Shouldering the Burden: An Alabama Aid Worker Helps Out in Pakistan

December 18, 2005

The front doors of the busy field office swing open and the cold mountain air pushes in, competing for space in the small concrete room around the newly arrived figure of Shannon Oliver. At well over six feet tall, built like the linebacker he once was, Oliver is a presence unto himself, and from his crumpled winter hat and dirt-stained jeans you sense immediately that he doesn’t spend much of his time here indoors.

Here is the remote Neelum Valley in northeast Pakistan, a rugged stretch of mountain peaks and rock strewn hillsides, and the scene of a massive earthquake that struck this region on October 8, killing an estimated 75,000 people and leaving another 3.5 million people homeless. At first glance it seems an unlikely place for an ex-college football player from Tuskegee, Alabama, but much about Shannon Oliver is unlikely.

Oliver, 31, has spent most of the last eight years living and working overseas as an aid worker, traveling to areas of conflict and natural disaster around the world. Through his work, Oliver operates on the front lines of disaster and development programs, providing assistance to those who have lost their homes and livelihoods and managing projects aimed at long-term development. It is a life, Oliver says, that he could never have imagined growing up as an only child in Tuskegee, raised by a single mother.

“When I was a kid, we had no money to travel,” Oliver said. “I used to read National Geographic, and I always wanted to travel.”

As some of his friends drifted into lives of crime and drugs, that chance to travel almost never came. With no money for college, Oliver was facing a stark choice by the time his senior year of high school approached – get a minimum wage job or join the military. It was then that the first of the breaks that have so dramatically shaped his life arrived in the form of a college football recruiter.

“I was playing high school football, and I didn’t know it but my mother was sending grainy videos of me playing to college recruiters,” Oliver said. “One day this recruiter came in and gave me a full ride to play at Tuskegee [University] right there in the weight room.”

Though he was leaning towards a career in law while studying Political Science at Tuskegee, Oliver happened by chance into a lecture one day during his senior year by the then Deputy Peace Corps Director. It was a moment he well remembers.

“I was sitting there listening to this guy, and in seven minutes he had me sold,” Oliver said. “It changed my life.”

Less than a year later, in 1998, Oliver began a three-year position with the Peace Corps in the West African country of Ivory Coast, a move that both launched his overseas career and stoked his passion for international humanitarian work. When his Peace Corps contract ended, Oliver worked with various other aid agencies in Africa, working to eradicate parasitic guinea worm in southern Sudan and building hospitals in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, using the opportunity to travel whenever he could.

After returning to the US in 2003 to get his Master’s in Sustainable Development from Boston’s Brandeis University, Oliver joined Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, with whom he is sill working today. Starting as a Fellow, Oliver was sent to Eastern Europe to work on a project helping girls in Serbia who had been trafficked as prostitutes – the subject of his Master’s thesis, which he completed during his fellowship. Like many of his international experiences, his time working on projects to help these girls – many of them only in their early teens – had a profound impact on him.

“You make these personal connections with people, and you realize you just can’t walk away,” Oliver said.

After nearly a year in Serbia, Oliver transferred to Afghanistan, where he managed development projects aimed at rehabilitating local livelihoods. Though Africa and Eastern Europe had been challenging, Oliver says, Afghanistan – which was still unsettled after the fall of the Taliban government there in 2001 – was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

“With all of the reading I had done in National Geographic when I was a kid, I felt like I was walking through the pages there,” Oliver said. “It was like walking on the moon.”

Though leery of outsiders after nearly 25 years of war, the Afghan people were eager for the sort of rural development projects he was working on in the countryside around Harat. Though he was happy there, and eager to see the results of his work, Oliver’s time in Afghanistan came to a sudden halt on October 10, 2005 – two days after a massive earthquake registering 7.6 on the Richter scale struck neighboring Pakistan.

“They said, ‘Can you be packed and ready to go tomorrow?’ Two days later I was here,” Oliver said. “We were still watching it on CNN and suddenly I’m going there.”

His time since then, Oliver says, has been a blur, working long days to assess the needs of earthquake victims and distributing thousands of transitional shelter kits to some of those who have lost their homes. With winter coming on fast in the Kashmir region where he is now working, it is high intensity work for both he and his colleagues.

“For distributions we get up at four a.m. to get where we’re going because the roads are so bad,” Oliver said. “You’re there until six or seven at night sometimes,” followed by hours more spent preparing for the next day.

In a typical day, Oliver might walk miles up steep hills to reach villages affected by the quake, feeding information back to other staff members who help decide which areas are most affected and how best to reach them. Once registered, each family is given a small token which they bring to receive a shelter kit on the distribution day.

Despite the intensity of the work, Oliver has energy to spare. Back at the Catholic Relief Services field office in the quake-damaged city of Muzaffarabad, he pulls a hand drawn map from his sweatshirt pocket and recites from memory the figures he has gathered on affected households and supplies available. Animated constantly by the immediacy of the work, Oliver at times bumps up against the more regimented side of emergency intervention, the strict control of supplies and occasional distribution breaks necessary for effective large-scale programming. But Oliver thrives, he says, on the relevancy and satisfaction that comes with working so closely with people in need.

“Because of the rapid pace, you can’t drop the ball,” Oliver said. “You have a huge amount of responsibility because people are out there in the bitter cold.”

It is that sense of responsibility that has drawn him to the world of international aid work. As it does for many in this field, living and working in developing countries can lend an air of disconnect to trips back home. Looking back at his own past, however, Oliver says he appreciates what he has been given, and remains passionately committed to the work he is doing.

“I am privileged, and when you are privileged you also have responsibility – I think sometimes we in America don’t appreciate that,” Oliver said. “I can’t imagine a life not doing what I’m doing now.”