Why he’s only humanitarian

Andrew Mathieson
HEARING the word disaster sends Chris Piper into a sense of calm – but never a panic.
He analyses the problems, maps out a plan and rolls up his sleeves.
Whether it be far-flung places in the Third World or small bush communities in Victoria, relief with a smile is on its way.
Chris has a flexible humanitarian assistance model that can apply to drought, famine, flood or bushfires.
Pushing a document across the table, he points out an emergency management chart that he considers gospel.
Resembling a weather map, the chart is covered with long arrows as well as lines of peaks and troughs.
As the rain sets in one morning outside a Torquay cafe, the project risk management and disaster worker talks about the urgency of fire prevention this summer.
“Just like any disaster, there is the immediate impact and immediate emergency response – everyone is on edge and all the media gets involved,” he says as his finger runs through the chart.
“Then there is the longer-term recovery, so, in a sense, we’re talking two or three years for the people involved.”
Combining his adopted hometown with a passion for humanitarian work, Chris founded Torqaid out of a desire to consult communities to prevent and manage disasters.
The latest mission for the 57-year-old Englishman is telling Aussies how to avoid complacency in a bushfire.
“Bushfire was, of course, a new type of hazard for me when I came out here in 1987, which was only four years after Ash Wednesday,” he remembers.
“It was at the time when they used to have those assembly area signs. Even then I was surprised that people forget so quickly (bushfire emergency procedures) in the bush.”
Understanding Chris’s creed requires knowledge of part of his childhood spent among the slums of colonial Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – during the early 1960s.
Mum had been raised in India decades earlier amid the height of British Empire, while dad later jetted around the globe for the British air force.
His life had shifted outside the walls of privilege in Sussex or Kent where Chris was previously educated in an economics and geography degree.
“I make sure I’m quite well read on places beforehand and I do my background,” he says, pulling out a recent copy of Guardian Weekly.
It was 1977 when Chris joined UK charity Save the Children fund as a field collector in Bangladesh.
After witnessing three years of turmoil and great change in the former Pakistani outpost, he was among a growing number of liberal Christians to sign up for World Vision.
The first mission was to rescue millions from poverty and starvation in Somalia.
“The (refugee) camp was out in the desert and it went from nothing to 45,000 people in less than six months,” Chris recalls.
“There was no running water – they had to get it from underground, digging in the sand.
“With the lack of food, they had a high malnutrition rate, so a lot of kids were dying all around us.”
For the first time, watching displaced people lose all hope finally broke his spirit. Despite disease and death tormenting those on the frontline, Chris’s aching heart mended when he wooed a Geelong nurse who would eventually become his wife.
Between trips from Kampuchea – now Cambodia – to the Balkans, Mozambique and Burma, Chris and Marilyn manage to have time to settle comfortably into Surf Coast life.
Still, the influence of spreading goodwill and understanding cultural sensitivities has since rubbed off onto their eldest daughter, 23-year-old Chloe, who is spending a year in India for Architects without Borders.
“I think you have to go in with the right attitude because it’s all about relationships,” he says, “even when you work in the most difficult place, like the first time an Australian visited Afghanistan under the Taliban in 2001.
“The Taliban made it difficult for the few agencies working there but if you go in there and play by their rules you can get around it.”