What the Heckistan?

I live [for the time being] in Australia. Folks here call it “The Lucky Country”. You could probably query the title if you wanted to. In the source reference (a book of the same title by Donald Horne) the title is applied ironically, suggesting Australia has the good fortune it does not through the skill of its inhabitants, but the happenstance of rich resources. There’s certainly not much lucky to celebrate if you’re an indigenous Australian- disease, slaughter, disenfranchisement, and today largely socially marginlized with the destruction of 40,000 years of cultural history now a reality rather than a threat. Australia has its fair share of natural disasters. Last year’s Black Saturday bushfires ripped across huge portions of rural Victoria with devastating results. Over a decade of drought has crippled the livelihoods of many many farmers. Intense flooding and tropical storms are commonplace in coastal regions, while many populated areas- the eminently livable Melbourne foremost among them- discovering that they are not sustainable with current resources.

But compared to Pakistan, there’s not a lot to complain about really.

The Less Lucky Country

The country’s name means, literally, ‘Land of the Pure’ or ‘The Holy Land’, but recently you’d be forgiven for stamping it with the moniker ‘The Unlucky Country’.

Pakistan’s history has been one dotted with challenges. From its inception as a nation during the 1947 partition with India (when it was in fact two countries- West Pakistan, and East Pakistan) it’s had a violent past. Up to a million people reportedly died during the mass population movements which saw nearly 15 million people uprooted and despatched to ethnic homelands in the north of the Subcontinent. In 1971, between 300,000 and 3 million more died in the civil uprising that saw Bangladesh birthed from East Pakistan.

Decades of political instability saw Pakistan as an uneasy client state of the US during the Cold War, where the seeds of today’s Global War on Terror (GWOT… what a great acronym) were sown. (For an absolutely unmissable analysis of the nexus between Bin Laden, the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the CIA, read Ghost Wars by reporter Steve Coll). Coups and assassinations have abounded. For a while the nation was suspended from the Commonwealth due to accusations of political repression.

Today the simmering tension between the central government and the fiercely autonomous north-western frontier has given rise to a fluctuating cycle of low-level insurgency-type violence and large-scale military manouevres. Last year, an offensive in the Swat and surrounding valleys by the Pakistani army, in an effort to shake loose insurgent strongholds, displaced over 2.5 million people in a series of rapid surges that were some of the largest, fastest population movements since the Second World War. The civil war continues, where attacks on convoys and government targets are counterbalanced by army raids and airstrikes by US drones. The shady relationship between Islamo-Fascist extremists and the ISI continues to lurk.

In October 2005, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook northern Pakistan, killing 80,000 people, injuring over 100,000 and hundreds of thousands- if not millions- affected- placing it by any standards as one of the largest natural disasters in what has been a half-decade of massive events (South Asian Tsunami, Cyclone Nargis, Sichuan Earthquake and Haiti Earthquake).

And now, we have the floods.

2010 Monsoon Floods

Before I go any further, I want to make something very clear- and not just because article 10 of the Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct stipulates that beneficiaries of assistance are treated not as helpless victims, but survivors with dignity. Pakistan is a country of intense and spectacular beauty. I myself have only travelled in the south- Karachi and Hyderabad, along the Indus River which even now is expecting a new surge of floodwaters- and I was deeply touched by the generosity of the people there. I enjoyed the bustle and the dense hum of daily life that exists in those cities crammed together, and the Pakistani colleagues with whom I’ve worked at different points over the years are lovely people. I have been wanting to visit the Karakorum Ranges- K2 particularly- for many years, and were it not quite so risky right now, have a real hankering to drive from Peshawar down the Khyber Pass as well. Someday, insh’Allah.

But these guys have had it tough recently.

It’s hard to downplay the magnitude of what’s happening out there right now. The volume of rain that fell- a result of stalled monsoonal weather systems- has resulted in flooding that in critical terms hasn’t caused the same loss of life as some other quicker disasters we’ve faced. But as of today, the Pakistani government is saying that 20 million people in the country have been affected. 20 million. That number doesn’t really mean much when you read it on paper. I know, because I’m writing it, and it leaves me cold. In fact studies have suggested that we, as humans, are not really able to connect emotionally with numbers higher than about 300- the size of a tribe or large extended family, courtesy of our old troglodytic days. But 20 million is about the population of Australia. Affected by one flood event. It’s more than one in ten Pakistanis- a country that is the 6th most populous in the world.

By contrast, the Haiti earthquake is said to have affected about 3 million people. The South Asian Tsunami, maybe 5. The war in Darfur, about 5 million as well.

