Moving to another country is a huge ask without having to contend with a natural disaster, as William Leece discovers

MULTICULTURAL schools are the order of the day in the melting pots of many cities.

But even the most disparate of British schools can hardly match the one that Emma and Fionn Boxshall attend: no less than 64 different nationalities at the last count.

It sounds like a recipe for chaos. But Emma, five, and Fionn, three, have taken it all in their stride. Their roots may be in West Derby, Liverpool, but home for the next few years is the cyclone-battered republic of Myanmar, otherwise Burma to English-speakers. Both their parents, Liverpool-born Dr Julia Kemp and her husband, Matt Boxshall, work in health service delivery for overseas aid agencies in Burma, with Julia in particular being plunged straight in at the deep end last year.

She had been due to travel ahead of the family to Burma, working for the British Department For International Development (DFID), when Cyclone Nargis swept ashore in May last year. Burma is the biggest country in south-east Asia with around 55 million people, and Nargis has been described as the biggest natural disaster ever to hit the country.

Accurate figures are hard to come by, but international estimates put the death toll at at least 146,000, with tens of thousands missing.

Burma’s military government is wary of the West and was slow to accept aid. But Julia had her visa and her plans were all in place when disaster struck. She was literally plunged in at the deep end, arriving in the capital, Rangoon, less than a fortnight later.

“There was some discussion about whether I should wait,” she admits. “But I already had my visa and air ticket and I'd worked in an emergency situation before so felt it was important to support the relief effort.”

Her immediate task was to get funds flowing quickly to the UN and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) on the ground, plus also working in the Health Cluster team.

She explains: “This is the health co-ordination mechanism set up in emergencies, which was headed by the World Health Organisation and Merlin (UK NGO). Just after the cyclone, the Health Cluster needed basic support to get this up and running, with regular twice-weekly meetings and follow through on action points.”

It was to be a while before she could pick up the role she’d been sent out to do, which she describes as her “day job”.

She adds: “As the Health Adviser, I am a board member for UK of the Three Diseases Fund. This is a US $100m fund set up by six donors in 2006 to address the epidemics of HIV, TB and malaria. As a board member, I am involved in setting the overall strategy for the fund, overseeing its progress and agreeing the grants to the implementing partners. I am also the representative for donors on the Country Co-ordinating Mechanism, a national co-ordinating body which oversees the national HIV, malaria and TB strategies.”

On top of all this there is Julia’s life as a wife and mother, shepherding two small children through a school life far removed both from Britain and also Malawi in Africa, where they were born.

For Julia, 41, it is the latest stage in a career that has taken her from St Edwards College in West Derby round half the world.

SHE originally read science at Cambridge, and after graduating, went out to Liberia as a volunteer in a school run by the Christian Brothers. All seemed to be running smoothly until Julia got her first taste of emergency relief work.

“I was coming back to do a master’s degree of development when the Liberian civil war broke out, so I stayed on as United Nations volunteer for another year as part of the early relief efforts there,” she says.

From the master’s degree at the University in East Anglia in Norwich she secured a research post nominally back home with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, but actually spending a lot of time in Nigeria, researching for her PhD.

The post of health adviser at the DFID saw her move again in Africa to Malawi for a few years before the Burma position came up.

She says: “My husband and I talked about it where we would want to move to, and we both felt it would be good for our experience to get some Asian context and understand that.”

They are now settled in Burma, at least for the medium term, with at least one family visit a year back to Liverpool, plus the chance of Julia snatching the odd day at home if every she has to fly back to London for a meeting.

“We do try to make sure they (the children) have a sense of where home is, so they can see their grandparents and their family, we do try to keep those links going,” Julia continues. “It was a huge adjustment for the children. They were a little bit out of sorts when we arrived, as there was a new house and I'd been away for a long time and was working long hours. But now they’ve been at school they have found a new network of friends and it’s become more like home for them.”

In the longer run, though, as the children get older, the sights are on a life back in Britain.

“Their schooling is going to become more of a problem, and maybe by the time that we’re looking at secondary schools I will, hopefully, be in a position where I can come back with the DFID,” adds Julia. “But that will certainly become our most important decision maker.”

The day-to-day life, meanwhile, goes on in Burma. The Burmese government is ultra-sensitive to criticism from outsiders and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises caution in such matters. Julia chooses her words very carefully when it comes to describing her relationship with the Burmese authorities.

“I came in just after the cyclone, and what was very striking was the real commitment by everybody to make things happen, to get the relief effort going,” she says. “Obviously the NGOs provide services and the UN here has to have permission for the areas they work in, and my experience is that within areas where they've got agreements they deliver services.”

The position in Burma also came as much to the delight of her family in Liverpool.

“My mum thought I’d become an eternal student and I think it came as some relief to them when I finally got a job!” Julia adds.

williamleece