What Disaster Response Needs to Save Lives is More Volunteers

Ramshackle apartment buildings on the edge of Thamel, Kathmandu’s old city, in 2007.

Thirty-six hours on from the devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake that struck central Nepal on May 25^th, we know that the statistical chance of finding survivors buried in the wreckage of homes, offices and apartment towers is dwindling rapidly towards nil. To date, some 2,200 people are confirmed dead by the Nepalese government, although this is a partial count of known dead that as more rubble is cleared and more reports of missing people coalesce, is inevitably, tragically, going to rise. Scores of small villages, many perched precariously on steep hillsides or beneath towering, notoriously unstable mountains, have simply not been heard from, and may take days yet to reach and account for. We can hope and pray that in those villages, lighter structures and an outdoors-leaning agrarian lifestyle have translated into greater odds of survivability for the families that live there. The likelihood, however, is that with the threat of landslides, coupled with the long distance from medical care for those who have received otherwise-survivable wounds, many more dead have simply yet to be accounted for. The projections of 10,000 fatalities from this earthquake may well prove prescient.

Annapurna Region, Nepal, 2007

The aim of any disaster response- especially rapid-onset- is to save lives. Of course, as any expatriate aid worker (EAW) who has been deployed into a disaster response can attest to, the experience of reality is often less about saving lives, and more about handling the awkward logistics of providing well-needed but often non-critical comforts to survivors. Bedrolls that make sleeping out under tarpaulins more comfortable- but don’t save lives. Temporary toilet blocks that reduce the spread of disease in temporary displacement camps- although historically epidemics following natural disasters (as opposed to human-made mass-displacement events) are very rare. And, as often as not, carrying out coordination between other aid groups, documenting findings of needs assessments, and submitting unwieldy paperwork to institutional and private donors which can take weeks to resolve and turn into actionable funding.

Ditto those Search and Rescue (SAR) teams that are dispatched, who often fly in with much heralding from sending nations and are widely celebrated in the media when they pull survivors from the rubble. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but generally speaking, your chance of finding many survivors after the first 24 hours have passed are very low. After 48 hours, improbably low. And after 72 hours, with one or two notable exceptions, they are essentially down to nil. Yet international SAR teams are rarely on the ground within the first 24 hours, and in many cases miss the 72-hour window that most professionals will agree is your outside limit of effective action in SAR.

Now, I’m not poo-pooing aid response here. On the contrary, I am a huge believer in the work that the UN, local and international NGOs, host and donor governments, and civil society organizations do to support communities to cope with and rebuild after a major disaster like Nepal’s earthquake. The psychological impact alone of knowing that you’re not abandoned is of almost immeasurable value. Some assistance- temporary shelter that protects people from aftershocks and the monsoon rains, for example- will certainly contribute to saving lives. And in situations of prolonged displacement, primary medical facilities and hygiene/sanitation services are also critical to keeping people alive.

Likewise, SAR teams selflessly risk their lives to find survivors, or retrieve bodies that allow loved ones essential closure to their grief. Every life is precious, and when survivors are found, it can give a disproportionately large psychological boost to responders and survivors. It also allows those teams invaluable training to prepare for a potential disaster in their own territory, when they may well be the first-responders pulling survivors from the rubble.

Durbar Square in Kathmandu, 2007

Durbar Square, March 25, 2015

Moreso international medical and surgical teams, particularly following an earthquake, where they provide an essential supplement to overwhelmed or destroyed local medical infrastructure, performing life-saving surgery, amputations, and dealing with the complications of crushing injuries. If they’re on the ground quickly enough, these guys too can save lives.

But- and feel free to take issue with me on this one- a typical aid response to a rapid onset disaster doesn’t save that many lives in real terms.

By the time an aid response is even at its earliest stages of ramping up, those in peril will have already died, and most of those who are left would probably have coped- albeit less comfortably- regardless of the aid delivered.

If we want to see disaster responses save more lives, then what we need is more volunteers.

Now, I’m not talking about expat aid workers here. International aid workers today tend to be professionals. Individuals who have studied, who have developed skills and experiences in the aid sector over a number of years, and who fit into a number of key roles within a highly complex organizational and inter-organizational structure and who are paid employees of the agencies sending them. Not volunteers.

I’m not talking about SAR and medical response teams- both of which are directly involved (to various degrees of success) in the job of actually saving the lives of survivors. While some of these individuals ‘volunteer’ their time to be sent into disaster zones, these are not spontaneous “I feel like helping so send me” volunteers, but people who have developed highly technical skills in their careers and who have usually received specialized training in disaster response.

And, with respect, I am definitely not talking about people from the general public offering to volunteer their time. However well-meaning, however altruistic, however badly peoples’ ‘I need to help’ button is being pushed, the time to step into the aid profession is never immediately following a disaster. Without experience, training and a knowledge of how the aid sector and disaster response works (coordination, technical standards, lessons learned and past mistakes, etc. etc.), it is very hard to hit the ground in a crisis and be helpful. Most often, offers of voluntary assistance simply add to the noise in an already chaotic situation. If aid is on your heart, get trained, get experience, work for an agency so that you understand what is required, and when the next disaster hits, you’ll be ready to go.

And not just sexy tourist spots like Vanuatu, Thailand or Nepal. We need qualified aid workers in disasters in CAR, in Mali, in DRC and in South Sudan.

Fishtail Mountain behind Pokhara. Disaster sites on the tourist track tend to solicit more voluntourism offers than less picturesque locales.

No, I’m talking about a different sort of volunteer altogether. The sort of volunteer who can save lives. Who’s been proven to save lives, disaster after disaster, and in far greater numbers than international SAR teams, aid workers and medical teams combined. The sort of volunteer who is uniquely positioned to know where the victims are at the moment of the disaster, and how to get to them. Who’s ready to respond in an instant, and who has more motivation than even the most altruistic NGO first responder.

Of course, I’m talking about the members of disaster-affected communities themselves.

Look at the photos coming out of Kathmandu over the last 36 hours, what do you see?

Beyond the devastation, the piles of rubble, the collapsed walls and the pall of dust. Beyond the horror and tragedy of a fascinating, historic city shaken to its core and the flashes of grief on survivors and injured alike.

You see people. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Nepalese people, crawling over the rubble, hauling at debris, digging out survivors. You see them working in teams, long chains of hands clearing fallen masonry, working as teams, high-visibility vests mixed in with office clothes and people just out in the street. From the images, it’s impossible to tell how many of these teams are spontaneously responding, and how many are being coordinated by emergency personnel. But with very few exceptions, they are almost all local Nepalese. They are acting within minutes and early hours of the earthquake. And anecdotally we know that the majority of this response is happening in an ad hoc manner as people try to save those immediately around them when the disaster hits, or who rush home to save families, friends and neighbours.

These are the people who will save lives by the tens of thousands.

These are the volunteers we need more of.

Swayambhunath (Monkey Temple), 2007

Swayambhunath (Monkey Temple), March 25, 2015

Now, the majority of this ‘voluntary’ action is spontaneous. It’s going to happen, regardless of whether we try and make it happen. If there’s one thing we’ve seen time and again following a disaster, it’s that in those moments of life-and-death, in the midst of horrific tragedy, a huge majority of people simply shine their brightest. In a disaster like this, what you don’t see is everybody just sitting around the piles of rubble going, “hey, let’s wait for somebody else to sort it out”. No, you see people getting in there, getting filthy and bloody, risking collapsing buildings coming down on their heads to save friends, loved ones and absolute strangers. I am a firm believer that, despite the overwhelming crapness that news media chooses to share with us from around the world, most people are inherently good and, when the chips are down, many prone to incredible selflessness.

But we can- and must- do things to facilitate this action to happen. Governments, the UN, NGOs and donors (especially donors) need to make sure that local community members- be they Haitians, Nepalese, Ni-Vanuatu, or any other disaster-prone location- are prepared, resourced and enabled to respond to save lives.

This is the domain of what in the aid industry is called “Disaster Risk Reduction” (DRR)- one subset of a large and [finally] growing set of programs that aim to make nations and communities in disaster-prone areas more resilient, more able to cope and respond, and- crucially- less vulnerable to disaster events.

The earthquake in Nepal was not (unlike that in Port-au-Prince) in any way unexpected. Disaster professionals have been talking for years- decades- about the earthquake threat to Kathmandu. The city’s location on a fault-line, the high population density, the poverty, the poor building practices and the way fragile brick structures were piled one on top of the other, and the isolation of the city high in a ring of mountains, were all factors that combined, made alarm-bells ring.

Kathmandu skyline, 2007

Nor were these alarm-bells ignored. There have been trainings, response plans, mitigation plans, public policies and drills. The UN, NGOs, and the government have all worked together, on paper and in practice, to prepare Kathmandu for an earthquake. We won’t know until the after-action reviews come out just how effective these measures have been. But the very fact that the conversations were happening and contingencies considered means that both government and aid workers were in a mindset to respond once the disaster hit- a critical psychological edge.

I know anecdotally that my own organization has carried out multiple response drills, has extensive response plans in place, and has a cadre of disaster-ready personnel among its local staff, as well as in its community programs. Their country director, a friend of mine, has a long pedigree of disaster response, which no doubt contributed to her being placed in a position of responsibility in an earthquake-prone office. She and I joked when she was first appointed that I’d be joining her shortly, once the earthquake hit.

We were all expecting it, and we were all planning for it.

So how do we save lives? We make sure that local community members- everyday citizens- in the countries we work are prepared and equipped to the best extent possible. And we encourage them to get on and do it.

1. Awareness-Raising (as a conversation)

As with any activity, the first place to start is making sure that everyone has the same information. It’s patronizing to think that external organizations can walk into an urban or rural community group and tell them “these are what your risks are”. In most cases, they know these things far more acutely than you do. That said, in many cases, certain risks (such as a massive devastating earthquake) may be deprioritized in a community because it’s been so long since one was experienced that it may not be perceived as a critical risk. Mutual learning has to take place. As external actors, it’s essential to respect communities’ perspectives on what is important to them. It’s also important to learn what their existing coping mechanisms and plans are- it’s unlikely that you’ll be coming in to a blank slate. They may have traditional responses. Elders may have memories of earlier events and what was done. All of this has to be factored in. At the same time, however, if a threat is genuine & building (such as an imminent earthquake), communities not already aware of this threat need to be brought up to speed. It’s a conversation. Facipulation? Try and avoid it. Apart from anything else, communities are made up of people, and people, by and large, are smart- especially when it comes to survival- so it shouldn’t be a hard job. Just do it right and do it respectfully and humbly. But between external actors and community groups, there needs to be a common understanding of what the threat to the community is, and how best to tackle it.

Community artwork as part of an NGO DRR program in Latin America

2. Invest in National-Level Response Structures

In more developed countries, emergency response is a blend of professional emergency services (911 operators, police, fire brigade, ambulance drivers, etc.) and trained volunteers. Here in Victoria, mobilizing large-scale civilian emergency response happens in a very structured way in response to large-scale disasters, either through the State Emergency Services (SES), or the Country Fire Authority (CFA). Both agencies have a similar structure and approach, with a relatively small core staff of full-time professionals who oversee the organizational integrity, and a very extensive network of trained volunteers with appropriate skillsets. Volunteers are drawn from and attached to community-level response teams, with the possibility to deploy into other geographical areas, which means that at their most basic, volunteers are often motivated by the desire to protect their own towns and suburbs, and by extension, homes and families. It’s a highly effective structure, and one that gets utilized year in and year out here (in Australia, the country where everything is trying to kill you).

Less developed nations are increasingly adopting similar mechanisms, to greater and lesser degrees and effect. Investing in these structures, from central government to regional and sub-regional levels, is critical to ensure sustainability, continuity, and effectiveness. These government programs are usually national in scale and with a reach that no single aid agency or donor is going to be able to achieve. The most successful models I’ve seen on the ground- primarily in Latin America- have brand recognition down to the community level, and are present in pretty much every at-risk administrative zone. Supporting and enabling these organizations will have far greater multiplying consequences than a stand-alone program.