In fact there are more people currently affected by the floods in Pakistan than in Cyclone Nargis, the Haiti Earthquake and the Tsunami combined.

And while the term ‘affected’ is a bit of a vague one- comparing people affected by floods with people affected by earthquakes is a bit like comparing Apples and PCs- there’s little doubt that the impacts are severe. Displacement, loss of homes, loss of assets, loss of farmland and cattle. Infrastructure is being destroyed even now that will take years to rebuild. The aftermath and implications will only really be understood when the floodwaters recede. This will take 5-6 days in northern Pakistan, and upwards of 2 weeks to even begin in the flatter lowland areas of southern Pakistan such as Sindh- where the flood waters are still rising and expected to surge. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who also toured Port-au-Prince after January’s earthquake, has called the disaster the worst he’s ever seen, and was reportedly visibly shaken on his trip. That’s a pretty big call from a guy who really knows what he’s talking about.

What’s Going On?

Everybody loves a good yank on the old Climate Change tail. The answer may not be as simple. Not that I’m suggesting climate change is simple, I assure you.

Interestingly, climate scientists have suggested that there could be a link between the flooding, and the crushing heatwave that has been burning western Russia to a crisp these past few weeks. An uncharacteristic ‘blocking high’ is perched over central Asia, allegedly disrupting the flow of the high-altitude jetstream and pushing saturated air where it wouldn’t ordinarily be at this time (parts of northern Pakistan received a year’s worth of rain in a week).

A blocking high (explains the ex-Geographer with glee) is a very stable anticyclonic weather feature (high pressure systems, or anticyclones, are caused when cool air descends from upper reaches of the atmosphere). Ordinarily, high pressure systems form, then move on or break down as they are affected by any other number of weather patterns. When these systems remain stationary for long periods of time, they’re known as blocking highs. They’re not uncommon. Growing up in the Alps, we frequently experienced blocking highs that would sit for weeks at a time, pinning low-level cloud in the bottom of the valleys but leaving the peaks bathed in glorious sunshine (resulting in what’s known as a temperature inversion). They are associated with dry weather and extended periods of sunshine, hence turning Western Russia into a tinderbox.

Beyond that, we don’t really know. Links are being discussed to ENSO trends (the infamous El Nino/La Nina cycles) as an intermediate factor. Weather and climate form such a complex system (with healthy spurts of chaos thrown in) that it’s very hard to predict beyond the micro-level what is going on, and it’s equally difficult to attribute causality.

It’s important to acknowledge that there’s a certain level of statistical randomness in what occurs; as with any system which has chaotic or random elements in it, you’ll end up with variations on a bell-curve distribution. This event happens to sit at the extreme end of one of those curves. It’s not a smoking gun (or even a dripping faucet) in support of any climate change theory. It is, however, a predictable outcome (globally, not specifically) of alleged climate change. The effect of climate change is to stretch out the arms of that bell curve, so that events at either end of the spectrum grow more severe. While in the one direction we can’t really attribute the Pakistani floods to an obvious cause or universal trend, we can expect, if the theories on Global Warming are correct, to see more and more events like this one in coming years.

For a more technical overview of ENSO, MISO and the Pakistan floods, check out this article on the IRIN news service.

In the meantime, please remember the people of Pakistan while this crisis- already overlaid on a highly complex political scenario- continues to deepen.  For those motivated to give, check out the list of NGOs on the right-hand column of this blog.

The Tyranny of Small Emergencies

About once a fortnight I get a request for emergency funding from one of our field offices. These requests typically relate to events that affect between 50-100,000 people, with minimal deaths (less than 50), and are often either weather related (floods/droughts) or minor earthquakes. In the last week, there have been requests for support to people affected by Cyclone Laila in India, monsoonal flooding north of Colombo in Sri Lanka, and the flooding of a major river system in Somalia. And those are just the ones in my portfolio.

In fact, at any one time there are dozens of emergency responses going on. Right now, for example, we’ve got the follow-on from recent bigger emergencies, such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China; ongoing protracted responses to conflicts in places like Darfur, southern Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza and the Caucasus region of southern Russia; food responses across the Horn of Africa, Western Africa and Southern Africa; emerging slow-onset emergencies such as the food emergency in Niger and the response to the harsh winter in Mongolia; and the long-term follow-up to disasters like Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the Sichuan Earthquake in China and the Padang Earthquake in Indonesia.

Three times a week our office produces a daily digest of current emergency-related issues relevant to our work as pulled from global media. This morning’s listed 17 different items, a pretty standard number. I also received our monthly early-warning brief for the Asia-Pacific region. There were more than 45 seperate issues listed as building concerns or events in the region.

