Filming Fun with Cam and Mike

While trolling through my blog archives I found a bunch of posts which I wrote months (in some cases, like this one, years) ago, and never got around to publishing. So I might drop a few of them onto the site from time to time. This one was originally written in September 2010, when I was deployed managing an emergency response program in Niger, and had spent a few days with a TV news team filming a couple of pieces. I thought it would be good to share. Seeing as I wrote it and all.

-MA

If I were to want to tell you about my week filming with a foreign media team and wanted to use pseudonyms, I might flippantly call my reporter ‘Mike’ and my cameraman ‘Cam’.

In a twist of truth being at least as amusing as fiction (and frequently far weirder)’ these are actually their real names. ‘Mike’ is correspondent Mike McRoberts, and ‘Cam’ is news cameraman Cameron Williams, both of TVNZ in New Zealand. They’ve been here in Niger putting together some pieces about the current emergency, and about aid workers, and I’ve had the privilege of keeping them company for the last four days while we’ve bounced around the central Nigerien countryside.

(Here, of course, ‘bouncing’ is not simply a euphemistic reference to the extent to which we travelled across the far reaches of rural Maradi, but has a visceral tangibility best experienced in the back seat of our Land Cruiser troop carrier…)

Over the years I’ve found that the professions of aid work and international journalism (particularly war journalism) tend to attract similar personalities (albeit with certain key differences as well). The contexts and activities to which we’re drawn are similar, the situations we put ourselves into providing a similar kick to the system. They’re high-stress jobs on which driven people with an experientialist bent tend to thrive. They’re drawn by the opportunity to make unique contributions in unique locations, and the added risk factor is often an appeal.

Mike and Cam both fit that bill, and the rugged and frequently confronting context of Niger, the world’s poorest country and in the depths of a tragic nutrition crisis, seemed to excite rather than daunt them. I felt quickly comfortable with them. They were personalities I could identify with. The war-stories they shared were like those I’ve shared with dozens of relief colleagues in bars the world over. And to top it all off, they were consummate professionals.

I’ve dealt with the media a fair bit over the years now. Most of it has been more remote- phone interviews from garbage-strewn streets in central Niger and hotel rooms in Colombo jump to mind. Around the time of the Haiti earthquake I also did a few TV interviews with the Australian press, including a particularly daunting live appearance on a daytime chat show, which I have no desire to repeat. So the chance to watch a couple of experienced hands put together some foreign correspondent pieces was a chance to observe the process from both sides of the camera lens- something which as a photographer I found fascinating.

Mike and Cam were making a couple of news slots, as well as a longer in-depth piece about aid workers, and were in-country for about 5 days. I, with a couple of our media staff, accompanied them to the field, and took the opportunity to combine the story-gathering work with an assessment of how our emergency programs are functioning in the bush.

Reporting on these situations is always a challenge. Article 10 of the Red Cross Code of Conduct insists that in their communications material they present beneficiaries as survivors with dignity, not helpless victims. Media has its own internal guidelines- driven mostly by the integrity of the individual reporters and producers (and I’m happy to say that Mike defines himself as a Humanitarian first, a journalist second). Just like NGOs are wanting to have an emotional impact to encourage people to donate, the media wants to have an emotional impact to encourage people to watch the show or buy the edition. This can lend itself to a tendency to focus on the shocking, at the expense of balance and dignity.

It wasn’t hard to find shocking stories, of course. We were all particularly struck by the plight of a 9-month old boy who weighed roughly what Mike’s own son had weighed at birth, with skeletal limbs and a bulbous head. We spent time returning some women to their village who had walked more than 30km that morning to be at the distribution site. But so too they focused on the positive- the children whose weight can be seen improving over several weeks of treatment, the agricultural work helping farmers diversify their income and food intake, the schools offering children who have fallen through the cracks of the educational system a second chance at building a future for themselves.

I enjoyed watching Cam at work. Like me, he’s a student of light and form, and he’s at the top of his game (shortlisted as he’s been for a cameraman of the year award in New Zealand). He took great care not just composing his frames, but also ensuring that the light worked for the image he wanted to capture. I speak from personal experience when I say this is no mean feat in the Sahel. Sunlight during the middle of the day is harsh and washes out features, burns out backgrounds, and casts unsightly shadows. During the magic hours of dawn and dusk, when the light is soft and warm and beautiful, the angles change rapidly as the sun moves quicker in the tropics, presenting unique challenges for a documentary attempting to capture some stability in the light.

Like photography, putting together a piece for camera is a blend of science and art. We spent time finding locations and sometimes having to reshoot when circumstances undermined the quality of the work we were doing (one such instance involved a generator ten feet from where I sat giving an interview which, 20 minutes into the piece, decided to roar to life after the main power-grid failed; it took us an hour to find another location, and we had to restart the whole thing from scratch).

The visit captured yet another aspect of why aid work is a fascinating profession to be involved in. I doubt I could have had the experience of being so intimately involved with the creation of current affairs news in many other professions, but aid allows you to cross a lot of different paths. It was an enjoyable learning and fun to be a part of. But most of all, like so often happens in overseas postings, it was just a great opportunity to meet a couple of really good guys, share some fun, unique experiences, and more than one hearty belly-laugh with guys that get it.

Mike, Cam, thanks for good times on the road.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

Exploring the Links in Central Africa’s Conflicts

Reading a couple of recent articles on the latest upsurge of the civil conlict in the Central Africa Republic (I understand if you hadn’t heard anything was happening there), and an interesting New York Times piece on the militarization of poaching in central Africa, led me to reflect once again on the fascinating interconnection that exists between the various armed groups across Sub-Saharan Africa. Here’s a quick, dirty and non-exhaustive glance.

CAR, Chad and the Sudans

We’ll start with the CAR, as it’s topical. The northern rebels (currently going by the trade name ‘Seleka’, which in a local language means ‘The Alliance’) are quite literally that- a hodge-podge of armed gangs, guns-for-hire, militia representing disenfranchised communities (mostly northern), and bolstered by rebels who have come into the north from their neighbour Chad.

Chad has been a breeding ground for militant activity for the better part of 20 years and longer. Current Strongman President Idriss Deby seized power in the early nineties, launching from his home base in the far reaches of eastern Chad (Bahai) on the Sudanese border. His ethnic Zagawa militia swept across the country in a series of bloody battles, the remnants (tanks, shells, landmines, technicals) of which are still scattered across the landscape today.

Deby’s rise to power was supported by armed groups within Sudan. His ethnic group- the Zagawa- are on both sides of the border, in eastern Chad and in Darfur, western Sudan, and his coup d’etat was backed by Khartoum. Various rebel groups sprung up as a result of his seizure of power- which was brutal both from a military perspective, and from the reprisals wrought on the civilian population.

From 2002, two major rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) became prominent in Darfur, fomenting an armed uprising against the Khartoum government. The Zagawa formed one of the prominent ethnic constituents of the rebellion, and Chad was implicated. Tensions with Khartoum quickly soured. Cross-border raids by the Khartoum-backed Janjawid militia took place into Chad. It became clear that rebel groups were using refugee camps in eastern Chad as an opportunity to rest, recuperate, and stage new attacks against government forces.

From 2005, a fresh impetus of rebellion against Deby began, with implications clear that the renewed support was coming from Khartoum, in response to Chadian support for Darfur rebel groups. Twice, once in 2006, and later in 2008, rebels (the same, or allied to those, as those now pushed into CAR) pushed all the way across the desert and showed up on the outskirts of N’djamena- where they were eventually supressed. In both instances, the government of Sudan was blamed. Interestingly, the attack was eerily similar to one carried out, also in 2008, by Darfur rebels, who pushed across the desert all the way to Omdurman, on the edge of Khartoum, before being overcome. Khartoum claimed the forces were essentially Chadian, and blamed N’djamena for arming the group. Tensions between the two countries remain tense.

The uprising in Darfur itself was a complex issue, based on similar complaints to those leveled by the southern Sudanese rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)- a combination of economic marginalization, Islamicization, the centralization of government control, and access to resource rights and profits. Indeed, the rebellion echoed that of the north-south civil war, quite literally: Throughout the history of the Darfur conflict, rebel activity has followed from gains and advances made in the peace deals with the southern rebels (now an independant state). Essentially seeing the SPLA’s rebellion as ‘successful’, they resorted to a similar model for their own resistance against Khartoum, and as gains were made by the SPLA at the negotiation table, so military pushes could be mapped by Darfur rebels, trying to get Khartoum’s attention and force concessions in their own deals.

As well as using conventional forces in both the Darfur and north-south civil war, Khartoum has always espoused using proxy forces- militia groups that it arms and supports, but with whom there is a measure of deniability- particularly when they terrorize the civilian populace with torture, killings and ethnic cleansing. The best-known of these groups is the Janjawid, horse-backed ‘Arab’ militia allegedly stocked by, among others, prisoners released by Khartoum. The Janjawid carried out indiscriminate killing of civilians and the burning of villages, essentially forcing up to 4 million people from their homes in Darfur between 2003 and 2005. However the use by Khartoum of Arab horsemen in subduing and slaughtering agrarian villagers was well documented during the 1983-2005 civil war as well (the Murahaleen). Various different proxy militias- including previously southern-allied armed groups enticed to break away from the SPLA- were employed by Khartoum. Likewise, the SPLA (itself a fragile agglomeration of warlords and their private armies) employed similar tactics on northern soil.

The SPLA itself received backing from external sources. More strongly identified with East Africa than with the north African/Arab culture associated with Khartoum, the south Sudanese at the time found natural allies in Kenya and, notably, Uganda. Both nations hosted large refugee camps of southern Sudanese, who eventually formed an influential diaspora in those nations. This quiet support was further strengthened by Cold War politics. NATO interests in Sudan’s oil reserves (at the heart of the civil war) had it come down on the side of the south, and backing was funneled via the former British colonies of Kenya and Uganda, both of which helpfully became bases for the large western-funded aid operation as well.