What does this look like? Obviously, it means funding them. It means training their core staff- at higher levels, in effective response management, and at lower levels, the critical technical skills required to respond. But it also means that in your community-level engagement, your DRR messaging is in line with that of the national response agency’s (and if you disagree with that messaging, then negotiating directly with that agency, rather than going cowboy). It means ensuring that you’re identifying gaps in their training and resourcing, and working with them on agreeing how to fill those gaps. It means ensuring that any community-level structures you put in place are directly compatible with national disaster response agency processes and structures. And it means that, when you launch your response, you ensure your agency (and any community-level mobilization you do) is slotting in to that structure, not working over or against it.

Civil Defence personnel working with an NGO DRR program in Guatemala

3. Drill, Drill, Drill

The most effective way to ensure that responders will do the right thing in an emergency is to have them dry-run it, in simulation exercises and in repetitive drills. The more you can do this, and the more realistic the circumstances, the more likely people are to get it right when the real event happens. Not only are their skills more robust, but they understand what to expect (which boosts psychological resilience), and how to fit in more efficiently and effectively with higher-level structures. This in turn allows them to more effectively mobilize additional resources.

Community brigades need to understand basic SAR techniques, and life-saving first-aid. They will be responding, regardless of whether any external actors get involved. They will inevitably be at their homes, scrambling through debris to pull out loved ones. How can we help them more effectively work together as teams? Prioritize disaster sites? Safely remove rubble and ensure nobody else is hurt and killed? Communicate when communication lines are down and they need a medevac, or critical resources? What equipment can we help them acquire and maintain that might save lives, which can be kept on-hand and be ready to use when disaster strikes?

None of this is without its challenges. First aid supplies get pilfered, equipment rusts or is sold when it appears defunct and no emergency has occurred, and training has to be maintained to stay current and effective. But we have to look at communities as our first responders, as the people who are going to save the lives whose fate will have already been resolved long days before our teams actually reach them.

At a higher level sophisticated simulations allow national response agencies to understand how to interact with the inevitable international response system that will arrive in force in the hours following a disaster. Teaching them how to work within coordination mechanisms, how to leverage for support and how to communicate and fill gaps in capacity and response is crucial. Likewise, the UN and agencies absolutely must drill their responses with national response agencies involved, or they risk ignoring or undermining the single most critical activities taking place during the first 72 hours following a rapid onset disaster.

Community members, part of an emergency response committee in Ecuador, drill first-aid and casualty evacuation in preparation for a disaster event

4. Give, Give, Give

This one’s for the donor agencies. DRR isn’t sexy. DRR investment is increasing, largely on the back of advocacy campaigns that have increasingly called on donors not to neglect preparedness funding. The Hyogo Framework has assisted this process as well. When I first started in this industry 12 years ago, getting disaster preparedness funding was like pulling teeth. This, at least, has changed.

None the less, because government donors often use overseas aid as a domestic policy tool, they give in accordance with the attention of their constituents, which in turn is driven by media attention that goes into a frenzy following a tragedy but tends to ignore the day-to-day stuff. An oft-quoted figure is that $1 spent in DRR programming saves $10 in disaster response spending. And that’s just cash. Never mind the lives that are saved by effective DRR.

This spending needs to go into the high-level stuff: Government policies, retrofitting, building codes, urban planning & development, and training and equipping national disaster response agencies. It also needs to go into the community-level stuff. Local risk mitigation plans, training and disaster simulation drills, and everything in between.

Agencies need to do likewise, and never stop pushing the DRR agenda. And- for both donor agencies and aid organizations alike- continue to push for the understanding that DRR is not an emergency response issue- it is a part of any and all good development. This conversation, I’m happy to report, is a mature one in many parts of the development sector- but DRR can still feel like a tag-on or optional extra, and often gets left on the sidelines like an ugly step-sibling. It mustn’t be. DRR done right will directly contribute to more saving of lives than most other development or response activities out there.

5. Post-Disaster Support

In the communities that response agencies ‘take on’ as their own, they need to treat community members less like ‘beneficiaries’- which is really just a politically-correct way of saying ‘victims’- and more like staff-members. Community members are our first responders. They are in a very real way our partners on the ground. They are doing the work of saving lives, and our hope as response agencies has to be- very humbly and carefully- finding a way to support them as best we can.

Just like our staff members need support in a post-disaster setting, so do our community first-responders. For the first 24-72 hours, these people will be running on adrenaline. They will be driven by the primal need to save the lives of people they love. Some will be successful. Many will experience devastating grief.

And like all humans, that grief will have different impacts, and will need to be handled differently. Response agencies moving into a community need to be acutely cognisant of how to support people in this situation.

Agencies need to learn how to utilize Psychological First Aid (PFA) and other basic psychosocial programming. Just as psychological support for aid staff is becoming increasingly mainstream, this needs to be extended to community-based first responders. For some of them, being kept busy- utilized further in response programs, either as volunteers or as newly-hired staff- will be critical. Others may require rest, and being allowed to stop and mourn. In response activities, flexibility to cater for a range of first-responder needs has to be built in across the program- ‘mainstreaming’, to use a dirty word.

But the critical thing to remember here- communities are never passive victims. They are our first-response partners, they are the people who risked their lives to save others while we were still sitting in airport business lounges, and they are the people who will carry the weight of what just happened for the rest of their lives. They are, and must be, our number one priority as external responders. We must celebrate them and their achievements, enable and support them, and avoid disenfranchising or patronizing them at all costs, lest we add to the harm they have already experienced.

Let’s make sure that in all our response and pre-response programming, we are enabling community-based volunteers at every opportunity. These are the people who will save the lives we never get a chance to.

Reflections on a Refugee Response: Dolo Ado

It takes us ninety minutes to traverse the 54 kilometres to Kole, and by the time we get there there’s nothing shiny about our two Land Cruisers. The plume of orange dust that’s been chasing our wakes rests in a fine silt over every available surface. There’s not much shiny about us, either, the feeble efforts of the rattling air-conditioning doing little to counter the burn of the desert sun through the windows. We’ve been bracing against the bucking vehicle the whole way, and are sweating and achey.

We pass through the village in moments. It’s little more than a collection of mud huts at a bend in the track. Set back from the river, the land around it is more rock than soil, scorched like an overexposed photograph. Villagers gather at a public tap-stand with jerry-cans and donkey carts, the ground dark with the stain of their labour. Another k or so up the broken roadway, and the drivers haul us off to the left across open terrain.

At the bottom of a steep outcrop, we stop. When the engines die, it’s a tangible relief. We clamber up the rocks, careful of our footing. It’s myself, a couple of my team leaders from down here, and our guests- VIPs from one of our donor offices. There are eight or nine of us all up. At the top of the rise we perch on a small space pretty much shoulder-to-shoulder and survey the land around us.

In the middle distance we can see the line of the river, marked by a strip of dusty green, dark against the rest of the scenery. This side of the road, shoulders of raised rock- the remnants of an eroded plateau several hundred feet high- serve as two arms demarcating the edge of our little vista. They are treeless save for a few bushes stubborn in their refusal to wither. In the flat ground between them, the terrain is broken- flat-topped trees, thorny thickets, patches of sand, and a lot of orange-brown rock. A wadi snakes around the bottom of the outcrop and wends its way towards the river several miles away, the only source of any green nearby. The tops of termite mounds, eight and ten feet tall, emerge from among woody growth. With the engines stopped, when conversation lulls, the only sound is the wind. The sun makes the sun tingle with latent threat, even this late in the afternoon. Even with my darker complexion I know I’ll burn within thirty minutes out here.

A month from now, this- Bahale- will be the newest refugee camp in the Dolo Ado complex.

Dolo Ado, a series of small pastoral communities in a southeastern corner of Ethiopia bordering Somalia and Kenya, first started taking refugees in 2009. It was in 2011, however, that it came to the attention of the world as hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled a combination of civil war and famine, seeking shelter here and, more prominently, in Dolo Ado’s Kenyan cousin, Dadaab.

Never subject to the massive influx of Dadaab (which at its peak was thought to have well over half a million refugees), Dolo Ado’s camp population has risen to a more manageable figure of around 180,000. Nonetheless, with an offensive in south-central Somalia to overcome al Shabaab militants, the encroaching dry season, and the continued closure of Dadaab and the Kenyan border to new Somali arrivals, December 2012 saw one of the camp’s busiest months for over a year, registering more than 6,000 new refugees. Currently between 150-200 Somalis are arriving each day.

Dolo Ado is in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, and as the name suggests, it’s more Somalia than Ethiopia in many ways. It is vast- over a third of Ethiopia’s land area- and underpopulated- just 6% of the population. Dolo Ado is one of the most remote points in the country; even accessing the regional capital Jijiga is a six hundred kilometre trip on poor roads. Air access is granted to aid workers via a five-day-a-week flight operated by the United Nations Humantarian Aid Service. A twice-weekly Antonov-26 from Dire Dawa flown by a squad of Russian pilots bringing a precious cargo of qat is the only commercial service operating here. It’s two days of committed driving by four-by-four from Addis- far longer by bus. Insurgent groups ply the bush further north, the legacy of decades of disatisfaction with Ethiopian rule and a failed Somali invasion in the 1970s.

It’s the details, not the context, that highlight the Ethiopian link in Dolo Ado town. The government administrators, Amharic-speaking and ethnically distinct from the Somali majority. The round, tin-roofed Orthodox church on the edge of town that stubbornly blares Friday morning prayers over the surrounding populace, as though at tacit war with the mosques. License-plates scribbled with hand-drawn Ge’ez script, evidence of the vehicles driven over the border illegally and registered with the grudging acceptance of an administration that knows there are some battles it can’t win.

Other battles, though, it is fighting harder. The Ethiopian military essentially controls a 70-kilometre band of Somalia inland from the border, implicitly annexed to shore up its own frontier from incursions by al Shabaab and other armed groups that aim to destabilize their longstanding enemy. We visit the border, a couple of k’s outside town. A dusty road leaves town via the rubbish-dump, where a healthy crop of plastic bags adorns the briars and hooks of the thorn-fencing of nearby properties. Evil-looking storks, tall as my shoulder with beaks as long as my forearm, stand watch by the dozen over the waste like vultures on a battleground. Their bald red heads are topped by a tuft of fine hair, and they glare menacingly at anything passing them by.

The border is active. A stream of donkey carts pours up the track from among the trees, bringing merchandise into Dolo Ado from the Somali side. However fragile the government might be, capitalism is alive and thriving despite the war, and doing a better job of servicing Dolo Ado’s needs than the Ethiopian economy, by the looks of things. In front of the final checkpoint (a stack of hescoes- large earth-filled sacks- manned by a bored-looking soldier and a male and female guard with a metal-detector wand) taxis wait beneath the trees to transport people to the village. We see one with a shattered windshield, the glass punched out in front of the steering-wheel so the driver can see. People come across in small clusters, family groups. I see a weary looking woman, two older children ahead of her, two small boys behind. One, barefoot, carries four empty jerrycans over his shoulders as he walks in their footsteps.

The guard at the checkpoint stops us. It takes ten minutes to talk our way past him and his commander. We watch life slip past, mostly boys driving more donkey-carts, loaded with everything from fodder to iron rods, from truck tires to plastic drums. A man has a monkey. It sits in the dirt by his feet, and whenever he moves it jumps up and seizes his lower leg, riding his foot like a kid on a merry-go-round as he walks around. It mouths at its surroundings with big wide eyes, looking for all the world like an anxious, overly-attached toddler. I keep my distance. I don’t want to find out if my medical plan covers ‘monkey bite’.