In short, there’s a lot of emergency traffic going on. Never mind the two or three appeals you get through your letterbox each year. We all heard about the Haiti disaster. But there’s stacks more out there to which humanitarian agencies need to be aware of and, in many cases, want to respond to.

The challenge, though, is how best to do-so. We have limited financial, human and organizational capital to draw on. When big high-profile emergencies such as Haiti occur, we can raise lots of funds from governments and the general public, but it’s impossible to do-so on a weekly basis to respond to all the minor emergencies that come along. We face what’s called ‘donor fatigue’. Repeatedly asking people to give to emergencies taxes their goodwill and their limited financial resources, and ultimately runs the risk of turning them off to giving altogether. In the same way that aid workers often become desensitized to violence and tragedy due to overexposure, we risk numbing the hearts of the general public if we hound them every five minutes for yet another crisis.

What to do then? Well, some agencies are able to raise what we term ‘non-designated’ funding, that is, pockets of money that is not tied to a specific location or emergency event, which we can contribute at our own discretion where most needed. But such funds are, sadly, hard to raise. Most people give because of specific triggers- such as a disaster they’ve seen on the news which they are moved to sympathy by. It’s much harder to encourage people to give ‘on principle’ and trust agencies to make the decision about where that money should be directed. That’s not a criticism, just a reflection on the reality of donorship. To some extent, agencies themselves bear the responsibility to educate the giving public to change these behaviours.

The practical reality is, no agency can respond to all the need out there, and disasters have to be ‘triaged’. We can respond to this one over here, but not that one over there. How do we decide who benefits from support and who is ignored? Ultimately, we need to be using the Humanitarian Imperative to guide this- that is, where are the greatest levels of need? Pragmatically, this is difficult (and costly) to measure empirically. It is more often, which implementing office can put forward a more compelling argument, and which offices have the capacity to do a better job with the money we give them? It can be hard to compare like with like across continents and across emergency types.

State capacity also plays a part here. Aid agencies aren’t lining up to help shrimp fishermen in the Gulf states of the US because, although they face a real economic need due to the human-made disaster of the BP oil spill, there are structures like insurance, recourses such as the court system, and a highly functional and wealthy government with a history and precedent of supporting its people when faced with difficulty (and sure, the US government might have its shortcomings, but when you compare it to the governments of Somalia, or Myanmar, they come out looking pretty good). NGOs mustn’t undermine a state’s sovereign responsibility to help its own people when in need. But where states don’t have the ability or the will to intervene, there is a higher onus on agencies to step in.

Finally, agencies employ long-term development programs with a risk reduction element. Communities living in areas where disasters are commonplace and cyclical (drough and flood cycles in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, or monsoonal storms in south Asia) are provided with tools and training to manage their own risk environment- that is, to identify the threats they face, and put in place measures to reduce those risks. Those might include growing more drought-resistant crops, or building raised cyclone shelters, or moving houses away from slopes prone to landslide, or creating village-level micro-insurance systems, or storing next season’s seed on raised platforms where seasonal flooding won’t ruin them. Anything to make communities more resilient to these regular disasters.

Risk reduction activities take time to implement, and longer to bring about behaviour change in at-risk communities. And, like I’ve mentioned above, we can’t be everywhere, nor can local-level activities mitigate against larger disasters. So our dilemma remains. Myriads of emergencies, and only limited resources. It’s a daily tension in my job. Who do we help, and who do we turn away?

Any thoughts on how to manage this situation from an organizational perspective are most welcome.

Photos:

1. Maradi Flooding: A small girl uses stepping-stones to cross a flooded street in the central Nigerien city of Maradi.  Rainy season storms routinely flood streets and houses, and wash out roads and bridges, in Niger and across the Sahel, displacing hundreds of thousands of people a year in many small events.

2. Dust Storm, Niger: The same city, nine months later.  And nearly nine months has passed since the last rains.  Winds whipped up by cyclonic systems cause intense dust-storms that damage homes and crops.  Drought itself brings economic hardship and food insecurity to millions of households in pockets across Sub-Saharan Africa annually, and to many children, death.

Putting the Complex Back into ‘Complex Humanitarian Emergency’

In the aid worker’s lexicon of Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) we call them CHEs- Complex Humanitarian Emergencies.  They’re what we get when we layer a natural or human-made disaster over a situation that was already pretty messed up to begin with (see, for example, Darfur, or the war in Eastern DRC, or northern Pakistan).

