After working in post-conflict zones, Damien Brown thought he was ready for anything. Then he moved to the Northern Territory, where his 20-bed hospital had to serve an area the size of Norway
“It can be harder than aid work,” a colleague cautioned me when I first applied to work in the remote Northern Territory. I’d just returned from six months with Médecins Sans Frontières, volunteering in a corner of Africa that was recovering from decades of civil war, so I’d assumed that I’d be ready for anything.
“It’s harder,” my colleague explained, herself an experienced aid worker, “because you don’t expect it to be. And because it shouldn’t be.”