Tornado #SWEDOW

The #SWEDOW (Stuff WE DOn’t Want) debate has surfaced a bunch of times on this site, and far moreso across the aid blogosphere over the last few years- with a particular crescendo around the Million T-Shirts conversation a while back. It deals with the issue of people wanting to give things– t-shirts, shoes, underpants, food, footballs- to disaster response agencies rather than cash.

For a whole bunch of reasons, this is generally unhelpful. Stuff costs huge amounts of money to ship, store, sort, distribute and track. It often ends up being mismatched to context- too much, too little, culturally inappropriate, or most often, just stuff that isn’t needed. There’s a misconception that what disaster response agencies do is hand stuff out, whereas in fact a huge part of their work is in delivering services, training and other more intangible benefits. Where stuff is required, it can be more cheaply acquired from local or regional markets than shipped from overseas. And stuff, dumped on local markets, can undermine local economies and actually make the situation worse, rather than better.

As a result, most aid agencies lobby for donors to give cash, not try and send stuff for them to distribute. Cash gives them the flexibility to respond quickly, cheaply and appropriately, and improves their chances of saving or bettering the lives of disaster survivors.

A lot of the SWEDOW debate has revolved around the shipping of stuff to third-world disaster sites, places like Haiti, Pakistan, or the nebulous ‘Africa’. Interestingly, in the wake of last week’s tornado in Moore, OK, in which 24 people died and nearly 400 were injured, SWEDOW has become more of an issue in the developed-world context.

@texasinafrica posted this link to this NPR article yesterday, in which disaster relief agencies responding in Moore are asking people in the US to stop sending stuff to ‘help out’:

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p>Sigh. Cash, friends. Cash is what you should ALWAYS give in disasters. Not stuff. <a href=”http://t.co/fXymRDEN9q&#8221; title=”http://j.mp/1769hfW”>j.mp/1769hfW</a></p>&mdash; Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) <a href=”https://twitter.com/texasinafrica/status/338304458415017984″>May 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

The article is interesting in that it captures the main aspects of the SWEDOW issue, and makes it clear that this is not just a third-world problem. According to the article, relief groups in Moore are now posting on their websites,

“Please, no more clothes.”

Of the inflow of relief donations:

Marty Taylor is a pastor at the evangelical JourneyChurch in Norman, just south of Moore. This megachurch has become a kind of mega-relief center. Hundreds of volunteers sort thorough rooms packed with donations, everything from diapers and teddy bears to crutches and toilet paper.

“And there’s your obligatory giant rack of ramen noodles,” Taylor says.

In fact, this church has accumulated so many items that volunteers are busy building a tent in the parking lot to store some of the stuff so there is room inside to hold church services this weekend…

[D]onations have been so overwhelming that groups around town are posting on their websites, “Please, no more clothes.” The city of Moore suggests that those who want to give should send money to the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army or a local food bank.

In a quick survey of Moore-related disaster appeals, I found only one agency (the Baptist Disaster Relief Agency) explicitly stating that it was no longer accepting clothes. United Way are also a bit more overt about the need for cash-only donations, saying:

City of Oklahoma City, the City of Moore and United Way of Central Oklahoma advise that monetary donations are the best way to assist the recovery efforts.

However, the default for most other response agencies is to direct all web traffic to a cash donations page, with no options given to provide non-cash donations- fairly standard practice.

Some agencies talk about providing material supplies in support, but it is the agencies themselves that purchase the equipment or supplies in question (hygeine kits, for example), while accepting cash, not stuff, from the public.

A handful of other agencies work specifically in delivering donated relief goods, and therefore do accept donations to their distribution network. Many of these list the specific items they wish to have donated, and others work exlusively with corporate donors, not the general public, to ensure the items received are bulk and of standard.

More on some of this in a moment.

The comments provide some of the most interesting reading, as they capture more depth from the readers who have had experience of this sort of thing.

A comment from reader Cyn B:

I know people mean well but it seems they use every tragedy as an excuse to clean out their closets.I worked in a warehouse after a hurricane once and it was ridiculous, the piles & piles of old, musty clothes. Just give $10 to the Red Cross, please…or $5 even…in lieu of closet cleaning.

Melissa H helped respond after the May 3 tornado in Moore:

One of my favorite memories? Getting some food and finding a box of pistachio pudding that had expired in 1978, a full 21 years before the tornado. People use these tragedies to rid themselves of garbage and make themselves feel warm and fuzzy at the same time. It has nothing to do with the people of Moore being ungrateful and everything to do with the fact that clothes do not rebuild homes or feed people. As has been said, mountains of clothes take manpower away from more important tasks.

vcponsardin writes:

I have a neighbor who has made a business out of disaster “relief.” Every time there’s a major disaster somewhere in the world, she organizes a “teddy bear” collection. She usually gets thousands of stuffed animals donated which she then sends off to places like Oklahoma, New Orleans, Haiti, Indonesia, etc. And she does this despite the fact that time after time she’s told by authorities (from the Red Cross to the National Guard) that while the donations are appreciated, what they really need are things like money, blood, water purification, medicine, etc., not stuffed animals But she persists nonetheless and invariably gets herself in the local newspaper as a disaster “hero.” I always wonder, when she does this, if misplaced good intensions might not be worse at times than doing nothing at all.

