Speak Up - KōrerotiaCultural and Linguistic Minorities in Disaster Risk Reduction (CALD in DRR)

13 October 2017

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Kia ora. Nau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” with Sally Carlton. Today we’re going to be talking about culturally and linguistically diverse minorities - often referred to in New Zealand as CALD or Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities - in Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR.

To set the scene we’re going to start by positioning these groups in the arena of disaster, focusing particularly on issues of communication in periods of crisis. We’re really lucky to have two members of the International Network on Crisis Translation - or INTERACT - with us in the studio. They’re visiting Aotearoa for their research and we managed to tee up an interview while they’re in Christchurch. I’m really looking forward to hearing from their expertise. Sharon and Federico, please could you introduce yourself.

Federico OK I am Federico Federici originally from Italy, I’m a researcher in translation studies at the University College in London and I used to be a translator for refugees and have been involved in several translation projects and now I’m focusing on crisis translation.

Sally When you say “For refugees,” was that part of the refugee crisis?

Federico I was part of the translation in support of asylum seekers, was just an external translator not dependent on any agency but involved as an expert in languages.

Sally Must have been fascinating.

Federico It was fascinating and terrifying which is one of the reasons why I’m

interested in this area of research.

Sally And Sharon?

Sharon My name is Sharon O’Brien and I work at the school of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University where we’re mostly involved teaching translators. I am coordinating this project INTERACT which is an EU-funded project looking at the role of translating and interpreting in crisis scenarios.

Sally I guess one of the first questions - this is something I think a lot of people confuse - what is the difference between interpreting and translating?

Sharon So generally interpreting is the oral form of converting from one language to another - so that’s done when people are speaking - and translation is what is referred to for the written production of translation.

Sally If we’re looking, then, both at interpreting and translating, why is it important to have such good communication in times of crisis, in times of disaster, and does that differ at times of ‘normalcy’?

Sharon I suppose there are lots of ways of looking at those questions and there are these sorts of philosophical answers and the more pragmatic or practical answers. So maybe to look at the practical point of view first of all: We think that accurate communication and timely communication in a crisis scenario is obviously very, very important and not just for response to a crisis but in the four stages of a crisis or a disaster we think that accurate communication is absolutely essentially. People need to know what to do; they need to know how to prepare themselves in advance - and the problem that we have seen so far is that often that communication is done in one language or a dominant language. So people who speak perhaps less dominant languages in a community are not necessarily well informed so that’s a problem if they don’t know how to prepare themselves or what to do or how to rebuild after a particular crisis. Also having situational awareness in a crisis - so they know how to react and what not to do sometimes is really important. And even when you think about the responders to a crisis, they need to be understood so if they’re only speaking one language and that’s not the language that’s understood by everybody that can be quite a problem too. So for all those reasons we think that communication is important but not just in one language.

Federico To add to that: When we talk about translation we are now very much convinced by the evidence that it is impossible to separate the language from the culture. So in a way we could have a number of arguments connected off to the legal argument of every individual has a language that represents their culture, they’re belonging to a group and that language is a human right so being able to speak in your native language, represent of your identity and your sense of belonging to a particular group should be supported. Now that argument could be

simplistic in a way because it is of course impossible sometimes of language transfer either in writing or orally to all the possible language combinations but there is a social argument which goes with it which is if we’re trying to communicate in a situation of crisis having a group of people that do not obtain clear information, efficient information are in fact a potential vulnerability for the society as a whole. So there is the idea that by enabling everybody to have access to clear information the entire society is better equipped to responded to a disaster or a crisis so that would be in a way a social argument.

There is also, in addition, a consideration to make that it is very important when we consider linguistic diversity: To differentiate between individual and community speaking a language that is different from the language of the majority or the language recognised by the country from the idea that the not being part of the majority speakers is not an idea connected immediately with being vulnerable or less resilient or in a position of difficulty compared to the rest of the society. The communication could be the difficulty but not necessarily the resilience and so those things are connected but not identical or immediately overlapping.

