The Foreign Service Journal, March 2019

24 MARCH 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Kovia Gratzon-Erskine was the USAID health deputy director in Haiti from 2010 to 2012. She joined the Foreign Service in 2007 and is currently an international development specialist at USAID in Washington, D.C. Her previous postings as a public health specialist in trauma-prone environments include Antanana- rivo and Port-au-Prince; she also rendered support fromWashington D.C. to Monrovia, Freetown and Conakry during the Ebola outbreak. She served in Moldova as a health programmanager in the U.S. Peace Corps from 2000 to 2002, and in 2016, was trained as a resil- ience trainer through the Department of State’s Center of Excellence in Foreign Affairs Resilience. W hether through terrorism or natural andman-made disasters, tragedy can strike anywhere—there is no longer any such thing as a “normal” post. Whether they deliberately sign up or unex- pectedly find themselves in themiddle of a crisis, Foreign Service professionals often work during and after disasters like the Ebola outbreak inWest Africa, the earth- quake inNepal, drought and food insecu- rity in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, and complex emergencies inUkraine and Sri Lanka or the Venezuelanmigration into Colombia. In some ways, FS professionals thrive in this environment. While often rewarding, working in these high-stress, trauma-prone environ- ments can also lead to compassion fatigue (CF). FS professionals andmanagers at all posts—even inWashington, D.C.—need to understand the risks of CF, recognize the symptoms and implement healthy prac- tices to help protect the workforce. I Didn’t See It Coming In 2010, I felt called by a sense of duty to go to Haiti after the massive 7.0 mag- nitude earthquake killed 200,000 people and left a million more displaced. When I arrived eight months after the initial disaster the lingering effects on staff— both American and Haitian—were clear. Behind their tough exteriors there was fatigue in their eyes. Everyone was work- ing nonstop to get more done, faster and under heavy scrutiny from the media and Washington. Perhaps most importantly, they were driven by their own sense of compassion for others’ suffering. Things got more intense from there. Several months into my tour, during which protests and tropical storms were a nor- SPEAKING OUT mal part of life, a viral disease broke out in a small village, spreading quickly and killing thousands throughout the country. Embassy staff, myself included, went into overdrive. The new normal was 14-hour days, six days a week. At first, we worked those hours because we needed tomeet the demands. But for me, it soon became compulsive. I felt I couldn’t stop—I worried that even a 15-minute break could cost a life. That’s the effect of empathy boiled over—an inability to take time to eat and sleep, knowing that thousands are suffering without shelter or medical care. The problem is that unchecked physiological and mental stress impairs performance. The Yerkes-Dodson Law, developed in 1908, posits that stress can improve performance, but only up to a point (see illustration). Both too much and too little stress can negatively affect Compassion Fatigue in the Foreign Service BY KOV I A GRATZON - ERSK I NE Source: National Counseling Group, Inc.