CHEs are typified by large-scale emergency events (usually covering a significant portion of one country, or several countries), generally involve some level of acute emergency layered over a chronically unsuccessful context (a cyclone, or food shortages, or a mass displacement of people in a war zone or an unstable region), and usually take place in a situation where the national or regional government is either unwilling or unable to solve the problem, and is therefore characterised by failure of state or governance systems.  They also usually take years, and sometimes decades, to resolve.

Basically, they’re screwed.

Interestingly, CHEs don’t necessarily make a big splash in the media.  Eastern DRC is the case-in-point of this sort of situation, but others include the Central African Republic, eastern Chad and northern Uganda, all of which spend very little time grabbing headlines but are archetypal ‘forgotten’ complex emergencies.

This week, we have a grand example of an emergency that is anything but forgotten, but certainly highly complex.  The earthquake which struck Haiti less than 72 hours ago has effectively flattened the capital, Port-au-Prince, and current estimates from the Red Cross suggest that 45-50,000 people have been killed, with tens of thousands more injured and hundreds of thousands homeless.  As much as a third of the tiny island nation’s population has been directly impacted by the disaster.

But Haiti too bears all the hallmarks of a CHE in the making.  Although on the surface it appears to be a natural disaster, like the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, or the Padang earthquake in Indonesia earlier this year- both of which were relatively ‘simple’ emergencies, with functioning (if overwhelmed) state structures and relative stability- the hallmarks of Haiti’s instability are already bubbling to the surface.

What is it that makes the Haiti context so complex?

Geography- Port-au-Prince sits snug against a harbour, ringed by extremely steep hillsides.  The hillsides themselves are crammed with shanties.  When the shaking started, these shanties crumbled into the valleys, taking access roads with them.  The congestion of blocked roads and the relatively small amounts of flat land in Port-au-Prince make it difficult to move about amidst the destruction.

Poverty- Haiti was a poor country to begin with- currently ranked 149^th out of 182 countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Indicator.  30% of the country had access to clean drinking water.  The country struggles to maintain enough food for the population at attainable prices.  Infrastructure is underdeveloped, trade (and therefore transportation) links are limited, building codes are often ignored and disaster preparedness measures not implemented.  With a baseline like this, there is very little resilience, or bounce, in the national coping mechanisms to manage a disaster of this magnitude.

Governance/Administration- Haiti’s government is fragile at best, suffering repeated coups and attempted coups, and currently largely propped up by the international community (backed by US political and military intervention, and 9,000 UN-mandated Brazilian peacekeepers).  Services, such as health-care, policing and emergency response were already weak.  With the earthquake, these services and structures have largely collapsed.  The government is effectively not functioning.  The scale of the devastation far outstrips the capacity of existing emergency services to respond, but even if it didn’t, because the disaster has focused on the seat of power, those very people who should be running those response services- paramedics and policemen- are themselves victims- dead, wounded, or freeing loved ones from rubble.

The UN and NGOs- While the chronic insecurity in Haiti over the years has bred a stable population of international and national aid workers, this populace was themselves not spared.  The UN has lost over 150 staff and peacekeepers, with their headquarters flattened.  As the driving force supporting government and national security services, their effective removal from the picture now leaves a huge vacuum.  NGOs themselves have also been hit, with most charities losing staff members and building facilities, hardware, and connectivity.  Staff themselves are victims, many of them still trying to locate loved ones among the rubble.  Many will not be in a position to return to their posts for some time.

Cyclone Season- From April onwards- three short months away- tropical storms and cyclones will start spawning in the Atlantic Ocean and sweeping over Hispaniola.  Every year Haiti takes at least one direct hit, and usually several, from these violent storms.  90 days (3 months) is a standard block of time during which to run the emergency phase of an operation, but it will take years (at least) to rebuild Port-au-Prince, replace basic services, repair damaged infrastructure and maintain the wellbeing of the population during this process.  Haiti’s populace are vulnerable to storms at the best of times, living as they do in ravines and on steep-sided mountains.  Without the protection of concrete buildings, the hundreds of thousands of people likely to still be in temporary accomodation such as tents or makeshift shanties will be at great risk when the next storm-season comes aroun.

Logistics- Port-au-Prince has an international airport of a moderate size- it can take commercial jets but does not have a large capacity, creating a log-jam in aircraft handling.  The road from the airport is damaged.  The seaport is also damaged and ships cannot dock.  Roads internal to Port-au-Prince are clogged with debris and temporary settlements- people refusing to return to their damaged homes (if they are still standing) for fear of aftershocks.  The international airport in Santo Domingo, in neighbouring Dominican Republic, is the alternative airport of choice, but is also strained to capacity, while roads between the two nations are not in great condition and somewhat insecure.

