Tribute to Sarah Justine Packwood: The Intuitive Humanitarian

 Sarah Justine Packwood (1970 - 2024)

Sarah Justine Packwood was a British humanitarian aid worker and our friend. She died at sea in June 2024. We, her friends and former coworkers in the humanitarian world, grieve for her loss. This is our reflection on her and her work and how important it was to her identity and an invitation to join us at her memorial on 1 December 2024.

There have been stories written about Sarah that focused on her sense of adventure, her passion for the environment, and her love story with her husband, Brett. Many now know about her around the world because the story of lovers who disappeared at sea only to have their bodies found weeks later, captured many people’s imagination. Sarah’s career as an aid worker is briefly mentioned in these stories but a better understanding of it helps shed more light about this warm, wonderful woman.  Sarah was truly a humanitarian at heart and a pragmatic optimist. Sarah had great passion for life and connecting deeply with people. As one of her friends said on LinkedIn, Sarah cared about “the experience of life rather than the superficial needs for position or asset acquisition.” 

Like many of us multitaskers, as Sarah set off to cross the Atlantic, she was also working as a freelance consultant, typing up reports for the United Nations and doing her part for humanitarian work and then tragedy struck. We don’t know what happened to her boat, but Sarah did not survive.

As an aid worker, Sarah specialized in protection - ensuring that persons with disabilities, older people, children and women who were vulnerable to violence received proper support and care and were shielded from further harm. Her warm and caring heart informed all the work she did. How did Sarah decide to become an aid worker? In her own words, “I took a gap year to learn how to apply myself. I did voluntary conservation work, a spell in retail, a stint at a youth hostel and volunteered. Throughout I learned the importance of serving others and working hard whatever the task.” She went on to get her masters degree in Rural Resource Management and conducted her thesis research in Kenya where she was confronted by the poverty of rural farming families there. “I was confronted by the challenges they faced every day just to survive, I experienced an epiphany. Africa captured my heart and I knew I had to return one day.”

And so she did, returning to Tanzania to work with Rwandan refugees living there in 1994 and then again and again in South Sudan, Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as to emergencies around the world in Kosovo, Haiti, Myanmar, and other places. In the early millennium, Sarah returned to the UK and did a stint of humanitarian work where she infused her international experiences with the spirituality that was such an important part of her identity, and grounding herself in UK for a season. During this time, she worked for both the Shaftesbury Society and HelpAge. While at the Shaftesbury Society, she was an important part of a steering group with other faith-based NGOs and individuals that shaped a UK-wide Christian faith focused Refugee and Asylum Seeker welcome network. Her involvement saw activists from communities across the UK effectively welcoming asylum seekers and refugees into their communities. In many ways, this early work created the foundations for small refugee charities being established that we now see across the UK. 

Sarah also worked with HelpAge International where she was a pivotal member of the disaster management unit, leading responses to support older people to live dignified lives after a disaster. Her work there responding to natural disasters like floods, cyclones, droughts and earthquakes lead to her lifelong desire to address climate change and live sustainably. Sarah spent time with the United Nations in Namibia and Papua New Guinea as a ProCap protection specialist incorporating persons with disabilities, older people, children, and women and girls in disaster preparedness initiatives. She returned to the UK to care for her mother in her final days, working with the British government at the Department for International Development again focusing on typhoon responses and supporting UN agencies alongside researching clean cookstoves for emergency relief distributions.  It was that stint in London that found her walking home from work in the rain and encountering her future husband on the way to the bus! Her last consultancies conducted remotely as she and her husband Brett developed a sustainable home in Canada and sailed on their beloved ship, Theros, were in preparing communities for disasters and emergencies through work with UN agencies like OHCHR and UNHCR, The World Bank, ChildFund Australia and others. 

Like many of us post-covid and in this time of localization, she was playing a role in humanitarian and development assistance by sharing her knowledge and skills and providing technical assistance from afar while stepping back from a frontline role. Ultimately, Sarah always worked best within a team, always in solidarity with seeking ways to limit the suffering amongst our fellow humans that have endured so much. Colleagues at HelpAge said Sarah was a joyful colleague to have, providing mentoring to younger colleagues from the UK and across the world. Her wise and measured advice has gone on to shape how many people work – and thus furthering her impact across the globe.