It is important that there is also the notion of the social and legal argument go together with an argument of human nature by enabling everybody who is a member of the society to participate in communication and having efficient access to information so they are including people who would use sign language, people who use other forms of communication. We are not only strengthening those communities and society as a whole but we are also in terms of resilience and readiness in the worst case scenario in creating an ability to community multilingually, we’re also strengthening the integration of these bodies into the society as a whole.

Sally You touched on a point there that I’d quite like to expand on which is the role of particularly translated materials before a disaster or a crisis eventuates. And I’d be willing to hear any comments you’ve got on that line of thought.

Sharon Well we’ve seen some interesting material here in New Zealand in terms of making people aware of what they should do - for example if there is an earthquake which is something that I suppose in countries that are earthquake-prone people are versed in - but if you don’t live in a country that is earthquake-prone you don’t necessarily know. So if you come here not being drilled in what to do, I think it would be very useful to have that information even in a very succinct form that tells you if this happens this is what you should do immediately. Of course having that in English in New Zealand is fine if you speak English but what if you don’t? So we’re looking at the possible role of translation to prepare people for those kind of situations and so far I think that the role of translation and interpreting is more acknowledged for the response phase of a crisis or a disaster where you see suddenly there are people there who don’t actually understand what they need to understand but very little thought

has been given to how do we use translation to help them prepare themselves as well. So those kinds of advertisement campaigns, leaflets and so on could be very useful in preparing people.

That raises the big question about literacy and modes of communication and maybe some of these communities are not necessarily going to be able to access that information. So lots of interesting topics arise there in terms of literacy, in terms of cultural appropriateness of the information that is being disseminated. So these are just things that we’re starting to look at.

Sally Sounds like fascinating research.

Sharon Hopefully.

Sally One of the things I got the impression you guys do is you work quite a bit with interpreters and translators who are involved in this crisis or disaster work. What are some of the challenges and I guess some of the benefits of working with people in that particular crisis period?

Federico Well there are two answers there. One is focusing on the interpreters and the aspect of response to a crisis. Tapping into a community of interpreters who are already known to the responders, known to the institution or to those who need to deal with the emergency is an important resource and we understand that some work has been done in New Zealand compared to other countries and we’re trying to get an overview of the international policies and international positions on this. But also in terms of relying on interpreters to participate in the emergency and response implies also a strong relationship of trust, being able to trust each other for communicating efficiently that language.

The other part of the answer is the one referring to translators, with translation being of course more linked to the idea of transferring in a known oral medium and I’m saying that because you can translate to be read to be broadcast on radio, you can translate to be read as a message, you can translate from the written language to another medium to make it more accessible. And all of these forms could have the benefit of time which interpreting doesn’t have when you have to react immediately in an emergency situation so working with translators and working with interpreters has different types of challenges and different types of advantages and disadvantages.

One of the disadvantages is the zero translation or zero interpreting position. What happens if a specific language of need there’s nothing available? And that is one of the big questions that is part of our project, is one of the big questions that drives us. What is the alternative there? And we’re considering a range of options.

In terms of working with translators and interpreters, there’s also the issue about protecting them as much as protecting the responders. So

when translators or interpreters are part of the response operations, it is very important that rather than becoming a helper, an assistant, they don’t become part of the problem; they don’t become this other burden to the responders and emergency operators. So it’s quite important that we consider and focus also on training translators and interpreters to respond to this type of situation and that is one of the remit of our project is what sort of training could be offered before the outset of a crisis or disaster.

Sally It’s definitely something I think we haven’t learnt from Canterbury: Prepared is definitely best.

Sharon I think also what Federico touched on there is something we haven’t looked at a huge deal so far which is how to deal with the trauma if you are an interpreter, for example, called in to a difficult interpreting scenario in the middle of a crisis or a disaster. Not much thought has been given to how those people should look after themselves afterwards and this is something we’d like to look at eventually: What kind of training could they be given to make sure that they’re OK after having to do that kind of work?

Sally I think even in a situation, a normal situation - if someone is having to interpret a health condition, for example - that can be incredibly stressful and they’re not necessarily trained as social workers or counsellors.

Sharon No not at all and we’re talking about interpreters now because of course they might be in the middle of a really awful situation but if you’re translating documentation that’s reflecting loss or trauma that can also have an impact on you so it’s not just the interpreters that might be affected but also the translators.