Museveni, Bashir, Garang, Kagame and Kony

While Uganda was providing a channel of support to the SPLA, Khartoum’s response was to engage with its well-established tactic of using proxy militias. The technique depends on identifying existing divides within the target community, and exploiting those accordingly. In Uganda, an obvious candidate was a northern-based and highly disgruntled Acholi rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which would come to be led by a sociopath called Joseph Kony and become infamous for its use of child soldiers, and horrendous crimes against civilians. Over the years, Khartoum’s backing of the LRA became common- if scantily-proven- knowledge. In doing so, Khartoum kept Museveni’s forces and military investment wrapped up at home, reducing the extent to which Uganda was free to invest in creating an ally on its northern borders in the SPLA. The LRA remained a major destabilizing force in northern Uganda from the early eighties and into the first half of the first decade of the new millenium- eerily echoing the timescale of the Sudanese civil war. Since 2005, they have been vastly reduced in capacity and influence, carrying out few attacks (despite an over-the-top web campaign suggesting the contrary), and pushed variously into pockets of South Sudan (where they were enemies of the SPLA), DRC and, now, CAR, where they are being hunted by a contingent of Ugandan troops and US Special Forces.

The links between Uganda’s Museveni and the SPLA’s Garang are well established- Garang died flying in one of Museveni’s helicopters after returning from a meeting in Uganda, the purpose of which is still unknown. While Museveni was providing backing to the SPLA, he was also supporting another regional warlord (who would one day also become President of his nation), Paul Kagame. Kagame, inspired by Museveni’s first insurgent campaign against Idi Amin, joined Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) in 1981, and fought alongside him in that second insurgency against Milton Obote. For a time, the Rwandan refugee served in Museveni’s government as head of military intelligence, before taking the leadership of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group that prior to 1994 launched a long, violent and militarily highly successful insurgency campaign against the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government. The RPF had bases in southern Uganda, and received backing from the Ugandan government. Both Kagame and Garang studied at US military institutions during periods of their respective exiles, and Kagame also received intelligence training in Tanzania.

Hutus, Tutsis and Africa’s World War

The RPF’s campaign- which included massacres of Hutu civilians that remain under-acknowledged to this day- kicked into overdrive following the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and the subsequent slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus that followed over the subsequent 100 days. A strong military force, their overthrow of the Hutu military establishment is lauded as a spectacular acheivement- indeed there are allegations that were it not for French intervention on behalf of the former Rwandan government, the RPF would have taken Rwanda in the years preceeding the 1994 genocide. Regardless, Kagame’s RPF did eventually take control of the country, and Kagame remains President to this day.

The fallout of the RPF victory was the flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hutus, among whom were the genocidaires- the architects and footsoldiers of the massacres. These fled into eastern DRC, into camps and into the jungles and villages. While the violence between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda had largely come to a close, it continued in various guises in eastern DRC, and does-so to this day, between various splintered militia groups. These groups generally share alliances that can be broadly categorized as pro-Hutu or pro-Tutsi (although names and divisions shift as you cross the border) in a highly complex and shifting patchwork of old allegiences and new grievances.

The most far-reaching consequence of the Rwandan civil war for the DRC showcased the phrase ‘when Rwanda sneezes, Congo catches a cold’. Laurent Kabila, a pro-Tutsi rebel fighter who cut his teeth following Congolese liberation in the 1960s, re-emerged in 1996 to front the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL), an overtly Uganda-, Rwanda- and Burundi-backed group that would eventually force despot Mobutu into exile and lead to Kabila’s presidency from 1997.

In all of this, it’s quite interesting to note that Kabila, Kagame and Garang all had close relationships with Museveni, who faciliated relationships between the men. Also interestingly, during his own rebellion to seize control of Uganda in the mid-80s, Museveni had actually approached Mobutu for military assistance, but Mobutu had been training troops loyal to the then-government of Uganda, which would go some way to explaining Museveni’s eagerness to support anti-Mobutu forces in DRC.

Nowhere was this interplay between various central African forces demonstrated- and with remarkably low profile- than during the Second Congo War. Dubbed ‘Africa’s World War’, it involved the overt engagement of no less than seven African nations. Following the initial installation of Kabila on the back of a Tutsi-allied army, backed by Rwandan, Burundian and Ugandan forces during 1996-7, their heavy presence in DRC subsequently forced Kabila to request their withdrawl or look like a Kagame puppet (not an unreasonable concern). Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian forces piggybacked a Tutsi revolt in north-eastern DRC (Goma) in 1998, aiming to unseat Kabila (and no doubt install a more acquiescent puppet), and would likely have been successful were it not for the direct involvement of Chadian, Angolan, Zimbabwean and Namibian troops. Libya and Sudan were both indirectly supportive of the Kabila government as well- Sudan did not engage directly, but did continue to fund its proxy militias to worry Uganda, including the LRA. (Interestingly, the support of the Angolan government came as a result of Mobutu’s backing of the UNITA rebels during that country’s nasty civil war; the government victors were keen to repay the debt by ensuring that Mobutu stayed out).

The fallout of this interplay of regional actors continues to this day, with north-eastern Congo becoming something of a lush, mineral-rich carcass over which a patchwork of militias fought- and continue to fight. During the Congo conflict, Ituri and Kivus North and South played host to an orchestra of militia on both sides of the conflict, including the anti-Rwandan militias the FDLR, the Mai Mai, the RDR and the ALiR, as well as the remnants of the genocidal Interahamwe and other Hutu groups. Allied to them were anti-Burundian groups CNDD and FROLINA. On the other side of the coin were the pro-Rwandan groups the RCD and RCD-GOMA, the ethnically Tutsi Banyamulenge, and the pro-Ugandan militias MLC, UPC and other pro-Tutsi groups. Since that time, this murderous alphabet soup has aligned, split, rebelled, splintered and reformed into a variety of coagulating movements, all squabbling for a piece of the eDRC pie. Most recently, the takeover of Goma by the M23 rebel group (with ostensible backing from both Rwanda and Uganda) signifies that this regionally-interwoven conflict is by no means over. The tension for Joseph Kabila, who replaced his father after Laurent’s assassination, is that the regime he inherited was essentially installed by a pro-Tutsi coalition which expected to dominate the subsequent political landscape. By rejecting this, both Kabilas find themselves fighting against the very group that put them in power. Meanwhile, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict that reached such a bloody crescendo in 1994 in Rwanda has merely been exported a few dozen miles over the border into what is in effect a disputed territory, irrespective of lines on the map (and with horrendous consequences for the population; the 800,000 who lost their lives in the 1994 genocide have had as many as two and a half million added to their number from the forests of DRC since then).

I’m not even going to try to list the latest iteration of rebel groups and their alliances in east DRC currently.

The oft-forgotten child of the Great Lakes region, Burundi, is no less intertwined with regional conflicts. Stepping back a decade or two, it is riven by the same Tutsi-Hutu divide that Rwanda and east DRC are, and was a little-mentioned but insperable part of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Indeed, new Burundian President and ethnic Hutu Cyprien Ntaryamira was in Habyarimana’s plane the night it was shot down, and died alongside his Rwandan counterpart. Tit-for-tat ethnic killings between Tutsis and Hutus, which had been ongoing for decades, reaching a crescendo in 1993 when Ntaryamira’s predecessor Ndadaye (a Hutu) was assassinated by disgruntled Tutsi soldiers- preceeding both the Ntaryamira/Habyarimana assassination and the Rwandan genocide. Indeed the Tutsi-Hutu killings in Burundi in the lead up to May 1994 provided fuel to the genocidal fire, and the presence of Burundian Tutsi refugees in large numbers in southern Rwanda proved to be a destabilizing (and fear-evoking) influence that leant credence to the genocidaire case, as well as proving a ripe recruiting ground for Kagame’s RPF.

Conflict in the Horn

A pivotal nation less directly implicated in its neighbour’s conflicts, but none the less indirectly involved, is Kenya. At the time of its engagement in southern Somalia in 2011, its claim was that it had never before fielded its army (a claim to which some truth was subsequently demonstrated in its fairly inept tactical handling of the fight with al Shabaab). Be that as it may, Kenya has repeatedly played host to war-embroiled diaspora. Sudanese refugees in camps in northern Kenya became a recruiting ground for the SPLA to which Kenyan authorities turned a blind eye, and Kenya became a safe-haven for SPLA leadership at points along the way. Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the mammoth relief operation funded by the UN and largely western nations (many of whom interestingly enough also had economic stakes in South Sudan) was also run out of Kenya, from the pokey northern airhead of Lokichoggio, and it, as much as any foreign arms transfers, holds much of the credit for prolonging the war and forcing Khartoum to the negotiating table which saw South Sudan win its independence.

Kenya also provided the home for the Somali Government in Exile, which has been based in Nairobi for most of the period since the fall of Siad Biarre in 1991. This, combined with a growing and restive Somali diaspora in Kenya, fears of a porous border, and alleged support, by Somali militants, for Islamic militants within Kenya, resulted in Kenya’s ill-advised military intervention in southern Somalia (‘Jubaland’) against al Shabaab- the fundamentalist group in tacit control of most of southern Somalia at the time.

Over the years, a number of different forces have been involved in the war against the various iterations of Somali Islamic militant groups, with Kenya the most recent addition. Uganda and Burundi have both provided substantial troop numbers (and suffered casualties), but the key player in the conflict has been Ethiopia, whose government essentially used the chaos in Somalia to justify a military invasion to bolster their own porous border, establish a buffer-zone, and weaken home-grown Islamic militant groups in Ogaden and Somali Region (Ethiopia and Somalia- both highly distinct nations with strong historical identity- have a long history of border conflict, and Somalia launched an invasion of Ethiopia as recently as the late 1970s).

A nation that allegedly provides support for al Shabaab is Eritrea, which recently faced sanctions for its involvement in moving Shabaab finances. Eritrea is possibly operating on the principle of ‘The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend’. Eritrea fought a bloody war with Ethiopia in which it gained its independence from that nation- after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) initially supported the overthrow of the communist Mengistu regime in 1991 alongside Meles Zenawi’s Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) as part of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Indeed Isaias Aferwerki, subsequently President of Eritrea and leader of the civil war, was one of the EPRDF’s co-leaders alongside Zenawi.

