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Starting Out at the United Nations Alf Ivar Blikberg Alf Ivar Blikberg is a 2000 graduate of the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University. He is currently a humanitarian affairs officer with the UN Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs in Zimbabwe. His earlier experience included military service in the Royal Norwegian Navy, a consultancy with the Poverty Group at the World Bank, and several years in Switzerland with the World Economic Forum. IJOINED THE United Nations in May 2004 as a junior program officer (JPO) sponsored by my home country, Norway. Before this, I had worked in the HIV/AIDS field for three years and traveled frequently to Africa. Witnessing the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic first-hand was what triggered my interest in humanitarian affairs. My experience at the UN began in the Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), where I have remained ever since. OCHA is an excellent posting, first because it is a relatively small entity, and as a result, one gets to know most of its 150 New York–based staff very quickly; second, because at OCHA, JPOs tend to be treated just like regular UN staff, even though JPOs have been sponsored by their respective home countries and not recruited through international competitions. My UN career took a new path at the end of December 2004. On my way back to New York from Christmas in Norway, I heard on the radio about an earthquake in the Indian Ocean. I was working on emergencies in Africa and not Asia, so an earthquake beneath the ocean did not seem significant to me. However, by the time I arrived in New York, it was increasingly clear that, in fact, it had resulted in a very large disaster. My department is the coordinating unit for emergencies at the UN, and knowing that most of my colleagues were away over Christmas, I sent an 206 Starting Out at the United Nations • 207 e-mail to the officer in charge, offering to help. Five minutes later, an e-mail came back, copied to all staff in OCHA, announcing that I was now the New York–based focal point for the Indian Ocean tsunami! As is often the case in humanitarian affairs, there was no opportunity to turn down the assignment. The next six weeks were the busiest in my life so far. The UN and its partners had to mobilize one of the largest relief operations ever undertaken , in response to one of the worst disasters of all time. For each day, the number of persons, organizations, and countries involved in providing relief grew exponentially, and the team effort at headquarters and in the field was in my view what ultimately made the operation successful. In this situation, the drafting and presentation skills I learned at Georgetown were crucial. Several times a day, I had to pull together and analyze information from the field for senior UN officials, with very short deadlines and constant interruptions in the office. In the first few weeks, the most frequent thoughts that went through my mind, and probably those of many colleagues, were ‘‘work now, sleep later’’ and ‘‘implement the assignment now, complain about workload later.’’ At one point, I was not sure if we were still in 2004 or if we had entered 2005. After about six weeks of work on the tsunami, I returned to my regular job at the Africa desk. During my second year at OCHA, I passed the UN National Competitive Exam, which makes young professionals eligible for regular UN posts, and was formally recruited soon afterward. My third and fourth years with the UN are being spent with the OCHA field office in Zimbabwe. My three years of working at the UN have been an inspiring, rewarding , and sometimes exhausting experience. I am part of one of the most dynamic branches of the organization, and I feel that our work is meaningful and important. As such, working at the UN is a career path that I strongly recommend to other recent graduates. ...

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