Sally Very multi-layered.

Sharon Yes.

Sally Just to finish off our wee chat: Is there any big overriding question… We’ve touched on quite a lot that you’re hoping to get out of this research but what’s the bottom line, I suppose?

Sharon There are big questions. Because we come from academia and we’re involved in training professional translators, one big question that emerges here is training of people who are perhaps not professional translators, not professional interpreters to assist in a crisis and what are the ethical dilemmas that are associated with that? So we have a lot of people who volunteer in these scenarios with all sorts of skillsets and people who speak more than one language are also volunteers. This is sometimes problematic for the professional community who at the same time may not all be available to react in a crisis so without a doubt people with linguistic skills will volunteer to help in crisis scenarios and the question is should we train them in some way? What kind of training

should we give them? Does that undermine professional status? So these are some of the big questions that arise in our little world of translating and interpreting in training.

Federico There’s also the question of the ethical use of technologies to support translators and interpreters in these scenarios. What would happen if poor translation is the result of misusing machine translation systems or ignoring the systems of a machine translation system that could help responders? So there is some big ethical debate within the discipline and beyond whether machine translation could be a solution or level of solution, could it represent? And another aspect there is responsibility and accountability so if a translation option is chosen instead of preparing and investing resources on training translators or interpreters who is responsible then for poor communication or miscommunication during a crisis? There is evidence that companies that have properly invested in translation have had a returning investment, socially we could see a return in investment in preparing translators and interpreters to respond to crisis and enhance communication in situations of emergencies.

Sally It would be wonderful to see that translate more into policy.

Federico Yes that is one of our ambition is to try and influence through recommendations and reports policies at different levels.

Sally Well with such an international group of researchers hopefully you will get some clout behind you.

Sharon and Federico

Hopefully.

Sally And final words before we finish up? We’re going to continue this conversation with Jay Marlowe and JC Gaillard from University of Auckland looking at Disaster Risk Reduction more specifically, any thoughts on that before we head into that segment?

Sharon Well I speak for everybody who has come from the INTERACT team to New Zealand if I say that it’s been a really valuable experience for us to be here because we can see that because of New Zealand’s history with disaster that you have already really started to make inroads into some of the questions that we have regarding supporting CALD communities so we’re delighted to be here and speaking to lots of people who have already thought about that and very grateful to be able to talk to all of those people.

Sally Well thank you very much for coming in and spending some time today.

MUSIC BY RISE AGAINST – HELP IS ON THE WAYSally You’ve just heard ‘Help is on The Way’ by Rise Against, a song which

ties in with today’s Speak Up – Kōrerotia theme: Cultural and Linguistic

Minorities in Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR. We’ve just heard from Federico Federici and Sharon O’Brien, members of the International Network on Crisis Translation or INTERACT and they were speaking about communicating with CALD (Cultural and Linguistic Diverse Communities) during times of disaster and Disaster Risk Reduction.

The rest of the show we’re going to be looking at Disaster Risk Reduction and proactive ways in which groups can do and should participate in formulating an application of DRR policies. I think we’d like to be able to show that these groups do not simply consume information but they also contribute to this information as well.

To speak to these issues we’ve got two guests from the University of Auckland - JC Gaillard and Jay Marlowe - who both have extensive backgrounds working with minority groups in disaster and Disaster Risk Reduction. Now JC and Jay, if I could please ask you to introduce yourselves?

JC Yeah thanks, my name is JC as you said. I’m a researcher and I’ve been doing some work with minority groups in New Zealand especially at the moment gender minorities, children, gender minorities, the homeless and prisoners and most of my work has been in the Philippines for the past 20 years with some extensions to New Zealand and elsewhere in Asia and Pacific as well.

Sally Looking forward to hearing more about your work as we go through.

Jay Kia ora koutou. My name is Jay MarlowE and I’m an Associate Professor in the School of Health and Human Services and Social Work. My research has been predominantly with refugee settlement and Disaster Risk Reduction.

Sally So another minority group then?

Jay Yes.