Dolo Ado is seperated from Dolo-Somalia by a shallow river, brown in colour where it seeps under a steel tressle-bridge. We wander over onto the Somali side of the bridge before security good-naturedly stops us from going further. Boys bathe in the water and come running up unselfconciously beneath the bridge to wave and get our attention. A couple of days later, we’ll be back to try and arrange a meeting with our staff on the Somali side of the border and discuss how to support one another, but will be thwarted by bureaucracy. The Ethiopians are highly protective of their borders.

We visit the reception centre, a refugee’s first port of call. Knots of women and children, mostly, gather in restless groups, finding shade from the sun beneath wood-frame lean-tos with galvanized zinc sheet roofing. In different sections of the centre, their names are recorded and checked against databases, then fingerprinted on a digital scanner and issued a wristband that identifies them as refugees. I see a small boy- no more than four- with one of these near-indestructable tags wrapped around his tiny arm and I wonder how that must feel. I find the things irritating after a single evening at a club or concert, but now his very identity- his rights to shelter, food, water, healthcare and education- are tied inextricably to a plastic strap on his wrist. For some reason, the indignity strikes a deep chord with me. Later they will receive the ration cards which indicate which days they’re supposed to attend food distributions, how many Core Relief Item distributions they’ve received, and so forth. A help-desk sits in one corner to support children who come across on their own, without an adult family member to support them.

Our compound is not dissimilar to many others I’ve now stayed in. In an area a couple of football fields in size, it’s got a set of portacabins for offices, another set for accomodation, a communal dining hall, and some cement latrine and shower blocks. It’s rudimentary but workable. It has a stark, barren feel during the height of the day. Although January is not the hottest of months here, it’s easily forty degrees and more in the early afternoon, and the sun is fierce enough that it’s unpleasant to cross the compound without a hat on. Around lunchtime, the generator is killed for part of the afternoon to save power and stop it overheating, and staff take a nap for an hour or so until the heat subsides. I find the intensity of both silence and heat a heady blend, and enjoy sitting in the shade for a while, watching the sunlight burn off the crushed rock and soaking in the stillness. When I try and nap, sweat gathers beneath me, wetting my mattress, and shines slick in every fold of skin. I drink litres of water each day.

Buramino is the newest of the five established camps. We visit child nutrition programs, alternative learning centres and a new primary school, and interview refugee families. I take myself away from the drama of the trip and walk out into the middle of the camp. It’s arranged into blocks, which in turn should reflect community dynamics, although this isn’t always possible. Each block is separated by a large open strip of land, which should allow for drainage, and also for latrine and shower-block construction slightly away from dwellings. The dwellings themselves vary, some with tin roofs and square adobe-mud walls, others built around metal rod frames provided by implementing partners, others still more in the traditional Somali style, dome-shaped over a frame of sticks tied together and clearly initiated by the refugees themselves. Some are an odd hybrid of several styles, and the only common demoninator linking all buildings are the blue-on-white UNHCR tents that have been incorporated into each structure.

It’s crushingly hot. There’s no electricity out here, and in the absence of vehicle engines and generators, oddly quiet for a town of 35,000 crowded into an area that could be measured in football fields. The wind is a constant. A donkey brays, a plaintive, distressed sound. I watch women in colourful headscarfs cross the dusty spillway, gusts tugging at loose material. It’s mid-afternoon. At any one time I can see three or four dust-devils spiralling amidst the camp. Vortices, mini-tornadoes formed by the rapid heating and rising of air, they roll over the landscape, briefly engulfing tents and refugees alike with a swirling tube of roiling dust, before moving on with little trace of their passing except a fresh layer of settled silt, like powder snow. Sometimes when the wind blows, it rolls out a sheet of dust before it, obscuring the camp behind a hazy orange veil and staining the horizon for minutes at a time.

Our visiting VIP is interviewing refugees. The whole thing feels a bit of a circus, and I keep my distance, but also recognize this is part of the process of convicing people to push money the way of these refugees who desperately need it. So with my team we put in guidelines to keep it as respectful as possible, and I step out of the way. He comes out from the last interview and does a final piece-to-camera describing his experiences in the camp. I watch him from the back seat of the Cruiser and let him do his thing. He’s a life-long businessman, a former highly-powered CEO and high-flier used to dining with ministers and Presidents. I watch as his face crumples and he bursts into tears and has to break off the interview. He turns away for a couple of minutes, regains composure, and starts over. Fifteen seconds later he’s sobbing. When he climbs onto the seat next to me afterwards, he’s subdued for some time. I find myself wondering when all this stopped touching me emotionally, and whether that’s something that should bother me.

We drop our visitors at the airport in time for the mid-week UNHAS flight, while I stay on to work with the team. Meles Zenawi International Airport is the grandest name for a strip of gravel ever devised. The waiting area, newly refurbished, is a WFP rubbhall with the sides rolled up. Bags are thrown into the back of a waiting pickup, passenger names ticked off against a computer printout, and the passengers themselves settle back to wait for touch-down.

It’s a scene essential to any remote but active relief hub, and the flight is a game in aid worker cliches. It’s logo’d Land Cruisers lined up just beyond the earthen berm, and similarly logo’d expats and local staff milling around beneath the shade, all sat-phones and VHF handsets. There’s Crusty Old Bad-Tempered Aid Worker swearing alernatively down his handset at some driver who’s forgotten to bring something he needed, and at the local WFP staff inconveniently wanting to check his bags; Skinny, Weathered Gallic Aid Worker with VHF hanging from her fishermans pants, in ethnic sandals, an NGO t-shirt and a headscarf, talking nonchalantly with her local counterpart; Heavily Branded American NGO Team, standing awkwardly to one side; Frantic UN Agency Coordinator, with UN ID card flapping, a VHF in one hand and a satphone in another, trying to manage too many staff and agencies at one time; it’s like a SEAWL post all by itself.

The nights are hot and breathless. The generator goes off by nine, its tiresome rattle replaced by a deep quiet. A full moon lights the compound as well as any spotlight, casting deep shadows. I relish the embrace of warm air in the absence of the aggressive sun. When I cross the compound to brush my teeth, I keep a wary lookout for scorpions. Apparently the local staff caught a whopper two weeks ago.

My mosquito net has been poorly fixed, and although I usually like sleeping under the things, I have to drape this one over me like a blanket- neither effective nor cooling. I sleep without sheets until around five-thirty in the morning, when the air finally cools enough to chill my skin- a relief. The cold shower I take when I rise with the sun at half-six is at first bracing, then deliciously refreshing. The low sun casts long shadows over the open ground. Mornings, before the heat of the day sets in, are a beautiful time in the desert.

One night, I inadvertantly leave my eye-mask facing down when I spray the [highly potent] insecticide around my room before bed. Woken at 3am, I fail to equate the burning sensation over my eyes with the mask, and it’s not until dawn that I finally realise I’ve had toxic chemicals pressed against my face all night. My skin burns until the early afternoon, and I half expect to find epidermis sloughing off when I check myself in the mirror.

Early morning, and a pall of smoke and dust hangs in a breathless blue haze over Dolo Ado town. Minarets and cell-phone towers protrude, fitting landmarks of this frontier outpost. Heading back for the border we drive into the rising sun, misty and opaque where it drifts in the murk. Scraps of torn plastic festoon the thorn trees in an oddly joyous display, gleaming in the sunrise with celebratory fervour. We pass the rubbish dump, the storks ominous sentries. Boys race their empty donkey-carts across the flat, putting up plumes of dust that hang in the air, a canvas for the shafts of split sunlight. When we eventually draw up and kill the engines, the air is cool, and irridescent weaver-birds flit among the thorny branches, plumage shimmering in the low sunbeams. The first of the day’s refugees begin their journey into Ethiopia and a new life to the eager chippering of birdsong alongside now-laden carts pulled by protesting asses.

From ten thousand feet, I watch the camp complex slip below me as the UNHAS Dash-8, flight UN47W, follows the road north and west, back towards Addis. I recognize Buramino- I identify it from the layout of our project sites that I can see on the outskirst of the grid of huts, so much more ordered than the host communities- then follow the road along. Eventually I spot Kole in its bend in the track, and the river, and then the Bahale camp site- still just a near-empty plot of scrubland- right down to the outcrop of rock we stood on to survey the ground. Two months from now, this patch of desert will look like the other five sites. Shelters in neat rows, clustered in blocks, seperated by wide stretches of open ground and punctuated by NGO compounds and project sites. Deceptively ordered, from ten thousand feet. Deceptively clean.

You can’t feel the heat up here. Can’t taste the grit that blows between your teeth, or smell the stench of full latrines, or make out the heaps of disused relief packaging collecting at the edge of compounds. Can’t see the shelters wrapped over with mosquito netting, or the ones that have fallen down completely. Can’t sense the intense thirst beneath that unquenchable sun, or the fatigue that accompanies the mid-afternoon zenith. Don’t need to brace against a sudden squall of hot wind that grinds dust into the eyes, or answer the questioning gaze of young children against whom the world has stacked unfathomable odds. Can’t hear the stories that can make a grown man break down in tears. No, from ten thousand feet, it all feels rather hopeful.

9 Events that have Shaped the Humanitarian Industry

The humanitarian industry is a relatively new one in its current form. This makes it an interesting, frequently exciting one to be involved with, as it’s constantly changing. This can be a challenge, too.

I like to joke that the earliest disaster preparedness and response on record is Noah’s Ark. Then of course there’s the story of Joseph (he of Technicolour Dreamcoat ™ fame), who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams of skinny cattle devouring fat cattle as an impending famine and subsequently requisitioned harvest surplus which he then redistributed to the hungry when said famine eventuated.

Humanitarianism as we know it today has, for better or for worse, become an industry, and has developed quickly from a relatively fringe activity best left to hippies and missionaries, to a multi-billion-dollar a year sector attracting a wide range of skilled and experienced professionals. It’s unique, dynamic and, certainly from an insider’s perspective, fascinating. But the way things look today haven’t popped out of nowhere. Over the last century and a half, the humanitarian industry has been shaped by a number of key events and moments that have given rise to its current dynamics.

1. The Battle of Solferino (June 24th 1859)

At the height of the Austro-Sardinian war, a Swiss businessman by the name of Jean-Henri Dunant travelled to the small Italian town of Solferino, where he witnessed the aftermath of a battle that left forty thousands dead and wounded. So struck was he by the plight of the casualties, many of whom were abandoned and left to die, or executed by the enemy, that he forewent his business plans and spent the ensuing days helping to organize medical care for the survivors.

The experience so moved him that upon returning to Geneva, he wrote up his memories, recommending the establishment of a movement of trained and neutral volunteers who could administer medical aid to the casualties of battle, and treaties offering such people protection. His recommendations became the foundation for what was to become the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as the first Geneva Conventions.

The Committee’s proposals, initially signed and endorsed by 12 nations in 1864, recognized the need for national committees of volunteers to provide medical assistance on the battlefield, but also enshrined the neutrality of wounded soldiers. The agreed international symbol, as laid out by the signed agreements, was a red cross on a white field- the inversion of the Swiss flag, itself a symbol of neutrality.

This notion of neutrality, and of non-combattants offering non-partisan support to the injured victims of warfare, became the founding tenet of modern humanitarian organizations, and the ICRC continues to this day to occupy a unique status under International Humanitarian Law and within the rules of warfighting. The Red Cross Code of Conduct forms the guiding set of 10 principles that most major NGOs voluntarily adopt as their core values, particularly enshrining the primacy of the humanitarian imperative, neutrality and impartiality.

2. The Aftermath of World War II and the Marshall Plan (1945, 1948-51)

Following the victory of the allied forces first in the European theatre, and subsequently in Asia, most of Europe in 1945 had been devastated. The extent of destruction caused by warfare and bombardment, the loss of millions of men at the peak of their economic productivity, and the diversion of years’ worth of resources into the machinery of war, meant that both society and economy across the continent was decimated.

