Somaliland

The Somali-bound plane sitting on the apron at Jomo Kenyatta airport has a shattered windshield, but the crew don’t seem to mind. And because I’ve been up since three in the morning, I dismiss the pang of discomfort and board anyway.

The aircraft is a Dornier twin-engine jet, seating 25. We cruise over the Rift Valley, lush volcanic craters emerging from the morning haze as we bank northwards. From 20,000 feet I watch northern Turkana roll into southern Ethiopia, and somehow the windshield is still intact. I’ve had four hours’ sleep so I’m too dozy to really care.

I’m flying to Somalia. I’ve never been there before. Not so long ago, I swore it was somewhere I would never visit. Not with a wife and a six-year-old featuring prominently in my life. Nor with a healthy aversion towards being kidnapped by pirates, or blown up by IEDs, or dodging mortar fire. But talking it through, rationalizing it, doing a bit more learning, the idea grew on me. By the time I’m actually inbound, I’m really intrigued.

Failed State Number One

Somalia doesn’t have a good reputation when it comes to travel destinations. By which you could say that it’s at the very bottom. Iraq and Afghanistan are both more likely to draw casual visitors. It’s name is synonymous with chronic warfare, entwined clan politics, a violent fundamentalist Islamic insurgency, drought, anarchy, piracy and human suffering. More than 600 people are currently being held by pirates along the eastern coastline. As many as 400,000 people are believed to have died in fighting since 1991. Last week, the Failed State Index once again listed Somalia in its top spot.

Somalia’s in a second year of drought, though to be fair, as a largely arid nation, somewhere in Somalia is experiencing drought conditions at any given time in any given year. This one’s particularly bad, with the UN estimating 2.5 million of the country’s 9 million people in need of assistance, and Global Acute Malnutrition rates of 45 percent in some sections of the population.

The war, raging since the 1991 overthrow of then-President Siad Barre, shows no signs of abating. Initially pitting a complicated array of shifting clan allegiences against one another (Somalia is ethnically homogenous but riven by clan groups vying for control), the civil war over the last 10 years has become increasingly characterised by an Islamic-based insurgence. Uniting many clans is a group called ‘Al Shabbab’ (literally, “The Guys”), who have recently claimed alignment with al Qaeda. They fight an internationally-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), based until very recently in Nairobi for security reasons. The TFG, with the backing of an Africa Union peacekeeping force and heavily supported by Ethiopia (itself trying to crush insurgencies on its long porous border with Somalia), currenly clings to a small patch of land in the capital Mogadishu, engaging in almost daily firefights with Shabbab fighters in the city. Meanwhile, Shabbab has slowly been consolidating its control over Southern Somalia, so that it now contols the bulk of the ground there.

This is the Somalia people may be familiar with- and in its most popular version, characterised by the [breathtaking] movie Black Hawk Down and book by the same name, recounting the Battle of Mogadishu (locally, Battle of the Rangers) fought by US troops against an overwhelming Somali militia in 1993. But there’s more to Somalia than understood in superficial reporting.

Somalia, as it currently stands, is three states in one. South-Central Somalia (SC) continues to embody much of what’s described above. Mogadishu remains, arguably, the most dangerous city on earth. The fighting there, deeply entrenched by over a generation of vicious warfare, shows no signs of dying down. The TFG, dysfunctional at best, is rapidly losing international support and legitimacy, but the West, loathe to let Shabbab take unmitigated control of SC, still props its ailing structures up.

To the north of South-Central, however, is Puntland. Claiming allegience to the government in Mogadishu and with a desire to maintain a Federal identity, Puntland has its own state structure and functions largely as a unit independant from South-Central. While South-Central makes it look comparitively stable, it has its own very significant security concerns- specifically, insurgent-style clan fighting with state security forces, skirmishes with Shabbab-aligned militia in the south, and a piracy problem that makes the Barbary Coast look like a bunch of drunks in a dinghy.