Sally Now my first question for you both is how do we think about Disaster Risk Reduction? Is there a standard definition, for example, or how do you guys choose to define it when you are talking about it?

JC There is actually no real stand-out definition especially at the moment because of the debate in the field about Disaster Risk Reduction in DRR versus Disaster Risk Management or DRM. Some arguing that DRR is more narrow in scope somehow because it focuses on clear disaster activities and DRM being broader in scope looking at pre-, during and post-disaster as well at the same time. Personally, I use DRR for everything because it’s been in the field for a longer time than DRM but it’s a context in terminology and I don’t think it’s a big deal to me in terms of way we deal with it. I mean, both would use…

Jay There’s even some groups now that are using DRRM: Disaster Risk Reduction and Management. To me, the focus on that notion of reduction is basically trying to reduce the risk and so that might be in terms of people’s understandings of particular hazards - whether that might be a big storm or earthquake or fires - or maybe even disasters that might be more human-influenced like an industrial catastrophe, how they might respond to that and even after an event occurs how people actually recover and the risk associated with recovery can be reduced as well. So thinking about how to reduce disaster-related losses and risk across the different time scales of disaster, whether its readiness, response, recovery or reduction.

JC Actually if we look back at what disaster means we can identify three main components which are the hazards or the phenomena - natural or industrial or technological - and in the second time people and their vulnerability or susceptibility to suffer from losses should the hazard occur and then these people also have at the same time some capacity; they are not helpless, they have resources, they have skills, they have knowledge which they use in facing or dealing with the hazards and disasters. So basically, the idea of preventing the hazard to occur or minimising its impact if it occurs, it means as well reducing vulnerability and it means enhancing capacity but at the same time it can mean as well managing the actual disaster when it occurs and fostering recovery on the long term afterwards.

Sally It sounds like it’s very multi-dimensional, doesn’t it?

JC Yes.

Sally I read somewhere when I was doing some research for this show that there is really no such thing as a natural disaster, it’s just natural hazards. Do you guys think that is an accurate description?

Jay I would agree with that claim. I mean, if you have a tsunami that occurs off a remote part of Alaska, people wouldn’t generally consider that as a disaster but if there was a town that was there suddenly it’s spoken about as a disaster in a certain way. So whilst you might have natural hazards - a natural hazard can be a tsunami or tornado or a fire or earthquake - what actually makes something from a natural hazard into a disaster is the decisions that we as humans make around it so whether we decide to build on flood plains or whether the building code to which we’re supposed to build to and withstand certain magnitude earthquake or the way that people are informed about hazards or not basically can make something that might have been a hazard and would transform it into a disaster. I mean, if you look at the earthquake in Haiti: Hundreds of thousands of people died in that but a similar magnitude earthquake occurred in Chile a few weeks after that and only a few hundred people died and part of that reason was because of the building codes that existed in Chile that meant that those losses were far less. Human decisions have a huge impact on whether a hazard turns into a disaster

or not.

Sally That’s really interesting. Speaking about human involvement, who tends to be involved in the Disaster Risk Reduction or Management processes?

JC Traditionally, and following on what Jay just mentioned about the differences between natural hazards and natural disasters - because we’ve always associated or long-associated natural hazards with the actual disasters, there has long been a focus on the hazard - so DRR has long been in the hands of physical scientists and Civil Defence or military-like organisations that have designed battle-like plans to deal with these extreme and rare events which we often associate with enemies like in a war. So it’s always been a very government control, and democratic process, we’re in the hands of organisations that follow a sort of chain of command like the military, the policy, the fire marshals. But this is changing and this has been changing for the past 20 years, 25 years to which we’ve seen an increasing involvement of grassroots organisations, NGOs and minority groups who we know suffer most from disasters and an increasing participation and engagement of these groups to advocate for more bottom up and more contact specific flexible initiative towards DRR.