Jennifer Murphy, who volunteered with the Red Cross in Hurricane Katrina, says:

Although donations of all sorts came in almost daily, the number of those donations that were actually useful to us was about half of what we got. The two “visions of waste” that stick in my mind to this day: The mountains of clothing that we would see piled on the curbsides like snow, not as detritus from the storm, but as well-intentioned yet useless donations. Also (and this one was my favorite), about three pallets of those crustless frozen PBJ sandwiches that are individually wrapped. Mind you, these need to be kept frozen until they are used, and the only freezer we had was your average-sized household refrigerator freezer! To make things worse, they weren’t even noticed by the staff until they had been sitting in the warehouse for over a week! Needless to say, they all went to waste, as well.

Talk to any disaster response worker, and you’ll get story after story of useless stuff gone to waste that has been shipped at high expense to a disaster response.

But why?

The article says it well. Quoting Taylor (referenced above):

“So many people … just feel this urgency like, ‘I gotta do something,'”

Something, unfortunately, often means giving SWEDOW.

“But writing a check or texting a donation isn’t always that satisfying for those who want so desperately to help.”

Trucks and volunteers have been streaming in all week long… Sean Hawkins and seven others traveled from Phoenix with three trucks loaded with cases of water, Gatorade, shampoo, soap, clothing and work gloves.

How did they know what to bring? Hawkins says they didn’t, really: “We just figured…’If we were without, what would we need?’ “

Many good, well-meaning people have a “I want to help” button, that gets pushed whenever a disaster strikes. They feel saddened, or powerless, or some other compulsion to try and fix what went wrong. The act of giving can make a person feel better. And that feeling can be magnified by giving stuff, rather than cash, which isn’t, as the article points out, ‘satisfying’ in the same way. I’m trying to be cynical- while there are people who give for selfish reasons, many who give- both cash and stuff- do so from a good place, and my not be conciously motivated- or motivated at all- by the need to feel good about it. None the less, the strength of this ‘I want to help’ button being pushed, coupled with an ignorance around what the disaster response community actually needs, results in people often tending towards giving stuff instead. Stuff that’s unhelpful.

Relief agencies do push for cash- sometimes stymied by fears among donors that cash can get misused while stuff is a safer option- and there’s been plenty of cash raised for the Moore response over the last week or so. Ironically, while donors worry that maybe some of their money might be mis-spent (i.e. on overheads), for more Gifts in Kind (GIK) gets wasted in a response, not to mention the cash required by agencies to transport, store, sort and distribute- so GIK loses out on every front when it comes to the conversation about cash.

But what about some of the agencies working deliberately with GIK? I’d like to look at a couple of those for a moment.

One of the biggest issues with GIK is the link to corporations and the inextricability of tax breaks for organizations to dump their unwanted stock on charities. It serves both corporates and the agencies themselves in a fairly cynical cycle of useless.

Not to name-and-shame, but one organization’s blurb on their corporate disaster relief partnerships is particularly telling- albeit I’m sure unintentional. Operation Blessing has this to say:

Across America, Operation Blessing’s fleet of tractor-trailer trucks travel an average of 2 million miles a year to service our corporate partners, helping deliver their GIK donations directly to families and communities in need. [italics mine]

I don’t want to be too pedantic, but I think the comment “to service our corporate partners” does capture the relationship that agencies often have with GIK- overt or not, that this is something that isn’t just about the communities in need- this is actually about the corporate donor as well, a total “we scratch your back, you scratch ours” dynamic.

Other agencies are more prescriptive in dealing with GIK issues. The Oklahoma government relief page lists donation centres and the specific types of GIK required at each. Operation USA is one of several agencies that also lists the relief items they are willing to collect and donate. The Moore Recovers site linked to the City of Moore allows would-be donors to list what they have available, and will contact donors back if this matches a requirement among the community- better still.

This is certainly a better way to approach GIK than it just arriving in a maelstrom of small and uncoordinated donations. But there’s another major problem with this, and that’s the evolving nature of disaster response.

The final line of the NPR article says:

“People here say, so far, they’ve gotten everything they need. It’s what they’ll get in the weeks and months ahead that are the big unknowns.”

This really is the crux of the matter, even for well-intentioned and thoughtful GIK. Disaster needs change, and change often and quickly, in the wake of a rapid-onset disaster. In the first few days after a disaster, particularly in a developed country context, people need medical assistance, water, food and temporary shelter.

After that, most people have access to their own bank accounts. Shops are re-opening- if not right on the disaster zone, then close enough by that people aren’t going to starve. Some food distributions can help, especially for people who can’t return home, but on the whole, people need to be able to move to more robust interim shelter arrangements, to regain some semblance of routine in their lives as quickly as possible, to get their kids back to school, and to engage with the clean-up operations.