As well as Eritrea and Somalia, the other regional actors the EPRDF has relationships with are Sudan and South Sudan. Initially, the EPRDF was supported by Khartoum as it overthrew the Derg regime- perhaps because Mengistu was allowing the SPLA to use the refugee camps along Ethiopia’s western border as bases for R&R and recruitment for its troops. Upon seizing the area, the EPRDF emptied the camps and forced tens of thousands of southern refugees back into Sudan. This changed, however, upon consolidation of power, and by 1995, Ethiopia and Eritrea both had troops in South Sudan in support of the SPLA. To this day, Ethiopia continues to provide support to rebels fighting the Khartoum government, allowing an SPLA presence around refugee camps in the west, where recruitment of militia fighters operating in Blue Nile state continues. One of Ethiopia’s primary interests- and the source of conflict with Khartoum- is over control of the Blue Nile’s water resources. The Blue Nile provides roughly 90% of the Nile’s overall flow, rising in Ethiopian territory, and Ethiopia is in the process of constructing a massive hydroelectric power station (the Renaissance Dam) close to the Sudanese border- a move that has heightened tensions between Ethiopia, and Sudan and Egypt downstream.

Libya, the Sahel, and Transnational Islamicism

The other lynchpin tying many of sub-Saharan Africa’s conflicts together is- or was- Moammar Ghaddafi. With his view of a Pan-Saharan Islamic Caliphate, Ghaddafi poured billions of dollars in aid money into propping up friendly regimes- including (but not limited to) Sudan’s Bashir, Chad’s Deby, Niger’s Tanja and Mali’s Toure. Indeed, at the time of the Libyan civil war and Ghaddafi’s death, mercenaries from Mali, Chad and Niger were all present fighting on behalf of the soon-to-be-late dictator, and upon the failure of the regime, flooded back home to their respective countries. This influx of arms created rapid destabilization, increasing security concerns in Niger and Mali particularly, although both Chad and Mauritania have also had coup scares since Ghaddafi’s death. The fall of the Libyan regime is argued as one of the factors in the insurgency that has split Mali in half, which the French have just launched military action in response to, pre-empting a planned ECOWAS intervention.

The loose coalition of Tuareg and Islamist militias that annexed northern Mali to form their state of Awazad is itself a regional conglomeration. Tuaregs exist across the Sahara region, with the bulk of their territory in northern Mali, Niger and Mauritania, and southern Algeria, but with significant populations and ties in Morocco, Chad, Libya and links throughout West Africa and even to the Bedouin of the Middle East. The strong cross-border ties ensure that the Mali conflict has direct repurcussions for stability in both Mauritania and Niger. Meanwhile, Islamist groups, particularly AQIM and its offshoots, also operate across the Sahara region. Originally born out of the Algeria conflict of the 1990s and the insurgent groups that rose to oppose the government, they now have operational reach in Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Algeria and Libya and beyond, in a complex presence that is part insurgency, part fundamentalist terrorism, and part criminality.

While long rumoured, the conflict in Mali also led to renewed claims of a partnership between AQIM and its partners, and the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, fighting a domestic insurgency in Nigeria to create a Sharia-based state in the north of that nation. Reports that Boko Haram fighters were supporting operations in Gao provided some confirmation that Boko Haram and AQIM share resources and information in their mutual jihads. Boko Haram has also publically announced its ties to Somalia’s al Shabaab, which in turn is networked to militant Islamic groups in Kenya and Uganda, as well as to global fundamentalist groups outside the African continent.

The below map is a rough and only partial representation of some of the relationships described above- more to visually demonstrate linkages across geography than to provide accurate detail. You’ll need to click on it to view large enough to read properly.

Note that you could carry out a similar analysis on a much smaller scale in any one of the individual conflict-zones, such as Darfur, east DRC or Sudan/South Sudan- which details I have not gone into here.

Strongman Politics, Statehood and Postcolonial Identity

The incredible array of cross-border interactions and networks that embody conflict in sub-Saharan Africa is hardly surprising. A relatively small number of individuals have a very extensive impact on conflict. Museveni supported Garang in his fight against Bashir, who in return funded the LRA in Uganda against Museveni. Museveni equally fought alongside Kagame in Uganda’s domestic conflicts, and so supported his former compatriot in Kagame’s own struggles, first in Rwanda, and subsequently in DRC. Kagame and Museveni together installed Kabila, who then rejected their influence, creating a new conflict. Meanwhile Bashir, as well as fighting Garang in the south, initially supported both Deby and Zenawi in their respective rebellions, but finding himself at odds with both, after Deby invested in the Darfur conflict to shore up his borders, and Zenawi took sides with Garang. Zenawi found himself at odds with Afewerki, and also took the opportunity to secure his borders with Somalia, taking on al Shabaab in the process. Meanwhile, Ghaddafi’s influence provided some facade of stability to several sub-Saharan nations, supporting Bashir, Deby, Tandja and Toure, and with his death, all four nations have experienced an increase in instability.

The concept of the Strongman has a dominant presence in the politics of most sub-Saharan African states. The cultural context is often described as embodying a ‘power/fear’ paradigm (contrasted with the notion of ‘guilt/innocence’ that is commonplace in most European cultures, or ‘honour/shame’ that is found across the Middle East and much of Asia). The development of society for many centuries has in many parts of the region revolved around a single strong leader who takes responsibility variously for family, clan and tribal groups, and this has translated into state-level politics.

The colonial division and subsequent post-colonial devolvement of sub-Saharan African politics and identity is both a part of the problem, and goes a long way to explaining this highly integrated conflict dynamic. State borders are lines drawn on a map by colonial surveyors and clashing European powers. They cut across traditional boundaries, creating situations (as in Rwanda/DRC, for just one of many examples) where ethnic groups are subsequently split by an arbitrary international boundary. Thus war on one side of the boundary naturally spills across the other. Alliances between self-identifying ethnic groups are far stronger than those to nation-state governments in many cases, resulting in the mutli-national involvement so often seen.

Indeed the very nature of ethnic identity in sub-Saharan Africa is problematic. In part it is a construct of the colonial period, where the notion of ‘divide and conquer’ was used to administer restive provinces. People-groups were identified and given artificial containment (see tribal groups in Kenya under the British, and Hutu/Tutsi identity as reinforced by the Belgians). Divisions that were malleable and interchangeable at best prior to colonial rule became reinforced in order to create some kind of order. Where once, ethnic identity could be redefined according to marriage or economic status, it had now become something linked to birthright, some genetic trait unchangeable and therefore open to exploitation. Thus have been born many of Africa’s post-colonial conflicts.

This post is by no means an exhaustive list of alliances. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the dizzying acronym maelstrom that identifies the various players in today’s war-zones, never mind those of the last thirty years. In 2007 there were nearly 30 armed groups operating in Darfur alone- many with ties to other groups in other parts of Sudan, South Sudan, Chad and CAR. A similar number of militia groups existed in South Sudan at the birth of its statehood- most of which were subsumed into the new South Sudanese armed forces, but which retain discrete identities within that force, ready to break out should their agendas be compromised. Then there are the proxy militias on both sides of the north-south Border, the various disgruntled insurgency groups within Ethiopia who claim ties to various other disgruntlecies across the region, and the veritable sea of militias, proto-militias, startup-militias and mom-and-pop militias in the jungles of DRC.

To name a few.

Without wishing to turn something with terrible and far-reaching consequences into an academic whimsy, I have long found the interaction between the various conflicts (and their masterminds) in sub-Saharan Africa fascinating, and it’s been interesting mapping them out for this little exercise. What I hope it demonstrates is the extreme complexity in understanding conflict in Africa; the need for careful analysis, both in terms of motivation and in terms of stakeholders involved; a greater appreciation for the diversity that this continent (or rather, the particular chunk of it reflected in this post) exhibits; and hopefully, a nuanced understanding that conflict in ‘Africa’ doesn’t just happen because it’s the ‘dark continent’- or any one of the newer myriad of tropes the media unconciously trots out when it covers ‘yet another’ African war. Rather, as with any conflict, there is a highly intricate set of circumstances, histories, identities, motivations and participants that coalesce to give a particular event at a particular point in time.

A disclaimer: This post doesn’t address any of the complex linkages to forces outside the African continent, such as politics of the Cold War during the 80s, or subsequently, the newer dynamics of neocolonialist power-games and players, such as China’s economic imperialism, or the US and its allies in their ongoing investment as part of the ‘Global War on Terror’- all highly complex networks that fuel conflict. Likewise I haven’t touched on the dynamics of post-independence conflict in southern Africa, which reverberate up into DRC, ROC and elsewhere, or the conflicts in West Africa, such as the nexus between Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Conakry (with destabilizing influences into Burkina, Ghana, Niger, Mali and elsewhere). And I’ve barely referenced the Arab Spring that ties all North African nations together, including tying in to Bashir’s Khartoum, and weakening that regime’s position vis-a-vis its ability even to manage its southern ‘problem’. Here, I’ve just focused on the central/east regions of the continent, but maybe sometime I’ll expand broader.

Also, apologies again for the lack of URLs in this post. There are HEAPS of sources I pulled drawing this together, gradually over several weeks of reading and pondering, but my internet connectivity out here is poor and going back to catalogue them all has been impossible. If I get a chance to update this again in the future, I’ll see what I can do to fix that.

Finally- I’m pretty sure that Kenya was substantially implicated in supporting Kagame and the RPF on some level during the early 90s, but I couldn’t dig up any sources that explicitly outlined this relationship. If you come across anything, please could you post a link/source/theory in the comments below- thanks!

-MA

5 Tips for Taking a Really Great Travel Portrait

Portraiture is something I’ve increasingly aspired to as a photographer. I love a good landscape- in fact, my landscape shots are often what people seem to enjoy in my shots. Portraiture is a different skill-set though. While light changes over a landscape in such a way that you may only have a few minutes to get the shot you want, the challenge of portraiture is even greater- you may have just fractions of a second to capture the image that you have in your mind’s eye. On top of that, a really good portrait often communicates far more power and emotion to the viewer than any landscape; it’s the human element that makes it special.