Jay If I can just jump on the back of that? It goes back to the discussion on DRR and DRM: DRM - the notion of management - does suggest a notion of command and control and so traditionally many disasters, people that were involved were those Civil Defence and other roles that were specifically tasked with responding to disasters but oftentimes it didn’t incorporate community and other groups within that. And one of the reasons I choose DRR in a way over DRM is that Disaster Risk Reduction actually involves everyone and I think that’s really where… If we’re looking people being prepared and making sure that any plans or responses are acceptable and accessible to culturally and linguistically diverse groups, everyone needs to be involved in DRR, it can’t just be a command and control where we develop certain procedures and guidelines which people are supposed to follow.

Sally Yes that’s no doubt the key message, I would suspect, from this show actually is getting people involved. Now Jay, you’ve mentioned the needs of cultural and linguistic minorities in disaster, what are some of those particular needs to that group?

Jay Well I think one thing… We talk about ‘Culturally and Linguistically Diverse’ groups or CALD, you have to realise that isn’t just one group, that’s many, many, many groups. And even my research with refugees and ‘refugee’ isn’t just a term for one group, it’s actually incorporates lots of people from cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, linguistic backgrounds so on and so forth. So I think that needs to be recognised. But if we even look at the research I’ve done in Canterbury following the 2010/2011 earthquakes, I think it’s first and most important to foreground

that the things that all groups or refugee background groups most need… I mean, they probably share far more in common with the wider society than they have differences but I think that there are some differences that we have to take into account. I mean, one of them being their linguistic background and how well they understand English which is almost the exclusive language through which disaster communications occur whether that’s written or spoken.

For refugees: They may have had previous experiences of trauma which might place them at higher risk of vulnerability when another major event occurs but even with that, that assumption needs to be questioned because when I start speaking to Somali, Ethiopian, different community groups from Afghanistan, Bhutanese groups… I mean, many of them actually said the context of where they came from like refugee camps or other forms of displacement and that actually taught them how to get by when the normal rules don’t apply, where going without food or water, without power, these are all things that they were very well adept at and had learned to get by. And so in some respects, some of the refugee background groups actually showed more capacity than the wider society which I think helps to sort of [challenges] this vulnerability lens that are oftentimes assigned to minority groups.

JC If I can add? It’s actually a sticky question because it’s difficult for us white male researchers to speak on behalf of others especially because the very point of what we are doing is to transfer our [research] on their own behalf - not for us to speak on their behalf - because as much as we are dedicated to their needs we may miss something because we are outsiders. So the very point is to actually [encourage participation] and I mean genuine participation which means transferring power and giving them an actual voice - not just listening for the sake of listening without giving them the ability to make decisions. They have to make decisions; they have to decide for themselves. So it’s a bit difficult for us to answer on their behalf somehow without wanting to be cynical about the question but it’s a tricky one.

Sally Definitely and I think it’s an excellent point that you raise that fostering participation isn’t just a matter of putting out a call for consultation; it takes far more than that.

JC Absolutely. In the field of participation studies, we look at consultation as a form of tokenistic participation because it’s just seemingly listening to people but still making it still within our outsider’s hands somehow.

Sally So just to finish up this segment then, if we’re thinking about genuinely encouraging participation from cultural and linguistic minority groups in Disaster Risk Reduction, is there an element there in which being by definition minorities and the minority cultures, is there some kind of challenge there? Trying to encourage participation when the culture of those groups isn’t the mainstream culture? Or I guess worded otherwise: How does culture impact or influence DRR policies?

Jay I mean culture is really the lens through which we socially construct our world so through culture we sort of develop understandings of what it means to be a community member or how we think about gender or how we think about parenting or how I think about education and lots of those things or even possibly even where disasters come from or how they occur, whether a disaster is something that is sort of willed by a certain god or deity or if it’s something that happens because of a natural phenomenon or whatever it might be.

When we start thinking about how we respond to disasters: If you don’t take culture into account, usually what that means is that you’re developing a disaster plan for the majority or at least a dominant group at the expense of others and so you might have the best evacuation model, the best predictive risk model, you might develop building code to certain standards, you might make sure that you’ve got disaster kits for people but if those disaster kits aren’t accessible or they’re not affordable to people, they can’t understand the evacuation models because of the language that’s used or the workshops that are used to train people - if they’re in some ways not culturally appropriate or gender is not taken into account suddenly women are exposed to risk that we may not be aware of that suddenly DRR becomes really problematic because it’s only to the benefit of a select few as opposed to the entire population.