Conversely, because it had stimulated its economy through the production of wartime assets without suffering any destruction of its mainland infrastructure, the USA had become the first country in history to economically thrive under conditions of warfare (a dynamic that has echoes today in how the economy operates while America is at war). In order to shore up its wartime allies, to assist with the vast humanitarian needs of post-war Europe, and no doubt to maintain the health of its key trading partners, Harry Truman’s government put together an economic recovery package of unprecedented proportions. It would see some USD 13 billion invested across western Europe.

Whether due to the plan itself, or due to the simple mechanics of post-war recovery, industrial output did increase substantially during the plan’s lifetime, and was deemed in many corners to have been a great success. The Marshall Plan laid out a framework for international foreign assistance that became increasingly the norm, with large bilateral or multilateral grants or loans provided to countries with struggling economies in order to lift their productivity and stability.

As well as normalizing the concept of foreign assistance on such a large scale, another interesting side-effect of such a large humanitarian crisis was the need to have capacity to deliver support, and so the US government agreed to allow private charitable organizations provide emergency relief to war survivors. Although the charity was not a new concept, this gave new impetus to non-governmental relief agencies, and many of today’s largest NGOs appeared around this time. CARE, which is an acronym for “Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere”, in fact originally stood for “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe”.

A third impact of the end of the Second World War was of course the founding of the United Nations (UN), to replace the defunct League of Nations that had failed so miserably to prevent World War II in the first place. This occured in 1945. As well as spawning a host of international agreements on everything from trade to human rights, the UN also gave birth to a spread of sub-organizations with specific mandates. Among the most pressing in the post-war years was the plight of the tens of millions of refugees forced from their home in the fighting- and thus was born the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1947, which three years later became the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the most dynamic and critical international organizations in the humanitarian field today.

3. The Biafran Airlift (1967-70)

In 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria following a series of coups, counter-coups and ethnic killings, and the ethnic Igbo in the south of the country declared their own homeland, the state of Biafra. The Nigerian government responded by blockading Biafra, and a humanitarian crisis resulted, with millions of civilians caught up without food and medical supplies.

In response, a huge humanitarian operation was launched, and a mix of well-meaning volunteers and mercenaries, funded by charity organizations, began flying food and medical supplies into Biafra. The mission was fraught with danger- the Nigerian airforce would shoot down any relief flights claiming (most likely accurately) that weapons were being smuggled to the resistance. Flights were flown in at night, without lights, and landings orchestrated on roads in the bush where supplies could then be delivered to starving civilians.

By war’s end as many as three million people may have died, mostly due to a mixture of starvation and disease. The involvement of humanitarian actors, however, has subsequently been condemned. Not only did the relief flights facilitate the smuggling of weapons to the Biafran rebels, but some critics claimed that the relief assistance merely gave the Biafrans the resolve to hold out longer, exacerbating the humanitarian situation rather than surrendering and allowing the seige to end. One report put the toll due to humanitarian action at 180,000 dead. This was the largest and most high-profile instance to that point of humanitarian intervention being arguably partisan, and also contributing significant harm, not just good.

Another important cameo played out in the Biafran civil war. Red Cross workers were allowed to work in the war-affected areas to provide medical assistance, but under the guise of neutrality were not allowed to speak about what they were seeing. Witnessing atrocities against civilians committed by government forces, as well as attacks against humanitarian staff, this enraged some of the volunteers. Most prominent among these was Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, who felt strongly that the Red Cross’s stance on neutrality was an ethical compromise. He determined to establish an organization that was free of any government influence and could speak out on behalf of those affected by crisis, and the NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was born. MSF remains one of the foremost NGOs to this day, and is fiercely independant and proud (to a fault…?) of its independence from government, military and even international organizational influence. The actions of Kouchner and his peers also set a precedent for relief agencies advocating on behalf of the rights of the victims of conflict and injustice, not simply being silent responders.

Biafra introduced a whole new complexity to the idea of ‘neutral’ aid agencies on several fronts.

4. The Ethiopia Famine (1983-5) and Live Aid (1985)

From 1983, a combination of failed rains, civil warfare and the purges and collectivist policies of a communist dictatorship had pushed Ethiopia into one of the worst famines of the 20th century. By its end, 8 million people would be affected by famine, with between 500,000 and one million deaths. Images of its victims, made famous by BBC reporter Michael Buerke’s dispatches from the field, were broadcast onto TV screens across the western world, making the Ethiopian famine the first to really be witnessed by a western audience.

Galvanized by public sympathy, a group of some of the most popular musicians of the day joined together, led by the enthusiastic Bob Geldof, to form Band Aid. They recording a song to raise funds for Ethiopian famine victims, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ which became a Christmas Number One in the UK charts in late 1984. In 1985, Geldof again coordinated efforts for a fundraising concert, held simultaneously in the UK and the US, which ultimately garnered an audience of a little under 2 billion people worldwide and raised an estimated $150 million.

The Ethiopian famine and the subsequent fundraising efforts marked a watershed moment in the history of aid fundraising. Large amounts of fundraising money were no longer just the domain of governments, nor were charities restricted to small pockets of whatever they could raise through collection baskets and faithful donors. Furthermore, the idea of a world out there- the third world- experiencing hardship was suddenly projected into peoples’ homes and made a part of their day-to-day consciousness. Since that time, people- particularly in the west- have remained aware of third world disasters. It is part of the collective experience and expectation that there is a poor world out there that suffers things that people in the west do not tend to.

On the up side, this has made the job of convincing people of the need to give easier. There is also a downside. Since Live Aid and many of the confronting images that were broadcast to shock people into giving, people have slowly become increasingly desensitized to images of suffering. The awareness-raising and media campaigns for the Ethiopia famine also represented the major incursion of shocking images into the public space, to the detriment of the dignity of survivors which has taken years to break down (and is still a challenge in some sectors).

5. The Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2004) and Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS)

The civil war between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) ultimately resulted in two million deaths and four million refugees. Africa’s longest-running civil war, and possibly the most destructive, it too resulted in devastating images of famine as population groups were forced from their homes to settle in large, unsanitary camps where food supplies were precarious and disease rampant.

The international community established Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a consortium of UN agencies and three dozen NGOs, in 1989, with the aim of delivering assistance to the mainly southern displaced people in camps both within and outside Sudan itself. A logistics airhead was set up in the small Turkana town of Lokichoggio, in Kenya, from which a vast operation of airdrops and relief deliveries was flown into Sudan. At the height of operations, Loki was the second busiest airport in Africa. OLS remains functional today, although not to the extent it was through the 1990s.

The civil war in Sudan was in part a proxy of the Cold War, and as such western allegiences found themselves favouring the southern rebels, both in terms of ideology and in terms of potential access to oil and mineral revenues in the long run. This was reflected in the huge amounts of funding that were invested in OLS, enabling such a massive aerial logistics operation. The offshoot of this was the explosion in budget of many of the NGOs party to OLS, catapulting some of them into the massive organizations they are today.

OLS also became an unwitting party to the conflict. Food aid became a weapon in the war on the ground, and was used to tactical advantage by both sides. By feeding humanitarian information to OLS, belligerents could influence where food drops were headed, and because populations would move to where the food was, they could thus influence the movement of people to their advantage in the field. It was an ugly ploy that cost the lives of thousands.

OLS’ involvement in the Sudanese civil war was a turning point in the humanitarian industry. As it became clear that the impact of food aid was having a detrimental effect on the people it was supposed to be helping, it began to become clear to the aid industry as a whole that they could no longer act out of the right motivations and still be operating with a clear conscience. The aid industry could no longer feign innocence- it was clearly becoming complicit in the conflict- and nowhere has this been more obviously demonstrated than in the Sudan civil war, and the ultimate secession of South Sudan as a state. With the humanitarian sector essentially propping up the southern government- even to this day- there is little doubt that South Sudan is a state that was created by the intervention of humanitarian actors. I have not seen any studies that suggest what the humanitarian impact might have been without OLS intervention, but I wonder whether the war would have lasted as long or cost as many lives, and I am utterly convinced that, for better or for worse, South Sudan would not be a state today.

The high profile of OLS, particularly the drama of large-scale airdrops, also had the unfortunate side-effect of cementing in the donor public’s mind that this was what aid was about- truck-and-chuck. It’s an assumption that twenty years on, the aid industry still struggles to re-educate the public about, making it hard to raise funds for other less appealing but often far more relevant issues such as human rights, advocacy and institutional capacity-building.

6. The Rwandan Genocide (April-July 1994)

During a hundred day period in mid-1994, Hutu extremists slaughtered over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a calculated, cruel campaign of extermination. Based on old ethnic tensions, a history of tit-for-tat killing sprees, a hate-fueled propaganda message, and the meddling and inaction of international powers, the Rwandan genocide remains one of the darkest stains on the concience of modern history.

The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, at the time a rebel army, swept across Rwanda and eventually brought the killing of Tutsis to something of a denouement. The Hutu extremists, together with nearly two million ethnic Hutus, fled ahead of the advancing front and found themselves in dire camps on the rocky lava flows of eastern Zaire. Unable to dig pit latrines, and living in deplorable conditions, cholera broke out and killed tens of thousands of the refugees in a matter of weeks.

While the international community had stalled and stalled again during the genocide, images of Africans dying by the thousands on TV screens now galvanized them to action, and millions of dollars worth of aid was flown into the Hutu camps around Goma- while survivors of the genocide were still receiving scant attention. As dollars flowed into the camps, the orchestrators of the genocide and their militias consolidated control over the population (and the aid resources), preventing the return of Hutus into Rwanda to begin a reconciliation process, and even launching attacks back into Rwanda (which the newly-installed Rwandan government returned with gusto). Eighteen years on, fighting continues to plague the forests of eastern DRC (as Zaire has since been renamed), with vicious slaughter of civilians and proliferation of horrific rape a daily occurence, while old scores are settled by both sides. The invasion of Goma by the Tutsi-backed M23 rebel group this week is the latest chapter in this story.

The failure of the international community to act to stop the genocide (something that could have been done with the right political will), and then the subsequent outpouring of international sympathy and support to the very purpotrators of that genocide- all in the name of impartiality and the primacy of the humanitarian imperative- remains the blackest spot on the history of the aid community. The concepts of neutrality, impartiality and humanitarian imperative all took a beating, and where at one time they might have been considered black-and-white standards, since Rwanda there has been a new appreciation for the shades of grey they embody.

The Rwandan genocide was one of three humanitarian interventions that went horribly wrong in the early 90s- the others being Somalia (1993) and the former Yugoslavia (1992-95). In the former, aid was appropriated by warlords and used as a weapon against a suffering populace, ultimately leading to a catastrophic peace-enforcing intervention. In the latter, UN forces with a sketchy mandate struggled to make sense of the deep-seated hatred of the belligerents, their biggest failure being the murder of 8,000 men and boys by Serb extremists in the beseiged muslim enclave of Srebrenica- even while a battalion of dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing.

The aftermath of these failed interventions gave rise to a whole new understanding of the complexity of aid and the potential for humanitarian assistance to be outright unethical. Approaches such as Do No Harm, which are mainstream today, were birthed from the Goma debacle, while standards such as the Sphere Project arose, in part to try and ensure that humanitarian actors were singing from the same songsheet and not tripping over each others’ toes.

In addition, the highly complex nature of operations following Rwanda began to make it clear that aid work was no longer just about well-meaning do-gooders with a social conscience. Humanitarian actors needed to be able to work within the highly complex contexts which aid found itself being delivered in- to be able to work both with the technical aspects, and also the political ones. Where up to and throughout the 1980s it was generally enough to have a heartbeat and a willingness to work in the field, the fallout from Rwanda, Somalia and Yugoslavia saw a push towards the ever-increasing professionalisation of the aid sector.

Ultimately, Rwanda served as a deeply humbling experience for the humanitarian industry. If nothing else, it robbed the industry of the moral high ground, and forced it to accept its place as a player within a political landscape, often to the detriment of the people it purports to support. No event before or since has communicated this message so clearly.

