Warrnambool man's decades of work making a world of difference to those in need

When COVID swept across the world last year, Mr Bennoun was able to catch the last flight out of Thailand and has been in Warrnambool ever since - the longest time he has spent in the city he grew up in since he left to work in the refugee camps of Thailand in the early 1980s.

Like many around the world, he is working from home but his work with the United Nations puts him on the frontline in the fight against COVID-19.

Until March last year he was living and working in Myanmar where he was involved in the rollout of health programs such as vaccines and treatments for HIV, TB and Malaria - but has now been expanded to include COVID vaccines. "It's the same supply channels. You just add COVID to it," he said.

Mr Bennoun said if you didn't aim to eradicate viruses and diseases globally, they would keep coming back. "If we don't really suppress COVID everywhere, the variants are going to come up in different ways. It will be a long way beyond Delta," he said.

Mr Bennoun's career working for organisations such as the United Nations, UNICEF, Save the Children and the Asian Development Bank began in the mid-1970s.

As refugees started to flow from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to Australia in the wake of the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the call went out for help.

Mr Bennoun stepped up to help people resettle, and began traveling to refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

He eventually took a posting in 1983 in one of the biggest refugee processing centres just out of Bangkok that was funded by the then Department of Immigration. "I never came back after that," he said.

All up he has worked in about 27 different countries - a quick Google search of his name will detail the many projects he has been involved with.

He spent years working for Save The Children in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, and it was there that he first became so ill with typhoid fever his friends feared he might die.

That is probably one of the reasons he is now a big believer in vaccines and went out and got the AstraZeneca vaccine in early April when they were first rolling out in Australia.

"I'm not scared of vaccines. In my career I've had five medical evacuations," he said. "I've had typhoid, typhus and heat stroke."

Mr Bennoun said he had seen children under five with high fevers die of preventable disease in seconds, and older adults struck down by measles. "So I'm a believer in vaccines," he said.

While working in Vietnam in the mid-80s, Mr Bennoun's headaches started to get worse and his fever just kept getting higher.

A friend helped him up the stairs to his room where he passed out, and when he came to he was in the French heart transplant hospital which was the best hospital in Saigon at the time.

"I had passed out and I'd been out of it for about six or seven days," Mr Bennoun said. He woke up to see his friend leaning down, saying "Robert, you are very unwell".

Blood tests failed to find a cause, so his employer, Save The Children, chartered a flight to Bangkok which turned out to be a small Russian jet.

All he remembers of the trip was being trundled across the uneven cement of the Saigon airport with a doctor and nurse by his side. When he finally came to in Bangkok, his mum, Yolanda, was by his bedside. She had flown in from Warrnambool.

In Thailand they were able to immediately diagnose typhoid fever. The $45,000 bill for his medical treatment was personally written off by the vice-president of Vietnam - a big supporter of Save the Children - who said "Robert is a friend of Vietnam". "Just amazing," he said.

He was medevacked again when he was involved in a car accident while on an assessment mission in southern Thailand with department of environment officials.

"This little van rolled four or five times and when we stopped everyone was fine. Then I put my arm down and I passed out because I had broken my arm in four or five different places."

In 1989 he got tick-borne typhus from cattle while on a UN mission to Laos. They had actually visited a hospital earlier in the trip and it was in such poor condition they remarked to each other: "you wouldn't want to be sick". Mr Bennoun ended up in a coma in that very hospital before being medevacked again to Bangkok.

During his time working for UNICEF in Port Moresby, PNG, part of his job was to medevac doctors and nurses who had been attacked back to Brisbane for treatment.

"Port Moresby in those days was probably the most dangerous place on the planet because of the violence that grows out of highlanders and lowlanders coming into an urban setting without work and finding alcohol," he said. "It was terrible. It was worse than parts of South Africa."

He had been tailed several times during his commute from the office to home, but his security knew how to shake them off. Others were not so lucky. He recalls cancelling a scheduled meeting with AusAid representatives after someone with a sawn-off shotgun had blown out the front window of the car as they were driving through the street. "The High Commission people used to live in accommodation called Alcatraz because it had an electrified fence around it," he said.

Years later, Mr Bennoun ended up in East Timor following the unrest that broke out in the wake of the 1999 independence vote.

He had been at the general assembly at UN headquarters in New York when news of the decision came on all the monitors. "It turned violent because the Indonesian military didn't accept the outcome that they wanted self-rule," he said. "I remember my boss, Carol, turned to me, looking at the monitors, and said 'I presume you'll be going'."

A few weeks later he was in Warrnambool visiting his mum when he got the call. He flew to East Timor via Darwin airport, which he said was like a military airfield, and arrived after Australian troops had landed.

For a year-and-a-half he was the officer in charge during the emergency which had left much of the country destroyed. "As a UN staffer you are in a security grid so you never get really scared but you get worried for everyone else," he said.

Mr Bennoun lived with the UNICEF team in a half-destroyed old school. He was guarded by a squadron of Gurkhas from Kathmandu and Hong Kong who he used to lend his satellite phone to so they could make one-minute calls to home.

"There were so many atrocities. So many killings by the militia," he said. He recalls sitting on the steps with a Timorese priest who had tried to protect those taking refuge in his church from the militia. "They killed all of them in the church," he said.

Mr Bennoun has also spent time working on health projects with the Centre for Disease Control in southern China and Tibet, and with the United Nations in Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia.

"That was tough," he said. "We had an HIV pandemic that we were helping the government to deal with. We had horrendous flooding. So many people died and so many people lost access to medical treatment and medications."

But amongst the sad stories and the devastation he has seen, its the stories of those who have found a better life in Australia as refugees that have stayed with him. "They just picked themselves up and put their kids through schooling and went into public service and private sector and did so well," he said.

Mr Bennoun thought his trip back to Australia last year would be short lived, but as the COVID pandemic has dragged on he is reluctant to leave his 97-year-old mum for fear he may not be able to return for a while.

"I don't want to wave goodbye and then not be able to return for 12 months. If I can leave and come back within six months I'll do it," he said. "I've worked in so many different countries and so many different contexts that I'm used to things changing dramatically."

And after years living in the tropical weather of Asia and Africa, he said this was his first winter in about four decades. "It's nice to experience seasons again," he said.

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