And around the top-end of Somalia, we find Somaliland. Unlike Puntland, Somaliland has no interest in aligning itself with Mogadishu, and considers itself an independent state, although internationally it is defined as a semi-autonomous republic. Fighting its way to independence in 1991, it has recently celebrated 20 years of freedom, and is wrestling for international recognition- with only limited success. With a functional government in Hargeisa (Somaliland recently held democractic elections which international observers declared as free and fair, after which the previous President gracefully stepped aside to his successor), Somaliland is largely peaceful, with some territorial disputes along the border with Puntland and some minor internal security issues.

When I say ‘minor’, everything is relative of course. Roadside bombs, grenade attacks and assassinations, even in Somaliland, don’t exactly stick it at the top of the ‘must-see’ destinations list. Expats travel with security details. The weekly security reports are pages long, with incidents up and down all three zones. But compared to South-Central, Somaliland comes off with a vibe like the French Riviera.

And this is where I’m headed.

Hargeisa

We land in Hargeisa a few hours after leaving JKIA. The plane banks on the edge of town, giving a view of sun-soaked scrubland all the way to the horizon, and a few small huts ringed by thorn-bush fences. Then we’re rattling along the bumpy landing strip and rolling up to the terminal.

I’ve landed in some dingy locales, but Egal has to take the cake for the pokiest International Airport I’ve visited. But- and this has to be acknowledged- it works. Disembarking the UN flight with a clutch of other expats, we queue to have our visas checked against a list, then pay our arrival tax in US dollars. The arrivals hall has the airs of a run-down railway terminal. A single tea-shop sells biscuits, and apparently nothing else: boxes and boxes and boxes of coloured biscuit packets. Resting atop a shelving unit, an enourmous clock with roman numerals adds to the station ambience, askew thirty degrees so that midday points off somewhere to the right and up.

I collect my bags from a heap in the corner of the terminal, and we head off.

Our American program manager meets me with the local security officer. He’s got a wooly beard-growth and is dressed in well-worn khakhis and prerequisite aviators. We skirt the edge of a dusty plateau that looks down onto the city proper, a spreading jumble of houses and low-rise shop-house blocks. It all looks remarkably civilized.

The office is housed a little away from the main international quarter. Other NGOs are dotted around. The UN has its headquarters a ten minute walk away, in what has become a cantonment marked by concrete bollards blocking off the streets to would-be car-bombs; a coordinated series of attacks in 2008 in Hargeisa and Bosaso, one targeting UN offices, claimed 30 lives.

It’s windy, and oddly cool. From the upstairs windows of the office- it’s a large house converted to fit our purposes- I can look out across a rocky landscape and down towards the city. Dust blows. The wind whistles on window bars. Inside the tiled rooms, a slamming door reverberates like a gunshot.

I have a brief with the security officer. We’re heading straight into the field. The young Somali is enthusiastic and committed, and cocky enough that I have only limited confidence in what he’s telling me, but my much more in-depth conversation with the security director in Nairobi the night before has left me with a strong understanding of the context and I’m fairly relaxed.

To Boroma

We set off in the early afternoon. Two four-wheel drives, unmarked, with a security detail in a third. The detail consists of a bunch of guys with Kalashnikov assault-rifles who follow us everywhere we go outside Hargeisa. They’re a standard setup, used by all international agencies, with their training and maintainance costs shared across the organizations. When we approach one of the score of checkpoints along the road, they speed ahead of the convoy and see us through, then drop back to the rear. In the villages, they shadow us on foot, lurking unobtrusively a dozen paces away by a wall or a thorn-tree. I hope their bored countenance covers for a stealthy and deceptive level of alertness. Whatever their demeanour, the villagers don’t seem to care. They’re just a part of the scenery out here.

There’s radio chatter. I’ve been issued my own VHF handset. I’m a security trainer myself, so I’m listening to how the radios are used by the team. There’s some pretty entertaining moments of miscommunication. Protocol is pretty abysmal, but they’re doing the right thing in principle.