Eventually, reconstruction begins- and with it, the need, perhaps, for help restarting a business, or long-term debt recovery, and in a few cases, long-term medical assistance- but each of these pieces will be quite household-specific.

The specific items that will support people in this process vary. And they vary rapidly. The period where food, water and medical supplies are needed is really a short window- a week, ten days, really not too much beyond that in terms of actual need. The cleanup period, a little longer after that, where tools and so-forth can be handy, depending on the capacity of other actors.

The reality will vary from response to response as to how long each window lasts, exactly what it looks like, and what is needed when.

However the donation of GIK is a slow process. If it’s being given around the country, it can take days for donated items to reach collection points, days more for it to be compiled, shipped and warehoused. Days more for it to be sorted by overwhelmed volunteers on or close to the ground. By the time donated goods actually reach the target community, there’s every chance that, even if the donation responded to a request by a legitimate response agency, by the time it gets to where it’s needed, there’s a good chance it will no longer be needed.

I’m not saying that no GIK donation provides any worth whatsoever. Some, I’m sure, subsidize operations on some level, and they will be appreciated. What I am saying is that with cash, rather than stuff, agencies can respond quicker, more appropriately, and for less money than it takes to manage somebody’s well-intentioned gift of stuff.

Nuff said. If you want to support survivors of the Moore tornado, please give cash to the Red Cross or another reputable response agency. And please don’t give anyone SWEDOW.

If you want to help, give cash. If there’s stuff in your house you want to meaningfully dispose of, give it to a local charity shop that has a system to effectively monetize it to meet local needs. That should be the only place you donate household items.

References:

1. ‘Please, No More Clothes’: Relief Agencies Ask For Cash, NPR

2. How to help Oklahoma tornado victims, NBC News

 

No, Thanks: An Aid Worker Answers the Question “Where Wouldn’t You Go”? (Daily Prompt)

I recently stumbled across WordPress’s Daily Post blog, where they suggest a topic each day designed to inspire and encourage bloggers to write around a set theme. I’ve been meaning to respond to a few of them, but rarely seem to be able to have the time to spontaneously write something against the clock. And I don’t today, either. But I thought I’d do it anyway, because I particularly liked the theme.

Today’s theme, “No, Thanks”, asks the question “Is there a place in the world you never want to visit? Where, and why not?”

Couldn’t refuse…

As an aid worker, I generally get to see the worst of the worst. Nowhere’s really off-limits. In fact, the places I tend not to get to are the really nice ones. You know, the sort of spot you might take your family for a spot of skiing, or a two-week all-inclusive on the beach.

Refugee camps? Done ‘em in spades. War zones? Sure, why not? It’s been a few years since I was last shot at. Poverty and human misery? To be honest, I’m rarely out of arms’ reach of them.

So is there anywhere I wouldn’t go?

There are a few places I haven’t been, when it comes to the list of top trouble spots. I’ve not been to Baghdad, nor Afghanistan. My folks used to live in the A-stan, however, and I pretty much grew up on slide-shows of the place. In fact, along with watching re-runs of M*A*S*H, I’d credit a pretty fair percentage of my drive to get into aid work with those old washed-out positives. As for Iraq, well, there was a time when they were decapitating foreigners when it didn’t seem like such a great destination, but even then I had friends in Kurdistan telling me I was welcome for a visit, and with the right opportunity I wouldn’t hesitate today.

Another of the world’s aid hot-spots I’ve not managed to get to is Goma, in eastern DRC. Generally acknowledged as one of the very worst humanitarian crises– it’s prolonged, forgotten, and horrifically violent- Goma is also fearfully beautiful. Forested hills overlooking deep lakes and in turn overlooked by towering volcanoes, I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about the crisis, and nothing but awe about the landscape. It’s definitely on my to-do list when the right assignment comes up.

While I’ve travelled a little in the more peaceful portions of Somalia– and thoroughly enjoyed it- I haven’t been down to the Mog yet. A former colleague of mine was there a couple of weeks ago, and it was amusing to see pictures of her all dressed up in her ballistics vest standing next to the armored vehicle trucking her around. But to be honest, Mogadishu is stabilizing rapidly (for now), with Somali businessmen and their families returning in droves, and while I wouldn’t want to buy a summer home there just yet, I would certainly leap at the opportunity to pay a visit to what is one of the most fascinating pockets of east Africa at the moment.

Darfur, South Sudan, Sri Lanka (at the culmination of the civil war), even Turkana in northern Kenya make up the list of some of the more challenging and unstable places I’ve dropped in on- each of them deeply enriching and fascinating places, despite the conflict and the deeply entrenched physical poverty and even injustice. A year in Papua New Guinea had me dropping in and out of Port Moresby more often than I ever would have liked, but even PoM has beautiful hills and bays, and from what I hear, fantastic diving. And my time living in West Africa took me through some of the poorest nations on earth, and some of the poorest communities therein. I still remember Niger with deep fondness.