Sarah was prolifically creative and always writing, making art and music and applying her heart to problems that she saw in the world. She interviewed many of us for a book she had hoped to produce called the Intuitive Humanitarian. It was based on her thoughts, reflections, observations and experiences in the humanitarian sector over the last 20 years. It was about using a particular lens to look at the broken humanitarian system and re-imagine it, signposting other aid workers and social activists towards modelling something different to cause a shift to happen. We often had conversations about the importance of treating each other in an empathetic, peaceful, and loving way, particularly in our humanitarian community which can sometimes be a traumatized and angry place. Her kindness and compassion were always present in her work, in her art, in her life. She had a ready laugh and smile and a keen intelligence. She was always on the side of the vulnerable and thinking of others.  

Our humanitarian world lost a kind and decent woman in that shipwreck and the world became a little less bright. But in her memory, we continue to try to provide comfort to the suffering in disasters and wars. We bear witness to their suffering and we aim to do our small part to help those less fortunate than ourselves. 

If you knew her or would like to join us in her memorial which is taking place 1 December 2024 in Long Itchington UK, you can find out more information on the service and other events at https://sarah-j-packwood.muchloved.com/ 

All are welcome, just as Sarah would have liked it. 

Another Long Silence

Another long silence from me and some writer's block. It's partially because I've been traveling and had a lot of friends in town since the end of April. I had a rough time in Papua New Guinea but it was good for me - found some things out about myself and came to some good healthy realizations.  And then I got to see a lot of friends and family which is fantastic - my sister came to visit me for two weeks, my friends Clay and Elli came to visit, I saw a friend from Amsterdam - Jim and then one from MSF - Tirana.... all good. I love having guests and I love having people stay with me in my apartment. But when they leave, I get sad and feel lonely. 

Tomorrow its the 4th of July - America's Independence Day - somehow this is making me homesick. Last year at this time, I had been in Bangkok for less than six months and I was able to pull together a 4th of July barbecue with about 20 people. This year, I know 2 people in town. Everyone else has either moved or is gone. That feels pretty sad.  But that is the nature of this transitory field I'm in and a big city like Bangkok. I can go out and meet people but I am sometimes overwhelmed by trying to make new friends. And social media feels like a crutch sometimes - I can stay in touch with my friends from all over the world but sometimes there is no substitute for just sitting across from someone and chatting. About nothing - about everything - and laughing. Or crying. As need be.

I'm now a consultant which means I work from home which I both love and is making me a little nuts. I love the freedom of not having to put on my "happy face" and go to the office but I miss copy machines and printers and inane chit chat in the hallway! I try to create routines so I am out and about but I get thrown off when I travel.

So two things happened this past week that threw me a bit... I had a big break through in therapy which is scary and exciting but leaves me feeling weak and scared.

And then when things were getting okay, I had the misfortune of seeing a terrible accident. In my apartment building, we have a big swimming pool on the 3rd floor. My balcony looks down on it. I like to come out on the balcony and treat it like my living room. I also like looking over the rail down at any swimmers below. I woke up from a nap on Sunday and saw a bunch of people down on the deck below - many in uniform and almost all of them Thai. At first I thought they were having some sort of ceremony or meeting. Then as I looked at the pool, I noticed a wheelchair lying in the shallow end. I had a horrible feeling about this and remembered this old 91 year old lovely American woman I met when I toured the building back in February of last year. I hope she's okay, I thought. And then my eye caught something else in the pool - her body, floating in the opposite corner facedown. It was such a horrible shock. And the police were all there investigating it but there was nothing anyone could do. And her body stayed there in the pool for over an hour. I have always been kind of sensitive and emotional. And this week I have been feeling even more so than ever. I was overcome by horror and sadness about this horrible lonely death. She was old. Yes. She was going to die eventually. But how terrible for everyone involved.

So... anyway, not feeling like I'm very bouncy or good company right now. But I think things are on the up for me. I'm going to Europe for a month and will get to spend some more time in Paris, a city that I have always loved. I'll see friends in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hamburg. And then I get to come back to the tropics and live in Asia. So I know that my life is good... I'm grateful for the freedom, the love I have from people around the world, and for being able to live in such a delicious culinary world capitol. And I'll get through this rough patch.