The car I’m in has fluffy seats and blacked-out windows. It’s so heavy I can barely see outside, and the window won’t roll down either, so before long I’m pretty carsick. I’m also missing a lot of the landscape, but for the most part it’s the same dull flat badlands that you find all the way from here to Dakar.

We stop for a pee. I’m told to check for coloured rocks. Blue rocks means the area has been cleared of mines. Red rocks means an uncovered field.

I stay close to the car.

A few minutes later we pass an international demining team. Sure enough, we see the blue rocks and the red rocks. They’re out there in their heavy blast gear in the heat, crawling among the rocks in their painstaking, lifesaving efforts.

The road is pretty good, but about two hours out the asphalt breaks down and we’re onto braided dirt trails. The landscape here is more interesting too- steep-sided rock outcrops that puncture the horizon and give something to look at. Green-topped acacia bushes populate the predominate biome.

We rock into Boroma a little before nightfall. The city is unremarkable, save perhaps for its solidity. Unpaved, rocky avenues and a little run down, but with concrete buildings of substance. There’s not much traffic. People watch us as we drive past. The hotel we stay in has three stories, and the rooms, while not exactly well appointed, are spacious and mosquito-free. A sign on the tiled wall forbids couples without a marriage certificate from sharing a room, informs that guns and explosives must be left in the lobby, and closes with the confidence-inspiring message, “We are here to care you.” From the rooftop I can see over fields dusted with light green, and a rocky pitch on which gangs of boys are kicking a football.

Awdal

We hit the field first thing the next morning. The road deeper into Awdal is rough. Not the roughest I’ve ridden- that title goes to the tracks on Haiti’s Ile de la Gonave, hand-picked after travel to more than 50 countries- but certainly on the shortlist in places. It’s offset by the scenery, which is dry, desolate and intense. We wind up and down steep hillocks. The place is remote and underpopulated. We drive for three hours but see only a couple of villages, and those small and huddled near scant water sources.

I’m told the country is as green as people have seen it in many years. I’ve spent lots of time in arid regions, so I know what they’re talking about, and I believe it. Drought’s familiar. That said, to consider what we’re looking at as ‘lush’ is a stretch. Pretty much the only thing growing are flat-topped thorn-trees, their leaves open and lending a spotty green acne to the hillsides. Near the few villages we pass are some cultivated fields, growth present but scatty. The only trees of substance congregate along wadi beds. We see tortoises and camels. The sky is white with heat-haze.

The track winds its way through a narrow canyon, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass on what is unmistakably the bed of an intermittent stream that, come the rains, will be a writhing torrent. It’s the sort of setting in which a 1950s western director would have the cavalry ambushed by clifftop Apaches.

We reach the town. On the map it’s a largeish dot with bold letters next to it, one of the major settlements in the region, but away from the abstract it’s a gathering of dwellings spread over a dusty basin where subterranean water presumably gathers in the wet season. If it’s home to a couple of thousand people that’s all there is here. We visit some of the children’s work being done, segregated boys and girls groups providing kids a place to play and interact and receive positive messaging around conflict management and child rights. The girls play volleyball in brightly coloured headscarfs, and when asked what they would like their group to be provided with, they say ‘computers’, so they can learn important life skills. At another compound, we watch boys in uniforms engage in an energetic football match. It may sound very normal and civilized, but it triggers staff to point out that in South-Central Somalia, this would not be possible. Sports are forbidden by al-Shabbab. Last year hand grenades were rolled into a room where men had gathered to watch the FIFA World Cup on television. We acknowledge that this basic right at home has special value for these kids.

We visit the local school. Community outreach has made the enrollment of children- boys and girls- blossom here, with the result that it’s growing overcrowded. Tacked onto the back of one of the concrete blocks is a makeshift shelter made from thorn branches and walled with cardboard from aid deliveries. Desks and benches are jammed inside so tightly that the only way to reach the back is to walk on them. A blackboard, the focal point, is nailed to the outside wall of the school building.

