Humanitarian Stephen Court is back in New Zealand after spending six years in Ethiopia with his young family, working for World Vision. Photo / Dean Purcell
Weeks after humanitarian worker Stephen Court arrived in Ethiopia, riots broke out in the capital and his young family was targeted in a violent attack. Six years later, he’s finally come home.
Stephen Court describes himself as having a “very high tolerance for risk”. He’s not kidding.
His CV readslike something out of a Boy’s Own manual – from living in a remote, water-based jungle infested with crocodiles in Papua New Guinea, where a pig held more value than a human life, to doing cash drops over a war zone that’s been described as the deadliest conflict of the 21st century.
Before moving back home to New Zealand this year, Court led one of the largest humanitarian programmes on the African continent.
As World Vision’s operations director in Ethiopia, he managed 2500 staff and a $600 million annual spend on projects ranging from psychosocial support for traumatised children to safe drinking water, education services, sanitation and monthly food supplies for more than a million people.
Court, whose parents were teachers, had an unconventional childhood, spending his early life on Nauru.
The youngest of his own three children was a preschooler when he and his wife, Karen, moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s sprawling capital, in early 2020, just as the Covid pandemic took hold.
Two weeks after they were released from quarantine, social and political unrest sparked mass riots and gunfire in the streets. Internet and phone coverage went down for a month and the family was essentially trapped inside, sneaking out only for food.
Venturing out to explore the city after tensions eased, they were attacked and robbed while walking in the hills with some friends. Two of the men in their group were badly beaten, with one requiring surgery.
It was a brutal introduction to the country, acknowledges Court, and the experience had a lasting impact. But instead of high-tailing straight out of there, it confirmed his conviction that he’d come to the right place.
“Ethiopia has a lot of complex problems and it’s a very hard place to live. But [the attack] was an isolated incident and what [the children] were gaining in their worldview and learning in the process made it still worth the challenge,” he says.
“My sweet spot is in a situation others might see as hard or challenging. That’s where I really feel at home. Going from being a single person to having a family, you do have to weigh that up, but things did improve and normalise somewhat to an acceptable level of risk.”
Now settled back in Rotorua, where Court went to high school, the family is adjusting to freedoms that would have been almost unimaginable during their six years in Africa.
In Addis Ababa, their home was surrounded by 4m-high walls topped with barbed wire and protected by five guards (and two German shepherds) on a 24-hour roster. The international school that the children attended was a fully secured fortress a short walk away.
In Court’s last six months on the job, 15 of his staff were kidnapped. Thankfully, a safe return was negotiated for all of them. Kidnappings have become a major income earner in parts of the country, and development agencies don’t pay ransom money.
“Fortunately, I’ve never been taken,” says Court, who nonetheless found himself in some “tricky situations” during his time in Ethiopia.
“I’ve got a very high tolerance for risk, I guess, but I’m not naive. It’s an informed risk, and the way I managed that was by putting myself in the same position I’d expect my staff to be in.”
After the Tigray civil war broke out to the north in late 2020, fighting came so close to the capital that his family had to be evacuated to Tanzania and then Kenya, while Court stayed on.
At the time, World Vision had about 350 people on the ground in Tigray, which was locked down and under bombardment from drone strikes and bombings.
When the Government sanctioned United Nations flights into the region, Court organised cash drops for his team. By then, they’d gone for several months without being paid.
“None of the staff wanted to take that risk, so I did the first few plane rides myself.”
An ugly armed conflict between federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the two-year war displaced 4.4 million people and left an estimated 800,000 dead.
A report by the US Department of State in 2023 found evidence of ethnic cleansing and that both sides had committed crimes against humanity.
Court travelled widely in Tigray during the early stages of the conflict, talking with survivors who had walked hundreds of kilometres to makeshift refugee camps, stepping over people who’d been killed along the way.
Children were armed with guns and the dead posed such a health risk that World Vision deployed teams to collect hundreds of bodies for burial in mass graves. Key infrastructure, such as schools, health centres and water sources, was also being systematically destroyed.
“It was almost like a war of elimination, through killing or impregnating them,” he says. “Every girl and woman had a story of rape. People had witnessed and experienced things that no family should ever experience.
