Barbara Saillez, a Belgian national, spent most of her life living abroad. She was born on 3 January 1967 in Katana, Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of the Congo – and attended primary school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and secondary school in Waterloo, Belgium. Her educational ambitions then took her to Blantyre, Malawi, where she improved her English; Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany, where she worked on her German; and Brussels, Belgium, where she studied to be an executive secretary at one school and then took language courses at another.
When she applied for a job with the ICRC in late 1994, Barbara was living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. She was 27 years old and spoke French, English, Dutch, German, Spanish and Swahili, and had already travelled to nearly 20 countries in North America, Europe and, of course, Africa.
In addition to her formidable energies – she also enjoyed running, aerobics, swimming, tennis and hiking – Barbara brought five years of solid professional experience to the ICRC. She had worked at Club Med hotels in Tunisia, the French Alps and Turkey, as assistant to the manager and deputy in the excursion department, from May 1989 to September 1990. Over the following three years, she was employed by three different trading companies in Johannesburg, Brussels and Paris, where she served as executive assistant, export assistant and customer service agent, respectively. In January 1994, she took a job as an executive assistant at a wholesaler in Belgium. Her last job before joining the ICRC in 1995 was as a French teacher with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, in Nairobi.
Barbara’s interest in humanitarian work could be traced back several years. Her father worked for the World Food Programme, and in 1993 she accompanied him on several assignments to southern Sudan. The time she spent speaking with emergency operations staff as well as with field monitors – who stayed in the villages to make sure the food was distributed properly – aroused in her a strong interest in this type of work. She began to search actively for a position with an international organization where she could take part in crisis programmes.
After hiring Barbara in early 1995, the ICRC sent her to Sukhumi, Georgia, in September for her first assignment. This proved to be a trial by fire. She was the administration and finance manager in what until that point had been a small and relatively quiet subdelegation. Her arrival happened to coincide with an expansion of the ICRC’s activities in that region that required the subdelegation to move offices and recruit more staff. Barbara was responsible for the subdelegation’s accounting, equipment and logistics; for managing 34 local employees and their contracts; for getting new delegates settled in; and for day-to-day office-related tasks. Her job was complicated by the subdelegation’s growth, as she was involved in hiring numerous staff members and moving the office to a new building – which first had to be renovated. By the end of this year-long assignment, Barbara had proven her mettle.
In October 1996 Barbara was transferred to Tanzania. She worked as an administrator-secretary in Ngara for four months and then in Kigoma and Dar es Salaam for the following five months. The ICRC was restructuring its activities in the country – closing its office in Ngara, opening one in Kigoma and establishing a permanent presence in Dar es Salaam – and Barbara was instrumental in this process. In addition to her already full slate of administrative duties, she supported the repatriation of Rwandan refugees from Ngara and handled the HR-, building-, equipment- and travel-related minutiae involved in closing one office and opening another. It was another job well done, despite the frustration she felt at not being able to focus her efforts more directly on the ICRC’s humanitarian work.
Barbara then accepted a position as an administration and finance manager in the ICRC’s Jerusalem subdelegation, starting in October 1997. In this role, she had administrative responsibility for the subdelegation, eight offices in the West Bank and over a dozen ICRC staff residences. After just two months, her supervisor remarked on the common sense, efficiency and rigour that she brought to her work.
In late March 1999, after nearly a year and a half in Jerusalem, Barbara was involved in a fatal traffic accident. The car she was driving was struck at an intersection by a lorry that ran a red light. Barbara suffered extensive injuries and died four days later, on 28 March, surrounded by family members and close friends. She was 32 years old. Her passenger, who did not work at the ICRC, escaped relatively unharmed.
Barbara brought an impressive set of administrative and linguistic skills to the ICRC, not to mention an admirable work ethic and a wealth of positive energy. She is a shining example of the crucial role played by the unsung humanitarian workers who labour tirelessly behind the scenes.
