move, so we helped them out of the building onto the street outside. Then we began to think about what to do. Some colleagues decided to leave the office to see how their families were. I started to set up a crisis center. I went back into the office and grabbed my laptop. The internet was working, and very quickly I gave an interview to the media via Skype. I think that was around 90 minutes after the earthquake.

The official death toll has been put at 316,000, with some 1.5 million others displaced. Given these figures and the momentous task facing you in the wake of the disaster, you and your colleagues must have felt overwhelmed, if not close to despair: What kept you going?

Of course, all team members - myself included - were affected directly. Some lost their homes, some lost family members - in my case, it was very close friends. You have to put that grief aside, and you have to concentrate. But what kept us going was really to see that we were able to provide relief to the people in need, and to see what difference that made for them. Like when we saw people gathered in an open field, sleeping outside under palm tree leaves because they were afraid to go inside buildings, and we were finally able to give them tents. This gave them protection from the rain. It was the people who kept us going; helping others liberated energy we wouldn't have believed we had, even under dire circumstances. We were constantly under adrenaline to keep the whole thing going. We were aware that we also had to take care of ourselves, but it keeps you going and we also had professional help for all staff members not to have problems in the future.

Five years after the quake, some critics say Haiti is pretty much a lost cause given extensive corruption and seemingly never-ending political crisis. Given your efforts to help the people of Haiti, how do you feel about such criticism?

It hurts! Obviously, if you put forth the effort for work like this and you are told it hasn't produced any results, it hurts. But I also think it's not true. It is not the case that everything has worked out fine, nor has all the money been spent in the right way, but such massive projects must be viewed with a sense of balance.

A natural catastrophe such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti must have been a life-changing event for all who witnessed it. How did it change you?

I definitely grew. I gained awareness, for instance, of the energy that can be liberated in such situations. It was truly incredible. And to see that I was able to manage this, that I could manage such a very difficult situation, this also contributed. Also, such an experience makes you conscious that your life can end at any moment. As I said, I was just working at my computer, and I could have died or been seriously injured.

You left Haiti late last year to move to Beirut where you now head the German Red Cross office for North Africa and the Middle East. How does working in the Middle East and its war zones differ from natural catastrophe zones such as in Haiti? As an aid worker, would you say it's easier for you to endure suffering that is caused by nature rather than suffering that is caused by people?

For me, personally, it is not. Every person who dies of unnatural causes is one person too many. It is one of the principles of the Red Cross: It does not matter what causes the suffering, what matters is the principle of humanity to help. One difference you have in these situations is the principle of neutrality and independence and impartiality. And this is of course much more important in situations of war and conflict than in situations of natural disasters.

Astrid Nissen works for the German Red Cross. She was in Haiti before the 2010 earthquake took place. She continued working in the country until October 2014 when she was named representative of the German Red Cross for North Africa and the Middle East. She is currently stationed in Beirut, Lebanon.