The basic rules all apply, of course. You want to think about composition (the rule of thirds is a pretty reliable starting point), colour (one of the joys of travel photography are the different colour palettes you can find in both the natural and urban environments) and lighting (shooting in the tropics presents visceral challenges with regards to fierce overhead lighting, washed-out skies and high-contrast backdrops, but dust and moisture can enrich late afternoon sunlight to make it magical).

I’m sharing some specific pointers I’d like to suggest for taking a decent travel photograph. They’re not exhaustive, nor are they unique to travel portraiture, but I reckon if you can nail these, you’re well on your way to capturing the sort of image you’ll want to bring home and share with friends and family when your adventures come to a temporary halt. (I’ll leave it to you guys to decide whether these shots fit the title or not…)

Note: All these photos were taken on a 3-day field visit in rural Niger in September this year.

1. Create a Connection

This is true with any portrait. I find the most powerful portraits are those where the subject is looking straight down the camera lens. It can feel (as a viewer) as though the person is looking straight out of the photograph at you. To achieve this, you generally need some sort of relationship with the person whose picture you’re taking. It might only be a momentary one- a glance in the street- or you may have asked the person to pose for you.

In travel photography you’re often communicating across language barriers, but respect is universal, so always put it into action. Just pulling out a camera and shooting willy-nilly is a sure way to upset people. I rarely take a photo where I haven’t signalled my camera (usually pointed upwards) and waited for an inviting smile or nod, or made eye-contact with the person and waited for them to acknowledge me in some way. If I sense hesitation or hostility, I smile and move on.  Even asking in a foreign language, people usually get the idea of what you’re wanting and can communicate a reply.

While in photojournalism there’s a power and pathos that comes with shots of human suffering or deep emotion, I find the photos that people go back to tend to be ones where the subject is joyful. People are naturally drawn to beauty. With that in mind, have fun. Laugh with the person you’re shooting, give them a big smile, turn it into a game. That won’t work in all cultures: for many, having a photo taken is a serious business and they want to look their formal best. Kids, on the other hand, usually love it, and in many African countries they’re overjoyed when someone points a lens at them.

Earlier I’d asked this girl if I could take her picture, to which she’d agreed, and I got a really sweet little shot of her smiling shyly while clinging to the trunk of a tree. A few minutes later she came back to me with a cheeky smirk asking me if I’d take another photo, and when I raised my camera she giggled. I speak no Hausa and she spoke no French, but as you can see, the communication worked just fine.

2. Consider your Background

When you’re taking a portrait, the person is your main point of focus, but they exist in a context. In fact this is the major difference between travel (and candid) portraiture versus studio portraiture. With the latter, you control the background ahead of time. With the former, you need to manage it on the fly- itself a challenge that can be both satisfying and heart-breaking.

Background can become a part of your visual narrative, or it can distract from it, so think about the effect you want. Environmental portraits frame people in a shot with items that contribute to telling that person’s story. A merchant in a fruit stall, for example, may be best photographed standing with all her colourful pineapples sharply in focus. For this you probably want to use a wider-angle lens (not too wide, as wide angles distort images and can stretch facial features unnaturally) and a reasonably small aperture (f/8 and higher, light-depending). Again, the joy of travel portraiture is that backgrounds are often exotic and full of interest.

On the other hand, a child on a busy street may get lost in the clutter if you don’t defocus your background. Use a mid-range telephoto lens and open the aperture wide to get a really shallow depth of field, which naturally throws the background out of focus. Just make sure your point of focus is spot-on, or you may end up with a fuzzy subject too.

If the background is unremarkable you probably want to use this technique too.  In the photo at the top of this page, the background was burning white sand- totally uninteresting and threatening to wash out the photo- so blurring it into white made the most sense.  This has advantages (declutter and an element of the abstract) but also disadvantages (the photo is placeless and has no context).

In this first photo, I chose to use a really shallow depth of field as the background was fairly dull, and I wanted the farmer to stand out. Using a small f-stop number (f/1.8) also means that the part of the shot that is in focus is REALLY sharp. The blurred green trees give just enough information to let you know you’re in the countryside, but don’t pull the eye away from the man’s wrinkled face.

In this next shot, the girl is standing against the wall, so both she and the wall are in focus. The wall is painted with a map of Africa. Although the girl herself doesn’t stand out quite so much from the background, the colours and textures are pleasing to the eye, and the map itself tells a story and gives the girl a context which (in my opinion) adds something unique to the photograph that might have been lost had she been against an empty or blurred background.

In this third shot, the boy is in focus while everything forward of and beyond him starts to blur out. There’s just enough detail, however, to give him a context- the cows, the harness and the water containers, as well as the rural backdrop. Because he alone is in focus he still holds the viewer’s eye, but there are other elements in the image that contribute to telling the viewer something about who he is and what he does.  Note: You could argue that this photo would have benefitted from a broader depth-of-field (something around f/4) to keep the cows sharp but still blur the background, and I’d accept that criticism, although I also like how isolated the boy is from everything around him; you can see just how precise the depth is by looking at how much of the yoke, front-to-back, is actually in focus before it blurs out.

3. Be Ready for the Right Moment

Facial expressions are fleeting, as are connections. If you’re in a place where you think you might see something interesting, have your camera out and switched on, with the right lens fitted, the correct mode selected, and your eyes scanning. You might be looking for a gesture, an emotion, or a fleeting glimpse of eye-contact. People may be moving. Think about your shutter-speed- will you be able to freeze motion given the light available to you? And think too about point number one and the importance of communication and respect; even in a crowded place, have you made eye-contact with the people you’re wanting to photograph, or made sure they’re comfortable with the camera? Stand-off lenses are all very well, but as a photographer you need to be asking yourself these ethical questions.

In both of these photos, these kids made eye-contact with me for just a few seconds where they were caught in a crowd of others. The children there had been watching me for some while and I’d been looking back at them and smiling, and noting those that smiled back at me and at the camera. I already had the aperture opened up so that when my opportunity came I knew I’d be able to isolate whichever children gave me a moment to photograph, and these two did.

4. Go for the Eyes

If there’s a cardinal rule in portrait photography, it’s this one. Eyes are all about moment and connection. They communicate emotion to the viewer, and a simple glance of a couple of degrees off-lens can make the difference between a missed opportunity and a wow moment. This is particularly true of close-ups.

For eyes, think about placement; rule of thirds is usually the way forwards here, so try and get one eye onto that sweet-spot at the intersection of the thirds-lines. An eye-line straight down the barrel is usually what I go for, and almost all of the portraits I’ve loved have involved that sort of eye contact. If using shallow depth of field, ensure that the eye itself is the point of focus. It’s all too easy to accidentally focus on the forehead or the tip of the nose, and even with a really strong facial expression, you’ll lose some of the punch of the image.

These two shots were both taken at a school in Niger (one inside the classroom and one outside), and they are both among some of my favourite portraits of all time.

5. Tell a Story

This is optional, but the difference between a techncially good photo, and a photo which makes people sit up and take notice, is that with the latter, they’re experiencing something new. The beauty of travel photography is that there’s always a story to be told, something new to see, something that’s exotic to the viewer back home, so try and think of what that story might be. A facet of daily life, a curious setting, some exotic produce, or just an unusual face that communicates a sense of place or time- it can be any number of things. Put this together with capturing the right moment and working on your background, and you’ll have a photograph that will really help you remember a place.

In this photo, I managed to combine moment, background, eye-contact and connection, and the setting was such that I’ve been able to capture a little slice of existence in this rural African village. Girls in Niger, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are the ones mostly tasked with collecting water- even quite young girls like this one. Here, I love the colour, the bright light, her expression, and the pouring of the water all framed crisply against a blurred backdrop of other women and girls waiting at the well behind her (and again, contrast this with the image at the top of the page which has no background).

Travel photography- and portraiture- is a personal thing, and it’s up to you as the photographer to decide what you want to remember, and how. Really, if you take a photo, and it reminds you of something special, and you’re proud of it, that’s all that matters. I wish you all the best of luck out there, and most of all, I encourage you to have fun. If you’re not enjoying yourself with you camera, seriously, what’s the point?

Photo Essay: Nutrition Program Walk-Through

 

I’m managing our emergency response program addressing malnutrition in Niger for a few weeks. For those who work in the aid sector, you probably have a fair idea of what that actually means. For the rest (those of you who are interested), here’s what we’re doing.

First, some background, so we’re all speaking the same language.

Malnutrition, simply put, is the state that results when a person’s body doesn’t take in enough nutrients- the chemicals that allow our body to function correctly, which we do generally by consuming a balanced and sufficient diet. Malnutrition can be due to the overall food/calorific intake being too low, a poor diversity of food-groups, or an illness that inhibits the body’s correct processing of those chemicals. Malnutrition has a large number of indirect causes, and a large number of direct results. Key among the latter are nutrient deficiencies, poor physical development (‘stunting’), rapid weight-loss (‘wasting’), susceptibility to disease and, in extreme circumstances, death (although direct death through malnutrition is relatively rare- it is more likely to be caused by disease which is more virulent in a body weakened by malnutrition).

We deal with two main types of malnutrtion: Long-term, or ‘chronic’ malnutrition, and short-term, or ‘acute’ malnutrition. Chronic malnutrition exists where populations consistently lack access to sufficient or balanced diets, or are exposed to regular and frequent cycles of acute malnutrition. Acute malnutrition exists where there are substantial short-term shortages in food availability.

Niger experiences both chronic and acute malnutrition. It is a landlocked country which is two-thirds desert, so growing food is a challenge. Rainfall is erratic and unreliable, and the desert encroaches into arable land. Roughly 90% of its agricultural harvest is a single crop (millet) which grows well under the circumstances, but means that diets are unbalanced. Traditional childcare norms (non-exclusive breastfeeding, early weaning and poor hygeine and sanitation practices) mean that children are health-disadvantaged from an early age. So the background chronic malnutrition is high, primarily among children. It means childrens’ bodies do not develop as well as they should. They are stunted (small for their age), and their brains may also not develop as well as they would have with a good diet. It has huge implications for Niger’s development as a country.