Security- Port-au-Prince is one of the world’s more colourful cities- by which I don’t just mean the paint on the walls, but the level of danger.  A kidnap capital, foreigners tend to remain behind barbed wires, are leery of spending much time walking around on the street, and avoid public transportation.  Criminal gangs run large portions of the slums, while drug cartels exploit the country’s fragile security services to make Haiti a base for drug-running operations.  Fragile and unpopular governance has provided Haiti with multiple and often bloody coups, rebellions and put-downs, and the capital and other urban areas are home to regular riots and violent protests.

Outmigration- With the capital city in ruins, people are streaming out into the countryside as road networks open up.  Many of them are injured or have lost everything.  While identifying and supporting hundreds of thousands of earthquake-affected citizens within the compact confines of Port-au-Prince was already a daunting prospect, trying to locate, register and assist a population that is rapidly spreading across the countryside is a staggering logistical challenge.

Over the next weeks, dozens of aid agencies, foreign governments, military forces and UN agencies will coverge on Port-au-Prince, attempt to identify the people most at need of assistance, and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of supplies, materials, food and medication.  This will be accompanied by thousands of foreign nationals.  Working with national counterparts, these various organizations will attempt to distribute assistance as evenly as possible to the highest standards possible.  In order to acheive this aim, they will have to contend with the above complexities.

And that’s just for starters.

Aid is a complex business.  Aid agencies of every colour get lots wrong, good intentions or no.  There’s plenty of criticism out there about the way these agencies do business, and a lot of it is merited.  By the same token, lives will be saved and vastly improved in many cases.  Where aid doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to, it’s worth bearing in mind a few of the complications that can make doing this job a mind-knottingly challenging prospect.

How would you resolve the Haiti earthquake dilemma…?

In Principle

The Theory

1. Analyse the needs of people affected by disaster

2. Write program designs to guide activities and get funding

3. Carry out relief response activities

 

The Field Reality

1. Carry out disaster relief response activities

2. Write program designs to guide activities and get funding

3. Analyse the needs of people affected

*sigh*

A Near Miss?

It’s still raining in Manila.  It’s been raining consistently and lightly for the last eighteen hours, but nothing to get excited about.  I imagine the water-levels in some of the flooded areas are going up again, but people are prepared for worse so they should be okay.

As of a couple of hours ago, Typhoon Parma made landfall up north, but if the forecasts and satellite images are to be believed, it’s substantially weakened and really just skipping off the very corner of Luzon, about 400km north of here.  It’s now listed as a Category II storm and we’re all still waiting to see what happens, but feeling a lot more hopeful today than we did last night.  With luck we’ve dodged this bullet and the system will skip back out into the Pacific and dissapate.  Thoughts remain with those up in Aurora district right now, where they’ll be feeling the impact of the winds and rain, but we probably won’t hear much news before tomorrow.  Meanwhile, the teams have resumed relief operations here in Manila, still trying to respond to the half-million people who’ve been displaced from their homes from all the flooding last week.  Business as usual, as they say.

Waiting for Parma

It’s raining in Manila. It’s a warm, drippy sort of shower that falls straight from a grey sky onto the tarmac with a gentle pattering sound that is all but swallowed by the rumble of traffic, the honking of horns and the incessant blowing of whistles by traffic police and parking attendants as they attempt to control the morass of vehicles choking in the damp avenues. Palm fronds hang limp in the still tropical air, weighed down by the smell of exhaust fumes, warm asphalt and wafts from open sewers. Or perhaps it’s the tension.

Five days after Manila suffered its worst flooding in three decades, the city is holding its breath again. Typhoon Parma, hot on the heels of its predecessor Ketsana, rolls ashore tonight. We’re not sure where it’s going, only that it’s on its way. A Category 4 ‘Super-Typhoon’, the prognosis isn’t great. It’s still intensifying, and will continue to do so until it makes landfall somewhere along the north-eastern coast of the Philippines, most likely somewhere north of the capital. It’s expected to pack wind-gusts in excess of 230kph (140mph). It’s also due to slow right down. Which is bad news. When a storm slows down, it has longer to dump the rain held in the saturated air caught up in the vortex of its system. Ketsana dumped more than 40cm (16 inches) in 9 hours- a month’s rainfall in one go, and Parma is set to deposit anywhere upwards of 25cm (8 inches). The mountainous terrain of northern Luzon is already saturated and can’t hold much water, and the steep mountain slopes are primed to slide. Large landslides are a perpetual hazard to the archipelago.