Chad remains the most unpleasant environment I’ve visited- and likewise for most of those I’ve met who’ve worked there. Physically harsh- beautiful in its own way- the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees sheltering in the desert was devastating, and the violence and hopelessness rivals anywhere I’ve visited on earth. It was a hard, hard place. I’d go back though- if for no other reason than to see what’s changed.

All up, I’ve been to around 60 countries, most of them poor and many of them pre- or post-disaster, and routinely listed on government ‘Do Not Travel’ lists.

So, is there anywhere I wouldn’t go?

Well, don’t tell my wife, but, probably not. I mean, maybe I’d pick my timing. I wouldn’t be so keen to visit Karachi today (I was there a few years ago), and there are certain slums in Nairobi I’d be steering clear of for the next few days, just as a precaution.

But sometimes people ask me is there anywhere I have no interest in going, and there is a place that typically comes in at the bottom of my wish-list. It’s even a place that I had the opportunity to visit, and actively chose not to (probably the only such time I’ve done-so in my life). And I realise in saying this, I’ll undoubtedly upset a lot of people. Not least because the residents of this nation make up one in seven Africans, and I don’t doubt some of them routinely read this blog.

Nigeria.

Let me tell you why. And then, before you lynch me, let me tell you why I recognize that this is unfair.

Why Nigeria? It’s not that I wouldn’t go there, or even that I can’t recognize that there would be some lovely things about it. It’s just that there are enough things stacked against it that don’t make it an attractive option.

Nigeria has sadly got a terrible reputation when it comes to crime. Friends and contacts who have travelled through Lagos speak of the scams and the urban crime, which traditionally starts before you leave the airport. Political corruption is rife, as is corruption in the police force. There’s extensive poverty and inequality (nothing unique to Nigeria given the places I visit), and simmering tension, both between north and south, and within communities.

Boko Haram, a militant Islamic group, along with other similar groups, are carrying out attacks on government infrastructure, churches, civilians, and foreigners (including, allegedly, the abduction of a French family from northern Cameroun ten days ago). Meanwhile, pirates operate off the southern coast, targeting shipping, and seperatist rebels operate in the Niger Delta, targeting foreign oil interests.

Even some Nigerians I know hesitate to go home. A former colleague, who was from the south of Nigeria, would travel by bus from the northern border to get home to see her family, and was routinely held up and robbed on the journey home. The organization I used to work for had opened an office there briefly, and was forced to close it due to the strong corruption in the place.

Now, let me be clear. No one of these things is unique to Nigeria. Nor do I want to suggest that Nigeria is a universally awful place. In fact it isn’t. For every person I know who’s had a negative experience in Nigeria, I know several others who have loved it- people who have travelled, who have been there for short missions or service trips, people who have lived there and brought up children, both Nigerians and foreigners.

There are some physically beautiful places, and many, many beautiful places.

I have recently finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran War of the 1960s. It is an achingly beautiful story, stunningly written, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me interested in visiting, that my attitude didn’t soften. It should also be required reading for any students of modern African history, given that it addresses one of the most important historical events in one of the most important nations in Africa, which still has echoes in today’s politics.

There are many, many fascinating places in the world, and I don’t doubt for a moment that with the right information, the right contacts, knowing where to go, a trip to Nigeria would be fascinating, beautiful, inspiring. But for me, with the long (long long) list of places I want to see, and go back to, balanced against the hassle of getting to and around those places, Nigeria just doesn’t yet make it into the positive balance. It remains somewhere around the bottom of my list.

When I was living in Maradi, a grubby town on the edge of the Sahara about 50km north of the Nigerian border, an Ivorian friend of mine suggested we take the weekend off and go down to visit Nigeria. I’ve never yet turned down an opportunity to stamp my passport. But my friend had shared just a few evenings before a long story about how as a young man he had been extensively robbed in Nigeria, and I remember looking at him and saying, “Why would I want to do that? No thanks!”

To this day it remains the only time I’ve turned down a chance to cross a border.

To my Nigerian readers, and anybody else who has a soft spot for that country, I welcome your feedback as to what you love about Nigeria, and how my appraisal is utterly unfair and misplaced. Let me know below!

All photography my own.

Filming Fun with Cam and Mike

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

-MA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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

Dear Santa…

It’s Christmas tomorrow. Cue M. bursting into our bedroom at 7am (not unusual for a Saturday) to announce excitedly that Santa Claus would be visiting tonight. Santa & Mrs. Claus were less enthusiastic about the early morning announcement, but we get it. We were six once too. In the meantime, there’s fairy lights on the Christmas tree and draped all up the staircase, a small but growing pile of wrapped gifts on the living room floor, and the girls are planning on making a gingerbread house this afternoon.

Except for the tinsel and a reduced staff load, however, you wouldn’t know it’s Christmas at work. Humanitarian life goes on. If anything, this week’s been a doozy. I got back Monday night from a brief visit to Dili, Timor Leste, to do some planning ahead of next year’s elections, and my week hasn’t really stopped since.