The harvest is brought in once a year. Depending on how good the harvest is, villages will have enough to eat. However stocks will dwindle through the year, so as the months go by, people will drop back to having two meals a day, one meal a day, and sometimes not even eat every day. This is known as the hardship or hunger season (saison de soudure). The onset of the dry season (February through May) reduces the availability of wild foods, and also puts herds of cattle under pressure. The worse the prior year’s harvest, the earlier this hardship season begins, the more pressure this puts on communities’ abilities to cope, and the deeper the crisis.

The rains traditionally arrive in late June (although as the world’s climate changes, they are becoming increasingly erratic and unreliable) and last until September. This enables the next year’s harvest to grow and flourish- depending on how good the rains are. It also brings with it malaria. The relationship between disease- especially malaria and diarrhoeal disease- and malnutrition is such that children who are malnourished are more likely to get sick because their bodies are not as well equipped to defend themselves; and children who are sick are less able to maintain their nutritional status. It is a vicious cycle.

These factors then give rise to acute malnutrition. In Niger, acute malnutrition traditionally starts to rise from May and June and continue until after the harvest in October, but on a bad year may begin to spike in February, and can last throughout most of the year, with substantial caseloads still recorded in November and December. It affects mostly children, and mostly those children under the age of five. Child deaths also spike during this time. It is inevitable, and the less work that is done to manage acute malnutrition, the more children will die. We focus on children because physically they have the fewest bodily reserves to handle shortages of food and therefore they become malnourished quickest, and also die quickest. It’s worth noting that children who are chronically malnourished already will be the first to drop into acute malnutrition once food runs out.

There are different ways to manage malnutrition. In refugee camps, malnutrition is typically done on-site in feeding centres, where women bring their children to receive a cooked ration directly from the supporting organization. ‘Wet ration’ feeding centres are expensive to run, as they require staff to prepare and distribute the food, often for hundreds of children at a time, but they work well in relief-camp settings where tens or hundreds of thousands of people may be in one physical location which can be easily accessed- so they are efficient. The biggest advantage is that staff can actually watch the malnourished children receiving the ration, so they know it has been received.

In a peace-time context like Niger’s, where rural populations are low and spread over large areas, wet feeding centres are too expensive to put into every village, and distances too great to expect women and children to travel to twice a day. The solution is a model called Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM), which brings women to distribution points once a week or once a fortnight to receive a ration for their child, which they take home and give their children as instructed. This has the advantage of being far more affordable to reach a population spread over a large area, but requires trust that the women will in fact give their children the ration- not always the case, when they might have two or three other children at home also not eating properly.

The first stage of the program is ‘screening’. Community volunteers are trained to identify children in their village who they suspect could be malnourished. They encourage those children’s mothers to take them to the nearest government health-centre.

There, program staff working alongside government health workers assess the children for malnutrition. This is done using something called a MUAC (mid upper-arm circumference) tape, which goes around the child’s bicep to assess how badly wasted it is (apparently that circumference does not change greatly in young children above the age of six months). It is marked in millimetres to measure the actual circumference, and colour-coded. A green reading indicates the child is healthy, a yellow reading indicates moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) and a red reading indicates severe acute malnutrition (SAM).

If the child is malnourished, it is then weighed on a hanging scale, then placed on a measuring board to take its height (which generally encourages loud wailing from the hapless child). The child’s weight for its height is then assessed against the average weight for a child of that size; obviously, the lighter a child of a particular weight, the thinner it is. These measurements are taken at intervals while the child is in the program to track changes in its weight. Additionally, they are assessed against a chart of ‘z-scores’ which plots the average weight for a child of a particular height. If the child is more than two standard deviations below the average weight for its height, the child is moderately acutely malnourished, and if it is more than three standard deviations, the child is severely acutely malnourished.

It may sound a bit technical, but in fact it takes no more than half a minute per child using MUAC, or ninety seconds to weigh, measure and score children using weight-for-height. The child’s information (name, village, score) is then recorded on a health card which is given to the mother- blue for moderates, and pink for severes. Program staff also assess children for possible medical complications (e.g. malaria, oedema), and if these are present, children are refered to an intensive care facility, managed by another organization.

So to sum up, we have four categories. Healthy, Moderately Acutely Malnourished, Severely Acutely Malnourished, and Severely Acutely Malnourished with Medical Complications. Our program looks after the moderates and the severes. And because the physical needs of moderates and severes differ, we treat them differently.

Moderates receive a bi-weekly ration of a reinforced meal-mix (‘reinforced’ meaning the staple has had things added to it to increase its nutritional value). This is usually a cereal flour (in our case Corn-Soya Blend, or CSB), sugar and oil, mixed together. Mothers take this home and feed their children the ration over two weeks, then return to have the child re-measured for progress and receive another ration (if required).

Severes receive a weekly ration of therapeutic food. We use a product produced locally in Niger called Plump’ynut. Each ration is self-contained in a small foil packet and tastes like sweetened peanut butter. It is specifically designed to address severe acute malnutrition, and generally speaking, the kids (and, sadly, sometimes the adults too) love it.

There are tweaks to the program beyond this, but this is the core. Our biggest challenges include ensuring the malnourished children receive the ration they are supposed to, and that it isn’t shared with other children (or worse, adults). In fact it’s not unusual for mothers to deliberately underfeed their children so that they remain on the program, so that they can continue to access the food ration which can contribute to their whole family’s wellbeing. Sometimes, an additional ration is given to the families of malnourished children to try and prevent this from happening.

The harvest is slowly coming in. Between now and mid-October it will be gathered, and during this time the food situation in the villages here will gradually improve. Malnutrition levels will lag- October is the peak malnutrition month historically. Millet is fine for adults, but kids under two will not get its full nutritional benefits (we push as hard as we can for mothers to keep breastfeeding). During the 2005/6 crisis we were still seeing kids in the program as late as April and May the following year, and I’d certainly expect to see some of the same patterns this time round.

The nice thing about working on a nutrtion program- as opposed to many other programs aid and development workers can often get involved with- is the short-term horizon. It’s normal for us to phase out of a place and never actually see the work that we do bear much fruit, beyond, perhaps, the provision of some basic goods and services. Here, however, it’s pretty easy to tell when a really sick kid shows up at the nutrition centre. Most of the kids in our severe program are ill enough that if they were to get malaria or cholera, they could die in a matter of forty-eight hours. Getting them out of that state and to better health is the aim of the program, and if the mother is feeding the child the ration, stays in the program, and the child doesn’t get ill during this time, then we can turn them around in a matter of four to six weeks. The really sick ones- the ones we refer straight on to the intensive care clinics- may only have lived a day or two past when they come to us.

It really is the business of saving lives out there. The teams on the ground (across several organizations) do amazing work, and there are many children who will live who would otherwise have died without their assistance. It’s a privilege to be able to drop in and be a part of the work they are doing for a few weeks.

Ponderings On The Road

The air-con is broken. This is rarely a good thing at the best of times, but when it’s so hot outside that opening the window doesn’t reduce the perspiration soaking into the back of my t-shirt, it starts to become something of a drag. We’re halfway into the ten-hour journey between Maradi and Niamey, and the day’s still getting hotter. Happily my iPad doesn’t seem to mind the heat. So far…

The trip is much as I remember it. Long, dull and unremarkable. But then I’m seeing it through the eyes of familiarity. Granted, a familiarity several years old. But I’m seeing only a couple of differences. One is the amount of green. This I recall from the very first times I did this journey, the same season in 2005. It was striking, because the fields seemed so lush for a country in the grip of it’s worst famine in a decade. But as colleagues pointed out to me, if the food is still growing in the fields it means it’s not on people’s plates.

Of course, the last time I did this journey it was the height of the dry season. I have vivid memories of stopping for a comfort break (‘checking the tyres’ as an Ivorian colleague euphemistically observed) along some desolate stretch of country far between villages. The air was so hot that inhaling it made the lungs burn. My skin sang under what felt like pressure coming from the sun, and I got little shivers up and down my back. Crickets whined a persecuted song, but otherwise the landscape was silent. In the distance, across brown scrubland near a line of low flat-topped hills, a pair of dust-devils, small brown tornadoes, twisted in a macabre dance. It was the sort of scene to crush a traveller’s weary soul.

Thank God for the rains.

The other difference now is the road. I noted immediately in 2005 how good the highway between Niamey and Maradi was at the time, certainly compared to other Sahelian roads I had driven. I can no longer make the same claim. While much of it is still in good nick, there’s a good two hours of driving where the blacktop has deteriorated into a potholed mess barely better- and in some cases far worse- than a dirt road. I have had a number of colleagues tell me that life here for the population of the world’s poorest country has gotten harder over the last half-decade.

Otherwise the journey is remarkably similar. It is an alternating pastiche of farmland with antenna-high millet, thicket-spotted scrubland running to a low, flat horizon, and run-down villages replete with square mud-brick buildings and ricketty wooden roadside stalls. The few towns are dusty but buzzing with energy. Gigantic overladen trucks jam the streets. Vendors hawk loaves of sugary yellow bread, cheap plastic wares imported from Nigeria, and chocolate wafers that taste like cardboard. Where we stop for lunch at a stall in Dogon-Doutchi we chow down on a plate of rice and sauce, liberally sprinkled with a local spice mix that is both tangy and delicious. It costs a buck fifty a head. Standing out on the street a few minutes later waiting for the car to come back for us, a skinny old man shuffles past us. His trousers are held around the middle of his thighs, he’s covering his genitals with a school exercise book, and nobody pays him any attention as his bony, dusty buttocks recede down the street. It’s a tragic indifference to poverty and neglect in a country where most people live on less than two dollars a day.

But now Ravi, our driver, is tootling along at 120kph, and if you see this post online it means we haven’t ended up as a metallic confetti at the side of the road, which some do as evidenced by twisted vehicular remains littered along the highway. George is dozing in the front seat, Cam has his head in the open window catching the breeze on his face like some satisfied pooch, and Mike is next to me in the short-straw seat in the middle, listening to an mp3 player (I’m trying to talk him into getting an iPad; which I do with most people). And we’re all looking forward to getting to our hotel rooms in Niamey, having a cool shower, and heading out for some Bieres Niger and good local cuisine.