The next day we’re visiting farmers. While Awdal is experiencing a good rainy season, the last few years have been less kind. Crops have been poor, animals have died. We’ve been running recovery work for families affected, helping them improve the productivity, sustainability and resilience of their livelihoods.

The farmers are good-natured and energetic. They’re happy to learn and put into practice what they’ve been taught in terms of new farming techniques, and hungry for more support. I’m amazed by the fluency with which they speak ‘NGO’. It’s kind of interesting, and kind of disturbing. I hope we’re not in the process of creating another NGO-dependent state like Southern Sudan. But I’m impressed by how much hard work they’re willing to put into getting ahead. Oddly, it’s not something I see everywhere I go. When we see the fields themselves, however, it’s sobering. The ground, while not as poor and sandy as I’ve seen in farms in Niger, is still dry and dusty. It’s hard to see how families can grow enough to support them through a year with what they have available to them. We’re there at the start of the rainy season, though, and I’m hoping to see photos of what it looks like in two months’ time.

There’s storm-clouds on the horizon. We pull back onto the main road, then stop. The local staff are having a discussion about whether we should travel to our next field site. It’s forty-five minutes across the plain. Down into a dip, then up to the hills on the far side. The road is a cattle-track. They’re worried about the rains and getting back in time. There are several river-beds to cross between here and Hargeisa this afternoon. But the program manager steps in, and we make a call to procede. Worst case scenario, we spend the night stuck in the trucks.

 We judder past a village with a mix of stone cottages and traditional Somali homes- bound bundles of fabric and thatching worked over a wooden frame like an inverted bowl. The ground in the shallow depression is fertile and grass is growing. Cows graze. Up the other side we are back among the rocks. It’s a good crop of rocks this year in Somaliland. Dikdiks, tiny deer no more than eighteen inches high at the shoulder, scamper away among the bushes as we pass by.

The clouds build. We can see columns of rain, dark against the horizon. The light is full of drama, one part intense sunlight, another part glowering cumulus.

In the village, we meet in a school-room. It’s dim under the impending storm. We’re starting our conversation with a women’s income-generating group when the rain arrives. There’s no warning, not even much of a build-up. In thirty seconds, the pounding of the water on the sheet-metal roof is so intense we can’t hear eachother talk unless we shout in one another’s ears. Water dribbles from holes in the ceiling. We laugh. There’s no way we can continue the meeting. We wait, but the rain doesn’t abate. Finally the local staff urge us back to the vehicles. If we don’t get a move-on, we could be cut off.

They pull the car up to the door of the schoolroom, and in the three feet from doorway to car seat the downpour has me liberally soaked.

The desert transforms. The sky is dark and visibility is down to a few hundred yards. What had been scrubland punctuated by rock, thorn-bushes and dry dirt twenty minutes ago is now running with water. It’s been raining for five minutes, but already the little track we followed is axel-deep. Water flows in sheets off the sloping terrain, inches deep everywhere we look, so it’s like being on a lake-bed that’s been tipped on an angle.

It takes us the better part of an hour to get back to the road. The drivers do well. We spend most of that time with the wheels in water from six to eighteen inches deep, occasionally threatening to bog, but here the rocky terrain is on our side. The depression down the middle of the shallow valley is filled with water and we’re lucky to get back across it. When the rain stops and the cover lifts, everywhere gleams a dirty silver. By the time we reach the rivers on the way back to Hargeisa, evidence of heavy rain is present, but we’re able to ford the new streams without too much drama.

Flight

I fly out a couple of days later. A short visit, but an interesting one. I’m struck by the energy that the Somalis have put into building a future with meagre resources in a harsh landscape. It’s easily one of the more hostile I’ve travelled.