7. The Bombing of the Canal Hotel (August 19th 2003)

Following the September 11 attacks on US soil, the United States led a ‘coalition of the willing’ against alleged terrorist targets, first in Afghanistan from late 2001, and subsequently in Iraq from early 2003. While the aerial assaults and troop incursions quickly broke the conventional forces of both nations (where they existed), the result was a bitter and drawn-out insurgency overlaid on a highly complex set of tribal and sectarian divisions that has turned both nations into two of the most unstable places on earth today.

As coalition forces swept through different parts of each country, the UN and NGOs flooded in behind them to pick up the pieces- providing humanitarian assistance to areas that had been difficult for them to reach in prior times due to political and security restrictions. With pro-coalition governments in each nation ostensibly supporting the foreign presence, humanitarian space opened up rapidly, and was quickly filled by humanitarian actors.

The net effect of this to the anti-western belligerents- who saw the coalition invasion of their homelands as an occupation and who framed it as an attack on Islam- was to view (not entirely without cause) the presence of western aid workers as simply a second wave of the occupation. While the first was a military presence, the second was a cultural colonization that sought to unravel conservative social norms with western notions of human rights, gender equality, tolerance and so-forth. The humanitarians became the enemy.

On August 19th 2003, a truck bomber drove into the compound at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, based out of the Canal Hotel. 22 people were killed, mostly UN staff, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative to Iraq, whose office was allegedly specifically targeted. One hundred were wounded. The attack was claimed by al Qaeda in Iraq. It was followed a month later by another bombing at the same site, and then a month after that, by a coordinated series of bombings that also targeted the Red Cross compound, killing 12. When it became clear that the humanitarian industry was no longer considered neutral by the belligerents but was being specifically targeted, NGOs and the UN withdrew rapidly from Iraq and began remote operations, based mostly from Jordan.

While aid workers had suffered incidental attacks, particularly while carrying out operations in active conflict zones, and had even suffered occasional deliberate attacks (for example the killing of six Red Cross workers in Chechnya in 1996), this was the first time that the industry had been targeted by a high-level campaign sending such a clear message. It did not mark the end of such attacks, either. Among other subsequent high-profile deliberate targeting of aid workers include the murder of 5 MSF staff in Afghanistan in mid-2004, the abduction and execution of CARE’s Iraq program director Margaret Hassan in November 2004, and the murder by militias of 17 ACF workers in Sri Lanka in August 2006. Roughly two hundred aid workers a year are victims of violence while on operations.

The Canal Hotel Bombing essentially set a precedent that said the humanitarian industry was no longer a neutral, impartial body but a party to the conflict, and as such a legitimate target. The industry has not been the same since. Aid workers now go through intensive security training before deploying to insecure areas. Aid agencies are jumpy about pulling their staff from hostile situations. Where once an aid agency’s logo might have protected them from violence, there are many places in the world where it is now seen to be something that puts them at risk. Significant portions of NGO and UN aid budgets are now spent on security, and in some parts of the world, NGOs struggle to differentiate themselves from military actors and government contractors who are agents of foreign policy and do not hold to humanitarian principles. No single event in the last ten years has had a bigger impact on the landscape of humanitarian action in insecure environments than the August 2003 bombing.

8. The South Asian Tsunami (December 26th 2004)

Early in the morning on December 26th, an enourmous tectonic rupture beneath the Indian Ocean triggered an earthquake of magnitude 9.2, generating a gigantic tsunami. The wave struck the Indonesian region of Aceh first, where the wave height was estimated at as high as twenty metres coming ashore, before other devastating waves washed up against southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and eventually even the east coast of Africa. More than 230,000 people died and five million were impacted.

The event made the term ‘tsunami’ a household word as shocking images of destruction emerged on television sets and the toll grew almost hourly, almost defying belief. Western audiences, particularly struck by the devastation on the tourist beaches of southern Thailand, where thousands of European holiday-makers were among the casualties, poured sympathy and money into the subsequent relief response. Ultimately, $14 billion would be provided in international humanitarian assistance.

The public response to the disaster was unprecedented and overwhelming. NGOs quite literally received more money than they knew what to do with- and while one (MSF) publically closed its appeal once it had reached an amount it felt it could work with, most others continued to allow the funds to flow in, creating a massive surplus. The result was an organizational disaster as agencies tripped over themselves to try and spend their funds in a timely manner, squabbling over response sectors and geographical areas in order to stake out their territory and not dissapoint their donors. Many smaller NGOs popped up specifically in response to the tsunami with no knowledge of the humanitarian sector or its standards, and coordination across the board became at points nearly disfunctional.

The massive response to the tsunami- an admittedly enourmous natural disaster- occured against the backdrop of a number of other major world crises, particularly the war in Darfur, but also a devastating conflict in DRC, both of which were suffering from a paucity of international attention and funding. This frustration was exacerbated by the fact that the actual humanitarian needs following the tsunami were not as great as the scale of the event itself might suggest. While the death toll was high, the damage was limited to relatively narrow coastal areas, and the countries most affected (Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand), while overwhelmed, all had some national capacity to cope. Nor were the majority of survivors at the same level of risk as those in IDP camps in Dafur or eastern DRC.

This reality led NGOs into a period of considerable soul-searching, and the revamping of fundraising processes, particularly around the concept of raising too much money for a crisis that did not need the funding, and how that funding might be redirected. The issue of transparency around NGO spending became a prominent theme.
The single biggest criticism, however, remained that of coordination. Although the UN’s cluster system had begun to be piloted, the failures within the humanitarian community in this regard created a renewed impetus for focusing on collaboration. In the years following the tsunami, the UN’s Humanitarian Reform program has become mainstreamed, and coordination between major humanitarian actors is now the norm- if at times still flawed- in any significant humanitarian response, and the central role of UN OCHA is largely undisputed.

The vast amounts of money raised and the numbers of humanitarian actors involved did however create a prime testing ground for a number of cross-agency initiatives. Humanitarian accountability, for example, was piloted across a range of response programs, while the notion of interagency evaluations also gained traction. Existing humanitarian standards such as Sphere were given a rigorous outing, and found to be largely robust.

Other knock-on effects of the tsunami response relate particularly to donors. The disaster set a new precedent for a shocking event against which all other disasters would be measured. It demonstrated just how fickle western donors could be (not a new truth)- the outpouring of assistance was demonstrably linked to people’s identification with Thailand as a holiday spot. It also raised the issue of donor fatigue. So many people had given significant amounts to the tsunami response that it became difficult to fundraise for any other disasters, including areas of arguably greater need, such as Darfur.

9. The Haiti Earthquake (January 12th, 2010)

When a large (7.0) and shallow earthquake struck near Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, it was that city’s vulnerability rather than the enormity of the quake itself that resulted in the scale of catastrophe that ensued. Between two and three hundred thousand people died, as many more were injured, and a third of Haiti’s population affected. Against the backdrop of a fragile political and economic state with entrenched poverty, and the intensity of destruction within the city itself, the impact was devastating.

Because almost all major infrastructure in Port-au-Prince was damaged or destroyed, aid floundered reaching the survivors. Reporting on the disaster was fast. Within a couple of hours of the quake, it was headline news, and details were pouring out aided by social media. Within twenty-four hours, most major networks had journalists and film crews on the ground filing reports, and the world’s giving public, again shocked by the scale of the tragedy, began to give.

They also began to ask questions. Within seventy-two hours, criticism was being ladled out that the emergency response was too slow, that international responders were not doing enough to get aid to the victims. The ever-accelerating news cycle, aided and abetted by Web 2.0, was looking for ways to build on the story. People, not understanding the complexity of aid as anything more than truck-and-chuck logistics, grew rapidly frustrated with what they saw as unacceptable delays.

The Haitians too played to the media. Savvy and well-connected themselves, they understood the potential of broadcast images to rally support for their crisis, and there were numerous reports of crowds playing up and becoming aggressive only once the news cameras were on the scene.

Crowdsourcing of disaster response information came in to play. Use of text messaging, combined with web-based crowd-sourcing platforms, triangulated the location of trapped victims and directed search-and-rescue teams to dig them out. The question of whether this was a good thing or not remains unanswered.

Haiti became the world’s first participatory disaster in many ways. Not only were people following along with information in near-real time- and contributing to it- but so too people felt that they had a right to get directly invovled. While the South Asian Tsunami had generated a lot of startup NGOs, the scale paled compared to what happened in Haiti. Due to its proximity to the US, as well as strong ties through the Haitian diaspora there, thousands- literally- of well-meaning but thoroughly unqualified citizens filled suitcases with money and flew on over to Haiti to contribute to the relief efforts. At one point, there were reported to be over ten thousand NGOs operating in Port-au-Prince.

While the UN coordination mechanisms had become well established by the time of the Haiti earthquake, they were insufficient to deal with the sheer number of ‘humanitarian’ actors, leading to accusations of poor coordination. In fact, most major humanitarian actors were coordinating reasonably well under the circumstances. The problem was, the influx of do-it-yourself do-gooders had no knowledge of the standards of behaviour developed to manage exactly this sort of issue, and simply did their own thing. Ironically, despite nearly thirty years of increasing standardization and professionalisation of the aid sector, Haiti marked a return to the days where anybody with a heartbeat, a will, and a wad of notes could carry out aid work.

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From its humble beginnings as a simple set of agreements around the treatment by volunteers of wounded soldiers a hundred and fifty years ago, the humanitarian sector has ballooned into a high profile, multi-billion-dollar and increasingly professional industry. The clear-cut principle of neutrality has been built upon, and then increasingly nuanced as the implications of high-value aid resources flowing into conflict and post-disaster settings has become increasingly understood. Aid workers have gone from being unsung heroes protected by their badges, to targets in an increasingly violent playing field.

Increased critical awareness of the impact of aid has led to the development of more and more standards and tools to unpack that complexity, while tragic mistakes have lent a sombre, self-critical and often cynical edge to the notion of international do-gooders.

The expectations of a giving public have shifted too, from a time when charity was the domain of churches and old ladies, to today where major emergencies become causes celebres among teenagers or corporate businessfolk, and revenues are measured in the billions. So too as the world has shrunk, ease of travel has increased, and communications media has accelerated, the giving public is increasingly interacting with disasters in near-real-time as they unfold, creating expectations often unrealistic at best, very often ignorant.

Aid now operates in a highly politicized environment with rapid changes, almost incomprehensible flows of information, and a vast and shifting range of constituents, all of whom require satisfaction on one level or another. With every major disaster or event, the aid world changes, and the goal-posts shifts.

For all its failings over the decades, one thing that stands out is that the aid industry- like many of the people who have to respond on the ground- is by very nature flexible and adaptable, changing as its circumstances change. It’s made its mistakes, and it remains a deeply flawed sector. But for all that, I couldn’t see myself in any other.

What do you think? Are there any other key events in the history of humanitarianism that you feel have had a major impact on the development of the sector?

Emergency Survival Tips: New Series

My parents tell a story from when I was six, which foreshadowed everything I was to become. At the time we lived in Wellington, and driving past the harbour one afternoon, we watched a waterskier towed behind a speedboat. I called forward to my parents,

“That’s a very dangerous thing to do.”

“Why is that?” they asked. No doubt they thought I was weighing up the risks of a high-speed crash, an accident leading to drowning, even something as obscure as a shark attack.

Said I, “Because a seaplane might land on your head.”

It was no great surprise to them when I became a disaster response professional.

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I am the Worst Case Scenario guy. I was in the Boy Scouts less than two years, but Be Prepared has been my motto, before and ever since. My heroes are MacGyver and Bear Grylls. I travel with three first aid kits, perpetually have a pocket knife in pocket, know my escape route from pretty much any room I’m in, and have a constantly updating list of contingency plans in my head.

I suspect I may take my survival just a little too seriously.