The parking lot in the office compound here has been the site of frenetic activity all day today, as dozens of young volunteers continue to prepare food packs and emergency kits for families already displaced by Typhoon Ketsana. It’s Friday night here, but none of us are expecting a quiet weekend. It is still possible that the storm will swing north and only strike Luzon a glancing blow, and for the sake of the people here we pray it will go that way. But already the storm has tracked further south than predicted, and there are reports that some of the outlying islands are already being battered by the storm. It’s due to hit around midnight tonight, in about eight hours, and then stick around for a further 24. If the highways and phone lines are cut, it may take days before we know exactly what happens. All we can do for now is place our teams on standby, and hope for the best.

Cyclone Ketsana

I realise that my blog has been a bit one-dimensional these past few weeks, a reflection in part of a slow couple of months in the office without much to talk about, and different priorities during my free time that have meant I haven’t spent as much time maintaining the site as I sometimes do. All part of the journey.

I found out yesterday afternoon that tomorrow morning I’ll be deploying to Manila to help with our office’s response to the flooding caused by Cyclone Ketsana that hit over the weekend. I’ll be out there for an initial couple of weeks, and see what happens from there.

As always with our line of work, when it rains, it pours. As well as trouncing Manila, Ketsana went on and as of last night had hit the Vietnamese coastline as a Category I typhoon. We’re still waiting to see the extent of the damage, and have teams on standby to help there as well. Three more tropical storm systems, two already named, are still queued up in the northern Pacific and tracking towards the east Asian coastline. Additionally, last night a shallow magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Samoa, resulting in a small (5-foot) tsunami that has swamped villages and so far claimed at least 14 lives. And in Guinea, heavy-handed forces allied to a military government that seized power in a coup last year have been violently quelling protests with live rounds, resulting in over 150 deaths and 1,200 injuries. Guinea is in a state of growing instability and observers will be watching closely to see what unfolds over the coming weeks.

All this, of course, in addition to the usual humanitarian fare of forgotten crises that plod on with minimal support or international concern: ongoing warfare in southern Somalia, massive displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur, continued rebuilding amidst the instability of north-west Pakistan, the detention of 250,000 civilians in camps in northern Sri Lanka, simmering tribal warfare in Southern Sudan, not to mention northern Uganda, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, and the three thousand people who will die from HIV/AIDS today. To name a few.

I’ll try and keep you updated with thoughts, experiences and images while I’m on the road. Hopefully I won’t face quite so many restrictions this time around.

Waiting for the Next One

It’s been more than a year since the last big natural disaster. It makes aid workers edgy. We’re a pretty edgy bunch at the best of times. It’s an unavoidable side-effect of a lifestyle that revolves around destruction on an epic scale, I guess. It’s partly the tension of knowing it’s only a matter of time (but not how much time) before the Next One hits, partly the frustration that comes with feeling underutilised.

Aid workers like to be utilized. We have overdeveloped ‘want to help’ mechanisms. It tends to be why we do what we do.

Aid workers are a funny breed. We mark our passage through life and career (often largely inseperable) by emergencies and disasters. We share a common framework of reference to big global events. The Rwandan Genocide in 1994. The war in Kosovo, 1999. The Iran earthquake of 2003. The Boxing Day Tsunami. The Myanmar Cyclone. They act as macabre milestones around which we frame other events in our lives. “I bought a house in late 2003. It was just before the Bam Earthquake”. “I broke up with her in February 2005, during the tsunami response”. “My second child was born while I was on deployment in Gaza.”

They drop easily into conversation, common reference points for a global diaspora. “How do you know Simon?” “Oh, we met in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami.” “Really? We worked together in Khartoum.” Common places, a small, interchangeable and ever-flowing community. Degrees of seperation are in the twos and threes.

We develop a jargon based around mutual experience. One- and two-word descriptors for events too terrible to contemplate for the victims and survivors. “The Tsunami”. “Nargis”, “Darfur”, “Rwanda”, “Mitch”, “Bam”. They’re thrown around flippantly, almost like destinations, places we’ve been on vacation, movies we’ve seen. In far-flung third-world bars and seedy hotel restaurants we swap accounts over cheap yellow beer, finding what responses and colleagues we have in common, and then outdoing eachother with stories from the front lines. It’s an exercise in bragging the morbid.

The true junkie collects them. Like a groupie with a rock-band, touring from one stop to the next. I’ve even seen t-shirts made out for response teams, listing the emergencies their members have attended, just like a band’s tour shirt. “World Tour ’05-‘06: Banda Aceh, Sri Lanka, Niger, Kenya, Somalia, Pakistan”. They’re worn with pride. Badges of assistance and intensity. Uniforms incongruous in their humour.