This is meandering but I wanted to put something out there. Hopefully my next post will be about my exploits in Papua New Guinea, seeing my old friend in Ho Chi Minh City, and meeting fabulous French men in Paris. We'll see. xoxox

Christmas in the Tropics

It feels weird! It's warm and sunny out. There are christmas trees and glitz everywhere. I can't bring myself to buy a tree because I'll be gone for most of the holiday season. But I put on the Christmas tunes last night and drank some red wine.... I have zero motivation to buy gifts, write Christmas cards or decorate a tree. In fact, I mostly feel like this right now thanks to my unsuccessful visit to Sweden.

Dreams

I'm in shitty dirty dusty Delhi in the same hotel as I was in a year ago when I came here to do a training. They are conducting all night construction outside my window. But somehow, I fell asleep at a reasonable hour despite the big wedding celebration going on below as well.

I was in the midst of a long and convuluted John Le Carre influenced dream about spies and red light districts and schoolyard friends. And then, like a boxer punching through a screen, a very clear and intense picture of my father. My father in his schoolyard in Iowa at the family reunion that we went to in July. I could see him exactly in his green plaid flannel shirt. Thin like he was in the last years of his life but smiling with his glasses on.

I'm now wide awake. Right before he died when I was in Udaipur alone, I awoke in the middle of the night -an odd event as I normally sleep like a log all night long. I awoke with aterrible retching feeling like i was going to vomit. I brought the bucket into my bedroom and put it next to my bed like my parents used to do for me. But then I went back to sleep. About 2 hours later, I woke up seconds before my phone rang with my sister on the other end to tell me my father had just died.

Now when I wake up like this, I"m afraid it means something else really bad is going to happen. I've been plagued with fear since the Haiti earthquake -afraid to hear more bad news. I am wishing to get there. My humanitarian emergency organization has no use for me. I want to help the people of Haiti rather than lying here in a lonely hotel room in India feeling helpless again.

Grief

"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break." ~William Shakespeare


When my mother died in 1997, I was 29 years old and in graduate school. I was dating a man named Michael and living in Washington DC in a group house with three other women. I had a persian cat named Dante and I worked part time at Witness for Peace, a grassroots Latin American human rights organization.

Why my father died in 2009, I was 41 years old and had been working full time for twelve years. I am not seriously involved with anyone romantically and I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands alone in an apartment in the Oost. I have a siamese cat named Simon and I work for Medecins Sans Frontieres, a medical humanitarian organization.

So a few things have changed - but not that much. Grief has caught me unprepared. I thought I could handle it- after all, he had been struggling healthwise and whenever he became ill, he would remind me that he had had a very good life and was tired and didn't want to live forever. I spent three weeks with him at Christmas, cooking him anything he liked to eat, and chatting with him, and taking him to doctor's appointments. We cooked spaghetti together and drank champagne on New Years Day. We had a wonderful time. I left in January, expecting to see him in April.

It's been eight and a half months since he died suddenly. I miss him dreadfully and as the Christmas season sneaks up and the year anniversary of the last time I saw him, the sadness becomes overwhelming sometimes. I feel unmoored by grief. Things I took for granted are gone. I don't have a 'home' anymore except for this rented apartment. Alyson and I are attempting to sell our childhood home and I haven't been back to South Carolina since March after the funeral. My landlady and I had a minor dispute about the use of the guestroom a few weeks ago and I felt a huge sense of violation of my privacy. I just wanted to go home and I don't have one that is mine anymore. I was enraged and overwhelmed by my anger.

When I travel to new countries now, I become overwhelmed by the fact that I can't call my father before I leave and when I get home to tell him about it. He always wanted to know what the beer was like. There's noone now, really, to worry if I arrive safely or if I return okay. My sister and friends care, I suppose, but its an empty feeling to know that the parents who always fretted over my safety and wouldn't let me drive to a Duran Duran show are no longer there to worry about me anymore. I cry now at departures because there is noone to wish me off and I cry at arrivals because there is noone there to welcome me home. Airports which before had been so incredibly exciting and dull at the same time are now emotional.

Sometimes the emotions are so raw that they feel unmanageable. I do not know if I can describe this feeling that sits on my chest like a heavy millstone. So for comfort, I turn to the words of others to assure myself I'm not crazy and that this is a human experience.

" The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost."  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

"I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't."
— C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
 
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes."

— Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in."

— C.S. Lewis

"As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop."

— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)