But not as seriously as this guy.

However I wanted to throw together a few posts on simple survival tips. This was inspired by a couple of recent events. About a week ago, Melbourne was struck by a minor earthquake. Minor, in geological terms, but at 5.3 on the Richter scale, it was bigger than most Melburnians had ever experienced. After the excitement of the shaking had subdued, my wife (Madam Inside Out) turned to me and said,

“What should you do to survive an earthquake?”

Needless to say, I had an answer for her, and it wasn’t short.

Today I watched friends post images of the wildfires burning out of control near Colorado Springs. It’s been more than three years since the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged the outskirts of Melbourne, but reading about the conditions in Colorado- high temperatures, dessicating humidity and gusting winds- it was impossible not to be reminded of that day, and the grief it brought so many people here. I found myself thinking I really hope somebody is giving those families the right advice right now.

So I figured I’d put together a few of the bits and bobs I’ve picked up over the years that improve your chances of not becoming a statistic on a news ticker. Some of this I’ve picked up in my career as an emergency response professional and as a trained wilderness first responder. Some of it is stuff I’ve looked into out of curiosity. And some of it’s just plain sensible.

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Before I go any further, a disclaimer or two. I’m not professionally or legally qualified to be giving you survival tips, so if you have genuine questions or concerns about your own safety or that of loved ones, please check with a qualified source. This series will be much more about sharing tidbits of information, discussing disaster and survival trends as I’ve come across them in my own experience, and hopefully triggering some dialogue.

If you’re living in a shack somewhere in Montana, convinced the UN is trying to hunt you down, and you’re looking for information that will help you survive the coming apocalypse, this series isn’t for you either. Not much conspiracy going on over here.

You know who you are.

I’m an emergency management professional with direct and indirect experience in disaster response, a generalist’s overview of the sector, and a knack for making information interesting (or so I’m told). I’m not an expert in any one given area of emergency response, and therefore I really welcome anybody reading this post who is an expert to share their advice and correct my mistakes.

And finally, if you have any questions ask them, and if you have any suggestions about what disaster scenarios you’d like to see discussed here, suggest them! I haven’t decided precisely what topics I’ll cover, though I’m  thinking earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes will be onboard, as a starter.

If you’re very, very good, I may even include something on zombies.

Better safe than disembowelled alive by a horde of the ravenous undead.

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Before I launch into subsequent posts, however, I want to share a three key pointers to surviving any type of disaster. They’re quite simple.

1. Know the threats.

2. Have a plan.

3. Rehearse that plan.

1. Know the Threats. To be prepared to survive an emergency, any emergency, you have to have some idea of what the threats you face are. These might be the threats you face in the home where you live, or the threats associated with a particular journey you’re making that takes you someplace different, or the threats associated with a work deployment. Identify what those risks might be. Nine times out of ten, the biggest risks we face are the mundane things we write off- things like vehicle accidents.

Another time I’ll put up a more technical post on risk management and familiarise you with some of the concepts and vocabulary. But for now, I just want to encourage you to think of the things in your space that could possibly cause you harm. Do you live in an earthquake-prone region? Somewhere that has a hurricane season? Near a river bed that could flood? Does your commute to work take you through a high-crime district of your city? Do you frequently have to travel on unsafe public transportation? Is your office well prepared for a fire?

Ask yourself critical questions about the places you and your loved ones spend time or pass through. Find out from local councils or emergency services what threats they are aware of and plan for. Talk to friends, neighbours, colleagues or other locals who are familiar with the area. Arm yourself with a knowledge base.

Knowing what threats could affect you is the critical first step in being ready to survive them. Without this information, you can be blindsided by something that you might otherwise have been able to survive.

2. Have a Plan. Once you’ve identified what threats you might face in a given context, you need to ask yourself, so what? If this threat becomes a reality, what will I do? What will I want others under my care to do? How will I do this? What resources might I need to make this happen?

Your plan needs to be realistic. And appropriately scaled. Ultimately, survival can be a bit of a selfish thing. We’re talking about how you’re going to survive here. If you’re at home or in your car, then you’re thinking about how you’ll help your family make it through in one piece. At the office, then perhaps it’s the members of your team. At this stage I’m not priming you to be Action Man and carry the weight of responsibility for your entire office or apartment block (although if you decide you can see some major holes in an organization’s disaster preparedness, by all means raise it with the right people).

Think about escape routes. What’s the quickest or safest way out of here under circumstance X? Does that hold up for circumstance Y? Safe zones.Where do I need to get to before I can consider myself safe? What if I can’t get there? Behaviour. Should I be yelling instructions at people? Keeping a low profile? How will I keep my head clear? Equipment. Is there anything I should have on or near me that would help me in this situation? If an emergency arises, can I get to it in time to be of help? Other people. How am I going to help the people I care about? Do I have a moral or ethical obligation to help anybody else? Mobilising additional support. Who would I contact in this situation? How would I be able to reach them? What information would they need of me, and vice-versa? Longer-term survival. How long would I need to be able to cope for? What else might I need under these circumstances?

Make sure your plan is something you can actually do. It’s no good coming up with a plan that relies on the SAS showing up with a helicopter and a strike team to evacuate you off the top of your office tower. Likewise, don’t plan to rappel out of your 18^th storey window if you don’t have three hundred feet of rope, a harness, an ATC and several years’ climbing experience behind you. And keep it simple. In an emergency, you can expect to be running on adrenaline, to experience tunnel vision, and quite possibly to be scared out of your mind. You’ll be capable of basic physical responses, but not necessarily very much more, so don’t expect your plan to include a large amount of higher cerebral function activity, such as trying to calculate the load that a collapsing wall should be able to bear, while trying to decide whether you should scramble under it or not.

And make sure that plan is adequately resourced. If your plan calls for a first-aid kit to be on hand, it’s no good for that first-aid kit to be listed as a to-do on your kitchen whiteboard. It needs to be in your glove-box, or in your desk drawer at work, or within arm’s reach of your bed.

3. Rehearse that Plan. Having a plan is all very well and good, but you need to make sure you know that plan inside-out if you want to make use of it during a crisis. The reason being, firstly, as outlined above. In an emergency, there’s no guarantee you’ll have full control of your higher mental functions- adrenaline does funny things to us. The more you’ve rehearsed a plan, the more likely it is to be embedded deeper in the instinctive portions of your mind and memory, and the more likely you are to be able to carry it out.

Research has shown that in plane crashes, there is a tendency for passengers to retrace their steps to the exit through which they first entered the aircraft- even if that exit is all the way at the front of the aircraft, and they are at the back. This is due to very old cerebral coding that dates back to when our mammalian ancestors lived in caves, or in thick jungle, and when danger threatened (usually a predator) their best form of escape was almost certainly the way they had come in by. Of course, an airplane has multiple escape routes, one hopefully close by, but you need to conciously tell your brain to use this route in an emergency. If you leave it to the moment of the emergency itself, your lizard brain may well have taken over and kicked your cognitive functions upstairs to wait it out- which may unfortunately compromise your chances for survival.

This, incidentally, is why some airlines, during their safety brief, ask you to count the number of seats to your nearest exit. It’s a way of cognitively preparing the brain- even at a subconcious level- to record the pathway to the nearest exit. I do it every time I sit down in a new plane seat- forwards and backwards. If at all possible, it’s worth physically walking the emergency escape route, as this layers it even deeper into your mind and increases the likelihood that your brain will revert to it. That, and it helps you identify any weaknesses in your plan or threats you may have missed.

Finally, and closely related to this, visualize your actions. Studies have shown that people who are mentally prepared for an emergency have a higher likelihood of surviving it. Visualization is an incredibly powerful tool in this regard. If you can picture in your head how you’ll react in a given situation, you are essentially preparing your mind (and also your body) to do just that. As in the above-mentioned plane scenario, one thing I do in every aircraft I travel is not just count the rows to the exit, but to mentally picture myself walking down the aisle, and then running through in my head the step-by-step actions I need to take to open the emergency exit and leave the aircraft. Is it one of those hatches you need to pull inside the aircraft? Is there a latch I need to throw before pulling the handle? Do I have to climb onto a wing or jump down a slide?

Repetition is key. The more you go over something, the more likely you are to respond as you imagine. The better your knowledge of the threats you face, the better you can plan for them, and the more accurately your visualisation will respond to the circumstances you might face.

Hopefully, you’ll never, ever need it.

Know the Threats.

Make a Plan.

Rehearse that Plan.

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Of course, you can rely on a combination of dumb luck and your own spark of personal genius should an emergency arise on your doorstep- and you can never, of course, plan for every eventuality. But if it comes down to a choice between running through some common-sense preparatory steps for a possible crisis, or sitting back and hoping for the best, well, my parents have known all along which way I lean.

Further Reading:

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes- and Why, by Amanda Ripley

Systems, Complexity, and Staff Realities

In a post last year (time flies) I discussed the application of a framework known as Cynefin to Humanitarian Response. The below post, which I plan to be the first of several, goes into more depth around some of the conclusions drawn from the earlier article, particularly as relates to how organizations manage their staff and operations in complex and chaotic contexts. I hope later articles will look at other aspects of complexity and aid work, and exploring more adaptive approaches to emergency management, and I look forward to discussions with various readers who, I know, are far more conversant in this stuff than I am.

I won’t go over the original framework in detail. Please see the article for more detail or if you’re not familiar with Cynefin. The framework was initially developed by Dave Snowden (@snowded) whose work and that of his associates can be followed on their blog “Cognitive Edge“

In brief, Cynefin assumes that contexts and systems fit into one of five realms- Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disordered.

In Simple systems, cause and effect are known and linked through direct, predictable causality. In Complicated systems, cause and effect again have a direct relationship, but this may be through several stages in a process which may require a level of investigation to understand. In Complex systems, cause and effect are related, but the influence of feedback mechanisms an external forcings mean that they are hard to perceive or predict. In Chaotic systems, cause and effect may not be perceptibly linked and the context is changing rapidly, with factors contributing to change often unknown and a high level of uncertainty. In Disorder, cause and effect are not linked at all.

As Humanitarian organizations, we can apply systems to contexts within these realms. However, systems must be applied to contexts in the same realm. If we apply Simple systems to a Chaotic context, or Complicated systems to a Complex context, we will end up with disfunction.

Most of the systems that we as NGOs utilize to do our work are either Simple (Finance systems, procurement processes, audit requirements) or Complicated (project designs, logical framework analysis, problem tree analysis). However the places that we work are either Complex (the majority of communities we work in in rural and urban areas) or Chaotic (rapid-onset disaster responses).

Take, for example, a Response Manager who has deployed into Port-au-Prince five days after the earthquake of January 2010. It is her job to ensure that assistance reaches affected communities as quickly as possible. To do this she requires supplies and equipment (which costs money) and people. To source supplies and equipment she must follow procurement procedures which state that 3 bids must be submitted in a transparent manner and then selected via a senior committee meeting, all of which must be documented and backed up with tender calls, invoices, receipts, bank statements and goods-received notes. To get people she must follow HR procedures which require posts to be open for a certain amount of time, a certain number of interviews, a selection panel and review process and careful documentation.

These are all Simple systems.

Her context is Chaotic. She can’t find 3 suppliers because many would-be suppliers have either been killed or injured in the earthquake, had their stores destroyed, or are looking after injured relatives. Communication networks have been destroyed so the only way to find suppliers is to travel around looking for them, but roads are blocked and there is insecurity. Her team is scattered all over the city doing assessments so there is not enough people for a committee meeting- nor is there time. The printer is not working properly because the generator keeps switching off, and they can’t buy paper yet. And there is no time to follow lengthy HR procedures because work can’t begin until they have local hires.

Our Response Manager has two options. The first is to do as the organization and its systems tell her, and comply. However if she does this, the response will choke to a halt for days, even weeks, while systems are fulfilled. There is a good chance she will not meet indicators for program success related to goods delivered and numbers of people helped, and her work will be judged a failure.

