World Humanitarian Day 5 Years On- 5 Security Trends

Note: All aid worker casualty statistics in this article drawn from “Humanitarian Outcomes (2014), Aid Worker Security Database, https://aidworkersecurity.org/”

It’s been 5 years since the first official World Humanitarian Day, August 19^th 2009. The UN sanctioned the day in memory of the suicide bombing of the Canal Hotel, the UN Headquarters in Baghdad on that day in 2003. 11 years ago today, a suicide bomber drove a flatbed truck into the UN compound, parked beneath the window of the UN Special Representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and detonated his payload. 22 people, including de Mello himself, were killed, most of them UN personnel.

World Humanitarian Day commemorates their sacrifice, but also remembers aid workers who are targeted by violence while carrying out their work on behalf of populations in need around the world. Each year, and in increasing numbers, scores of aid workers experience violence in the field while bringing aid to people affected by war and disaster. Many, like de Mello and the 21 others who died August 19^th 2003, pay with their lives.

As somebody who was involved in a serious security incident some years back, today is a day that means something to me, too, and a chance for me to reflect on the co-workers who were with me that day, some of whom still carry the wounds they sustained. Many of my friends and colleagues in the aid industry have themselves survived security incidents, and many have lost friends and colleagues to violence.

The Aid Worker Security Database is a project which compiles global information about attacks on aid workers. Specifically it looks at acts of violence (as opposed to accidents and illness, which claim even more lives) in which aid workers are killed, seriously injured or kidnapped. The project began gathering data in 1997, so that now, 17 years on, it’s becoming easier to determine trends in the sector.

Let’s take a quick look at the figures.

In 2000, the AWSD recorded 42 violent incidents involving aid workers, involving 91 aid workers around the world (variously with UN, INGOs, LNGOs, IFRC and Red Cross/Red Crescent societies). Of these, 57 were killed, 23 wounded, and 11 kidnapped. 21 were expatriate staff (23%) while 70 were nationals (77%).

In 2013, thirteen years on, the database recorded 251 violent incidents against aid workers, with 460 aid workers caught up in violence. 155 aid workers were killed, 171 injured, and 134 kidnapped. 59 were expatriates (13%) while 401 (87%) were national staff.

The 11-year mean has seen an average of 112 attacks per year against aid workers, with 217 aid workers involved. 80 aid workers a year have been killed, 80 a year injured and 58 a year kidnapped. On average, 18% of aid workers involved in violence are expatriates, while 82% are nationals.

Since 2000, there has been a dramatic shift in the security landscape for aid workers. While the dataset is still relatively small, what is reflected in the figures is backed up by anecdotal evidence from the field, by individual agencies’ experiences and records (most large agencies and the UN have their own internal security incident tracking database for analysis and risk management purposes), and by trends and behaviours within belligerent groups.

Note as well that the AWSD only captures the top end of security incidents- instances of death, serious injury or kidnapping. It excludes less serious incidents (illegal detentions, muggings, threats, robberies, etc.). The AWSD does not factor in the psychological consequences of these incidents, which for victims of violence, including rape, can include a lifetime of psychological distress or struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (a report by the Antares Foundation this year reported up to 30% of aid workers exhibit symptoms of PTSD upon returning from the field). It also doesn’t capture the ‘near misses’- times when good management or pure luck has averted a much more serious incident in the field.

On top of this, remember that since 2000 (when most agencies considered themselves ‘neutral’ and therefore relatively immune to being targeted by hostile actors), the UN and other international aid agencies have seen a massive increase in their risk management strategies- increasing their protective and deterrent measures in particular to make it harder for them to be targeted, and generally trying to reduce their exposure to threats.

Despite all this, there has still been a huge increase in incidents and casualties in the field. Between 2000 and 2013 there has been a six-fold increase in the number of attacks, a five-fold increase in the number of casualties, with deaths up 270%, injuries up 740%, and kidnapping up by a substantial 12-fold increase. The only trend that has remained relatively constant is the proportion of expatriate vs. national staff involved in attacks, which hovers for the most part in the 15-20% range.

Overall, the absolute numbers of aid workers in the field (national and expatriate) has increased- so the rate of attacks on aid workers is not quite as pronounced. The AWSD estimates a modest increase in the attack rate against aid workers over the study period, without divulging the precise figures (they are based on its estimates of numbers of aid workers in the field- a difficult figure to pin down).