So too I’m struck by Hargeisa. Home to nearly a million people, it’s a far more developed place than I was expecting. My benchmark for underdevelopment is the provincial towns in Niger or the shanty-esque towns of Southern Sudan in the early 2000s. Hargeisa was more like a tidy version of Nouakchott, with evidence of commercial growth and a hum of activity.

Sitting in the Ambassador Hotel the night before my departure- despite being behind blast walls and buried within a patchwork of streets sealed to vehicle traffic- I muse how remarkably safe Somaliland feels. Perhaps it’s an expectation thing, comparing it to the myth of Somalia, Number One Failed State. But I feel more relaxed here than I have in a range of other locales- Nairobi, Abeche, Port Moresby, and a bunch of others besides.

That feeling of safety evaporates with my departure from the airport. The same airplane with the shattered windshield is waiting for me. I learn that our pilot is a 23-year-old lad from Mexico, and that three weeks ago the aircraft had two failed attempts at take-off, and then, the next day, an emergency landing due to engine-failure as it tried to leave Hargeisa. The only person on the flight more nervous than I is the Hungarian aid worker who tells me these stories, as he was on the plane both times. We watch a squall-line slowly closing on the airstrip, a single patch of blue sky ringed by dark grey hanging stubbornly over the airport itself. I find myself hoping the incoming flight won’t land before the storms get here so we won’t have to fly into them. No such luck. We take off into the turbulent clouds, me hanging on to the arm-rest with white knuckles, and it’s not until we’re above the storm twenty minutes later that my ears stop straining for the sound of an engine dying and I know we’re not about to die.

We touch down in a small village in northern Kenya. It’s a tarmac strip surrounded by round thatch-roofed tukuls and a small administration building. In contrast to stormy Hargeisa, here the afternoon sunlight is strong from a clear blue sky, and it makes the soil achingly red. We’re processed through immigration- they don’t like letting the Somalis get too close to Nairobi in case they’re entering illegally, I guess- and we’re back at Jomo Kenyatta by sundown. We glide through the same smokey haze into Nairobi’s mix of grey, green and red. An hour later I’m winding through rush-hour traffic back to the hotel in the back seat of a hire taxi, quietly scanning for carjackers. Just another day in the office.

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.

Wat-er Mess (or, Why Society is Once Again Seriously Screwed)

I’ve always been a bit of an environmentalist. From a very early age I’ve had a thing for the rain-forests, and later, a desire to be environmentally concious and relevant. I guess going through grade school in the 1980s meant that I imprinted a whole lot of those social awareness messages- especially growing up in Geneva and surrounded by the UN and other international organizations. At university I studied environmental issues in depth at both undergraduate and postgraduate degree levels- right down to examining journal articles analysing ice-core samples, pollen records and isotopes found in the shells of prehistoric crustaceans. So when ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was released to much global chatter ten years later, I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t already concluded from the research I’d dissected years earlier.

That said, being convinced of the need for humans to be environmentally courteous, it’s still a challenge to know how to do this. Trade-offs abound. Hidden costs are everywhere. I recycle. In the past I have tried to exist without much use of a car (though living in the sprawling suburbs of a city with a rotten public transportation network- Melbourne- this has proved extremely impractical now). But I’m also aware that for my job I travel vast distances by airplane, and this probably puts me into the more pollutant-contributing members of our species- a fact I try to justify through what I do, but the fact remains.

Water is a huge issue. It ranks as the second most essential ingredient for human life to continue, after oxygen. It is an extremely limited commodity which is being depleted globally, and the worldwide distribution of which is being negatively impacted by changing climate patterns. It has long been predicted that future conflicts will be driven by the struggle for control over clean water resources.

The state of Victoria, where I live, has been struggling with drought for over a decade now. In this interactive graph provided by Melbourne Water, you can see how water levels in dams and catchments have fallen from the period 1997-99 (top 3 lines) to the period since 2007 (bottom 3 lines). We are in city-wide water restrictions at Stage 3, which restrict activities such as watering gardens, using hosepipes, washing cars and filling pools (watering gardens, for example, can only be done twice a week on designated days, using a watering can; cars cannot be washed, except for spot-washing of windows and mirrors where visibility is being affected, using a bucket and sponge).