Uncomfortable travel is a part of any aid worker’s job description- and any foreign correspondent’s too. It is, of course, by far the most dangerous part of the job we do- even though it gets far less press than abductions and hijackings. The combination of poorly maintained vehicles, bad drivers, meandering donkeys, long distances and deteriorating roads make traffic accidents among the leading causes of death for adults across the developing world- and that includes foreigners silly enough to take to the roads as well.

I actually quite enjoy road travel as a rule. I prefer it if I’m the one driving, and if I’ve got the time to stop, explore, take photos and let the roads lead me. However even on work trips, it makes for a great way to see the country up-close, to get a feel for landscape and people, and show how things hang together.

In my early twenties I wrote a list of things I wanted to accomplish or expeience. It was (unsurprisingly) quite long, but I recall that one of the things on the list was ‘to have a job where in order to commute I need a four-wheel-drive’. I’ve certainly ticked that one off the list. Just in the last four days I reckon I’ve spent an easy 24 hours in Land Cruisers getting to remote field locations, mostly on sandy tracks through the scrubland and getting nicely knocked around in the process.

The novelty wore off a long time ago, but it still beats the heck out of the Monash freeway at rush hour.

(Actually, root canal work beats the Monash at rush hour, but that’s the subject of another post…)

So our wing-mirror slips down the length of another overflowing truck trundling the other way up the narrow highway, and the verdant landscape glides past in a blur of contrast with rich red soil. Heat haze makes the horizon white and featureless, like a washed-out photograph. The car stinks of dust and diesel fumes, and the clothes I’m wearing now will need to be washed before I put them back on, even though they’re fresh from this morning. The sun slanting through the passenger window washes out my iPad screen, but not enough to halt my typing. It burns my skin and makes my eyes squint. Mumford & Sons are singing ‘Awake My Soul’ in my ears as we pass some dead animal hidden in the bush, and the stench fills the vehicle.

They’re the moments both mundane and exotic that form the patchwork of memories that are often all that we, sojourners, get to carry away with us when we leave these places through which we pass so temporarily and so frequently. On the one hand, they tend to fade, after so many similar journeys, into an obscurity that is hard to distinguish one from another. On the other, they sit at such sharp contrast from the routines of our daily lives that they become in their own way enough of an experience to justify coming here; just to live the difference.

Both a privilege and a pergatory.

Yet another example of the dichotomy that is the aid worker’s existence.

Three more hours till Niamey…

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Niamey-Maradi Road near Dogon-Doutchi

Legacies

It’s day three in the field.  For the last two days, we’ve been spending most of our time looking at the nutrition program.  It’s been a mixed mission.  On the one hand, we’ve still got Mike and Cam, the journalist and cameraman, with us doing their story on the Niger nutrition crisis- and me (oddly enough).  On the other hand, I’ve been using this opportunity to spend time with the field teams, check up on the work we’re doing, and orient myself well for the next three weeks of work here in-country.

Today, though, we’re all about the media stories.  It’s been an interesting experience for me, watching how the news is made.  Mike and Cam are both at the top of their respective fields and they’ve been a pleasure to work with- even if there are moments when I cringe at the thought of what the villagers who watch our antics must be thinking.

We going a little more into the background of Niger- and my background as well.  It’s a nice angle for the story- an aid worker who was here in 2005 during the last crisis, returns in 2010 and comments on his journey, and what he’s seeing.  So I’m doing a few pieces to camera, usually interviewed by Mike, either beside me, or perched to one side of the camera.  When I’m not on camera, and because most of the things we’re seeing today are not part of my program responsibility, I’m a little off-duty, which is nice because I’m free to take photos.  Which of course I do.

The work aid agencies like mine do is built around both long- and short-term realities, and each has to take the other into account.  For example, although my focus is on acute malnutrition and how to make sure that hundreds of children in our areas of operation don’t die between now and November, the team also has to be aware of the long-term context.  There’s issues of chronic malnutrition, health care, disease management, clean water, hygeiene practices, breastfeeding, and a host of other trends, changes within which are measured in years, yet which have a direct and tangible affect on our work.  Likewise, when our colleagues in the development wing of the organization are designing their fifteen-year program cycles, it’s essential that these programs are built around the emergency contexts that are likely to arise during that time (such as acute malnutrition) so that the root causes of these emergencies can be tackled over the long term.

So the first place we stop is outside a small village on the horrendous road to Dakoro.  I say horrendous, because the Senegalese are funding a road project to pave it all the way up.  I remember this road from my time here.  It was laterite- a bright red dusty unsealed track running due north for several hours.  It was one of the more uncomfortable journeys to make, as the road was marred by rock-solid washboard, and you spent the journey trying not to let your teeth grind down with the jarring.

Ah the good old days.

Today, the road is under construction.  The first few miles are now metalled, and the rest is undrivable.  In fact, we spend most of the journey not on the road, but on a set of sandy tracks which drivers have been forced to forge off to one side of the road because it’s gotten so bad.

It’s a relief to branch off straight into the bush when we do.  We’re accompanying a wizened farmer who’s one of the more entrepreneurial types.  Instead of just growing millet, he’s planted acacia trees to stop soil erosion, as well as cassava (an edible root crop), melons, hibiscus, sorghum, and a bunch of other things too.  We walk around his plot and he shows us what he’s doing.  This is all good for the long-term growth of the rural areas, and the health of communities, if what he’s doing can be replicated to others.

I take a portrait of him which I love.  He’s wearing a red-and-white chequered headscarf in the bright overhead sun, and his face is full of lines, evidence of a life lived hard.  He’s looking at the camera, and I’ve stopped the 85mm lens down to f/1.8 so that the background is thrown out of focus and the details on his face are extra sharp.  It’s one of my favourite types of portraiture, and one of the most satisfying when it works.

Our next stop- and photographically my favourite- is further north at a village with a second-chance school.  In Niger, many villages don’t have schools, and those that do are often understaffed.  Children who don’t enroll into primary school at the correct age are not allowed to enroll at a later age, and therefore if they miss registration one year (or in some cases, if they have no birth certificate) they miss out on being able to gain a formal education altogether.

These schools have been set up as a safety net for kids who’ve missed out through the normal channels.  They teach the national curriculum, but teach it over four years instead of six, so that the kids can catch up sufficiently to be able to attend college (secondary school) when they graduate.  The children themselves understand the importance of education (I always enjoy visiting schools in rural communities, because the kids understand what a privilege it is to be at one, unlike so many classrooms in Europe, the Americas or Australasia).

The children in Niger are beautiful.  They’re graceful and have elegant features, and are a joy to shoot.  I mean, kids are great most places, but I’ve always found the Nigerien children particularly endearing.  These ones are no exception.

Mike and Cam set up some interviews with some of the children, and again I’m free to do some shooting.  Which I do.  Some more from this shoot (and some of my favourites from this trip- and for a long time) will show up on a later post.

From here, we visit a cereal bank.  I was involved in setting up our cereal bank program back in 2005 (when I knew very little about them; the advice was coming from our local staff who had worked with them before).  The principle is, you provide some sacks of food to a village committee when food is at its cheapest (right after harvest).  The committee then keeps this food in a central location.  If people in the village need food, they can buy food from the cereal bank at rates cheaper than the market rate- a benefit to the community- but still more expensive than the food was purchased for at the start of the year.  If the bank is managed properly, the committee should have enough money to replenish the store when the next harvest hits the markets and grain prices are surpressed again.  If they’ve done a good job and market prices have worked in their favour, they may even gain some profit which they can then invest in their own community development.

The cereal banks have come under fire at different times.  When they’re not managed well, communities expect NGOs to top them up for them, so it can become a hand-out project if not carefully supervised.  They’re vulnerable to market shocks and food shortages.  However this one we visited had done well for itself.  Over the last five years, only this year had they come to us for help to restock it, and that because the food crisis was so severe.  We gave them a few extra tonnes of food- not a huge amount- and they reckon with that they’ll go back to being able to replenish their store again in the next harvest, in a few weeks’ time.  Meanwhile, over 800 families in the community benefitted in some way from the bank’s work over the last year.

It’s nice (and remarkably rare) to be able to step back into a country many years after leaving it, and to see a project that you’ve contributed to in some small way having made a difference to peoples’ lives.  I can assure you, it doesn’t happen often.

(And obviously, when the chats and the interviews are over, I head off and take a few photos of cute kids. )

On the drive back to Maradi, Mike and Cam want to recreate some background shots from the Dafur incident.  Part of their piece on me will involve a brief re-telling of the ambush.  They shoot some stylised footage of the vehicle in the bush, of us taking cover behind the dashboard, and of Idi, our driver, wearing my turban and menacing the vehicle.  It’s all rather hilarious in its own way, four guys with expensive gear playing Cowboys and Indians making light of a very serious situation.  But as we watch the sun start to kiss the tops of the millet stalks, we settle back into the bumpy ride and muse on yet another good day in the field.  We’ve been lucky with the times we’ve had, and we all know it.

Tomorrow we drive back to Niamey.  Ten hours.  It’s going to be fun.

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.

Back in the Headlines: Niger

I spent a year living in Niger from mid-2005, courtesy of a media-labelled ‘famine’ that put about a third of the county’s population at risk of acute food shortages, and during which time tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of children died. From time to time I run into former Nigerien colleagues, and they always tell me, ‘you must come and visit us again’. Of course, they don’t really mean it. Given my role in emergency response, the only time I visit a country is when it’s in a really, really bad way. Nobody wants that.

The title of this post is, unfortunately, a total misnomer. Niger isn’t in the headlines. It’s barely ever been in the headlines. It got a couple of weeks of coverage in mid-2005, courtesy of a BBC camera crew who visited an MSF feeding centre in the east of the country and snapped some shots of a few skeletal children, thus propelling the story of a famine into the headlines. It also made a blip a couple of months ago when a low-level military coup deplaced Mahmoud Tanja as President of the country, all in the name of a more streamlined democratic process. Maybe 2 days’ worth.

Most people outside France confuse the country with Nigeria, can’t prononce its name, and wouldn’t know the proper noun for its inhabitants (Nigerien, versus Nigerian). I remember doing media interviews with Australian press when I was in the field. Standing on some street corner with a Thuriya Satellite telephone against one ear, the conversations always started the same way: “We’re joined now by an aid worker in Niger. Tell us, where exactly is Niger?”

