MAGGIE HERATY

Maggie Heraty, 75, was employed by UNHCR from 1995 to 2007 and now lives in London. She worked in logistics and supply covering areas like procurement, warehousing and transport. Part of that involved moving newly arrived refugees from borders and transit centres to safer zones and transporting staff, often by light aircraft, to areas they were urgently needed.

The job took her to regions like the Great Lakes Region and West and Central Africa and she spent time in war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone, including missions to neighbouring countries to help run repatriation operations. She also worked in Sri Lanka in the tsunami relief effort in 2005 and was posted to Baghdad in 2003 but was unable to fulfil the job after an attack on the UN headquarters. Since retiring, Maggie has continued her humanitarian logistics work with projects focused on Mauritania, Haiti, Liberia and Myanmar.

I have friends for life all over the world

Among Maggie’s most sobering memories are being threatened at gunpoint by rebels in Liberia and elsewhere, and, in 1999, helping track down Sierra Leonean refugees who had fled into the forests of Guinea: “Two women, two drivers, two cars and a satellite phone,” she said of that experience. “We forded rivers and battled through muddy tracks in torrential rain for two or three days to find hundreds, then thousands, of refugees, many of whom had suffered amputations and most had lost family members during their flight.”

Maggie Heraty sails across Lake Tanganyika, working with a local colleague to supervise the unloading of returnee baggage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

© Maggie Heraty

Two trucks become stuck on their journey between Zwedru and Harper, during the repatriation of refugees from Liberia from Cote d'Ivoire.

© Maggie Heraty

UNHCR chartered ships to assist Rohingya refugees travelling up the river Yangon.

© Maggie Heraty

Maggie’s warmest memories of her career are repatriation missions by ship, to Sierra Leone and Liberia and across Lake Tanganyika from Tanzania to the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We sailed overnight when it was cooler and calmer, and at dawn there would be a steady stream of returnees coming out on deck to look at their homeland, and pointing out landmarks to small children, some of whom had been born in exile.”

“I have friends for life all over the world,” Maggie said. She has a solitary regret about her career at UNHCR: “I just wish I had done it earlier in my life.”