I have always tried to do my bit. Campaigns call for 4-minute showers, and as a guy I don’t find this hard to comply with. I find I can’t take a shower now- anywhere- without mentally keeping a check on how long the water is running for. I see the value in water and I do want to conserve it.

My struggle has been wondering how much difference this sort of choice makes. I have always been sceptical. For example, it’s all very well if I restrict my water usage, or even if all households in Melbourne restrict their usage and cut back, but what sort of a difference do we make when there’s no evident transparency around the amount of water going into, say, agricultural irrigation schemes, or industrial production. In my mind, it was quite possible that 80% of the available water was going into these other things, so unless work was being done to curb water use in other economic activities (which, of course, I could see as being highly unlikely politically due to desires to maintain economic throughflow) then my efforts might very well be the proverbial drop in a bucket.

I did see a statistic at one point that suggested that household water usage accounted for about 50% of state-wide water consumption, against agricultural and industrial production. This made me feel a little better. I could see the value then in making some personal sacrifices. After all, every litre saved is a litre in itself and has value. Having lived and travelled extensively in the third world, having watched people queue for eight hours to fill up their buckets, or women and girls spend hours each day gathering water to survive, I understand how precious each of those litres are. Heck, I’ve done my time washing out of buckets on a couple of litres a day. I get it.

But at the back of my mind has always been the hidden environmental costs that go into every facet of daily life. It crops up in a variety of ways. For example, when you buy a product that’s come from overseas, it’s been transported at an environmental cost. Has it come by plane? By sea? What about the various components that went into it- did they also travel to a point of manufacture? And the packaging? Without a detailed environmental audit of every product (someday I hope to see this on packaging much like we take nutritional information for granted today), it’s impossible to tell.

Good examples of this are organic foods. Touted as better for the planet, in fact this isn’t strictly true. Yes, they reduce the amounts of chemicals we’re pumping back into the soil. But in fact, the earth doesn’t have enough fertile land area to be able to produce enough food using strictly organic techniques to be able to feed our burgeoning population. If we converted all available land to grow organic foods and stopped polluting with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agents, tens of millions of people (and more) would rapidly starve to death- because in fact those pesky chemical fertilizers do vastly increase the yield of food per hectare that we can produce.  Trade-offs.

Another example is ethanol fuel. It’s plugged as an environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline, and is mixed in with regular gas as the ‘green’ option on the forecourts. However the processes behind ethanol production involve vast amounts of land area converted to sugar-cane. Demand for ethanol is accelerating the destruction (by fire) of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and the commercial exploitation of the residual infertile land for sugar-cane farming is devastating the soil quality, resulting ultimately in unsustainable practices, poverty traps for small farmers, and desertification. It is, in the long term, horrible for the environment, and I’ve stopped putting ethanol into my tank as a result (although the whole thing is a trade-off; which environmental cost is higher per litre of fuel- burning down rainforest and desertification, or pumping out higher levels of carbon fumes from my exhaust? It’s not easy to find out).

I was both fascinated and chilled to read a story last week on the BBC website about water use in Britain and how water use in developed countries was creating shortages in the developing world (not the story itself; that’s old news. But the details within it). They had taken just one resource- water- and applied exactly the above thinking to it: What is the hidden cost behind the products we take for granted? They call it “embedded” water usage- namely, how much water goes into producing said item- watering the crops that are the raw material, washing goods ready for commercial availability, involved in chemical processes, etc. There is an awesome interactive graph (yes, I like these things), and it displays per unit, and per kilo of product.

An example. A single sheet of paper takes 10 litres of water resources to produce, while a kilo of paper, around 2,000 litres (think about that the next time you by a ream of paper for your printer at home). For reference a bathtub takes on average 150 litres to completely fill. Melbourne’s household water target per person per day is 155 litres (and water statements here now come with little graphs showing how close your household water usage has been over the past quarter to that target).

