“THIS is a special organisation, therefore it attracts special people.” The new head of Mercy Malaysia, Dr Ahmad Faizal Mohd Perdaus quotes one of his professors who is also a Mercy volunteer.
“We attract special people but this doesn’t mean someone who has three or four degrees. It means people with the right heart and right attitude,” explains Dr Faizal.
Humanitarian aid: A Mercy volunteer demonstrating the use of donated medical equipment to doctors serving in Gaza earlier this year. He points out that Mercy’s founder Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood had always believed that Mercy and organisations like Mercy play a huge role in the development of our society and in imparting values like altruism.
“We managed to bring people of all races together to do this work. For that to happen, the organisation must be true to its principles of providing aid regardless of race, religion, creed, colour or culture. Only then can we get people of all races and culture to join us. Rhetoric alone is not enough; deeds, like pictures, speak a thousand words.”
In 2004, Dr Faizal notes Mercy made a conscious decision to change its direction. Prior to that it was just a volunteer-based organisation doing work as and when needed. Now it is a mix of emergency medical response as well as sustainable health-related and disaster risk reduction programmes, the latter being something Dr Jemilah championed.
He cites lesser known work Mercy has done in the earthquakehit Sichuan province with Save The Children and with the Mingala Foundation in the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar after the typhoon. They had short missions to North Korea too.
On the local front, they have eight state chapters and plan to cover all the states in the future.
To do this work, Dr Faizal says Mercy needs to evolve into an organisation that is professional, while maintaining its volunteer base and volunteer spirit. With that comes the realisation that to do sustainable work, they need full-time and serious parttime staff.
Volunteers giving health talks to young victims of the Bihar floods in India. “We need people with the right organisational skills, strong backroom staff, people to do fund-raising, communications planning, and so on. A lot of this is done in the office just like any other corporation.
And this is just as important, if not more important than the actual work of going into the field.” Dr Faizal says many people do not realise it is easier to deal with the stress of going on field missions.
“You just have to focus on that. Volunteering during your spare time while holding a full-time job is more taxing and stressful and it can result in burnout.”
Which is why he hopes more people would volunteer their time to handle the more mundane work to ease the burden of other volunteers. Mercy is lucky, Dr Faizal says, in that being relatively young they can learn from their bigger, more established counterparts in the West.
They have gone through the metamorphosis without losing the spirit of volunteerism. As the new president of Mercy, Dr Faizal will be focusing on three specific areas, at least for the next three years.
The first is a sustainable funding base and systematic fund-raising. “Mercy has grown. However, most of our funds are specific project funds and locked into specific countries and disasters. We need more non-earmarked general funds which we can use at the organisation’s discretion .”
Medical volunteers attending to the sick during Mercy Malaysia’s Cambodia 2001 Kampung Cham mission near Siem Reap. Mercy will also source more international funding for its international programmes. Dr Faizal says that Dr Jemilah had already laid the groundwork for this .
Secondly, Dr Faizal would take pains to develop the human capital within the organisation. Over the last eight years, the staff turnover as well as that of key volunteers have been quite high. Mercy, he says, is proud that some of its former staff and volunteers are now working for international organisations and the United Nations.
Finally, Dr Faizal says he would like to expand the scope of services; health, sanitation and hygiene, and disaster risk management, and include more sustainable programmes and put better systems and processes in place. That, of course, costs money.
Dr Faizal does not want the public to have the idea that Mercy will be “consuming” large amounts of money. He notes that over the past 10 years, they have managed to maintain operational expenditure at 13%-16% of actual aid budget and rarely has it ever reached 20%.
“We have it in our constitution as an organisation that we will not spend more than 30% on our own operational expenditure and we have not gone close to that.” And here is where you can do your part: volunteer your services in whatever form.
That’s a call not just to the public but to the corporate sector as well.
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