A week in my life...starting in Nigeria and ending helping Ukrainians

We are all wrapped up in the Ukraine crisis - it’s all over the news, social media and conversations with friends and family. I and my colleagues at CLEAR Global are trying to balance our response to the language support needs that crisis has generated with those of many other crisis-affected people around the world.

Over one million people have already fled their homes and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that hundreds of thousands more will follow.

We’ve spent the past week scaling up our response, while ensuring that the millions of other refugees continue to get much needed support.

I wanted to tell you a little bit about how the last two weeks went for me. I was in Maiduguri, in northeast Nigeria last week, supporting our team there, while working to start our response to the Ukraine crisis. The photo above is of a painting done by a Nigerian artist (Sadly I don't know the name of the artist, but I love the painting!)

On Monday, 21 February, we celebrated International Mother Language Day in Maiduguri. The Maiduguri Linguistic Center hosted an event on language and technology. I spoke about CLEAR Global’s aim to bring 4 billion people into the global conversation by developing language technology in the languages of the most vulnerable.

I had a CLEAR Global Board Governance committee meeting where we discussed bringing more geographic diversity to the Board again this year. They also reminded me to set my annual objectives.?

On Thursday, the crisis in Ukraine started. I started the day with a session with the Bangladesh team where the team really engaged in discussing our global strategy - they had some great questions.?

By Friday, we knew the crisis in the Ukraine was going to mean a lot of suffering. I spent the day speaking with donors not only about funding our Nigeria response, but also about how we could support the people of Ukraine.

I traveled over the weekend, spending time in airports talking to people about deploying to Poland, getting our internal team ready to respond, and clearing space in workloads so we can do so. Our teams put out language maps and made people aware of our resources to support field interpreters - our training materials and guides.

On Monday, our amazing team had started translating relevant information that we knew people would need - tip sheets, information on preventing sexual exploitation and abuse, WHO information.

By Tuesday, we had put the team together, and launched a free translation service for the volunteer organizations working on Ukraine’s borders. And we were writing to our partner organizations to find out if they needed help.

By Wednesday, we had a sense of the scale of the response and launched an appeal for funding. We’ve already raised almost $30,000 - this will help us to deploy to the borders (which we will do over this weekend) to find out what communications preferences people have, and continue critical translation and language services.

Through all of this, we’ve received amazing support from the localization industry and thousands of translators and interpreters around the world.

And there are other crises in the world that need our support, too. In our drive to support people affected by the conflict in Ukraine, please, let us not forget that there are millions of others around the world who have also fled their homes.

Please consider supporting CLEAR Global - for the Ukraine crisis as we scale up to help the most vulnerable. And for the work we do for people around the world. clearglobal.org/donate