In the West African countries of Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, there’s a growing food crisis. Really it’s just an extension of the chronic food insecurity and malnutrition that exists across much of the region. Fragile economies, unreliable rainfall, deteriorating soils, climate change, population pressure, feeding practices, access to clean water and health care- in brief, a whole host of reasons- all make rural populations highly vulnerable to any shocks in their livelihood production systems. While the indicators for the coming season across the region as a whole are not all bad, and while there isn’t the threat of widespread emergency or famine as in the Horn of Africa this year, but regardless millions of people (around 6 millions of them) in pockets in all five of those countries are going to struggle to feed themselves. The hunger season- traditionally beginning any time between February (in a bad year) and May and running until the harvest in September, has already begun in places, with some households out of food already, and some child deaths reported. Niger is still recovering from a difficult year in 2010, and 2012 is likely to see elevated rates of malnutrition and, realistically, the likelihood of significant numbers of child deaths if relief efforts are not stepped up.

The food security outlook for Sudan has been released this week by the USAID-sponsored Famine Early Warning System- the gospel when it comes to classifying global food shortages. It rates areas on a five-point scale (IPC- the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification)- No Food Insecurity, Stressed, Crisis, Emergency and Catastrophe. Large areas of western Sudan (Darfur) are forecast to be in Crisis (IPC level 3), while several areas- significantly those in ongoing conflict, particularly South Kordofan and Blue Nile- are anticipated to be at Emergency levels- levels similar to those seen across most of northern Kenya, Puntland and southern Somalia earlier this year.

And while on the subject of Sudan and conflict, tensions between Sudan and South Sudan (which earlier this year separated from Khartoum-led Sudan following a popular referendum) continue to escalate. Aerial bombardments of populations in disputed areas continue. Troop build-ups are reported. Pro-north militias in the south are allegedly forcibly recruiting southern Sudanese refugees in Khartoum and making them fight against the south. MSF reports large-scale displacements. While the food security outlook for South Sudan is less alarming than for Sudan, the combination of unpredictable population movement and the increasing indicators that large-scale conflict is likely are major concerns over the coming months.

If there’s good news to be found in sub-Saharan Africa right now, it is in the Horn of Africa, where rains have started to bring about an improvement in the drought and famine over the past couple of months. Grazing pasture is reported to be returning, which will support pastoralists, while wells are replenishing and food will soon be able to be grown in some areas. The UN has declassified some areas of Somalia from Famine (Catastrophe) to Emergency, and humanitarian support has been credited with having had a significant impact in this area. That said, huge portions of the Horn of Africa remain in very serious food crisis, and some populations still remain at Catastrophe (IPC Level 5) levels, particularly areas around Mogadishu and with high IDP populations. In addition, while the rains have improved some conditions, they have worsened others, making runways unusable by relief flights, bogging down overland trips which now take three days in place of one, and, most serious of all, spreading Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD) which has been credited with hundreds of deaths in recent weeks among Somali IDPs. We won’t talk about the security situation, which continues to simmer at the very most unstable end of the spectrum, with troops from Kenya and Ethiopia engaged in de facto unilateral action against al Shabab militants, who in turn appear to be strengthening ties with global terror networks like al Qaeda, and continue to destabilize the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the Africa Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). 3 Somali aid workers were killed in Somalia yesterday, motive as yet unreported.

Leaving the African continent, more than forty thousand people have been impacted by heavy rains in northern Sri Lanka this week. The districts of Kilinochchi, Mulaitivu and Jaffna have all been hit by moderate flooding, with the government calling on local NGOs to respond. The past eighteen months have seen northern Sri Lanka slowly being rebuilt in the wake of a thirty-year civil war that saw twenty thousand reportedly die in the early months of 2009 alone, and as such is an immensely fragile area. More heavy rain is forecast.

Heavy rain this week in the Philippines also triggered tragedy in Mindinao, in the southern Philippines, when flash floods tore through several areas during the night. A thousand dead have been recovered, and the government reports another thousand remain unaccounted for. The Philippines sees death and destruction on an annual basis at the hands of powerful storm systems, like Typhoon Ketsana in 2009 that caused extensive damage in Manila. This however remains one of the deadliest events in recent years.

Even closer to home, a storm system is building off the north coast of Australia and is due to make landfall on Boxing Day some hundred kilometres east of Darwin as a Category Two tropical cyclone, with the potential for damage. And yesterday, two large, shallow aftershocks struck Christchurch– where nearly 200 people lost their lives earlier this year and large portions of the city were destroyed- triggering fear and distressing memories for many folks living there.