I don’t criticise. This is my community, or at least, a part of it, and I choose to live here. I thrive on it as much as the next relief-rat. I languish in the times between deployments, feeling useless and undervalued, until the flurry of excitement and activity hits like a metaphorical landslide, and we’re swept away in the euphoria of tragedy and assistance.

It’s a difficult dichotomy. Most people in the industry are here because they want to help. Most are people with feelings, who are moved by the plight of people worse off than themselves and motivated to do something about it. It’s what draws us to the world of emergency relief. Yet we find ourselves waiting for the next tragedy, the next disaster, the next invasion- dare I say it, looking forward to it. It’s our raison d’être, our purpose, our professional drive and, because so many of us fail to draw the line between our professional and personal lives, often far more than that.

Disasters happen. We don’t make them happen, and if they didn’t happen, we’d all happily pack up shop and find something else to do with ourselves. Some of us would probably join some hippie commune in rural India and grow organic vegetables. Some of us would become perennial backpackers. I doubt very many of us would go into the financial sector, but there would probably be a few. But as long as emergencies continue to take place, aid workers will be sitting around, waiting for them to happen, and wrestling with the recognition that disasters are terrible things, and yet our lives, our sense of purpose, even our sense of satisfaction is drawn from the fact that they do happen, that people will suffer, and that we then contribute to doing something about it.

Photos:

1. Refuge: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) tents at a camp in Chad for refugees displaced by warfare in neighbouring Darfur, Sudan.  June 2004.

2. Stacking: World Food Program (WFP) grain sacks awaiting distribution in an NGO warehouse in the famine-struck post-war region of Bahr-el-Ghazel, South Sudan.  November 2004.

3. TFC: A severely malnourished child awaits food at an NGO-run Therapeutic Feeding Centre in central Niger during the nutrition crisis, during which hundreds of thousands of young children faced death through malnutrition and disease.  August 2005.

4. Feed: A child recovers at an NGO-run feeding centre in western Niger, nine months after the peak of the nutrition crisis.  June 2006.

A Nomad’s Footsteps (3 of 3)

More pictures from different axes of the globe we wander, a sampler of some of my recent travels…

Mauritania (2005)

Sunrise over the city of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania.  Half as big again as the US state of Texas (slightly smaller than the Northern Territory, half as big again as the nation of the Ukraine, or roughly the same size as France and Spain combined, depending on the audience and frame of reference…), Mauritania has a population of just 3 million mostly-nomadic people.  In true Sahelian fashion, it straddles the line between civilizations, with a thin southern strip home to a significant population of African ethnic groups, including the Wolof, and the rest drawn from north African groups with roots in the fairer Moorish, Berber and Tuareg peoples.  Sadly, as with many similarly-divided nations, a sense of superiority aligned with the lightness of skin has developed, such that in Mauritania there are ‘white’ moors and ‘dark’ moors, the latter of whom tend to be subservient to and occupy economic positions below the former.  Mauritania has the dubious reputation of being one of the last bastions of societally-condoned slavery in the world.

Mauritania is a fascinating place.  Much of the population is truly nomadic, and while the African agriculturalist groups have settled close to the Senegalese border (about a third of the population), and another million have begrudgingly accepted a sedentary life in the country’s nondescript capital by the sea, this leaves the final million to be finely sprinkled throughout the rest of this vast Saharan nation, with the result that it is, predominately, devoid of anything.  Just vast empty expanses of desert.

We love it.

I took the above photo with my Canon Powershot G6, the little digital point-and-shoot that kept me company during my year in West Africa.  No polarizer, no special lenses, and no post-processing.  The image of the sky you see there is exactly as it came out of the camera, the colours as they appeared, as the sun came up from beyond the desert above the eastern end of the city.  A phenomenal view.  I will talk more about Mauritania some other time, as it’s a country that has captured my imagination and left me thirsty for more…

Nepal (2007)

Another trip I will doubtless spend more time talking about in more detail is my brief stay in Nepal, trekking to the Annapurna Sanctuary.  Three of the best-spent weeks of my life.  The scenery was spectacular, the culture fascinating, the weather perfect, and the company pretty stellar as well.  Many very, very fond memories.  Among which is not the fact that my camera died forty-five minutes after arriving at the crux of the trip.

Fortunately, on this morning my camera was working.  I snapped this of one corner of the enourmous Annapurna Massif, here capturing at least two seven-thousand-metre peaks just as the sun’s first rays lit their crowns.  Howling winds tear across the tops of the peaks, whipping snow and ice crystals into the air and leaving them hanging like a fine veil for the sun to get caught in.  I have always been a fan of the mountains, and Nepal remains one of my favourite destinations on the planet.  Stupefyingly beautiful.

