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CJ (Chad) Hendrix - The Humanitarians Need You
The ranks of the GIS profession seem now to be full of people for whom GIS is little different from any other IT profession. They manage databases, maintain web services, drink lots of coffee, turn pasty white. And of course, they are right; in many ways GIS is simply a specialized sort of IT function. But many of us who have been around long enough to remember when shapefiles were shiny new things didn't become geographers to sit behind a computer terminal. If that's you, then I need your help.

In 2003, four years after receiving my Masters at USC, I found that even being specialized in remote sensing was not enough to guarantee a regular diet of field work. Not that I didn't enjoy the work I was doing, but in those four years, I spent a lot of time looking at imagery and precious little time out in the field. And the field work I did was looking at irrigated lawns in urban areas. Instead of lunch out of a backpack, we stopped at the mall.

So, I saved up my pennies and quit. I lined up volunteer work on a research preserve in Kenya. I crewed on a sailboat in the Indian Ocean. I lived in a monastery in Thailand. It was a good time. But the bank account ran low eventually, and I started thinking about going back to the states to work. Just in the nick of time, someone sent me a job ad: the UN peacekeeping mission was looking for GIS people. I signed up and spent 14 months in Eritrea, making topo maps to support the peacekeeping. It was heaven: working with people from all over the world, living in a fascinating culture, mountain biking to remote villages, weekend camping on desert islands in the Red Sea, and field work the way God meant for it to be. Two of us went to the Danakil depression, a strange apocalyptic landscape of salt flats and volcanoes. We drove several days down the long, empty, coastal road, seeing flocks of ostriches, coral reefs, sand dunes and lava flows. We GPS'd trench lines flying low and fast UN helicopters. There are more tales than can be told here, but suffice it to say I was a happy geographer.

Eventually the government of Eritrea kicked out all the peacekeepers from western countries and we were evacuated, but luckily I had lined up my first contract with my present employer: the UN Joint Logistics Center. UNJLC deploys in large disasters to help coordinate cargo movements, smooth customs problems, map roads, track deliveries, in short, to do whatever needs to be done to keep the flow of humanitarian aid moving. I arrived in Pakistan about two months after the October 2005 earthquake which killed over 80,000 people and left millions without shelter for the approaching winter. We mapped roads, monitored landslides, had tea with Taliban leaders in the mountains, dropped guys out of helicopters with mountain bikes to map roads impassable to cars (I didn't get to do this, sadly, but it was so cool that I had to mention it). At the end I took a one month break to go trek in the Karakorum mountains on Pakistan's border with China, then off to south Sudan to work again for UNJLC.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that it hasn't been all good. I've had every sort of intestinal parasite you can imagine, spent a week in the hospital with meningitis, got pushed around by the police who wanted to take my bike, been awoken by gunfire outside my tent (unpaid soldiers rioting), and had two haircuts so spectacularly bad that I had to shave my head. But it's a small price to pay to be in the field.

Just recently, I took a post in Rome (Italy, not Georgia), at UNJLC's Headquarters, where I get to prepare for our emergency deployments. This includes doing things like writing this article to entice hearty geographers with an appetite for adventure to send me their CV so I can add you to our roster. Then when disaster strikes, you might find yourself on a plane to some place you've never heard of. You'll still spend a lot of time staring at a computer, but in a tent in the middle of no where, even editing shapefiles is interesting.