Papua New Guinea’s government remains in a state of considerable uncertainty as two senior politicians- Sir Michael Somare and Peter O’Neill- face off over disputed leadership, with the threat of unrest and violence a major concern. President Laurent Kabila’s victory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s polls has been confirmed by the courts, but criticized by international observers and denounced by political rivals. Police action in that country has lead to the deaths of over two dozen people in recent days, and the country remains under scrutiny to see whether further political violence will spiral out. Iraq has experienced a massive series of coordinated terror attacks in the wake of the US pullout of troops, with its government split along sectarian lines as Vice President al-Hashemi is accused of ties with terrorism and a looming threat of spiralling civil violence. Syria’s internal conflict has stepped up a notch, with a powerful and sophisticated car bomb targeting security forces and civilians in Damascus killing 44 people and injuring scores more. Drug-related violence continues in Mexico at a rate rivalling that of many civil wars, while concerns over insecurity in Afghanistan in the face of a US troop drawdown there in 2012 are increasing, given ongoing levels of insurgency across the country and a fragile, divided state government. A recent leak claims that Pakistan’s government fears a coup by the military is on the cards.

You could say things are busy right now.

I don’t write this to be a downer, or guilt you out, or anything else. Christmas is a time for celebration, for remembering those people and values in your life that are important, for those of us with faith to celebrate what we believe to be a pivotal gift to human kind, and to be close to the ones you love. For me, however, the values of being a humanitarian- remembering those people who are in need in a wide range of ways- is central to reflecting on this season which can be so materialistic, shallow and self-focused. It’s an opportunity for me to take a look around, take a breath, get some perspective, and reflect on what I can do to make the world around me a better place- starting with my family and working outwards from there.

Friend, fellow humanitarian & social media-ite @richendag, who works for INGO World Vision, posted this letter that the Grade 2 daughter of one of their supporters wrote in class for Santa Claus a couple of weeks ago.

If that’s a little unclear, it reads:

Dear Santa,

This year I have tried hard in school, helped mum clean the house tidy, and made new friends. All I really would like is the Kenya people to have a home and something to eat and drink please. Right now they are probably eating dirt. Thank you. Love from Lauren.

Nuff said really. She gets it. You go, Lauren.

Tonight, M. asked if Santa Claus was going to be visiting all the kids in the world, even the ones in places I go and visit when I travel for work. We had to tell her that no, Santa doesn’t visit all the kids in the world, that there are some kids who miss out at Christmas. At bed time, she reflected sadly that it wasn’t right that Santa didn’t visit some of the sick kids. With luck, she’s on her way to getting it too.

Merry Christmas all of you, and rich blessings to friends, family and loved ones for 2012.

 

Why Aid Agencies Fail to Stop Famine

I’m starting to get a little ratty with all the media right now talking about the Horn of Africa.

Articles are starting to look like a fill-the-blanks template that the reporters are all sharing around: Quote some stats about the famine; talk about the complicating factor of al Shabbab making life difficult in Somalia; drop in some pithy quotations about the fact that short-term aid is repetitive and doesn’t solve the underlying problems (always with a nod to the fact that, well, of course it saves lives now); then end on the dark yet hopeful twist that while aid agencies clearly don’t have it right, clearly what’s needed is ‘long-term solutions’.

Yeah, cool, thanks.

Interestingly, the reporting, which feels cookie-cuttered from every other cyclical emergency that pops up around the African continent (alternate Somalia with Niger, Sudan, Kenya…) is exactly the sort of thing that the reports slam aid agencies for doing in their emergency appeals: Template emergency request, paste photo of child in malnutrition centre top-right, insert country emergency name here.

But what I’m really ratty about is not that what the media are saying is wrong per se. My problem is, they’re making noise but missing the point.

Two of them, actually.

By rabbiting on about long-term solutions (I’m sorry, what solutions did you suggest, exactly?), they make it sound like nobody’s ever come up with that idea before.

[Cue professional aid workers the world over beneath newly-illuminated lightbulbs slapping foreheads, exclaiming “Long-term solutions! Of course! Why didn’t we think of that?]

The point is, aid agencies know about this. They speak this language. They can ream ideas out ad nauseum, et cetera, et cetera.

This is not new.

It’s just that, they suck at implementing them.

That’s point one.

Point two is, these solutions aren’t simple in the real-world. But we’ll come back to point two later.

***

Aid agencies have a presence in pretty much all these places that suffer cyclical emergencies. Long-term presence. And presence that isn’t just based on emergencies, either. Long-term community development, empowerment programs, child sponsorship, infrastructure development, food security projects, governance, microenterprise development… In short, kitchen sink included.

So, shouldn’t the presence of aid agencies stop famines from happening?

In principle, yes.

In practice, a woeful no.

Why not?

Well, it would be unfair, but only partly inaccurate, to say because ‘aid agencies aren’t doing their job’.

There are other factors, of course, the most significant being that macro-level factors (global economy, environmental trends) do in fact overwhelm the relatively small investment that NGOs make by comparison. But, it’s not only that.

Most aid programs, however much they might claim the opposite, are not geared to manage pending emergencies. Their activities are not built to context. Their funding sources are restrictive, their monitoring and analysis is not geared around mitigating risk, and their management systems are too rigid to adapt.

Each in turn.