Her other option is to work around the systems. Go ahead and purchase from whichever supplier she can find. Let documentation lapse below expected standards. Hire staff who are recommended by other local staff or organizations without following full HR protocols. However if she takes this route, she will be deemed to be in breach of company policy. At best, she will have to spend time at a later date documenting her decisions and/or justifying to an audit panel why processes were flaunted, creating more work for herself and others, and in the eyes of some parts of the organization, failing in her workplace integrity. At worst she may face disciplinary action from the organization.

While this may appear to be an overly simplistic narrative (and indeed many organizations have a different set of expectations around some basic protocols such as finance and logistics, to ensure operations in emergencies can continue), the point is valid across most aid agencies. Staff are deployed into highly Complex or Chaotic situations, and are expected  largely to adhere to Simple or Complicated systems which do not match that context.

In this way we end up with a duality in how we operate and how we measure success. We talk about being ‘Humanitarian’ organizations and existing for the wellbeing of the communities we’re trying to support. But we actually measure our success through how well we comply to the systems we use to run operations- Have finance processes been followed? Have audit requirements been fulfilled? Have human resources protocols been engaged?

In the same vein: Have SMART indicators been reached? Have activities and outputs been acheived? Do gender audits measure up?

Systems that make sense in a Simple or Complicated paradigm, but which do not work in a Complex or Chaotic one.

What to do then?

Our Response Manager, as mentioned, has two choices. Which one you would pick probably depends on whether you are a field-based program manager operating largely in a Complex paradigm or an office-based grant accountant operating largely in a Simple paradigm; whether you see success as operational output, or system compliance; whether you (or your boss) understand your primary client to be the target community, an internal auditor, a donor, or a senior manager. Please note, in this comparison, there is no denegration implied in the use of the word ‘Simple’- it is an organizational context and nothing more or less in this discussion.

Most field practicioners have tales of when they or colleagues with them have ignored head-office regulations and bent or broken the rules to make something happen in the field. Generally they get away with it.

I remember working during the rainy season in a famine response as a junior field worker (but token expat) in the car with a local field manager. I took a call from our logistics officer. He could get 10,000 mosquito nets for the program today- an outlay of a very substantial amount of money- but if we didn’t make the purchase straight away, it would be four months before the stocks returned and we wouldn’t get any more before next year. What should he do?

Normal process required layers of approval for an item of this cost. The field manager and I held a brief conversation, agreed that the nets were crucial to helping slow the spread of malaria during the rainy season and which was killing children, and we then told the logistics officer to make the purchase.

It was a breach of organizational protocols. Way, way, way outside my level of authority. Or the field manager’s, for that matter. But it was also the right thing to do for the communities we were serving. Malaria wouldn’t care that we’d followed procedure.

That certainly isn’t the last time I’ve broken company policy- and I don’t expect it to be, as long as policy restricts my ability to do the work I need to.

Talking to other aid worker colleagues, I hear stories like this all the time. ‘The rules say this, but I ingored them and got the job done instead.’

Most aid workers out there reading this probably have your own stories- times you’ve broken the rules, or watched others do it. Please do share those stories in the comments section below.

I want to draw out three points from this:

1. Principle versus Protocol

An underlying tension here is that aid work is a principled industry. When I say that, I recognize the contradiction that implies. An industry is soulless- literally. It is a set of rules, regulations and institutions geared to a particular set of outcomes. It is amoral by nature.

The people who populate an industry, by contrast, are not. They are people with beliefs, experience, motivations and interests.

The people who make up the aid industry tend, on a whole, to be a principled bunch. Many work for organizations whose values they align with. Many work for less pay than they could earn elsewhere because they believe in the task they are working towards.

By operating in the manner we do, overlaying Simple-realm systems over a Complex- or Chaotic-realm situation, aid workers often have to choose between following protocol (what is the right thing to do according to Simple rules) or following principle (what is the right thing to do according to the Complex context). And, where you deal with principled people, you end up with people working around the protocols to fulfil those principles.

I’m serious. Ask any field aid worker and see how many stories they have about doing just that.

But in acknowledging this, we also have to acknowledge two truths:

a) We are making more work for our staff in the field- i.e. they have to circumnavigate the barriers we put in their way

b) Our systems are, apparently, not appropriate to context in Complex and Chaotic situations

2. Decision-Makers versus Compliers

If we put staff who are good at complying into a complex or chaotic context and give them simple or complicated systems to comply to, we will end up with a situation where the boxes are ticked, but the context is not responded to appropriately.

To avoid this, we need decision-makers who can work around compliance hurdles and still acheive organizational objectives.

And for this to happen, we need the right sort of decision-makers.

We don’t want to throw compliance issues out of the window here. These systems are there for a reason. To measure program effectiveness, or to prevent corruption, or to create accountability to donors and communities. All good things. Just done in an appropriate way.

We don’t want people who ignore the good intent behind inappropriate systems. We want people who can internalise these intentions, then base their decisions accordingly. Then we have people who don’t allow systems to prevent them from reaching the aims they’re trying to acheive, but who also ensure that the principles behind those systems are maintained. Such as transparency, integrity, accountability…

What we’re talking about is value-based decision-making. We need staff who can be trusted to make decisions based on principles (whether organizational or humanitarian- probably both).

What’s important is not the process which the decision-making follows, but the outcome. Does the decision reflect organizational and humanitarian values? Does it move the team towards acheiving goals that will benefit the communities we’re serving? If the answer to both questions is ‘yes’, does it matter whether or not the decision can be fitted into an organizational checkbox?

Of course, this is a risky proposition for an organization. I acknowledge that. And that’s why it’s so hard for organizations to move in this direction. Particularly risk-averse organizations such as NGOs, which are so dependent themselves on the trust of voluntary donors.

3. People versus Systems

What we need, as organizations, is to develop systems that are appropriate to the realms of operation. If we are operating in a Complex context, then we need to have a way of operating that is complex in nature. If we are operating in a Chaotic context, then we need to have an approach that is appropriate to chaos.

This requires a loss of direct control by removed decision-makers and those who hold political risk. It requires shifting from a mindset that risk can be controlled, to a mindset that risk can be managed, and from holding staff accountable to process, to holding them accountable to achievement. Box-tick systems assume that if the box is ticked, risk is eliminated. Chaotic realities acknowledge that risk is always present, and can never be completely discounted.

Instead of investing in systems that govern staff behaviour, we need to be investing in staff behaviour in such a way that the values that drive the systems are internalized. We’re talking about prioritizing behaviour over process. Values over procedures. People over systems.

The Red Cross Code of Conduct outlines 10 key values that agencies operating in humanitarian emergencies should exhibit. It’s very difficult to put measurements around these. You can try. But how do you truly put a numerical value around something like ‘impartiality’? And if you try, how do you avoid forcing frontline aid workers from having to jump through a series of organizational hoops to demonstrate on paper that they are running operations impartially, rather than just trusting them to be impartial? And if you do create such a system, how do you avoid the reality that some people will still flaunt it for their own ends and twist the system to only appear impartial? And how do you avoid adding the organizational cost and burden of subsequently measuring, auditing and reporting on that impartiality? And when you’ve successfully assured impartiality across all your programs, is it now time to do it with neutrality, accountability, dignity, respect, and a host of other values that we should all be abiding to?

Or should we be identifying staff who, by their actions, we already acknowledge as having strong impartiality in how they operate? Should we be trusting that, if we put person X into a relief response, she will by very nature strive for impartiality in her program? What does that cost an organization by comparison? Some risk? Sure. But it results in a lighter, freer response and a happier staff member who isn’t wasting time on internal protocols, who can instead focus on the complexity or chaos at hand and try and make a difference.

I close with the words of a friend on this topic, who summarizes far more succinctly than I can:

“It’s inappropriate to put a staff  member into a context, tell her to manage or lead, then prescribe how she must do-so. That assumes a consistency in the context which is not evident in Complex & Chaotic contexts. This results in wasted effort focused on system design which could and should be invested in staff development instead.”

We talked earlier about organizations which have exceptions for some of their systems for emergency contexts. This can shift systems from being simple to complicated, and even complex at times. Managing this shift can itself be challenging in organizations where staff are used to more rigid ways of operating. If staff are used to the perceived ‘safety’ in complying to a set of simple systems (assumption: risk can be controlled), then getting them to adopt a more complex or chaotic form of operating (principled action, decisions based on gut reaction, trust) can be very difficult.

This is where organizations need to do three things:

1. Ensure they have the right people in the right places. People who have appropriate experience, and appropriate training. Ensuring staff are trained in issues such as ethical decision-making and principled action (not just ‘these are the decisions that we make’ but also ‘this is the reason for those decisions’) is central to this. And here we’re not just talking about ‘training’ as a way of telling people what to do, but ‘developing’ staff, enabling them to get the experience they need so that they understand inherently how to apply their knowledge in a given context: that is, wisdom.

2. Invest in trust- trust by removed political risk-holders in their frontline operations staff, and trust by junior staff in on-the-ground leaders who may appear to flaunt ‘normal’ business practices to fit an evolving context.

3. Reconsider their notions of success in an operating environment. While Simple and Complicated realms assume success looks like ticked boxes and process-compliant action, Complex and Chaotic realms base success on change achieved- a results-based measure increasingly regardless of the process used to achieve that change (within the confines of the principles and ethos that guide the organization’s actions providing boundary conditions).

This conversation’s only just beginning. I’ve lots more to say on the matter- as do lots of others- and will hopefully have the space to do so over the coming weeks. Stay tuned. And I’d love to hear your feedback. As with any article of this nature, I can only present a narrow slice of what there is to say, and friends who have seen this article have already identified some room for development and some holes to plug, so input is most welcome.

Aid workers, share your stories: Please tell us about times you’ve had to work around rules to get the job done when you’ve been operating in the field.

What the Heckistan?

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

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

The Less Lucky Country

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

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

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

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

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

And now, we have the floods.

2010 Monsoon Floods

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

But these guys have had it tough recently.

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

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

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

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

What’s Going On?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgive Me, Interwebs, For I Have Sinned

It has been 4 weeks since my last post.

It is a cardinal law, all but set on tablets of stone, that attainment of Blogospherical Salvation rests on regular written communion with the faithful readership. In this mission, I have trespassed catastrophically of late.

Be they the faithful unto Blog, devotees of the Great FB, or members of the Church of Twit, congregations connect to the messages shared from the pulpit of QWERTY and HTML. Without these pressed words, followers begin to drift.

I have my justifications, of course. From mid-July I was preparing for my third overseas trip in six weeks. I then spent two weeks in Fiji helping to manage an emergency simulation exercise. Not only was this flat-out exhausting, but internet communications in Fiji were devlishly poor. From there, I spent a blissful ten days on vacation, during which I was completely disconnected from the interwebs (being, as I was, on a small heavenly tropical island five hours from the Vitu Levu mainland). As an added blessing I even dropped my phone on the first day of that vacation, and which now no longer works as a result. This has some drawbacks now that I am back in civilization (such as the loss of my entire phone contacts list) but it was truly glorious for the time away.

In Fiji, I was joined by my girlfriend who, as happy providence would have it, agreed to become my fiancee while we were away.  This (I confess with only limited penitence) meant I had slightly more pertinent issues to fill my head and heart with than what to post as my next blog commentary on aid trends or complexity theory. I now come home with just four months in which to plan a wedding- a fact I’m extremely excited about, but also thoroughly overwhelmed from an administrative perspective.

(Admin and I are not good companions; in fact I tend to acknowledge myself to colleagues as an ‘administrative black hole’. They don’t take long to realise what I mean.)

