Andy Robinson is the Acting Head of Fragile and Developing Contexts, International Partnerships for World Vision New Zealand.
At 22, Andrew Robinson undertook the rite of passage of many a young New Zealander and went on his OE. Unbeknownst to him, the trip would completely change the trajectory of his life and career.
“I really wanted to have a bit of an overseas adventure and was really interested in Africa,” the now-country programme manager at World Vision NZ told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
“The great continent I knew nothing about, but I knew there were elephants and giraffes and monkeys there, and I thought it would be great to see those.”
Although he was flying into Ethiopia to do volunteer work with homeless children, Robinson admits his idea of life there was a little “idyllic”.
The reality came as a shock. There were few exotic animals around, but the scars of poverty were everywhere.
“There were thousands and thousands of street children on the streets of Addis Ababa. The organisation I was volunteering with was like, ‘Please do something with these children’,” Robinson recalls to Real Life.
He was tasked with helping at an overnight shelter for 30 young girls who would otherwise be living on the streets, and asked to do whatever he could to help them – which Robinson says as a naive, inexperienced 22-year-old, “wasn’t very much”.
“But for half a year, I ended up doing a whole lot of things: from basic maths and English lessons, to teaching them how to make fudge so they could sell it in a local market and earn some money to buy a new pair of shoes.
“At night, with my little guitar, I’d go to the shelter where they were, I’d help them with dinner, and then we would sing songs and do children’s stories.”
The experience was confronting.
“It was such a contrast to anything I had ever experienced in New Zealand before, and I realised in hindsight I had a lovely but sheltered upbringing. For me, six months with these young children, they just captured my heart – and they still have my heart. It set me on a course.”
Returning to New Zealand, Robinson was eager to get back to Africa as soon as he could – but the next opportunity that came up took him 4000km away, to Afghanistan, where he was tasked with providing clean water to rural communities and educating people about hygiene.
It was the start of a career in aid work that has taken him all over the world: from Ethiopia and Somalia in East Africa; to Afghanistan, Lebanon and Jordan in the Middle East; into Bangladesh, India and Myanmar in Asia; and to Fiji and Tonga in the Pacific.
Robinson says his time in these environments has made him realise there are three types of people in the face of disaster, crisis or other emergency – those who abuse and take advantage of others in their time of need, those who do nothing, and those who actively oppose cruelty.
“Broadly, if it’s a spectrum, perhaps most of us sit in the middle and we kind of maybe consider our own needs and we look to the wellbeing of our own family,” he said.
“But then you have those who will go above and beyond… amazing people who will do amazing things for people in distress they don’t know to help them.
“Our responsibility here in New Zealand, where we are so far removed from these terrible crises in the world – be it Gaza, the famine happening right now in East Africa, the terrible civil war raging in Sudan – is for us to come behind the helpers and be a stopgap against those who would be cruel.”
Now back in Aotearoa with World Vision for the past three years, Robinson says it’s his faith that drives him to make a difference.
“There’s so much in the Bible about God’s frustration and grief when poverty is just left to run rampant, and when there’s things that are just plainly wrong in a society that no one seems to be addressing,” he told Cowan.
“Those children [in Ethiopia] captured my heart in a way my heart had never been captured before. It was also me really wrestling with my faith and understanding hardship and suffering in our world, and what is my responsibility to respond to that?
“For me, it’s this idea that at the heart of God and Christian faith is love, love, love. And that love is not soppy, not mushy – it’s about making life better for someone else who’s doing it hard.”
Robinson says while he’s always struck by the scale of need around the world, he’s heartened that New Zealanders “are incredibly generous” people.
He says that while many of us can naturally be cynical about whether the money we’re donating is being used in efficient ways, our children tend to have a way of cutting through the noise.
“Often it is as simple as seeing a need on TV or hearing about it on the radio and they’re compelled to act, they’re moved. Children are just so pure right and a child sees something that just isn’t right to them and says ‘Mum, Dad, we’ve got to do something’.
“And so often we hear these stories of parents being prompted to act because their children are like, ‘That’s not right, we can’t let that stand’. I think that’s marvellous.”
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
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