Above and Beyond: Anna Haskovec

Posted on 2 October, 2018

Canberra women aren’t just changing our city. They’re changing our world.

We meet two Canberra women with a taste for something outside the confines of a nine-to-five workplace and driven to make a difference.

Anna Haskovec has crammed a lot into 27 years. From rural roots at her parents’ property in Murrumbateman, she’s voyaged on a Sea Shepherd expedition, been a producer’s assistant at the Sydney Opera House, a logistician at a Ugandan refugee camp and is currently transporting tuberculosis treatment via raft to remote communities in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

As you might expect, her journey to these varied career points was not a straight one but it is one built around a desire to help. For Anna, it all started when she took a job repairing Sea Shepherd vessels in Port Melbourne.

“I joined because I wanted to be a part of protecting ocean wildlife,” she explains via email from where she’s currently based in PNG. “The Antarctic waters are a total wild west, there is no law enforcement or fisheries patrols protecting the sanctuaries or endangered species. Antarctica and its sea life deserve protection from us.

Anna on the Sea Shepard. Credit: Simon Ager.

“I went on to sail with them and spent three months out at sea. Sailing the Ross Sea was incredible, the seascape was amazing—the depth and complexity of icebergs is honestly unreal, like incredible floating kingdoms made out of 100 shades of blue.”

Back on dry land once more, Anna worked in events management at the Sydney Opera House and for Melbourne’s Federation Square (as well as a stint in Nepal, where she got stuck during the 2015 earthquake). While Anna enjoyed the roles, the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean was reaching epic proportions, so she reached out to German organisation Jugend Rettet.

“Jugend Rettet [is] a German group committed to the fact that everyone at sea deserves rescue,” she explains. “This really resonated with me. As a seafarer you have an obligation to assist vessels in need. You don’t get to ask for their citizenship status before you drag them on-board.”

So Anna booked a one-way ticket, spending the next few months at the forefront of the search and rescue operation in international waters.

“It was pretty scary to be honest…because I knew that where we were headed we were really the end of the line. We operated in the SAR search and rescue zone off the coast of Libya on the lookout for people in distress.”

Even though Anna had been through Sea Shepherd’s rigorous training when it came to safety at sea, the stories of the people they helped have stayed with her.

“The people that we were dealing with have been looking for safety for often years,” she says. “They have been escaping wars, crossing deserts being used as slaves in Tripoli and have nothing, not a single possession.

“The one thing I noticed that a lot of them carried were small bits of paper—letters from loved ones, scraps of paper with phone numbers on them. Small enough to be hidden and personal enough to not be of worth to anyone else and not stolen.

“The last rescue that we did I remember one women in particular. I found some new clothes for her from our donations and she took them, gladly discarding her old clothes—literally the last things she owned in the world.

“During this process we didn’t make eye contact or speak at all. But by the end she looked at me and she gave me a small nod. This was, to be honest, the best feeling I’ve ever had in the world. In hindsight she was probably in shock but this little flicker of her really meant a lot to me.”

With all this behind her, it’s unsurprising that Anna chose to apply for a role with the international aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

“It happened pretty organically for me,” she says. “My mum has been a donor for years so I had always known about MSF and it just seemed like they were doing the kind of work I wanted to do.

“I really loved their integrity and independence and their ability to respond in emergencies—MSF can deploy a group of people and an inflatable hospital in just a matter of weeks to people in need. I just thought that was incredible and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Anna jokes that her experience in event management “parallels pretty nicely with working in a refugee camp… I mean [whether] you are a citizen or not, everyone needs toilets, water, good signage and a clear exit route!”.

So she applied for the role of Logistician and she soon found herself in Uganda, working in the Bidi Bidi Refugee Camp, which she explains was a camp for South Sudanese refugees “fleeing violence in their home regions”.

“We built a functioning maternity unit, inpatient ward, nutritional feeding centre and outpatient department out of timber, plastic sheeting and a whole lot of determination,” she says. “Of course, even these mammoth efforts only respond to a small part of the refugee community’s needs. My favourite part of the hospital was always the maternity ward; whenever I would drop in to check on the building or the biomedical equipment I would get to see some very happy new families.”

Having just become an aunt for the first time, Anna believes that there’s little that separates us as humans, except luck.

“We all just want to live happily with our families and have enough money to eat food and drink clean water,” she says. “But we’re luckier than some, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work in contexts like these.”

As you might realise by now, Anna says that she always knew a “9–5” wasn’t the life for her, but is unsure of what the future will hold. For the moment, she’s currently helping MSF tackle the issue of PNG’s “massive” tuberculosis problem, helping the organisation deliver treatment to remote, low-density areas.

As for those whose lifestyle prevents them from, say, jumping on a rescue ship in the Mediterranean, Anna says there’s a lot we can do close to home.

“In Australia and in Canberra, a lot of us have the opportunity to make a difference,” she says. “Whether that’s donating to an organisation you feel passionate about or spending your time with them. You’re totally capable of making a difference in someone’s life, just choose to do it yourself.”

Feature image: Sea Shepard. Image supplied.