Niger is facing another food crisis. At this point in time, failed rains have precipitated a state whereby 7.8 million people, more than half the population of the country, are facing food shortages. The government and aid agencies in Niger have all sounded the alert, far earlier than in 2005 (when it wasn’t until mid-year, as the country approached the height of the traditional ‘hardship season’ that the media, and by inference the world, finally started to pay the emergency any attention), and the implications are that 2010 will be a worse year for Niger than 2005 was.

Of course, nobody outside NGO circles is talking about Niger at all.

It Just Ain’t Sexy

There are all sorts of reasons why countries like Niger don’t get press coverage, fitting neatly into the category we in the industry refer to as ‘forgotten emergencies’. That Niger is a geographically obscure former French colony doesn’t help. But beyond that, there’s the dynamic of the emergency itself. Complex.

The media labelled the 2005 crisis as a ‘famine’. The word ‘famine’ makes for a great headline. It has an emotional hit with it. We get images in our head like Ken Carter’s infamous pullitzer-prize winning image of a vulture stalking an emaciated toddler in Sudan. We think of Ethiopia in 1984 and Band Aid; of the Biafra famine and airlift of the late sixties; of the great famines of the Victorian period in India which cost millions and millions of lives.

What happened in Niger, of course, was not a famine. Which was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, no country wants a genuine famine. On the other, it meant that as soon as people started to delve into the root causes of what was happening in Niger, they lost interest. It was too complex to stay on the front pages. Not sexy enough.

It’s the old challenge we’ve faced for years in the aid industry. Natural disasters are fast, shocking and simple to explain. From a media perspective, they are attractive. People eat them up. Disasters like the Haiti earthquake, or the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, jolt themselves into the public conciousness and hold headlines- and attention- for weeks. Sympathy- and cash- flows.

By contrast, complex emergencies such as famines, wars, refugee crises and political emergencies are slow-moving, complex, and distinctly lacking in hope. They take far too long to explain to an audience used to the sort of oversaturated ADD-pandering stimulation provided by MTV, Jerry Bruckheimer and Fox News (complete with soundtrack). People lose interest. If they bother to learn even the slightest bit about the crisis, they feel their money will be wasted there. If it’s a war, then anything they give will just get blown up. If it’s a political crisis, then it’ll get eaten by a corrupt system. If a famine, then the children whose lives they save this year will just die in the next hunger season.

There’s more than a grain of truth in this prejudice.

A Beginner’s Guide to Famine

Famine is already a complex proposition. Hunger and starvation are pretty straight forward, but in fact famine is invariably a symphony of contributing elements. It’s food shortages, distribution systems, politics, purchasing power, economics, growing practices, feeding practices, health systems, soil mechanics, climate patterns, and many other things all wrapped up together. Famine deaths are rarely (though occasionally, in acute circumstances) due to actual lack of food, but usually a vicious interplay between nutrient deficiency and disease.

This downward spiral is in itself multipronged and complex- if quite easily explainable if you’re willing to take the time.

We eat food because our body needs certain inputs to maintain healthy life. Energy in the form of sugars, carbohydrates and fats. Building-blocks in the form of proteins. Specific functions supported through the intake of vitamins and minerals- micronutrients. Reduce the intake of any of these things, and the body doesn’t work so well. Reduce them enough over the long-term (chronic malnutrition), and the body doesn’t develop properly- it becomes smaller (stunting) and brain function is reduced. Reduce them enough over the short-term (acute malnutrition), and the body starts to consume itself (wasting), ultimately leading to death if not checked.

In both instances (but particularly situations of acute malnutrition), the lack of essential supplies means that the body is more succeptible to disease. The inbuilt defence mechanisms to fight bacteria and viruses are weaker. At the same time, many diseases also inhibit the correct absorbtion of different nutrients- resulting in a downward spiral, where poor nutrient intake results in disease, which in turn slows nutrient intake. The alternative cycle is equally true where certain diseases (such as malaria, or diarrhoeal diseases) are endemic in a population- disease inhibiting nutrient intake, leading to higher succeptibility to disease.

In both cases, high mortality results. Usually among the most vulnerable members of a population- young children.

There are additional complicating factors. The biggest is hygeine, which contributes to the prevelance and spread of diarrhoeal disease. This in turn is driven both by mechanical factors (is there a sufficient supply of clean water for drinking, washing and cooking?) and behavioural factors (do people wash their hands after going to the toilet and before handling food? Do they boil water?).

A nation’s public health system is the next tier. Is there a network of hospitals, clinics, doctors and nurses to support a population and treat illness? Are there campaigns to reduce endemic and epidemic diseases (such as vaccinations, or mosquito net distributions)? Are there public health messages reaching remote communities to reduce risky behaviour?

Yet another driver that contributes to mortality cycles is population displacement- and particularly, relief camps. Cramming large numbers of people together puts huge stress on food and water production and distribution systems, and existing health care systems. People quickly become under-nourished. Hygeine systems and fecal waste management become difficult. The physical proximity of people to one another vastly accelerate disease transmission rates. The chances of an outbreak of diarrhoeal or viral disease increases by orders of magnitude, and the rapidity with which it can take hold can have catastrophic impacts on existing support networks, and ultimately on mortality.  In the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, tens of thousands of ethnic Hutus died in a matter of weeks after diarrhoeal disease ravished displacement camps on the Congolese border.

In short, camps kill.

Malnutrition

The term famine, in the international public health context, relates to a state of excess mortality driven by food shortages- both acute and chronic- across an entire population. In other words, if we call it a famine, we should be expecting to see a rise in the number of people dying in multiple age cohorts, attributable directly to these physiological effects of limited food intake.

In Niger, this was not the case. In fact, during the 2005 hunger season, there wasn’t a single case of a recorded adult death directly attributed to food shortage. The mortality and morbidity was almost exclusively confined to the cohort of children and infants under the age of 5. A nutrition crisis, certainly, but not a famine.

Is this just semantics? Famine, nutrition crisis, surely it’s all pretty much the same thing. People need food, right?

Well, no, actually not right.

Famine, as we’ve already discussed, is a highly emotive word with which we immediately attach baggage. Drought, crop failure, rake-thin Africans and starving babies. People need food, and need it fast. We think famine, we think problem. We think solution, and we think food distribution. Trucks and airplanes loaded with sacks of grain, long queues of colourfully-clad black women with plastic bowls beneath a World Food Program logo. Donors expect it. And, sadly, aid agencies often jump to it as well.

But we’ve already talked about what famine is. It’s so much more complex than this. If we use simple, loaded language to describe the problem, we run the risk of failing to pause and fully understand it. We’ll be easily pressured into jumping into a knee-jerk response. We won’t tackle the problem where it needs to be tackled. And people- children- will die.

Complexities of the Context

Over the last couple of decades, Niger has been consistently ranked at the very bottom of the UNDP’s Human Development Index- somewhere among the poorest three countries in the world, as a rule. This is more than simple economics. It relates, yes, to the fact that the nation produces virtually nothing for the export market except a few crumbly chunks of Yellow-Cake Uranium, but also to the low adult literacy rate, the extremely high birth rate, or the catastrophic infant mortality rate.

Niger exists on the border between Sahel and Sahara- the former being that vast semi-arid band of mixed grass and woodland that stretches from east to west across the African continent and marking the gradual transition from the true-desert of the enormous Sahara to the moist tropical jungles that seethe around the Congo River. The Sahel is characterized by short, intermittent and unpredictable rains, high temperatures, and a current trend towards increasing aridity and desertification. A third of Niger- the southern region- is Sahel. The other two thirds are desert. The vast majority of the country’s population of 15 million live in this southern band, and it is here that the nation attempts to provide enough food to feed itself. 82% of the population are involved in agricultural or livestock production, much of it subsistence. Just 15% of the land area is actually arable.

Niger’s staple is millet, supplemented by sorghum, and small quantities of market vegetables. Millet is a hardy crop which grows well in drought conditions, but which is low in nutrients and hard to digest, particularly by children, and by people who are unwell. It is generally ground into powder and turned into a paste or porridge- something which takes a lot of physical work and energy. Children are typically fed millet from an early age- the traditional weaning age is two, disregarding the health status of the child or the potential benefits of remaining on breast-milk.

Adult males in the family are likely to be fed before children, as they are economically productive and need to be kept healthy to continue bringing resources into the family. Superstitious beliefs in many parts mean that children are not fed eggs (there is a fear that they will grow up to be thieves)- the best and most easily accessible form of protein in most villages. Strong conservative and male-centric values mean that men take the largest and tastiest portions of food, and children and women are fed only after men are satisfied. (There were many reports during our feeding programs of men taking the nutrient paste we had provided to infants and eating it themselves because they liked the sweet taste).

A large portion of the country’s agriculture is subsistence, with any surplus production usually sold on local markets for cash income. Families are large- Niger has a fertility rate of 7.1 children per woman, and it’s common for men to have more than one wife. Water in this arid country is in short supply- 3- 600mm per year, or around a quarter of that of continental Europe. Resource production is spread thin.

In rural areas, all kinds of traditions prevail in child-care. Generations of high infant mortality has resulted in a certain detachment by mothers towards newborn children. In places, mothers will not care for children until they are weaned (when it’s clear that they are not going to die as babies) and the task falls to other women. Colostrum- the thick, nutrient-rich substance that womens’ breasts produce during the first few days following childbirth and which provide newborns with a huge kick-start for life- is considered unclean, and infants are fed water until the mother’s milk becomes ‘normal’. This is a double-whammy, as it means that not only are children denied that boost they need to start life off, but they are often given unclean water, which makes them sick straight off the bat. Assuming they survive (almost 80 in every 1,000 children born in Niger die before they reach the age of 1), they start life off sick, and poorly able to absorb what nutrients come their way, paving the way for high vulnerability to malnutrition.

Roll all of this together, and nearly 170 out of every 1,000 children born in Niger die before they reach the age of five. That’s almost 17%, or more than 1 in 6. Given that the average woman gives birth to 7 children, that means that on average, every woman in Niger will lose at least one child.

