Meet Marley Tinnock, a Communications & Reporting Officer at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Erbil, Iraq.
Based in Erbil, Iraq, Marley is a writer, a photographer, and a storyteller originally from Australia. In Erbil, she oversees strategy development and content production for the country office’s website and social media accounts, in addition to highlighting the impact of their work on local communities. Yet communicating what’s really going on in Erbil to a diverse audience is not so straightforward. Bridging the gap between perception and reality begins with a story.
Marley:
If I go back 10 years it definitely would never have guessed that I would be sitting in Erbil or doing this job but it kind of just end up happening that way. I wanted to be a communicator and I wanted to do something that I felt that had impact.
Elyse:
Welcome to Episode of 2 of Humans of UNDP: a podcast where we to get to know fellow colleagues and where and explore how we connect and communicate in the digital age. Today we are in Erbil, Northern Iraq, in an area known as Kurdistan. It’s one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world.
Marley:
Kurdish people are very proud of their heritage and who they are. The noises, the music, everything about Kurdish culture...it is a lot about bringing people together and actually embracing and being in a space with your family, every Friday and celebrating for most anything with music and dancing. So I think the Kurdish people are really, really warm people and really willing to help and go over and above.
Elyse:
Human settlement here dates back to as far as six thousand years ago, but Marley Tinnock, a communications and reporting officer at UNDP, is relatively new here.
Marley:
I am Australian, and often obviously there are stereotypes that come from every country. So, I'm not blond blue-eyed surfer girl and actually in fact a lot of people have mistaken me for Kurdish. It still happens when I get into taxis, they'll say, certain greetings and things to me in Kurdish. I can say [Kurdish expression] I can direct the taxi to where I want to go, but my command of Kurdish is not fluent.
Being in a conservative society, you have to think more about others and respect for others in the way that you present yourself and that you act and be mindful that it's a country with a different heritage and a different set of stories and they haven't always had the same privileges as you. So they can be challenges but I think it's also, it's a part of the culture that you learn about and it's not a negative part it's just different and it's just coming around to realize that you know it's not hard, it's not difficult, it's just being mindful.
Elyse:
Originally from just north of Sydney, Australia, Marley grew up surrounded by bushland and national parks. So, home could not feel farther away.
Marley:
I grew up very far from city life. But I think it kind of grounds you when you grow up somewhere, a little bit more relaxed and calm. And then whilst the big city can be a shock, it's always a peaceful place to come back to. So, yeah, that's where I am right now. And it's a big change from from being in Erbil in Iraq, which by no means is a big city. But it's obviously a very different environment to a sleepy beach town in somewhere in the middle of Australia.
Elyse:
After we connected with Marley at her office in Erbil, we also caught up with her when she had just arrived back in Australia to visit her family for a month. It was Marley’s second time coming back home since she first moved to Erbil from her prior job working with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. She adapted to life quickly in Erbil, but there are simply some comforts from home she couldn’t help but miss.
Marley:
I very much miss Vegemite and I always take it with me wherever I'm going a lot. But you can only carry so much of a big glass jar of Vegemite with you, so it inevitably runs out. So it's easy to access here. So I end up always eating a lot of Vegemite toast when I'm home. And that's to me the best taste ever.
Elyse:
In case you’re wondering Vegemite is a salty and slightly bitter food spread. It’s got some funk to it.
Marley:
May be cliché and maybe also shocking to whoever listens and has actually tasted Vegemite because it's very much an Australian thing that most people find not that pleasing to taste.
Elyse:
Although when we talked Marley was on leave, her schedules’s quite busy. When she’s back home, she doesn’t just have Vegemite toast on her plate.
Marley:
My mum and dad always pick me up from the airport, and it's always a big, loud, warm welcome. I’ve got a big, big family so my itinerary is usually preplanned for me visiting all the family members all over the East Coast pretty much. When you only come home once a year, they’re usually lengthy, lengthy visits with coffee and sitting and listening to what everyone's done for the last twelve months while you've been away.
Elyse:
And those conversations can also be complicated. Marley spends a lot time challenging people’s assumptions about life in Erbil.
Marley:
I think the idea of the Middle East is still obviously for many people, quite a daunting one. So often people who are not close to me, often when I catch up with some friends that I haven't seen in a while or maybe some of my extended family that, you know, I don't talk to on a regular basis, they often have a very negative idea in their mind of the Middle East. People kind of go, wow, why why do you live there? Isn't it dangerous? I always try to explain. But I guess, you know, when you live in Australia, I think it's a special case. We are very far away from everything else that's going on in the world. And I think often that kind of unfortunately ends up being a bit of a bubble. And they can only really see and hear what is reported on the news.But I think that usually the conversation is skewed towards a little bit of shock and awe when I explain to them that life is really not that hard there in terms of access to what we need and that it's actually a really beautiful place with beautiful people and I can get around quite easily.
Elyse:
To give people back in Australia an idea of what Kurdish culture is really like she tells them about this funny thing that happened when she first arrived.
Marley:
I learned this rule when I first got here that complimenting someone on something, here it actually implies that that person should then give you that something. So it's a bit of an adjustment here when you say, oh your sunglasses look great on you and then they hand them over and say okay have them. And they don't like to take no for an answer, they really do, they are really like giving people. So you kind of end up in these situations quite often where you have to very earnestly say no, I don't want your sunglasses they look really good on you but thank you. So that I think is a good way of summing up just how warm and giving people are.
Elyse:
Working in Iraq for UNDP was not Marley’s plan, but her passion for writing and service took her here.