During the period 2006-2012, this fluctuated between 40 and 60 victims per 100,000 aid workers. Using the average figure of 50 victims per 100,000 aid workers, this results in a probability of a 1 in 2,000 chance of becoming victim of a serious attack as an aid worker. In perspective, the chance of being hit by lightning is estimated at 1 in 1.6 million. The chance of dying in a plane crash (if flying one of the world’s bottom-rated 25 airlines) is 1 in 800,000. The chance of dying in a plane crash (if flying one of the world’s top-rated 25 airlines) is 1 in 12 million. The chance of being killed in a car crash this year is about 1 in 7,000.

There are some key trends we can draw out of these figures.

1. Kidnapping is a rapidly growing threat.

The sheer number of aid worker kidnappings- from 11 in 2000 to 134 in 2013- is not just a statistical spike, but reflective of a well-understood development within the operational mandate of belligerent groups. Since the globalization of al Qaeda, its subsidiaries (AQIM, AQAP) and other similar extremist insurgency groups such as al Shabaab and the Taliban, their own experience has taught them that kidnap for ransom is an extremely lucrative trade. Indeed the rapid growth of AQIM in particular has been substantially attributed to the ransom payouts by European nations for the safe release of kidnapped nationals.

As such, AQ has developed guidelines for how to run a kidnap-for-ransom operation targeting foreigners, which has been widely disseminated, and acted upon. And because in the areas where these groups operate, aid workers make up a large, visible and vulnerable population of foreigners, it’s not surprising that they are frequently targeted. In fact, until this year, aid workers have been the #1 victims of overseas kidnap-for-ransom operations. In 2014, employees of global corporations apparently face a higher kidnap risk than aid workers now. But the threat to aid workers is so pronounced that the AWSD released their key 2012 report with the title “The New Normal: Coping with the Kidnapping Threat”.

If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that kidnappings are, overall, survivable. While in the earlier years of the Iraq insurgency (2003-5) there were a number of high-profile executions of kidnapped foreigners, AQ and its partner agencies have realised that there is a better business-model, and as such, kidnapped foreigners are quite clearly valuable assets, worth protecting to exchange for prisoners or large sums of money. Since 1997, just 14% of aid worker kidnappings have resulted in the death of the hostage- and most of these deaths have occurred either during the hostage-taking itself (generally agreed as the most dangerous time of any kidnapping situation), or during an attempted rescue or escape (also highly dangerous). In short, if you survive the initial hostage-taking, you don’t attempt to escape, and nobody tries to rescue you by force, then your survival chances jump into well above 90% probability.

Yay!

Just be prepared for a wait. The average holding period prior to release for an expatriate aid worker is a little under 2 months. So be patient, wait it out, and keep your spirits up.

Also, do a hostage survival course.

2. Far more national staff are in the line of fire.

This is has always been a given, and this is why the average trend for expatriate v. national staff victims is relatively flat. There are simply a lot more national staff members on the ground than international ones, and therefore when something happens, they’re much more likely to be involved in the incident.

There’s some important reflection for agencies to do around this one, namely because inadvertently or deliberately, aid agencies manage the risks of national staff differently to expatriates. There is a good reason for this. Expatriates do generally have a higher risk profile than national staff (this may not be the case in some contexts, such as those involving ethnic or local political tensions). They cannot blend in, or disappear into a crowd if things go bad. They do not have the language skills to diffuse a tense situation. They have more economic value as a hostage and more political value as a target than nationals (depending on the context). Therefore there need to be more stringent risk management processes around expatriates in most contexts.

And on the flipside, dead national staff members are less damaging to the reputation of an organization than dead expatriates. The abduction and murder of CARE Iraq’s country director, Margaret Hassan, in 2004 was a high-profile media event and crisis for that organization. Ditto the kidnapping of the 2 MSF-Spain aid workers Montserrat Serra and Blanca Thiebaut from Dadaab in 2011 who were held for nearly 2 years, and in both cases would have required a massive organizational response and extensive damage-control. By contrast, while the murder by death-squad of 17 Sri Lankan ACF staff members in 2006 was a tragic event, and likewise the killing in a militant raid of 7 Pakistani World Vision staff members in 2010, neither event made a comparably big splash in the media, and neither had significant political, fundraising or profile consequences for the organizations in question (though I am confident that both events resulted in extensive internal changes to security management processes within those organizations).