Another example. A loaf of bread takes about 440 litres. Per kilo, bread requires about 1,000 litres.

Or take a cup of coffee. To make a single cup of coffee, 140 litres is required. Think about how little actual coffee goes into a mug- just a few dark grains at the bottom of the cup (or jammed into the espresso machine). To make a kilogram of coffee- get this- the report says it takes 21,000 litres. 21,000!!! When you see those lovely-looking 10kg hessian sacks of smooth polished coffee beans sitting by the counter at your local Java-juice dispenser to add a little ambience and authenticity, consider the fact that it took 210,000 litres of precious water just to produce that one sack. In perspective, that’s about what a thoughtful household in a western country might use in a year. It’s also the volume of a moderate sized swimming pool. 10kgs. It’s crazy.

Here’s one more. Jeans. This one freaked me out. To make a single pair of jeans- get this- it takes 10,500 litres. For one pair! This kills me! I never want to buy a pair of jeans ever again! And I like jeans! I have a good buddy who works for Levi’s here in Australia! But I can’t get over this number. It’s mind-blowing stuff.

Society is seriously screwed.

Anyways, that’s my rant for the day. Hopefully not too much doom-and-gloom in there. But at the same time, hopefully something to think about the next time you buy something.

And in all seriousness, I can’t wait for the day that all our commercial products have environmental information printed on them, just like today we can read the nutritional information. If we want to keep not just our bodies but our society and our world healthy, I think this is absolutely critical.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

Photos:

1. Fill: A Haitian man fills a water container from an NGO-installed water-point on the island of Gonave, off the coast of Port-au-Prince.

2. Industry: Steam billows from an industrial smokestack in western Melbourne.

3. Stain: Saline water stained brown flows out into the sea in northern New Zealand.

4. Outback: Australia’s outback landscapes support it’s moniker as “The Dry Continent”- the most arid landmass on the planet.

5. Stage III: Hosepipe bans and garden watering restrictions are hallmarks of Melbourne’s Stage III water restrictions.

6. Gathering Water: Haitian women and children gather at an NGO-installed water point to collect water.

7. Shade: A boy shelters from the burning midday sun in the Sahelian drylands of southern Niger during the 2005 famine.

8. Therapeutic Feeding Centre: An infant waits to be registered at an NGO-run therapeutic feeding centre for severely malnourished children during the 2005 famine in Niger.

9. Stream: Steam blows from industrial smokestacks, western Melbourne.

10. Pouring Water: A Nigerien girl fills clay jars of water from a deep well.  Girls and women in Sahelian Africa spend many hours of each day gathering water for their households- first hauling the heavy liquid up from wells and bores, then transfering it to pots which they then carry back to their homes one by one. 

To see more of my photography please check out my Gallery here.

Nigerien Nostalgia- The Rains Arrived Last Night

The final travel piece I wrote while living and working in Niger in 2005-6. A couple of weeks later, I left the country and travelled overland through West Africa for a month by myself. If you’ve enjoyed reading these pieces, I hope to write up my travel journal from my time on the road in West Africa- if nothing else it was quite the experience- and hope to have some of it posted here. When I can find the time…

The Rains Arrived Last Night

The rains arrived last night. We’ve been waiting for weeks now, since early May, since the heat. The heat and the dust. You never really get away from it, though you can step into your air-conditioning, jump in the pool on a Sunday afternoon. Every time you step outside, the sun pounds your shoulders, takes your breath away. The dust gets everywhere, until you don’t really notice it, except when something ordinary and everyday takes on a fine orange hue, and you see the smudge-marks where your fingers disturb a fine layer of sand on your toilet seat, on the door-handle, on the screen of your computer.

Click here to keep reading…

Nigerien Nostalgia- A City of Sand and Sun

The fifth article in a series of travel/diary pieces I wrote while living and working in Niger, in West Africa.