Needs Context

Most aid agencies have their way of doing things. Although they will all claim that their interventions are based on need, most of the time their interventions are based on an assumption of need. Their assessments are often facipulative or partipulative. Their approach is dictated by their organizational ethos, the way they’ve done things in other places. Very rare indeed is the [large- and read, able to make a significant and multisectoral difference over an area sufficient to mitigate against the effects of famine] aid agency for whom each project is truly designed from scratch. Most have to fit a donor funding model, match up with existing organizational skills and experience, fit into standard monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and are lifted from projects and programs that have been run elsewhere.

Most agencies don’t realise that they are a solution looking for a problem. And their ‘solution’ may not be what’s needed.

What is needed?

Context analysis.

Let me say it again: Context analysis.

And I don’t just mean context awareness. All the gathered knowledge in the world won’t save us if it’s not applied. I mean a critical appreciation of the various factors that influence trends, patterns, norms and change, taken and re-applied in an intelligent way to what action is planned.

Agencies have to learn to go in there and fit their interventions to the reality on the ground. Not the reality they assume is there because it looks similar to some other place, or because sweeping the eye over the landscape makes it clear that they lack a particular resource which the agency knows it can provide.

Macro-level. Micro-level. Understand relationships. Understand the need, and the reasons for that need, and the reasons why those reasons exist. Make the communities you’re targeting a part of your analysis process so that you can learn their perspective and, if they’re interested, they can learn yours. Then figure out not what services you can deliver, but what changes need to happen to the situation to change the need that has been identified.

And that is already way too oversimplified.

Easy? Of course not. It involves time, flexibility, intent, relationships.

The frustrating part? Aid agencies have already had time. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty years of it. And if you go into some of these places and talk with the field staff, or the community members, when you drill down into it, they do in fact know a lot of this stuff. But the projects aren’t built around that context. They’re still matched to organizational norms, easily summed up in a donor report and an implementation table.

This has to change.

Funding Patterns

Agencies have their sources for funding long-term programs. Sometimes they’re long-standing cooperation agreements with institutional donors, where five years’ worth of funding is guaranteed for a particular community and sector. Sometimes it’s child sponsorship, where donors provide funds to the agency on the basis of a link with a child in the community in which the agency provides support. Sometimes it’s from general donations sourced from a faithful donor base.

Too often, these funding sources are restricted- either by the donor, or by the agency. If an agency has promised a donor a particular type of activity- providing clean water, or providing education- the agency may not be able to use those funds in other sectors. In some agencies, donors and not the agency have the strongest say in what sectors, approaches or activities are used (guaranteeing that we miss the context). In other cases, the funds may be more malleable, but still tend to be geared towards a suite of perceived acceptable activities.

Of course, these funds are often the agency’s bread and butter, providing the bulk of what keeps the agency in business, so making changes to how those funds are spent is a risky proposition.

When dealing with a context, like the Horn of Africa, which routinely slips into a crisis, we see a pattern. Existing funds continue to be pumped into the agreed sectors because there’s no donor flexibility to jump to other, more needy sectors. Activities continue to be geared towards the long-term development context without taking the emergency context into account, because this is what the organization has promised to deliver with the funding.

It sounds basic, but this is essentially what happens.

And if we’re also seeing a situation where the project has been cookie-cuttered into place, rather than built to context, then this is only going to be compounded.

What’s needed? Well, der, flexibility. On behalf of both donors and the agency. The agreement that, when a crisis emerges in a long-term program area, the agency can switch its donor funding into what ever activities it needs to to meet the needs. Not an unreasonable request, you’d think, for a donor who wants to help communities. So long as the donor trusts the agency.

And, of course, the organizational will and apparatus to do-so.

Thus avoiding the need to launch a fresh appeal every time a new emergency cycle appears in a place we always knew it was going to.

Monitoring and Accountability

And that’s the thing. We know. We often know. We knew about the Horn of Africa drought months ago. Many agencies began responding, in their own small way, long before this was a media circus. Mostly by tagging a few auxiliary activities onto their existing programs with a bit of extra funding. This was in part, to be fair, restricted by the lack of donor interest in the burgeoning crisis. It wasn’t until the media started making a fuss about it a few weeks ago that the public and governments sat up and started taking notice- making them equally complicit in this debacle.

Subject of another discussion.

Where aid agencies struggle though, and this is closely linked to the funding issue, is their indicators for success. When a block of money is granted to a project, there are almost always guidelines around how that money can be used. Hit the agreed targets and indicators, and the project is deemed a success (even if impact is negligible, uncertain or not measured).

And these targets- generally based around what can be produced by the project activities themselves- are most commonly concrete deliverables. (Some, granted, are vaguer, but these are both harder to measure and harder to get funding for.)

What long-term development projects are almost never measured against is their success at reducing the likelihood or impact of known crises in the area.

A malnutrition project may measure the number of children treated (in this case, a crisis that produces lots of malnourished kids actually makes the project look good!). A food security project, the increase in yield produced or the increase to household income- if the agency is really doing its job. Very rare is a project held to account for averting- or failing to avert- a crisis like a famine.

