INTHEBLACK May 2022 - Magazine - Page 33
Kazakhstan, with UNRWA in Jordan and
with the United Nations Office for Project
Services (UNOPS) in Myanmar, where she
ran the largest finance team of 100 people
in the largest UNOPS country office.
While her husband had accompanied
Austin on some of her posts, more recently
he has chosen to stay in Tasmania with
his own work, and the couple meet up
for holidays in various locations around
the world. Often Austin works on a cycle,
working for six to eight weeks before
returning home for about two weeks,
similar to a fly-in fly-out worker.
That was before the pandemic. Austin
considers herself lucky to have been able
to get back to Australia twice during the
height of COVID-19 restrictions between
March 2020 and the end of 2021, once
in late 2020 – which took seven weeks,
including two quarantines and a home
isolation period – and again following the
May 2021 military action in Gaza. Apart
from small group gatherings with friends,
most of Austin’s downtime in Gaza is spent
on video calls to home, reading Australian
news, watching the AFL on TV and
exercising in her home gym.
COVID-19 has also been a game
changer for the UNRWA, the UN agency
that provides humanitarian assistance for
Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon and the West Bank.
As the deputy director of operations at
the UNRWA’s Gaza Field Office, Austin
oversees the back office support – finance,
HR, PLD, admin, IT, job creation scheme,
infrastructure and camp improvement – for
Gaza’s frontline programs of education,
health, relief and social services.
A direct service provider, UNRWA Gaza
runs 280 schools serving 290,000 children.
intheblack.cpaaustralia.com.au May 2022 33