And as if that isn’t enough, I come home to find my portfolio popping off (typical that this would be the week I choose to disconnect from the world). I look after emergency situations in the band of nations from south Asia all the way to eastern Europe, with Somalia and Haiti thrown in for good measure (because the first semi-continent doesn’t leave me with enough to do). While I was away, Pakistan managed to sink itself into one of the largest humanitarian emergencies of the last decade, while there have been significant security incidents in both Afghanistan and Somalia which require attention around the way in which we do business in those countries.

I’m on my knees here.

To further distract me, I also picked up my long-awaited iPad on Monday. I have already taken an evangelical liking to it, and will be prosletysing its wonders shortly on this blog no doubt; already a follower of Apple, it took no time at all to convert me to the beauty of this new device. Setting it up this week, I can see it’s going to be both a fantastic tool, and a terrible distraction. I’m looking forward to constructing some of my blog posts on it and seeing how that works…

So I hope you can find it within your hearts to forgive me this temporary transgression. We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I do have a canon of posts up my sleeve to impart when time and circumstance allow, not least of which some words to share around the upcoming World Humanitarian Day. There are a few photos from the trip to Fiji (although I confess my mind was on other things than my photography for much of that trip, both while working and while on holiday).

And the one grace in all of this is that, perversely, my average daily readership these past four weeks has never been higher. Should I be reading into the fact that when I’m not posting anything, that’s when most people seem interested in Wanderlust? Not to develop an inferiority complex or anything…

At any rate, thanks for your patience and your continued visits to this site. I hope you can continue to find things here that you enjoy, as it’s certainly a joy for me to share them with you.

Till next time, Peace, Shalom, Salaam (and for my Muslim Brothers and Sisters, Ramadan Karim)

PS- I’ve never been one to share much personal stuff on this blog, and that’s not about to change now. However, lest any should ask, yes, the proposal involved all the proper components: ring, bended knee, beach and sunset, followed by champagne & lobster for two on the beach, and a picnic the next day to a small deserted island.   It also involved that all important word, ‘Yes’.

Who knew getting engaged could be so much 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.

Triage: News Media and the Disasters that Languish

If I ask you to recall which humanitarian emergencies stand out in your mind, I can pretty well predict the top contenders that will appear.  At the top of the list, the recent Haiti earthquake, most likely followed by the December 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.  This year’s earthquakes in Chile and Tibet may also be on the list, as they’re fairly recent.  Most of you will probably recall that there’s been a refugee crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, but you may be a little hazy around the dates and details of what was actually happening out there.  Those of you with a broader understanding of the context may include the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Pakistan over the last 9 years in your analysis, while the older among you will recall events such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 in California, or maybe the Mexico City earthquake of 1985.

I remember most of those events (except maybe the Mexico City earthquake, as I was a little young to be watching the news at the time, although I studied it at school later).  The more recent ones I have a little more intimate knowledge and memories associated with, given my choice of profession (and a long list of other lower-profile emergencies to boot).  The older ones I have particular images in my mind that relate: A stratospheric plume of grey ash over the Philippines; toppled segments of raised highway in Kobe; cars flattened beneath the Oakland Bridge in San Fransisco.

Disasters such as these stick in our minds for precisely that reason.  The images that get broadcast into our homes via news and media outlets.  The more relatable the image, the more likely it is to have an impact on us.  The Boxing Day Tsunami was a shocking, rapid and overwhelming disaster which both stunned people by its scale, and also struck areas with which western donors were familiar (the beaches of southern Thailand, where many have taken vacations).

This is why natural disasters tend to have a greater pull on the public imagination than war-zones.  They are more easily summed up by a photograph or a thirty-second video clip.  They can be easily communicated.

Because of this, they also continue to captivate for longer.  The shock value lingers.  The fascination with destruction on that scale claws at the insides of our souls, searching for answers.  Why?  How?  Could that happen to me?  Why or why not?

Ultimately, of course, these images reach us because news media outlets choose to broadcast them.  The longer that media outlets continue to broadcast, the more the events are likely to reach us, and have an impact on us (within parameters).

And the more we’re affected, the more likely we are to give to an emergency.

By contrast, there are emegencies that we never hear about, or which don’t have as much impact.  For example, the displacement of Pakistanis following the (western-backed) military offensive into tribal areas in early 2009 was one of the largest and most rapid population displacements in the last century.  However the humanitarian implications of the event, while overwhelming the capacity of NGOs and the UN to manage, got very little screen time compared to the warfighting itself.

The Darfur crisis did get some coverage, but comparitive to the needs, moderately little.  In Darfur in excess of 200,000 people are thought to have died, and over the seven years since the conflict erupted, 3-4 million displaced, and 5-6 million affected.  These numbers, standing alone, are relatable to the scale of the tsunami.  When you examine them qualitatively, in fact, the extent of need and human suffering in Darfur is far greater than that suffered by the survivors of the tsunami.  However Darfur has received just a fraction of the media attention- and just a fraction of the material support.

Similar emergencies that get little attention are things like the war and displacement in eastern DRC (ostensibly the highest death-toll of any conflict since World War II); routine food crises across the Sahel; the ongoing war and humanitarian emergency in Somalia; and a long, long list of other sorry situations where the UN and aid agencies struggle to operate on underfunded program budgets while people wrestle with a range of natural and human-made impediments to a full and healthy life.

The reason you hear little or nothing about these other emergencies is generally the fact that they don’t get much media air-time.  There are in turn reasons for this, which I’ll discuss below.

However, the question which I wrestle with, and which I’ve asked myself many times in the past is, how much is our media accountable for which humanitarian emergencies get funded, and which get forgotten?

And I’d like to suggest, very.

Working part of my career in an NGO office based in a western country which works to raise funds for overseas emergencies, I am acutely aware of the interplay between media coverage and money-through-the-door.  If a story gets headline time, we get cash, phone-calls, offers of assistance.  If it stays in the headlines (Haiti, Tsunami) then we raise millions of dollars.  By contrast, if a story doesn’t make the news much- or at all- we get next to nothing.  The recent earthquakes in Chile and Tibet are good examples.  Both had less than 3 days in the news media here, and we raised very little for either.

DRC, which remains one of the worst crises on the planet, gets almost no media airtime, except on obscure late-night news analysis or foreign correspondant shows.  We get almost no money for it.

The correlation is solid.  Even our own fundraising efforts are limited without the appeal of mass media.  We can run advertisements or send letters asking for funding, but if the request is about something that the public knows nothing about, then we don’t get much back for our investment.  As a rule, it is not financially worthwhile for us to do so, and a poor use of our resources.  We simply don’t have the reach to be able to educate the public about what’s going on out there in the same way that the major news networks do.

In short, if it ain’t in the headlines, it ain’t getting paid.

News agencies, certainly in western countries, are free to run what stories they see fit.  Or at least, what stories Rupert Murdoch sees fit.  So how much should we hold them accountable?  In principle, if news organizations choose to run a humanitarian crisis as a lead story for two weeks (as opposed to, say, a story about Paris Hilton, or the British Prime Minister insulting one of his constituents by accident), they could arguable transform the level of resources raised for that emergency.

By contrast, if they choose to not run a story on a particular crisis, they effectively damn it to obscurity, and can guarantee that it will be nearly impossible for agencies to raise funds from the general public.

And not even the general public.  NGOs and the UN receive large amounts of funding from state governments.  As well as recieving information through their own channels, these governments are influenced themselves by what gets reported in the news media, and also by what their constituents are clamouring about.  If the public gets riled about a crisis, chances are the government will want to be seen to be doing something.  The reverse is equally true.  Will the Australian public be pleased to hear that their government has just contributed twenty million dollars of tax-payer’s money to some obscure war-zone they’ve never heard of?  That’s not the sort of stunt that gets you re-elected.

The influence of news media on raising support for emergencies is hard to knock.

Of course, it’s only partly fair to blame media organizations for this process.  They are responding to public demand.  If stories are run that are not interesting to the public (long, complicated, lacking dynamic images, or uncomfortably confronting), then channels are changed, papers are not sold.  Ratings go down.  Profits go down.

So there’s an extent to which the public themselves, in their appetite for soft, easily-consumable newsertainment is equally guilty.

I’d argue that media itself has helped create this dynamic, in its quest to become ever more about entertaining the lowest common denominator, with fast-changing topics and brief soundbites that communicate a punchy message but little depth to an audience that wants to be stimulated but not challenged.  Pitching to the lowest demoninator, attention-deficit consumerist junkie.

With different expectations about what media should be about, perhaps demand itself would be different?

Realistically, in my mind there’s two levels of responsibility.  There’s what the news media portrays (both in terms of content and in terms of expectation).  And there’s what the public demands.  As a rule, people aren’t interested in educating themselves about world affairs.  That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions.  But let’s face it, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re well aware that there are all sorts of information resources out there about what’s going on in the humanitarian field, some of it listed down the right-hand column of this blog.  Anybody who wants to know what’s going on out there can do so.  They just have to spend a few minutes of their day learning.

But I submit that if the news media were routinely highlighting, in a balanced, intelligent and informative fashion, what was actually happening in humanitarian situations around the world (as opposed to cliched fifteen-second summaries to a dramatic soundtrack), they’d change the way the donor public looks at world affairs, and ideally change both the giving and the living practices of that public to be more geared around global realities and understandings (and not reflexive reactions and cereal-box interpretations).

Yes, there are economic realities.  Yes, there’s donor fatigue.  But I’d like to believe that, on the whole, people do care about the plight of others.  And the more that those ‘others’ in humanitarian crises overseas can be brought perceptively closer to those with the power to give and act, the more we’ll see people and societies making changes and sacrifices for a greater good.

I believe international media has a lot to answer for to the people caught in forgotten emergencies around the world.

Faces from a Guatemalan Village

We visited the tiny hamlet of Pavantslom high up in the hills behind Huehuetanango.  The road was a treacherous unsealed pathway of hairpin bends above panic-inducing drop-offs without so much as a fenceline between the wheels of the Land Cruiser and a five-hundred foot roll.  The hills themselves were dusty and badly eroded- a combination of geography and natural resource management.  It was hot.

Guatemala’s brutal civil war left the country’s soul badly tattered, and fear in many rural communities is rife.  I was told the villagers here hadn’t had a white visitor in years, and there was an element of disquiet and even distrust to begin with.  ML, my colleague, is a Honduran- both the most passionate and most competent community mobilizer I have ever met.  I have worked with her in at least six countries in Central and South America, and everywhere she goes she is able to inspire local people with her words and her attitude.  Her subject of expertise is community-based disaster management- encouraging communities to take measures to identify the risks they face, and then put into action a plan to reduce those risks.  People who have spent their lives planting maize in a radius of two miles from their birthplace stop and listen to her because she knows how to engage them, how to relate to them.  I’ve watched her do it equally in remote hillside villages and in urban slums, and her fluency in the vocabulary of poverty humbles me.

It took a little while for people to let me take photos.  During the civil war, people with cameras came to mountain villages like Pavantslom, and shortly afterwards, children would disappear.  I waited to be invited to break out my camera, and even invited people warmed to the camera to varying degrees.  By the end of the shoot, mothers were asking me to take photos of their children- but it took them a good half an hour to get around to that point.

Relating to people through the lens is always a dance, and this photoshoot was actually one of my first with a proper portrait lens.  Indeed, I still wouldn’t consider myself an experience portrait photographer today- although I have considerably more experience than I did two and a half years ago in these hills just south of the Mexican border.

I enjoy the variety and intensity of expressions that came through the lens that day.  Not always beautiful in a typical sense of the word, but certainly beautiful in the soulful sense, I think the reason I like this shoot so much is the lack of pretense.  The gazes are full of honesty, and unlike shoots you do in many other parts of the world where people are used to cameras, here there was no sense that people were putting on a display or trying to be vain.

I’m not travelling for a few months at the moment- at least, not for work- and my opportunities for doing portrait shoots such as this one are a little more limited.  I think I’m sharing this shoot as much for my own wistfulness as any other reason, but I hope you can enjoy travelling through the expressions captured here.