As a result, we see the following:

1. National staff are more likely to be given clearance to travel into hostile environments, with the expectation that their risk profile is lower and they are better able to navigate the hazards (both statements often true, but they still end up exposed to risk)
2. Relative numbers of expatriate staff in the field are reducing. This is partly as a deliberate risk-management strategy, but also reflective of the increase in capacity of national staff members globally. Where many roles used to require expatriates to fill them, the number of field roles for expatriates in most large organizations is decreasing, as nationals are more and more capable to do the jobs, and do them for less than it costs to put an expatriate in that role. Note that this reduces risks to expatriate staff (who are not in harm’s way as a result), but can also reduce the overall risk to the national organization, as with fewer expatriates, the organization’s risk profile reduces, and its interest as a target goes down.
3. There is an increasing use of remote-operations in hostile environments. In places like Syria, Somalia and Iraq, agencies are less likely to put their own staff on the ground, and more likely to build a relationship with a pre-existing grass-roots NGO already operational in the field. They then channel programs, funding and resources into those partner agencies to do the work for them- which partly explains the big jump in both absolute and comparative numbers of LNGO and local RCRCS victims in the AWSD. This is known as ‘risk transfer’.
4. There is an increase in absolute terms in the number of local start-up NGOs. Similar to the previous point, with the increase in education, global connectivity and awareness in many less developed nations, locals have increasingly recognized the value in the NGO model to access and deliver assistance to needy local populations. As a result, there are far more spontaneous local NGOs appearing in hot-spots around the world, exposing more and more locals to security risks. Not only are these local personnel often directly implicated in crises (see for example many of the community-based organizations that operate in Syria, who will be identified by belligerents as being on one side or the other and therefore as potential targets), but these LNGOs rarely have the resources or the skills base to invest in significant security risk management for their staff and operations.
5. Expatriates are more likely to receive security training. Partly because of the higher individual risk profiles of expatriate staff, and the very high cost per capita of providing security training to personnel, most large agencies have prioritized training up their senior managers and deployable expatriate staff in hostile environment survival and risk management. The result is that many field-level staff in hostile environments have little or no security training, and as such may be engaged in more risky behaviour. This is something that is increasingly acknowledged by aid agencies, and programs are beginning to be put in place to rectify this, but it is a slow process. Training 10,000 national staff globally for a large organization takes a lot of time and a lot of precious donor funding in an environment where agencies are being given less and less. For small agencies, it can be a financial impossibility.

3. Expatriate staff face a disproportionate risk in hostile environments.

For reasons already discussed- their perceived political and economic value, their lack of awareness around local risk contexts, their inability to blend or disappear- expatriates do still face a higher risk profile when compared to their local counterparts. In short- they are more likely to be targeted by a belligerent.

Although on the surface this may not appear to be borne out by the accompanying statistics, it very much is. While 2013, for example, saw just 13% of victims being expatriates, recall that there are far fewer expatriates relative to national staff in the field. Even your typical large NGO program with 100 or so local staff might only have 5 to 8 expatriates. In some cases (e.g. Ethiopia, where expatriate numbers are strictly controlled), the ratio can be far lower- just 2 or 3 expatriates for several hundred staff. Many LNGOs- whose ranks increasingly populate the statistics- have no expatriates in the field at all. The AWSD estimates that expatriates are at least twice as likely to be targeted as national staff.

This does make developing a balanced risk management strategy challenging, and ultimately, agencies need to decide where their thresholds of acceptable risk lie, how critical their programs on the ground are to the populations they are supporting, and therefore the extent to which they are willing to place their staff at risk.

4. The majority of security incidents occur in a handful of global hotspots.

This goes without saying, really. There’s a reason nobody books vacations to Syria or Mogadishu– because we well understand that bad things regularly happen in these places, and going there puts us at unnecessary risk. The same is true of aid workers.

For example, in 2012, of 170 incidents, fully 130 took place in just 5 nations- Afghanistan (56), South Sudan (21), Syria (18), Somalia (17) and Pakistan (17). (Note that in relative terms, the rate of attack against aid workers was highest during this period in Somalia, as there are vastly fewer aid workers inside Somalia than inside Afghanistan and other locations). This dynamic is pretty easy to interpret looking at global and humanitarian news headlines. As an aid worker, if you’re in one of these places (this last twelve months, other security hotspots include Nigeria, Iraq and Gaza), your proportional probability of being involved in an incident is dramatically increased.

