LocationsSara Ferrer Olivella, UNDP Resident Representative in Indonesia, shares a journey across continents, crises and cultures guided by empathy, trust and a deep commitment to people
What More Beautiful Mandate Could There Be?
June 22, 2026
Tree Planting Day with Indonesian Coordinating Ministry for Food Affairs
Photo: UNDP Indonesia
In 1999, in a remote village in Timor-Leste, a mother grabbed my arm.
Her child had been gored by a buffalo horn. He was losing blood. The nearest doctor was two hours away. She didn’t speak my language; I didn’t speak hers. But I understood exactly what she was asking me to do.
UN policy was clear: you cannot carry anyone else in a UN vehicle.
I put the child in the car and drove.
He survived. That family is still alive somewhere in Timor-Leste today. And I have carried that moment with me through Cambodia, New York, Jordan, Colombia, and now across more than 17,000 Indonesian islands, because it taught me the only thing that has ever really mattered in this work: when you can do something, you do it.
A Village of a Thousand People
I grew up in a small town in Catalonia’s Penedès, in Spain, a place of just over a thousand people. It is not somewhere that points obviously toward four continents and 25 years of international development. But it gave me something every posting since has confirmed: the habit of showing up.
I started volunteering as a teenager: looking after the neighbourhood’s children at weekends, helping organise local events, cheering wildly when Barcelona hosted the Olympic Games in 1992. It felt small at the time. But those years taught me something no job description ever quite captures: that giving (genuinely giving, with your whole heart and no expectation of return) always gives back more than it costs.
I didn’t know it then. I know it now.
When I arrived in Timor-Leste in 1999 as a UN Volunteer, just weeks after the violence that followed the independence referendum, that early lesson came back into sharper focus. Talking to families about what they needed, I kept hearing the same answer everywhere: nothing complicated, nothing extraordinary. Health. Education. Food on the table. The chance to watch their children grow.
That’s it. That’s always it.
Cambodia Taught Me Patience. Jordan Taught Me Trust.
From Timor-Leste, nearly seven years took me to Cambodia, working on human rights and governance. I arrived thinking I understood how institutions are built. Cambodia corrected me. What I witnessed there was slower, harder and more human than anything I had studied: officials working late in buildings without consistent power, systems rebuilt paragraph by paragraph by people who had seen those same systems deliberately destroyed within living memory. I learned to respect the pace of things. Change that lasts is rarely fast.
Visit to Banteay Meanchey with Cambodian Mine Action Centre.
Photo: UNDP Cambodia
Then came almost a decade at the centre of the system: New York. First with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund, then as a regional adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean and for Asia and the Pacific. Headquarters teaches a different humility: you watch how a single decision made in New York ripples out across dozens of countries, each of which understands its own reality far better than any policy paper ever could.
Jordan came next (first as Country Director, then as Resident Representative), and Jordan, sitting at one of the world’s most pressured crossroads, taught me the other essential lesson: trust is not a given. It is earned, every day, in every conversation, every time you choose the honest answer over the comfortable one.
I remember an early meeting with a partner ministry. I arrived prepared and confident. Afterwards, one of my most experienced national colleagues took me quietly aside. The relationship with that ministry, she explained, had taken three years to build, and what had made the meeting go well had nothing to do with me. It was everything the team had put in place long before I walked in. I have never forgotten that conversation. The knowledge is always already there. The job is to listen, and then to get out of its way.
Then Colombia, for four extraordinary years.
People always ask what the thread is: what connects Phnom Penh to New York to Amman to Bogotá and now to Jakarta. My answer is always the same: being passionate about others. Curious about who they are, what they carry, what they dream of. That curiosity has never dimmed, and every culture I have lived inside has returned it with more than I brought.
This work changes you. If you let it, it makes you better.
Partnership Forum on Social Cohesion in Amman, Jordan.
Photo: UNDP Jordan
Indonesia Shocked Me
I arrived in Jakarta in September 2025 thinking I understood scale. I had just come from Colombia: some 50 million people, staggering diversity, a country still building peace after five decades of conflict. I thought I had felt “big.”
Indonesia laughed at that.
More than 17,000 islands, some 6,000 of them inhabited. Three time zones from one end of the archipelago to the other. More than 1,300 ethnic groups, over 700 living languages, and countless traditions and forms of music layered across a geography so vast that no map can hold it. You have to go. You have to travel to the outer islands, sit with the communities there, look out at the water and understand that what you are looking at is a single country.
And then the weight of it lands. More than 280 million people. Some of the world’s richest biodiversity. Some of its most climate-vulnerable coastlines. A government with fierce ambitions. And development challenges that do not wait for anyone to work out where they fit.
I knew it was big. But when you arrive, it shocks you, in the best possible way.
Batik Day at UNDP Indonesia
Photo: UNDP Indonesia
Nobody Is Asking How AI Is Being Fed
A few months after arriving, I travelled to Morotai, in North Maluku, in Indonesia’s far east, a remote cluster of islands hours by plane from Jakarta. Beautiful places, with extraordinary fish and communities that have lived from the sea for generations.
I was there to see something modest and remarkable: solar-powered boats cutting fuel costs and ocean pollution, and solar-powered cooling boxes that let fishers preserve their catch at sea. One woman I met had used her cooling box to start making tuna nuggets, processing her husband’s daily catch and selling to neighbouring islands. It was the first income that had ever been her own. The technology was simple. What it changed in her life was not.