Marley:
I started from a private sector background and I through a few twists and turns end up working with the UN. Since then have kind of moved around and tried different things and right now where I am is challenging compared to the other offices that I've been based in. But it's a learning experience and it's definitely a way for me to be face to face with the projects that we're doing. And as a communicator that's very key because I want to actually be able to see and hear from the people that we're supporting. It helps me to write stronger stories and to hopefully with the goal of connecting better with our audiences both at the local level but also at the global level, people can actually understand what's happening in Iraq but most importantly just to really hear the voices of the people. So that's kind of the reason that I decided to come here.
Elyse:
Marley’s projects take her all over the region. It’s about as far as you get from get from her former office job in Geneva.
Marley:
So my project is a complicated one... I work across all of the projects that happen underneath my program, the Iraq Crisis Response and Resilience Program. So we have projects in five different areas: social cohesion, protection, basic services, livelihoods and crisis response and recovery.
My job is the storytelling side...to understand the project first and then to also understand if it's working for the people, how it's working and what their story and what their journey really looked like to get to where they are today.
So often I'm the first and the last person to come into the picture, to understand what things look like at the beginning and then what happens in between and what it looks like at the end. And that's across like I said a huge range of different projects with a huge range of beneficiaries. So I keep my hands full both in south and central Iraq and northern Iraq, visiting project sites and speaking to people and then transforming that into hopefully what is useful for the average person, but also for our partners and for our governments and all our different stakeholders to understand why we're doing it and what the impact is.
Elyse:
Yet sharing UNDP’s various sustainability and peace building initiatives in Iraq, is not so straightforward. There’s a lot to consider, from producing engaging stories to creating content that is specifically tailored for their diverse audiences.
Marley:
Living in a digital communication world and I have yet to really see that there is an ultimate solution to bring everyone on the same page and make digital communication simple and streamlined. But that's also the beauty of it I think because it's constant innovation.
Elyse:
Part of that innovation involves strategizing the best ways to publish her content in a highly sensitive and unstable environment.
Marley:
I think, one one big critical issue is the access to the platform we produce on. We produce content for local news stations, for television, radio and Facebook. A lot of the time is the most engaged we have with the audience; Twitter as well and the website. But not everyone has access to those so we have to consider how we adapt our content to make sure that the messages are getting to the right people in the right way, So I think one of the difficult parts being a multilingual country, a multi-faith country, multiethnic country, is that content is received in very different ways. And messages can be can be misinterpreted if they're not carefully thought out.
Iraq is very, very much a country for Facebook, not so much Twitter. Twitter is more our global audience and our donors. So the kinds of content that we publish is very different. And then also we don't have an Instagram in Iraq. But we connect with the regional hub in Oman, and then they use our content for the regional instagram.
I think it's a more visual audience in Iraq more than anything, because it is multilingual. So if you want to speak to audiences in multiple languages at once, an image is going to speak louder than having a caption edited into three different languages, which can be tedious for a reader, I think. But it's also important.
Elyse:
And at the end of the day, producing a good story doesn’t really matter if people cannot understand or access it.
Marley:
In Iraq think it's still quite difficult to reach the wider public. You have obviously huge inequality between people that are living in the cities and then people that are living in rural communities. Obviously, mobile technology is completely pervasive. I mean, it's everywhere. But then literacy levels again, very fluctuant between different areas of the country. So I think that there’s still work to be done to see how we can communicate with people that have less access to technology and if they do have access then they have lower literacy rates or in some cases they have no literacy.
Elyse:
Yet even after she’s tackled the logistical problems, like language and access, Marley still needs to tell a good story.
Marley:
I think there’s a digital literacy element to it always. Obviously everyone's level of skill when it comes to using technology, using different platforms is always going to be very varied. There's got to be more creative ways of communicating to people what the impact is and it's what's the purpose of digital communications and why it's important that we adopt it on a day-to-day basis for our communications within the agency, but also why we adopt it as individuals and as organizations to advocate and to elevate the impact of our projects.
Because often I think communications more broadly is misunderstood because it's not the first thing people think about. You want to think about the project, and the project's impact. But if we can't elevate the voices of the individuals we're kind of limiting ourselves in terms of the impacts, because, okay yeah we've had a great impact in a certain area with a certain number of people, but if people could hear that story and more people could understand about the issue it is that we're tackling and about the impact of these interventions, not only could they learn from that potentially as other development practitioners, but then also people can just generally understand what's happening in a certain country, and maybe have a little bit more time in their personal lives to consider those issues and be more mindful.
We talk big when we talk UN. You know we want to tackle poverty, and we want to do this. But if my mom in Australia doesn't fully understand what it is we're trying to do, that's one less person that's going to advocate for positively changing the world through the work that we do.
So I think digital communications can both be a means to better our day-to-day work through our communications together. But it also can be a long-term impact on global awareness of issues and global changing of mindset to want to actually tackle these crazy big ideas that we call the SDGs.
Elyse:
We will hear more from Marley later this season about how she makes her stories stand out. In the next episode, we will go to Fiji to meet Victor Ladele, an Innovation Specialist and Head of Exploration.
Victor:
Fiji is a volcanic island meaning there are a lot of mountains in the ocean. You hear "bula" a lot. That is the greeting. "Bula" means hello. It means goodbye. It means welcome. It means almost everything.
Elyse:
This episode of Humans of UNDP is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music by Lemon Guo, additional music by Chris Zabriskie and Sero Produktion, and sound design by myself. Special thanks to Marley Tinnock for sharing her time, story, and sounds with us. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow DOT UNDP DOT org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.