Richard Poole obituary
My friend Richard Poole, who has died aged 81, worked for humanitarian aid organisations, most notably International Voluntary Services, American Refugee Committee and Trócaire of Ireland, between 1970 and 2015, progressing through the ranks to hold country and regional director posts and international consultancies in his later years.
As a result he lived and worked in many troubled zones, including Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan countries of Africa such as Guinea, Angola, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
He also wrote five books that drew on his experiences, from The Inca Smiled (1993) to Mankind’s Last Chance (2013), works that focused increasingly on global issues and were analysed via his Bahá’í faith, which he had adopted in the mid-1970s after searching for answers to existential and spiritual questions.
Richard was born in Bristol to Joan (nee Ruskin), a hospital administrator, and Douglas, an engineer. He was educated at the local Fairfield grammar school before in 1964 entering Southampton University, where he and I met, to study Spanish and French languages.
After graduation in 1968 he signed up with Voluntary Service Overseas, working in subsistence farming in the altiplano of Ecuador, an experience that sparked his long career in humanitarian aid, confronting the effects of war, poverty, neglect and exploitation, especially in Africa.
His lifelong love of football included a spell playing semi-professionally for LDU of Quito and ended as a referee of youngsters’ matches in Zimbabwe, where his wife, Alice Otiato, a Kenyan doctor and fellow aid worker, whom he married in 2015, ran a hospital facility.
He retired soon after his marriage to Alice, and from 2020 they settled for good in Colchester, Essex, close to an active Bahá’í community.
He was a man of integrity, modesty, humility and good-humoured intelligence who had the ability to mix with people of all ages and backgrounds in his personal quest to confront inequality and injustice, and latterly the degradation of the planet.
Richard is survived by Alice and her daughter Patricia, his elder brother, Steve, and two nieces.
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