South Africa (2007)

One of the images I carry with me that reflects the grandeur of the African landscape is the awesome skyscape that accompanies it.  No memory of the open drylands of this continent is complete without taking in the drama of the clouds that hang above, lending a sense of scale to the scenery beneath.  I snapped these cumulus towers building in the early afternoon near Pretoria, when a hot and humid January day promised to turn into a thundery downpour, and which it subsequently did, with gusto.  In this image I love the deep blue gradient towards the top of the frame, and the tangible texture of the clouds themselves…

Haiti (2007)

I took this photograph in a small village that was being rebuilt by the NGO I work for after it had been destroyed by a cyclone.  We were on Haiti’s Ile de la Gonave, a small island a short distance off the coast of the nation’s capital Port-au-Prince.  While Port-au-Prince remains one of the world’s more unsavory destinations, replete with riots, kidnappings, political violence and general criminality- not to mention substantial poverty- Gonave couldn’t be more different.  A laid-back Afro-Carribean island with friendly people and gorgeous tropical scenery laid out on coral-white rock and ringed by azure seas, the only thing that reminded me I was actually working while I was here was the fact that we spent eight hours a day rattling around inside a regulation Toyota Land Cruiser, on what I maintain are the very worst roads I have been on.  Anywhere, anytime.  And I decry anybody to find me a worse set.

Great place though.

Canada (2006)

As we’ve already ascertained, I love mountains.  So I’ve actually been pretty restrained in this collection by not just launching a whole ream of mountain photos at you.  Though truth be told, as my photography skills (and equipment…) have improved, the amount of time I’ve had around mountains has sadly dwindled, an error which I plan to remedy as soon as I get the opportunity.

I took a few weeks out from my stint in Niger to join friends in Alberta for some quality mountain time.  This generally meant strapping on two pieces of carbon-fibre onto the undersides of my boots and hurtling down steep slopes.  I find it hard to conceive of a better way of engaging with God and creation.  I snapped this shot of a mountain whose name I’m unsure while we were driving out to Lake Louise (or was it the Bow Hut area…?  My memory fails me).  It’s not a technically remarkable shot.  But the sheer scale of rock, snow and ice is awe-inspiring, and that blue sky behind the white snow gets my heart beating for more.  I am desperate to get back to the Rockies with my new Canon EOS 5D…

Ecuador (2005)

One of the downsides to travelling to lots of exotic places in my job is being there, and having to spend most of the time working.  One of the upsides is those rare days off.  On this day, a colleague drove us up to the jumping-off point for the ascent of Cotopaxi, Ecuador’s second highest mountain, a stratovolcano of 5,897m in altitude, and one of the world’s most threatening volcanoes.  Part of my trip had to do with supporting a project which is working with communities to be ready for a possible eruption, and so I felt it was particularly justifiable that I spend some time on the volcano itself.  A real hardship, given my earlier observations about my love of mountains…

And hardship it was.  Quite aside from the powerful winds, the altitude was an absolute killer.  We foolishly drove up from 2,000m to 4,500m in the space of ninety minutes, ignoring all calls for acclimitization.  Then we hiked up past the hut at 4,800m, eventually tailing off around 5,200m just short of the start of the ice-cap.  By the top, I was taking five paces, then stopping for two minutes to catch my breath.  Then another five paces…  We ended up coming down of the mountain fairly shortly after that, when my colleague began to complain of difficulty breathing.

This woman was one of the villagers with whom the project was working, one of several who wanted to accompany us on our little excursion.  I caught her in this brief moment of reflection at the mountain hut at 4,800m, and her bright clothes against the grey stone just stood out.  I’m really fond of this photo.  It captures something of the mountain spirit of these gentle people.  She seemed right at home up there, on the edge of where people survive.

South Australia (2006)

The Flinders Ranges, in South Australia, capture for me the rugged beauty of the interior of this continent.  Barren, dry, wild and isolated, they grab my imagination and make me want to explore some more.  The five days that my brother and I spent driving around the southern part of the SA outback only whet my appetite.  Such a beautiful country, right on my doorstep, sometimes I wonder why I spend so much time jetting away from it.  But then I think there’s beauty wherever we end up in the world, we just need to learn how to see it.  Certainly for those of us who’ve ended up here in Australia, we have no excuse to complain.  It’s a pretty amazing country, really.

Am I allowed to say that as a wandering Kiwi…?