In addition, you can cross-reference this against the most deadly belligerent groups. For example, in IntelCenter’s latest analysis, Boko Haram has revealed itself as the most deadly terrorist group so far this year, with nearly 3,000 attributable killings since the start of 2014 (not, obviously, restricted to aid workers). The Islamic State comes in second place, while other groups with an honourable mention include the al-Nusrah Front, AQAP, al Shabaab and the Taliban. Again, no real surprises here if you follow security trends. As always, good security management tends to begin and end with common sense. But when you map these groups, global hotspots, and areas where aid workers operate, you immediately get a very skewed focus as to where real investment in aid worker security needs to begin.

5. When it comes to expatriates, your veteran EAWs are more likely to be involved in a serious security incident.

This is a very simplified and anecdotal descriptor, but there’s a key learning here. The sort of aid worker most likely to be involved in a major security incident is not your excited, idealistic newbie sent off on her first overseas assignment from head office. Why not? Well, because she’s far more likely to be aware of her own limitations, will probably be taking risk advice (like curfews & no-go areas) seriously, and is less likely to be placed into a highly threatening environment. If she’s just arrived in country, her senses will be up and therefore her situational awareness more likely to be running high. Frankly, she’s probably going to be a little edgy- as is the norm when you first arrive somewhere unfamiliar. It’s a basic human reaction.

By contrast, the primary at-risk descriptor here (which I know goes a long way to capturing a number of readers of this blog, and this author hits quite a few of the criteria too) is probably 10 or more years into their aid worker career, have done three or four long-term assignments overseas, and are several months into their current posting. They tend to have a been-there, done-that attitude, which means they will- deliberately or inadvertently- expose themselves to more risks. They are more likely to be deployed to a hostile environment. After the first few months, they’ve settled into a routine and have lost the initial awareness and heightened focus that comes with being in a new environment. And they’re more likely to settle into a ‘nothing’s happened so far, so I’m not really expecting anything to happen now’ mindset.

In short, it’s not just the inexperienced young expatriate staff that agencies need to concentrate on, but critically, the experienced, somewhat-jaded older hands who are moving into the peak of their humanitarian careers.

***

The sad reality is, any UN, Red Cross or NGO response necessarily requires placing staff at ever-increasing risk these days, and that much is borne out very clearly in the accompanying statistics. The absolute number of attacks, the number of victims, and particularly, the drastic increase in the kidnapping threat, means that being an aid worker- national or expatriate- in many of the world’s hotspots is dangerous business.

For any agency that operates in hostile environments- UN, INGO, LNGO, IFRC or RCRCS- security has to be a central component of operational budgets (donors, please take note), and putting in place a robust, well-informed security strategy is critical for every country office. Management staff need to be trained up in risk management processes, clear security SOPs need developing, a skilled and experienced cadre of security staff need to be employed to support response capability, and field staff need to be trained in basic survival procedures.

Even with all these things in place, sooner or later, chances are most large agencies will face one or more major security incidents, so they must be drilled in critical risk management and containment procedures. It’s sadly so commonplace as to be almost inevitable. But with good processes in place, the chances can be reduced, the impact minimized, and, hopefully, lives spared.

A Sense of Community

I’ve taken to checking the Daily Prompt on the WordPress Daily Post blog. I rarely have the time to be able to spontaneously write to the topic on a given day, but one that came up this week was the prompt: Idyllic.

“What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?”

I’m not always aware of it, but community is a powerful theme in my life. I guess it’s a powerful theme in everybody’s life. But I think it’s something that we often take for granted- by which I mean we don’t necessarily look at it that closely, stop to think about it, consider how we relate to it and how it relates to us.

You hear a lot in Western countries about the ‘breakdown’ of community. There’s some truth in the concern. Also some misconceptions. What it reflects, though, is that people have the perception that they are less connected to other people, at least on some level.

In the humanitarian industry, you hear a lot about community. Here, the community is some assumed state in which people live, by which they are connected, and hence becomes a vehicle through which assistance can be delivered. Hence ‘community development’. Again, there is truth, and there are misconceptions.

It’s a critical concept when it comes to understanding society, and how society changes (or, if you believe in such things, how society can be intentionally changed). There is a monolith of literature out there on the subject- entire tertiary education courses- and I’m not about to hack a review of it here. But spending part of my life living in the west, and part of my time living in ‘developing’ nations where community is assumed to be happening, I get to see both sides of the story. And in addition, the notion of community has very personal implications for me.

