Meet Aitor Rubio, a communication, partnership and outreach associate for the Junior Professional Officer (JPO) Service Center at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Denmark.
Based in Copenhagen, Aitor Rubio is a father, a photographer, a self-proclaimed world citizen who is originally from Spain… and a communication, partnership and outreach associate for the Junior Professional Officer (JPO) Service Center at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). His sense of discovery and a charismatic nature has led him to where he is today: attracting bright, young individuals to be a part of the UNDP’s future, but doing so is challenging.
Elyse:
This is Aitor Rubio and his family having dinner at their home in Copenhagen.
Aitor is a father, a photographer, a self-proclaimed world citizen who is originally from Spain… and a communication, partnership and outreach associate at UNDP.
Welcome to Episode of 1 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.
Tonight, Aitor and his family are enjoying a dish he cooked that’s nostalgic of his home: lentils and chorizo, it’s a typical Spanish winter dish. No matter how busy he is, having dinner with his family is a must.
Aitor:
No, I mean, I like to be busy, but that's me. I like… I'm an unorthodox person and I like to try different things. That's my motto.
Elyse:
At dinnertime, Aitor and his wife, Diana, like to play this game. They ask their sons to tell them three things that happened to them on that day and out of those three, one has to be false. Aitor and Diana then have to guess which one. They play this game as a way to get their kids to talk about their days and to encourage their imaginations.
Aitor:
I have two boys, so they're very physical and I'm the kind of father that...I like to play football, to play basketball, to play in the playground. When I go with them, I'm not one of those who just sit on a bench and leave the kids to get entertained by themselves and I'm very active and they like to interact with them.
Elyse:
In 2016, Aitor and his family were living in Madrid when his wife was offered a new job at UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. When they moved to Copenhagen, Aitor took on the role of caring for the family and home.
Aitor:
That was the first time I was a stay-at-home dad. My kids are eight and five now. When we moved here, there were five and two. So it was our first time as a family moving to a new country, but not the first time for me moving to a new country, because this is my fifth time.
Elyse:
Before moving to Denmark from Spain, Aitor also lived in France, the United States, and Japan.
Aitor:
So it was challenging, but I think it was also very humbling, you know like to be in that role. You get to realize how difficult it is to deal with practicalities when it comes to raising your family and making everybody be at ease in a new place, in a new country.
Elyse:
Copenhagen is a city he never anticipated living in, but it’s a place he and his family have come to love.
Aitor:
It's a very green city...It's a city of 750,000 people, which is not big, quite small. But that it has all the services that any major capital in the world will have.
Well, the first thing that you realize when you live in Copenhagen is the sound of the bicycles. There are bicycles all over the place, all over the city. That's the main means of transportation for people who live downtown Copenhagen as we do my wife and I. We are a family of four and we have five bikes. There are thousands of people going all over with bikes, no matter if it rains or pours.
Also, UN City here is located by the ocean, which is something that I've always wanted to live in, in a place near the ocean. I come from Madrid ...there is no ocean nearby.
I mean you can totally hear you know like the wind coming from the ocean and all the echo that it produces. It's a sound that...you become very familiar with, the sound of the wind blowing.
Elyse:
Inspired by being in a new city, Aitor also pursued his passion for photography.
Aitor:
Besides taking care of the family and everything, I set up a small photo agency here for a year or so. But, I’ve always, you know I've always done photography on the side. You know when I was in Madrid, when i was in New York, when I was in Japan. It’s something that I've always done since I was 15 or 16 years old.
Since I was very little my image of the holidays of the summers, it was going somewhere with my three brothers, my mom and my dad and my dad taking pictures all the time of us, and nature, the ocean, all that. My dad bought a new camera so he gave me his old one. So from that moment on I got attached to it. What I found is that sometimes, the world is very different if you look through that little window of the camera, because you get into kind of a movie. If you close your eyes, you keep one of your eyes open and it's like you're sitting. You have a different view. You have a different perspective of things.
Elyse:
As a stranger in a new city, his favorite way to get to know a place and its people was through street photography. With time, he discovered that he could get around the cultural and language barriers that he faced and connect with the people he was photographing by just being himself.
Aitor:
As a Spaniard I have a competitive advantage. We use a lot of nonverbal communication when we speak. So we tend to use a lot of our hands, and so the best tool to communicate is your mannerisms. And your nonverbal communication is as important as your verbal communication, that's something that I've learned. And something that is the main tool that I've always had to get things, or to get help, or to open doors, it's to have a nice smile, and smile to people, and be humble. When you go to a new place where you're the one who knows the least about it.
Elyse:
His approach to life comes through his photographs. It’s not necessarily about the type of lens or the technique the photo represents, but about communicating the meaning behind the photo. In his archive of over forty thousand photographs from all over the world, there’s one photo that stands out. It’s blurry and out of focus, but it captured a moment many can relate to.
It's a close-up of my mom and we're sitting in the living room of my home. And my parents came to visit, and my mom had been going through these chemotherapy sessions, and it was one of those days that she was feeling a little bit weak and not very well. And I remember it perfectly, she was sitting on the living room, she just asked my wife if she could hold the baby. And I remember that she sat on the couch, she grabbed my son and she looked at him. And then afterwards she gave him a kiss on his forehead. And I see that my mother's not looking directly at my son, but is looking to the distance. And I don't know, I have a feeling of, when I took that picture after, when my mother passed away. I don’t know, I interpret that picture as like a farewell, saying to her grandson, "you're in good hands and I'm sorry I cannot be with you, but I wish you the best in your life," or something like that.
It is one of those photographs I have it hanging in my home. And actually, my son, many, many times he has asked me about it. And he's like, "dad, tell me a story of your mom."
Elyse:
When Aitor’s kids ask him what he does for a living, it’s often hard to find the words. In a way his job at UNDP, is a continuation of what he does as a street photographer - he searches for people who, in a particular light and moment he sees potential in.
Aitor:
I tell them that I work that I try to attract the talent who is going to be dealing with the most challenging issues that the planet, our civilization is going to be dealing with in the next 20 years. That I'm trying to find those, talent, individuals who will deal with this big challenges. So that's what I tell them that I do. Is try to find very smart people and very motivated people to work for the planet, for the common good.
Elyse:
It’s Aitor’s first year working at the Junior Professional Officer service center and he’s taken to it quickly. Yet, despite Aitor’s experience and charisma, his biggest challenge at work still comes down to communication - digitally connecting with an audience that he has not met is tricky, especially in a landscape that never stops changing.
Aitor:
In my case, I have to be aware of my target audience is. I'm not native digital, I was born in the analog world. But my target audience is digital. They're all people who have born with a set of digital skills. So you have to be aware of many, many things. So for me it's been mind-blowing. It's been a process that I will never finish, because what is being used today, maybe it's not use anymore in five years, 10 years time. So it keeps you in the look for new things, you know?
Elyse:
Aitor not only needs to learn the latest digital communication tools, but he also needs to use them more skillfully than his competition.
Everybody's out there communicating. So it's not easy to get your message through. My main challenge is to really be heard and to really reach this very specific niche of people. That's my biggest challenge.
Elyse:
We will hear more from Aitor about how he navigates getting his message across to his target audience later in the season. In the next episode, we will go to Iraq to meet Marley Tinnock, a Communications & Reporting Officer, for the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support.
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 like a good way of summing up just how warm and giving people are.
Elyse:
This episode of Humans of UNDP is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Original music by Lemon Guo and sound design by myself. Special thanks to Aitor Rubio and his family for sharing their 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.