A City of Sand and Sun

I am still living in a team-house in Niamey, a pleasant if overpriced affair which comes complete with colleagues (the most permanent of whom being Program Officer Anne-Marie and her fiance Ryan, who doesn’t actually live with us but might as well), a cook called Ibrahim (who we love dearly and who is very good), Boubakar our night guard, and a television set which shows CNN International and nothing else. The house is a five-minute drive from the office, which helps breed healthy working habits such as returning to the office after dinner and working until midnight.

Click here to read more…

Rainy Morning Dreams

Victoria’s drought is no secret. Since I got back to Melbourne in late December, the state has averaged less than about 2cm (1 inch) of rain. Our water storages are at about 30%, 5% lower than the same period last year, and dropping at a rate of about 0.5% per week. It’s the lowest level displayed on the record, which starts in 1997, but as far as I know we’ve never been this low before. We’re in stage 3a water restrictions, and gardens are dying out across the state. Flying in to Melbourne airport, the landscape is yellow-brown from horizon to horizon.

The morning after Mike & Lisa’s wedding in sub-tropical New South Wales was mild and damp, and a wet grey rain fell in a refreshing shower that hissed on vibrant green leaves and left the atmosphere singing with moist droplets. For this Victorian, it was like taking a deep breath of cool, clean air. Invigorating and nostalgic. How we could do with a nice downpour here in Melbourne…

A Little Closer to Home

This is Zac.

No, don’t worry, I haven’t run out of travel images to post.  Nor am I becoming one of those people who posts soppy pictures of their pets all over the web.  (Zac’s not even mine…  you think I can keep a dog with my lifestyle?  But he belongs to my folks, so he’s part of the family).

We’ve kept Tibetan Terriers for a good twenty years now.  First Toffee, when we lived in France, and now Zac and his little sidekick Zena.  I’ve been camping at my folks place looking for somewhere to live, and every now and then I take the dogs down to a nearby park where they can run, and play with other dogs too.  It’s a real joy to watch them tumbling around as a pack together, a big bundle of paws and tails and ears flailing in a big ball of dust.

(Incidentally, you can see how the drought’s really taking hold down here; where Zac’s perched is supposed to be grass, but now the whole place looks more like the back-lot to a beach).

From a photographic side, it’s been fun taking my 5D for a walk while I exercise the dogs.  I’ve been fitting my 85mm f/1.8 on the front and it’s an ideal focal-length to catch some of the canine chaos.  The shoots bring with them their own challenges.  The dogs are rarely still, and when they are, they’re rarely looking at the camera.  I open up the aperture as wide as it will go so I can ramp up the shutter-speed and freeze the action, but unless I absolutely nail the point of focus, their faces end up a little blurry.

I caught the top one of Zac as he took a breather between romps.  It’s shot at f/1.8, hence the deeply blurred background.  It’s not a perfect shot (you’ll notice the bench growing out of the side of his head), but I like that his face is in focus, and he’s wearing a typically Zac expression, happy and content and just a little bit puffed.  You can see the gleam in his eyes.  Intelligent, and stubborn because of it, he’s affectionate and gentle, and frankly, we all love him to bits.

Yeah, the little heart tag isn’t very masculine.  That’s my Mum’s doing…

And just to make sure I haven’t alienated the rest of you who don’t like dogs, I promise to post something less pet-related very soon.

Photos:

1. Little King. Zac sitting in the park

2. Playtime. Zac (l) and Zena chasing down a willing Staffie

3. The Chase. A Labradoodle (Labrador/Poodle cross) gives Zena a run for her money

4. Romp. A Retriever and a chocolate Labradoodle having a good time

5. Dogfight. Zac checks out the fun and games between a pair of young Retrievers

6. Show me the Love. A Cavelier King Charles Spaniel finds some affection

7. Thoughtful. Zac can be a sombre little bugger sometimes