Community. Co- together. Unity- a state of oneness. The notion that many individuals are some how joined or connected, maintaining their unique status as individuals (to varying extents), but also creating some larger unit through a set of social or interpersonal interactions.

Central to the notion of community is a shared commonality. In its most traditional sense, community tends to relate to people who share a common set of physical resources- space, fundamentally, because until very recently, meaningful and regular interaction over any distance greater than the voice could carry was not possible. Hunter-gatherer ‘communities’ would have shared food resources, labour, care functions. As time went on, traditional notions of community are centred on the shared space of a sedentary settlement, with the sharing of resources varying between communal and individualistic, depending on social structures in place.

Urbanization confronted the limitations of community- that there are only so many social contacts that humans can continue to maintain with any sense of meaning (the number is generally thought to be around 150, give or take). Thus the fragmentation of community into sub-units. Communities could be formed around geographical neighbourhoods or communes. But they could also be formed around other things, such as professions (a new development under urbanization and the higher levels of regimentation of resources and labour division that are required to make it function), or social status, or, as things such as leisure time increased with the creation of excess resources, interest-groups.

The notion of community is now accepted to mean a wide range of things today. We have ‘communities of practice’- professional bodies who occupy a certain academic or professional niche within an industry. The ‘online community’ via which you may well have connected to this article. The ‘international community’, of which I claim citizenship, and whose members are joined by the very notion of their placelessness- or, more accurately, their routine orbiting around a certain set of geographical hubs and professional millieus.

In the west, this increase in the placelessness of community appears to be correlated, whether causally or not, with a decline in place-based community, particularly urban environments. People in suburbs complain they don’t even know the names of their next-door neighbours. In apartments, people don’t necessarily know who is on their block. We live behind closed doors, behind fences.

This isn’t universal. There are some very vibrant urban and even suburban communities. But this is the perceived trend.

There is also a certain nostalgia for the perception of the community that once was. This might be harking back to the ‘golden era’ of the fifties and sixties, when suburbanization was a new trend, and at its heart was the notion of being good neighbours, where people on the street might have known each other fairly intimately. Or it might be reflective of some idealized utopia of the village of the medieval times, when people lived in close connection with the land, shared labour, common problems, and were in constant social interaction with people who lived close to them, who they saw regularly, and with whom interactions therefore took on a higher level of meaning.

This hunger isn’t misplaced at its source. People crave interaction with one another, as a rule, and mental or social disorders notwithstanding. Enough studies have demonstrated a close correlation between morbidity and mortality and social connectivity, and even net happiness and social connectivity. It is hardwired into us, whether by a relational creator God, or the eons of social interdependence that gave our species an edge in natural selection, or some combination of the two.

And when my day to day routine- collecting food for the family, for example- involves interacting with somebody who I know intimately as a neighbour, rather than somebody I might recognize but whose name I don’t even know, these daily routines take on a different value. They serve not just the purpose of meeting physical need, but also meeting that embedded need for social connectivity.

Because in our social interactions, we need meaning. And when our day is devoid of meaningful social interaction, but simply involves tasks, it loses meaning.

The virtualization of community, then, means that more and more social interactions are seperated by either spatial or temporal distance- either we have remote forms of communication (phone, Twitter, Facebook), or we link up with those people in the communities we identify with on a less frequent basis (such as going to church on a Sunday, when we might get the bulk of our meaningful social interaction). Which I believe contributes to this sense of dissatisfaction.

Although I am of the Western European model of decreasing emphasis on spatially-oriented community, I feel I have been lucky enough to be part of some beautiful communities. As an adult, most of those communities have been faith-based, although not necessarily church-based. At university, I had a close group of friends who I would see most weeks, usually several times a week, all brought together by our Christian faith and certain practical outworkings of that faith. We shared very close personal interactions, supported one another, and genuinely loved spending time together, and I recall those times very fondly. They kept me sane through my university years, and I missed them deeply when I left the UK.

More recently, in my late 20s I was part of another faith-based, non-church community, this time quite a small and intimate group of friends who were seperated by a bit more distance than we were at university, but still saw each other on a nearly weekly basis. With my constant travel schedule, it was the first time since I’d left university where I truly felt connected to a group of people, and they provided a safe and warm place to connect to others.