Despite the lip-service that agencies pay to having a positive long-term impact on a community’s context, very few of them can demonstrate this empirically, and even fewer actually hold themselves accountable to this principle in tangible terms.

They need to.

In fact, this should be the very raison d’etre of any long-term development project in an area known to be vulnerable to a particular disaster. Before we start launching into a wide array of obscure assistance packages that are au fait with our donor audience, let’s first make sure that our communities have food, water, shelter, and that we’re greatly improving their chances of hanging on to these things when the known and quantifiable threats this community faces materialise.

And, let’s actually hold them accountable with our measures of success and failure.

It’s called Disaster Risk Reduction. But like so many other technical terms that get touted in the industry, this one lost its currency almost before it had any. It’s another tick-the-box theme that pops up on proposal templates. “Explain how this project will reduce the impact of known disaster risks.” A paragraph of blurb, donor nods and signs the cheque.

Why does such a basic, logical and common-sense principle get sidelined? Partly staff knowledge, partly organizational will.

Internal Systems

Many agencies have a firm divide between what is ‘development’ and what is ‘aid’. Long-term presence in communities is generally to acheive development outcomes. Emergency situations require short-term aid interventions, after which the aid cowboys can bugger off and leave the development professionals to their job of transforming communities.

Staff are not trained to live in both camps. Either they are aid workers, or they are development workers. It is not uncommon to find development workers resentful of having to change their activities because an emergency operation has been mobilized and their manpower is required. And by the same token, assessing long-term development projects for their suitability to the risk context bores a lot of aid junkies.

So staff lack the training, and often the knowledge. But they also lack the motivation. Because they’re held accountable to different outcomes. While aid workers might be expected to meet indicators around services provided in an emergency, long-term development workers will be expected to deliver on achieving their project targets. Getting the organizational systems- including operations management and staffing- to shift from one mode to another without completely shifting the operational and staffing structure- is very hard.

What am I saying? I’m saying that we need to train our long-term development workers to be short-term emergency workers as well. A staff member working on a water infrastructure development project needs to, at the drop of a flag, be ready to become a staff member working on an emergency water project. Staff managing a program to reduce chronic malnutrition must, when the indicators are reached, start managing acute malnutrition instead.

They need to be supported by flexible systems and management, and an organization that is ready to react when thresholds are reached.

***

In summary, a major reason why aid agency presence has not translated into reduced vulnerability to, for example, famine, is due to aid agencies not being geared to do just that:

• Aid agencies do not build their programs around context, but are influenced by donor interest, assumptions, internal capacity and their own models of approach.
• Aid agencies don’t have resources that can be quickly tasked from one mode of operation (development) to another (emergency response).
• Aid agencies’ internal measuring systems do not hold them accountable to how well they reduce the risk of a disaster happening, only on how well they acheive project deliverables.
• And aid agencies own internal systems and staffing do not allow a seamless transition from a long-term development presence to an emergency response.

As such, aid agencies condemn themselves, much like the context they are in, to an endless cycle of superimposing an externally-funded, externally-managed and externally-staffed emergency response program, when in fact they have plenty of funding, management and staff capacity in-place. It’s just not being directed properly.

***

All that said, for correspondents to sit in their air-conditioned offices and take pot-shots at aid agencies for their inability to come up with ‘long-term solutions’ without offering any themselves; to criticise media circuses in refugee camps without ever acknowledging that this is exactly where their story comes from; to slam hyped-up emergency funding appeals while their own publications feed off the drama created by images of dying Africans; and to condemn aid agencies’ slow response to the emergency when the attention which agencies require to raise resources is so largely crippled by the media’s short attention-span with chronic disasters; makes these journalists run the risk of being obtuse, hypocritical, or simply missing the point entirely.

Want to be part of the solution? Get to grips with the complexity of long-term crises and find ways to engage your audience so that donor funding is more forthcoming, understanding more sympathetic, targeting both more flexible and more intelligent. And where aid agencies aren’t doing their job right, don’t just regurgitate pithy soundbites. Take time to find where the holes are, then hold these agencies to uncomfortable account in the public light and show them where change is actually needed.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s about logic and common sense. Let’s be honest about these gaps and encourage change among agencies, donors and the public alike.

It’s not that aid agencies don’t think about long-term solutions. They have the language coming out of their ears. It’s that those solutions don’t match the context and aren’t backed by an operational reality that supports that sort of change. And until they’re forced to change because their survival depends on it, they may not.

***

Complexity coming up in a subsequent post.

Je m’excuse for the plethora of Francophone cliches. I was ranting.

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.

Photo Essay: Nutrition Program Walk-Through

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ponderings On The Road

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

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

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

Thank God for the rains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both a privilege and a pergatory.

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

Three more hours till Niamey…

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Niamey-Maradi Road near Dogon-Doutchi

Legacies

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

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

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

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

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

Ah the good old days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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