JC And it’s a difficult issue. I mean, when we bring culture into the picture - and we need to - it’s difficult because it’s whose culture and whose need we are talking about? I just want to use my favourite example of somehow it is eclectic humanitarian dilemma, if you are facing a situation of famine in a patriarchal society, if you want to feed the most vulnerable who are probably the kids and women in that society then you have to go straight to them and provide food which means bypassing probably traditional cultural processes that may involve male elders. But at the same time we want to respect culture so if we respect culture totally then we go through the traditional leadership and then may end up starving those who are most in need so is it’s a matter of their culture versus the culture of those who provide assistance. It’s very difficult because if you want to [inaudible], it’s a very tricky situation again and the way out is usually to try and open up a dialogue between locals - both the most vulnerable and less vulnerable - and outsiders who may try to bring a different culture. And this issue of dialogue is, to me, one of the most important ones in DRR and the fields of development and this is where participation should fit in. But participation can’t occur in a silo, it needs to be fostered in that ordered dialogue platform because it involves other people with more power who share power. Sorry I’m getting a bit complicated but I hope you get the…

Sally No, really interesting. I think, as well, disaster sometimes opens up opportunities for individuals and for groups that otherwise may not have access to some of those leadership roles to take on board those roles - and I’m thinking particularly of younger people who might have more

competence in a majority language for example, acting as unofficial translators or interpreters. I think that was something that was quite evident in Canterbury after the earthquakes.

Jay It is something that I’ve actually written about, around how young people from refugee backgrounds sort of emerged as unexpected leaders in some communities and served as linguistic and even technological bridges that connected their ethnically-defined communities to information and resources that would have otherwise been unavailable to some groups.

Sally And I highly recommend you check out Jay’s research if you’re interested, our listeners, he’s done some fantastic stuff. It’s time for our second song and we’ve got Jonny Cash. JC, you chose this song because you thought it tied in well with the theme.

JC I think it’s a song that big capacities in the sense that these families and Johnny Cash experience - if I remember well, flooding, they are facing flooding, the water is rising - but they are still coping with the situation without anyone else’s support from the outside. So it’s a good way of emphasising that people are not helpless in facing disasters.

MUSIC BY JOHNNY CASH – FIVE FEET AND RISINGSally Nau mai haere mai, welcome back to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia.” I’m your

host Sally Carlton and we’re talking about cultural and linguistic minorities in Disaster Risk Reduction with JC Gaillard and Jay Marlowe from the University of Auckland. I think we’ll pick up where we left off in the last segment thinking about engaging with different cultures in Disaster Risk Reduction. How can and should local or specialised knowledge be incorporated into Disaster Risk Reduction policies and practices? This is another big question! I’ll leave it open to you guys.

Jay From my point of view, even, I guess before you get into policy, is a thing about how that is informed and the research that informs that? So what was great about some of the work we did in Canterbury was I was able to hire and train research assistants from refugee background to help conduct the work, they helped co-publish some of the work and I think that gives the research a greater sense of legitimacy and rigour about it because you have communities that already have an established relationship; they’re more ‘insiders’ to certain community groups than I might be. And a lot of disaster relief research has been critiqued - it’s sometimes referred to as helicopter research - where researchers get helicoptered in, they go down and extract information and then they jump back in their helicopter and return to wherever it is that he or she is from and write their peer-reviewed publications. So I think in that way trying to incorporate capacity building even in developing the evidence stage or trying to answer the researcher’s questions is really important.

Sally JC, any comments from you?

JC I think Jay’s final point is important about the role of researcher versus the role of insider and how much we need to get those most at risk to do the research, to assess the risk in the first place because no-one knows the local context better than the locals anyway. That’s the bottom line I will always use in our particular activities. I mean, no-one knows disaster relief better than those who are at risk.

Sally And yet I would imagine that they often are fairly voiceless, is that a correct assumption?

JC Yes. Not always - it’s context-specific - but often.