“I carried a lot of anger at that time – anger at the conflict, anger at the injustice of what people were enduring, anger at what humans were capable of doing to other humans. Anger that children were paying the highest price for a war they had no part in creating. And then I met Florida.”
A 13-year-old scrap of a girl, Florida had fled 250km with her family on foot from their home in Shire to an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle.
The spirited teenager, who’d learned some basic English at school, had been adopted as the camp’s spokesperson and become a beloved member of the community, helping out when women gave birth. Her dream was to return home one day and train to become a doctor.
Court says many of the people he met had simply given up and withdrawn into themselves. “There was an empty void behind their eyes; they were like shells. Florida’s eyes were alive and full of hope.
“What struck me most was that other people seemed to draw strength from her.
“It wasn’t that she was pretending things were okay – she understood exactly what her family had lost and carried many of the same stories I’d heard over and over: the rapes, the killings, the destruction.
“But she still talked about the future with a passion. In a place where despair would have been completely understandable, she carried a sense of possibility that lifted those around her.”
A peace deal for Tigray was brokered in late 2022, but the region remains volatile and more than a million people are still displaced, unable to return to their shattered homes.
In recent months, an increase in tension has raised fears that Ethiopia is yet again on the brink of civil war.
Court has lost track of Florida and will probably never know what has become of her. Last year, the United Nations estimated that more than nine million children were out of school across the country due to internal conflicts and natural disasters.
However, the lasting impact she made still makes him emotional today.
“I’ve met political leaders, diplomats and people in positions of influence around the world, but Florida, a 13-year-old girl, taught me more about courage and resilience than almost anybody I’ve ever encountered,” he says.
“In the darkest place I’ve ever been in, she reminded me that hope is not the absence of suffering, but the decision to believe that suffering doesn’t get the final word.”
Ethiopia is a key strategic ally of the United States and has been less affected than many by the dramatic cutbacks to foreign aid under the Trump administration.
In Addis Ababa, the Government has made huge investments in infrastructure, aiming to transform the capital into what Court describes as “the Dubai of Africa”.
Beyond the bubble of the city, he says, the country is falling apart at the seams. A new US$15.5 billion airport scheduled to open in 2030 is displacing more than 15,000 people from 3640ha of agricultural land.
The Horn of Africa is particularly susceptible to drought, creating long-term food insecurity. When Court first arrived in Ethiopia, some regions had already missed four seasons of rain.
“We couldn’t call it a famine because you’ve got to use the government statistics, and there’s a lot of control over what you can and can’t say.
“One area where it was really bad finally got rain after six seasons [of drought] and the remaining cattle were killed because of the flooding. The ground was so hard, the water just washed off.”
Leaving Africa has been a wrench for Court, who spent time in Lesotho on land missions after being placed in Papua New Guinea during his bible college training. Faith, he says, has given him the strength to stick it out in difficult places when it would have been easy to leave.
Despite such a tumultuous first few months in Ethiopia, his children loved their school in Addis Ababa and had made close friends there. However, they struggled with the transient nature of the expat community and their lack of independence.
When Karen was offered a specialist role at Rotorua Hospital, Court accepted it was time to step back from the intense environments he’s been drawn to in the past.
His new role with World Vision, as New Zealand’s director of international partnerships, has a strong focus on the Pacific, where climate change and creating sustainable livelihoods are the most pressing issues.
He says the world is getting more desperate, not less, and humanitarian aid is more important than ever before.
Yet according to the OECD, there was a record fall in international aid last year, driven primarily by the five largest donors: Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and France.
“I’ve witnessed places where emergency food has been turned off due to aid cuts and seen the repercussions of that, quite literally deaths due to lack of food and a rise in malnutrition. It’s heartbreaking.”
Court acknowledges many households in New Zealand are struggling and there’s increasing pressure on governments in developed countries to put their own people first.
The answer, he believes, is not to withdraw help but to invest in durable solutions that reduce long-term dependence. That means staying the course in countries when it’s hard and rethinking old systems that aren’t working.
Recently, he spent time with World Vision’s national director for Sudan, where the world’s most acute humanitarian crisis is unfolding.
“The numbers are horrific; it’s overwhelming. But you just keep going, person by person, because it’s one more child who has hope. One more family that’s been restored.”
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with an interest in social issues and the arts.