Standing there, I found myself circling a question that has been growing in me since I arrived: the global conversation about artificial intelligence is missing something. Everyone is telling the same story: transformative potential, economic growth, a better future. I believe in that story. But I keep asking something I am not hearing enough: how is AI being fed?
Data centres consume enormous quantities of energy. They need water, vast amounts of it, for cooling. They need land. They need infrastructure. In a country where climate change is already straining water access in some regions, where communities depend directly on natural ecosystems, where geography makes everything harder and more expensive, the idea that AI arrives as a neutral technology is simply not true.
There is a second question I find even more pressing. What happens to a country like Indonesia when two or three companies, based in two or three countries, control the cloud infrastructure that runs its banking system, its transport, its hospitals? What happens the day someone, somewhere, decides to turn off the switch? That is not a hypothetical. It is a question of security. Of sovereignty. And Indonesia is asking it loudly and rightly, including through the G20 Bali Global Blended Finance Alliance, launched when Indonesia hosted the G20 in 2022 and to which UNDP contributes as a knowledge partner, working to bring the hidden costs of AI into the conversation.
There is an Indonesian proverb I have come to use often: berakit-rakit ke hulu, berenang-renang ke tepian; bersakit-sakit dahulu, bersenang-senang kemudian (raft upstream, swim to the shore; bear the hardship first, and the ease comes later). The difficult work done now determines how safely we all reach the shore. The decisions being made right now (about who governs AI, who finances it, who it actually serves) will shape human development for a generation. I am not pessimistic about technology. I am precise about it. And precision is exactly what countries like Indonesia need most.
At the La Reserva Natural Inkal Awá La Nutria "Piman". Colombia
Photo: PNUD Colombia
Trust Is Not Given. It Is Earned.
Every time I walk into a new country office, there is a moment. The team is watching. Carefully, politely, but watching. Who is this woman? What does she know about us?
It is completely fair. Because those teams have what I do not: years of hard-won relationships with governments, communities and partners. Institutional memory. Roots. They know which door to knock on, which conversation to have before the meeting, which silences mean something.
My job is not to arrive with answers. My job is to ask one question: what would help this team give the very best of what they already have?
I put a second question to my teams consistently, across every office I have led: are we truly serving the people and the country, or are we serving our own idea of what they need? The difference between those two things is the difference between development that lasts and development that disappears the moment we leave.
Four Children and One Rule
I have learned, slowly and sometimes the hard way, that I cannot lift others if I am running on empty. I cannot carry a team through a hard week if I have not taken care of myself. The rule, if there is one, is simple: I cannot give unless I have something left to give.
When my children were small, balance meant being present for the moments that mattered most: not every school presentation or parents’ evening, but the birthday, the performance, the quiet dinner where nobody talked about work. As they have grown and found their own lives, balance looks different. A long walk. Exercise. A good book. A voice note from one of them that makes me laugh on a Jakarta street at seven in the morning.
Simple pleasures.
Looking back, I notice that this is exactly what the families in Timor-Leste told me they wanted in 1999. The most basic things. The things that should be within reach of every human being on this planet, and so often are not.
Some lessons, it turns out, teach themselves to you twice.
Innovate for Amman
Photo: UNDP Jordan
To Anyone Thinking About This Work
I want to be honest with you, because honesty serves you better than inspiration right now.
This is a vocation. Not a career path, not a travel opportunity, not a lifestyle. A vocation. If the drive to serve is not genuinely in you, this work will find that out, and it will be hard.
It carries real sacrifice. Friendships thin with distance. Your children change schools too many times. You miss things you cannot get back. There is a weight to this life that never fully puts itself down.
And yet, I cannot think of a better life to be living. Truly.
If you are considering it: start. Find the NGO, the UN Volunteer placement, the Junior Professional Officer route. Go to the field before you feel ready, because you will never feel ready. The knowledge that shapes you most does not live in a training room. It lives in the conversations you have not had yet: with the government official who has been in that ministry for twenty years, with the community member who knows which solution was tried before and why it failed, with the national colleague who will, if you are lucky, take you aside after a meeting and tell you the truth.
Every single person has something to offer. Give what you are most passionate about. Contribute to the lives of others. And watch what comes back.
What Peace Actually Looks Like
If you ask me for the moment I carry most deeply from 25 years of this work (one image, one place), it is a cemetery in Palmira, Colombia.
Colombia signed a peace agreement in 2016, after more than five decades of armed conflict. But I was there for what came afterwards: the part that does not make front pages, the part that is harder than any negotiation and more important than any ceremony.
Listening to a testimony at the war cemetery in Colombia
Photo: PNUD Colombia
In that cemetery, former members of the Colombian military and former FARC combatants were working side by side, helping to identify the remains of people who had disappeared during the conflict, including victims of the “falsos positivos”, civilians who were killed and wrongly presented as casualties of combat. Together they were returning those remains to their families: a burial with dignity, and the truth, even when the truth was unbearable.
I do not have words for the energy in that place. The grief. The gratitude. Two groups who had spent decades destroying one another, choosing (slowly, painfully, imperfectly) to repair.
Politicians describe peace as a signature, a ceremony, a handshake in front of the cameras. That cemetery is what peace actually looks like.
It is also why organisations like UNDP exist: not for the speeches, but for the spotlight we can turn on moments like that one, so they are witnessed, so they are not forgotten, so they count.
That is the mandate. What more beautiful mandate could there possibly be?