Jay In terms of refugee settlement policy which involves disasters because the area is wider than that, I’m oftentimes asked to comment on my perspective in relation to housing or work or social media and other sorts of things and it’s really striking that oftentimes I’m asked by government to provide some comment about that when in fact really it should be the community members themselves that should be providing that comment so it does come back to the politics, the voice and who is in power and often it’s the responsibility of researchers to ensure that those community capacities are built.

Sally You guys both go out into the community - into these, I would suspect, fairly voiceless communities - and conduct your research. Are there any particular sensitivities or particular issues you need to be aware of conducting research around these sorts of issues? I imagine particularly immediately post-disaster there may be sensitivities that need to be taken into consideration.

Jay I speak definitely from the Canterbury standpoint, I mean I conducted focus groups with Somali, Ethiopians, Bhutanese and Afghan communities following the last major earthquake in December 2011, a few weeks after that, and certainly one of sensitivities is just around people's safety and for some people it was the first time they’d come back into the CBD [Central Business District] and just seen the absolute devastation of Christchurch - you could still look into the shop windows and see frozen moments from February 22 [2011] where people had run out of restaurants. And whilst I was really wanting to speak about how people responded to the earthquake I’m trying to highlight to different agency, often need to be very mindful that talking about earthquakes and even having them coming back into the city could actually expose them to certain vulnerability and then another… There’s quite a few other considerations. Obviously there’s working with interpreters and are those interpreters trusted by the community. Just because someone speaks that language doesn’t necessarily mean that they trust that person who is speaking that language; there might be issues around confidentiality around very small community groups. For some of these community groups that I’m speaking with there might be less than 100 members in that actual community so it’s very likely that if you work with an interpreter they possibly know the people that they’re talking about.

I guess finally the last thing I want to highlight is you spend the entire session is this power and the way that power is sort of communicated and who has a voice and talking about those things. And so it can be very easy to go to a community leader and really just get one perspective that maybe doesn’t incorporate the experiences of women or young people or maybe other groups that might be from other ethnic backgrounds. The Afghan community in Christchurch, for instance, there’s the Tajiks, Pashtun and Hazara and they all have slightly different perspectives on the earthquake but you can easily miss that if you just sort of think of community as the ‘Afghan community’ or the ‘refugee community.’

Sally I imagine that some of the issues you’ve just highlighted there Jay are challenges to effectively incorporating the viewpoints of these communities into effective Disaster Risk Reduction. Do you think it is one of the reasons why perhaps these voices aren’t so included? It’s just the difficulties in bridging those kinds of gaps.

Jay Well there are some difficulties in bridging those gaps but I think it’s also about priorities and going back to the idea of is it about management or is it reducing risk? If it’s reducing risk, we should be involved in that and if that’s the case that goes beyond command and control and we can’t just think about the population of Christchurch or Canterbury or any other part of New Zealand or any other part of the world for that matter and just treat them as a uniform group. If you’re in the business of Disaster Risk Reduction you have to engage with it in terms of complexity, in terms of people’s populations and with the demographic and the relationships they have with one another.

JC I was pointing to the importance of a dialogue between the insiders and outsiders or with a large range of stakeholders and I think that is very important in the sense that… We need to start with the participation of those who are most vulnerable - so including these minorities - but ultimately if we want to reduce disaster risk in a sustainable fashion we still need outsiders to step in.

We need outsiders to step in the business to share power - the power to make decisions - but as well we need the outsider to address what poses a vulnerability. And if I come back to these different components of disaster relief: Capacity are largely [inaudible] meaning that they are most often within the hands of those who are facing hazards and disasters. So it is quite easy somehow to enhance capacity because when you deal with these people, they have control in this but addressing the whole process of their vulnerability is much more difficult because vulnerability is largely driven by structural issues, how power and resources and shared within society so you need those with power to actually share the general resources, grant access to those resources that are most often available locally. So ultimately you need all the stakeholders to collaborate and to dialogue based on the need of those

who are most vulnerable in the first place so we need to start with the bottom-up approach but we can’t just rely on that, we need some sort of… I actually don’t really use top-down/bottom-up anyway, it’s more from the outside to the inside and inside to outside process of collaboration, if that makes sense.