Just a few years back, I transitioned into a third faith-based community, this one characterized more by people who felt a hunger to explore their faith and ask difficult questions they did not feel they could ask in the established church. Of the three communities, this was by far the most structured, in that we met regularly, and our meetings had some sort of order to them, but by the same token, in its own way was also the most sprawling, in that the community took on quite a robust nature for a time, providing practical assistance at various points for one another, and with very intentional efforts to see that community managed, to see struggling members encouraged, and even, at one stage, an attempt to establish a leadership structure to better help it grow and continue.

Throughout all of this, I have been part of another community that I’m very fond of, which can alternatively be given the label ‘international community’ or ‘humanitarian community’, although in practice it’s a very small subset of those that I have any right to call ‘my’ community. They are the people who I interact with in different parts of the world on my professional assignments, who share common humanitarian values, with whom I share often intense experiences, common worldviews (for the most part) in politics and leisure (see: adrenaline junkie), many of whom I see repeatedly in different locations time and time again, some of whom I’ve never met face-to-face but know just from virtual communication that I would get on very well with, but with whom I feel none the less very connected in a meaningful way. They are people I can meet in almost any pub in any expat-occupied city in the world and, even if I haven’t seen them in five years, can instantly strike up a rapport with and pick up like we were never apart. And I know many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.

Of the three faith-based communities I have mentioned, the first essentially came to a close when university ended and we all went our separate ways, to keep in intermittent touch, but now spread all over the globe- in China, the UK, South Africa, and wherever the heck I am these days. The second, I still see the members of regularly and am very fond of them, but my long-term assignment in PNG saw my engagement with that community transition out, and during my absence, the nature of that community also changed as circumstances changed.

To some extent, the third community was linked to the changing of that second. And in many ways, the story of that community is the most interesting, because it was the closest to an ‘intentional’ community, but also walked that challenging line of having some structure that enabled it to function, while remaining flexible and meeting the needs of a group of people who were very suspicious of structure in the first place- that being the reason they wanted to be in the group. It was a paradox, and for the first while, it flourished. Then circumstances changed, the needs of community members shifted, and the community ultimately ended. MIO and I met through that community, and are still in touch with most of the members of that group regularly, and we even meet up regularly, although the nature of interactions has changed very much over the last 2 years.

The fourth community, of course, is in many ways the most unsustainable, in that at any given time, I am interacting with a  very small portion of that community directly, and however stimulating I find engaging with it, it can only ever contribute a small portion to my social needs.

In short, although virtual community can be a good and supportive thing, I strongly believe that most people require some degree of meaningful interaction in a shared physical and temporal space.

Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for everybody. It does seem to apply to most people I know. But I know I speak for both MIO and I, because we talk about it regularly: We crave that.

So perhaps, if I start trying to answer the question posed at the start of this piece, the first thing I would look for in an idyllic community would be a community that shares time and space. That is in close enough proximity to be able to enjoy regular face-to-face activities and interactions together.

Being at a bit of a life-crossroads at the moment (a story for another place and time), MIO and I have been exploring what practical steps we can take to increase our social connectiveness- to actively seek out community. To that end, we visited an ‘intentional community’ on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Moora Moora has existed on a forested hilltop between Healesville and Warburton since the early 1970s- almost 40 years. It would be easy to dismiss the place as a hippy commune. In fact, while it shared a vision for shared resources and communal living, the community’s values, charter and approach to intentionality were very much the brainchild of a highly academic sociologist, who helped found the settlement, who lives there to this day, and who plans to die there.

The story of Moora Moora is long and fascinating, and I won’t go into any detail here. The community is spread out over a few hundred hectares of hilltop bush, with half a dozen clusters of homes, each cluster made up of four or five households, that cluster then becoming the basic unit of interaction and management within the community. Each individual is expected to contribute one day of labour to community tasks each month, but is otherwise free to live according to their own needs.

The community has gone through ups and downs- nearly becoming extinct on a couple of occasions, while thriving at others. Relationship- and conflict- management has clearly been central to the success and otherwise of aspects of community life. Meetings and administration are a necessary component.

There is a real beauty to the lifestyle that’s been established there, however. The houses are mostly non-traditional- some wooden, others adobe-mud, all of them quirky and built by the community members. Trees encroach close to the properties, and there is a strong sense of closeness to nature. A small communal vegetable garden contributes to each household’s monthly food basket. Water is piped from a natural spring, so pure it requires no treatment, and the community is off the grid and largely self-sufficient in energy needs.