In perspective, the infant mortality rate in Australia is 5 per 1,000 live births. The under-5 mortality rate is 6 (in other words, just one out of every 1,000 children born in Australia will die between the ages of one and five, compared to 90 in Niger).

I hope you’re getting the picture.

All this context mumbo-jumbo (that most readers have probably stopped perousing by now) really means that Niger’s population- and specifically, it’s children, are in any given year extremely vulnerable to anything that might reduce their food intake. If, in a normal year, these are the background statistics, and this is the difficulty people have in simply not dying, it means that when the resources available go down, large numbers of people are very rapidly pushed into a place where they will be at risk of death. Which is how, this year, 7.8 million Nigeriens now find themselves at risk of ‘starvation’.

The crisis, as we can see, is not so much an immediate, short-term issue, but rather it’s couched in this long-term situation.

Anatomy of a Crisis

Short-term factors still play a part however, layered into all this complexity. In 2005, the causes were manifold. First off, there were the combination of failed rains across the southern part of the country in the 2004/5 growing season, and a locust invasion which finished off the rest of the crops. So, acute food production shortages.

Merchants with significant purchasing power- many from Nigeria- foresaw that there would be a food shortage, and as soon as the harvests came in, they bought as much as they could from farmers. Many farmers even mortgaged off their coming season’s harvest before it was in- pushing themselves into debt and annihilating their own production and purchasing power to cover short-term needs. Many men left the land and moved to urban areas or out of the country to find waged labour.

As the year progressed and demand for food on the market spiked, it was trickled back onto the market by merchants who were hoarding it- but at hugely increased prices- a simple supply/demand effect. The merchants made a killing. Literally.

This layering of natural and man-made factors pushed a chronically food-insecure context into a critical emergency. Food shortages across the country meant that households simply didn’t have enough to eat. Children- already chronically underfed with low physical tolerance or resistance to nutrient deficiency and disease, bore the brunt of this. They started to waste away by the hundreds of thousands. Many died.

The politics of a male-dominated conservative society compounded things. It was commonplace for men to leave food and seeds locked away in their storehouses. They would take the key with them and forbid the women from touching the food supplies. They would be gone for months at a time without being in contact. We heard of many instances where women refused to take their dying child to a nutrition centre or hospital, because to leave the village they needed their husband’s permission, and he was travelling looking for work.

Into this mix came a government fearful of the implications of an emergency on its population. The last time there had been a major food emergency in the country the government had collapsed as an indirect result. Frightened the same might happen, they became aggressively defensive. Journalists who threw about the word ‘famine’ were kicked out of the country, accused of embarrassing the government which supposedly had everything under control. NGOs had to tiptoe around government sensitivities. Authorities were slow to admit anything was wrong, reluctant to ask for international assistance.

NGOs sent in their emergency teams, loaded with the ‘F’ word and all the professional expectations that carries. Fundraising campaigns were run, small amounts of money raised. We ran food distributions and set up feeding centres. Tens of thousands of metric tons of food aid flowed into the country. Tens of thousands of families received food. Tens of thousands of children were admitted to nutrition programs.

We undoubtedly saved lives.

We undoubtedly failed to prevent some deaths.

Lessons Learned?

Aid reached Niger too little, too late. NGOs rushed in expecting to find an acute famine based on food shortages (failed rains and locusts) but failed to understand the broader context for several months- everything from cultural practices to the ecnomics of supply and demand to a fragile and defensive state structure. While bits and pieces of the long-term situation in Niger certainly began filtering through in the early days, the complexity of setting up a time-critical emergency response and all the operational demands that such a program demands meant that precious little time was dedicated to reflection and understanding. Spurned on by the emotional sense of urgency, key clues were missed.

It took months to re-orient the response to focus on the structural issues. Food distributions- particularly the network of nutrition centres for young children- certainly kept many alive while the process was reshaped. Had the government been more proactive and had the international community (including donors and the international media) pulled their act together in a more timely fashion, that band-aid measure could have prevented far more deaths, and allowed that re-orientation to take place earlier in the journey. As it happened, by the time the context had been analysed and fully understood, donor and media interest had moved on, and there was little additional funding to run essential programs.

But dealing with these big-picture changes is not easy. How does an NGO change the child-care or hygeine practices of a nation? How do they influence government expenditure on health-care networks or vaccination programs? How do they transform the agrarian sector of an entire economy?

The fact is, they can’t. They can tackle the practical issues on a local (village) level. They can advocate to regional and national government officials. But the potential for this big-picture, long-term impact is limited. And sadly, small, short-term changes in a locale which is couched in a much bigger and more complex context tend to be easily undermined.

The Now and the Not Yet

Niger is again on the brink of a food emergency. It remains a severely impoverished country with political upheaval, and a long-standing set of cultural practices, beliefs and dynamics that are unlikely to have changed much over the past 5 years. Programs have been running to tackle chronic malnutrition and food insecurity, but I can’t comment on their efficacy. To the best of my knowledge, millions of children have once again been placed at risk of acute malnutrition, and by all accounts, the lead-in to the current crisis is worse than the lead-in we saw in 2004/5.

Once again, there is no media interest. Once again the year ticks on, and NGOs and the UN have all put out their early-warning reports, and nobody seems to care. Once again, other emergencies overshadow the crisis in Niger- such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China.

Niger’s hunger season traditionally runs from May to September. That is, the period after the seeds have been planted in the ground and last year’s harvest has been mostly consumed, but before the next harvest is brought in. Every year, rural Nigeriens have to struggle to find a way to keep food on the table- either ration their own dwindling supplies, cut back on the number of meals a day, scrounge for bush fodder, or look for waged labour in urban areas. The longer the hunger period, the harder it is to make these coping mechanisms meet the needs of families. It’s April, and we’ve been seeing signs of food stress for months. The hunger season has already been underway for some time.

If the world intervenes now, lives will be spared. If the media can raise public awareness, and governments and individuals give money and resources to respond to those needs, and NGOs can mobilize response programs early enough, fewer children need to die there this year.

If, as generally happens, we wait to see photographs of emaciated children in feeding centres on BBC and CNN, then lives will have already been lost. The time it takes to ramp up response programs will cost even more lives. This is the practical reality of the aid sector.

The government, at least, appears to be picking up on the mistakes of the past, and is already sounding alarm-bells at its level, accepting that there is a problem. NGOs too have been engaged since early 2006 with the structural issues in-country and are far more aware of the context than they were in 2005. Programs would be run differently. Best practice in the management of child malnutrition has come a long way even over the last 5 years. The UN and interagency partnerships are far better established than they were before, and long-term nutritional programs aimed at structural issues have been running. You can read more about how 2010 differs from 2005 in this analysis by IRIN here. But resource needs remain, without which programs can’t be run.

Sitting as I do in an aid and development charity, knowing full well that we can’t create resources out of thin air, I’m frustrated to know what to do. I have no power over what stories the media runs. I can’t swing government policy. I don’t have the ability to tell the Australian public where to give their [generously donated] funding. All I have is the memory of the faces I saw when I was there five years ago. The barren landscape and the fields dotted with sorry-looking stalks of millet. Skinny children with piano-key ribcages and oversized round skulls. Fierce heat. Looking at the statistics sheets on our feeding centres: The number of new children admitted; the number of those recovered; the number of defaulters; the number of dead.

I’m unlikely to be the guy on the ground this time round. My role doesn’t have me travelling quite so much at the moment, and that’s not likely to change into the near future. I have mixed feelings about this. I don’t particularly want to get embroiled in what is a complex, slow-moving and at times seemingly hopeless context like Niger’s. On the other hand, you don’t get involved with a country in a situation like that without leaving a bit of your soul there, and taking a little of its soul with you.

I sincerely and with all my heart hope that people can get their act together and choose to do something to prevent people dying needlessly in Niger this year.

Photos:

1. Niger River at Sunset: The sun sets over the Niger River as viewed from the Grand Hotel in central Niamey.

2. Feeding Centre Mother and Child: A woman and her malnourished child await registration at an NGO-run feeding centre in central Niger.

3. New Admission: A malnourished infant awaits registration at an NGO-run feeding centre in central Niger.

4. Maria: 2-year old Maria exhibits signs of acute malnutrition. NGO staff talking with her mother try and convince her to take her daughter to hospital.

5. Food Queue: Women queue at an NGO-run food distribution in rural Niger.

6. Warehouse: An NGO warehouse stacked with WFP food aid in rural Niger.

7. Millet Stalks: Staple crop of Niger.

8. La Nutrition: An NGO staff member registers an acutely malnourished child into a feeding program.

9. Recovery: A child who has been in an NGO-run feeding program for some time exhibits signs of improvement.

10: Split Peas and Mais: At an NGO-run food distribution, a man demonstrates the food being distributed.

11: Traditional Coping Mechanisms: An elderly woman sells a plate of baked leaves which she has foraged from the bush as a food source.

12: Hilltop Sunset: The sun goes down over the hills beyond the Niger River near Niamey.

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.

Sunset Drifting

A fisherman poles his canoe, or pinasse, down the Niger River at sunset.  Not even ten minutes from the heart of Niger’s capital, Niamey, the feeling along the riverbanks is of a time far older and simpler than the quaint, bustling Sahelian town.  During the painfully brief rainy season, the Niger- West Africa’s longest river- floods to over a kilometre wide here in the city, with a steady, weighty flow behind it.  During the crippling dry season, which lasts from October until June, the river all but dries up, and herders drive their cattle across the bed, and it’s narrow enough that you can cross all but a channel a dozen metres wide without getting your feet wet.

This author has, in fact, been silly enough to swim across the Niger while its waters are not in flood.  And, hippos notwithstanding, quite enjoyed the experience.

This shot was one of my favourite to come out of my time in Niger, and captured the serene beauty of the river which, in turn, turns Niamey from a dry and dusty outpost on the edge of the desert, into a restful and characterful watering hole in the midst of a land wracked with poverty and desolation.  Watching the sun set over the Niger River, cold beading beer in hand, was one of a handful of simple pleasures in that country where simple pleasures were few and far between- making them all the more precious when they came.

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