Sally That’s a great way of thinking of it. So just to finish up then, we’re slowly running out of time. What are some of the strengths that these communities can bring to the formulation of DRR?

Jay I think one of the strengths about bringing in a diverse perspective is that you actually get precisely that, you provide more opportunities to think innovatively and creatively around possible solutions, it brings a number of people into conversations with one another, there’s a number of researchers now that are showing… The work of people like Daniel Aldrich for instance, a book called Promoting Resilience, where he argued that the most important thing for Disaster Risk Reduction isn’t about how strong the buildings are or how good predictive risk models might be, it’s actually about the importance of social relationships and that social relationship that sort of exists within communities are similar to each other but also what he calls bridging relationships around weak relationships between people that might connect you to the new resources and opportunities and then also linking relationships which is the relationships that people have with the institutions around them.

So when you start bringing cultural, linguistic and diverse groups into the conversation it provides additional ways of thinking, it helps to identify resources that can be mobilised and creative solutions that can be developed in the specific context in which people live.

JC And there’s infinite amount of capacity available on the side of those who are at risk and this is very evident in the fact that 80 to 85 persons, those who survived the earthquake survived the earthquake because they were rescued by the neighbours, their kin, family or relatives who are on the spot at the time of the event so we are avoiding much losses at the moment because of capacity, because of what people continuously do to face disasters. That’s a key point: People are not helpless, they have to participate and have to recognise these capacities in the first place otherwise we duplicate or we miss much to what the needs are so this is a starting point.

Sally Yes, recognising capacity.

Jay If I can make one further… I mean, to me one of the most important take-home points is that whilst disasters are often positioned as extra-ordinary events, it’s the way that people respond to them and the way that they live those extra-ordinary events are often based in the everyday and so really Disaster Risk Reduction starts with every day. It’s not just thinking about a tsunami or earthquake or the big storm that might come, it’s thinking about people’s everyday lives and everyday livelihoods. If

people are employed, if they’re not experiencing discrimination, if kids are in school and feel as if they belong and people feel that they belong to a community, that they’ve got a common story, a shared solidarity then creates a common bond to respond to adversity when it arises. If you wait until the disaster happens… I mean, some say that disasters actually shine a light on everyday existing inequality and so if you can address inequality and disadvantage and oppression and marginalisation within the everyday you will go a long way to reducing disaster risk.

JC My take-away message would be that there is no single disaster worldwide that kills everyone or that takes all buildings down; there are always people who will survive while others die or others survive. There are always buildings which collapse while others withstand and even the worst case tsunamis in Indonesia or Japan, there are always inequalities in the impact and that shows that most often the resources, the knowledge to face are available locally. The issue is: Who has access to the resources and who doesn’t? And who don’t obviously are the most vulnerable including these minorities.

Sally And I would just like to add from the experience of the CLING group - which is Community Languages Information Network Group which operates here in Christchurch - forming relationships before disaster happens seems to be super critical in terms of what you are talking about JC, in terms of alerting people to what resources are actually out there and can be accessed.

JC Absolutely.

Sally Have you got any final words either of you before we finish up?

JC No, I would say the audience is very welcome to send an email and engage in discussions, we would be very happy to provide any feedback, any comments to email or Facebook whatever their means of communication.

Sally Great thank you, I will make sure people are aware of that. Also for our listeners, don’t forget that the Facebook and Twitter pages will post up relevant resources as well. Jay, anything to add?

Jay Just a final concluding point, one is that again to reinforce that people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds arguably share far more in common than there are differences and I think that’s really important because otherwise it sort of positions them as outsiders different from the rest of society and whilst I think we need to recognise these forms of diversity that people bring with them, if they’re just being in terms of differences it sort of further pushes them out as outsiders and pushes it to the peripheries of society. Then just to reinforce that notion again that the everyday and extra-ordinary are infinitely linked, that if we think about people’s everyday lives, if neighbours get to know who is living around them, if people develop relationships across society with

institutions, we think about people’s opportunities to live their lives in ways that are inclusive and empowering it actually goes a really long way in terms of preparing people for the unexpected.

Sally That’s a great final message, thank you Jay. I’d like to thank both of you very much for sharing your expertise with us today.