Moora Moora is currently facing a crisis as many of the long-standing members are now well into their sixties and older, and are beginning to struggle to meet the physical demands of the lifestyle, but there are no guidelines in place to regulate their transition, nor has there been an influx of younger people to support the elders.

Sadly, another challenge- one that floored MIO and I, who both love the idea of spending more time working the land, and are quite open to the idea of sharing some labour and resources- is that some members of the community refuse to contribute their one day a month of labour. We couldn’t believe that people could be selfish enough to verbally commit to supporting a community (which provides a low cost of living in a beautiful environment, and a unique opportunity that many people would love to take up) and then refuse to play their part, when expectations are so low. A day a month contributing to common needs really isn’t that much, and instead people are just taking. A real shame, and one that made us wonder how much longer Moora Moora will remain viable.

Moora Moora isn’t for us. But it gave us a lot of food for thought, and forced us to consider what we actually wanted from a community- a conversation we’re still having.

One thing I realised up there, among the trees, is that I need to see the sky. It’s not that I don’t like trees- on the contrary, I love being in forest, and thick jungle, and trees are gorgeous. The more the merrier. But I love being somewhere I can see great expanses of sky, too, and I think to live, this inspires me more than a hilltop forest. It’s also why I don’t really like urban and suburban environments- because there’s all that clutter of rooftops and cables and buildings crowding the horizon. Perhaps it’s the photographer in me. But I’ve always loved big open spaces- the prairies, the mountains, the desert. MIO loves the sea. I love the sky.

Which makes me reflect. If the first thing I’m looking for in a community is the sharing of physical space and time, then somewhere in there, the nature of that physical space needs to play a part. Many of my best memories of shared experience and community have occurred outside urban environments. There is definitely a part of me that would prefer my ideal community to be rural, not urban.

MIO and I both value nature. We’re greenies at heart. We’re not perfect, but we’d like to get better at reducing the environmental impact of our lifestyle. MIO talks a lot about the notion of being ‘connected to the land’- recognizing that everything we have and everything we consume comes, on some level, from nature, and has an impact on nature, and that therefore, we should seek to live in a way that minimizes negative impact and maximises sustainability. She’d love to grow more of our own food, and rely less on vertically-integrated mega-corporations. I’m 100% on board with that. So another aspect of my ideal community would be a community that is closely connected to nature and the environment.

All of the communities that I’ve been intimately involved with and that have affected my life have involved a shared set of values- and important values at that. Either the shared values of the Christian faith, or the humanitarian values that most aid workers I am close to connect with. I think for community to thrive, it needs to share a set of meaningful values. An ideal community for me would share faith-based, humanitarian and ecological values.

The most engaged communities of people are, in my experience, communities that depend on one another. They help each other out, offering support for practical tasks or emotional needs. They share resources on some level- although a lesson we took from Moora Moora was that a level of individuality and independence is also critical in communities, just as it is within a family group. They are also vulnerable to one another- needs are expressed, and trust reciprocated. An ideal community for me would involve some level of interdependence, and a high level of trust. It would also allow family groups and individuals to remain somewhat independent at the same time.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but if the ideal community shares space and time, then it also shares certain activities. Spending time on shared activities- whether pleasurable or functional- creates shared experience, which in turn creates bonds between people, building relationship and building community. So an ideal community for me would engage in shared recreational activities, and would also labour together on shared tasks for the benefit of one another.

Ultimately, though, I suppose what I would be looking for from the idyllic community would be a community that adds value and meaning to life. It creates enjoyable, peaceful and grace-filled interactions. It contributes to making our physical environment better and reducing social injustice. It celebrates spiritually. It adds satisfaction and fulfillment to the completion of the daily tasks of survival. It creates a millieu in which children are loved, supported, encouraged and enabled. It shares tasks and resources in a sustainable way that facilitates the creation of free space and time to be able to watch the sky, to pursue dreams, and simply to dream.

I think this is what my idyllic community would look like. So if you find it, could you send us the address please.

All photos my own.

 

Humanitarian Zombie Fiction Challenge

So, the twisted minds over at Humanitarian Fiction (you know, the ones that brought us Disastrous Passion, which should be enough to send chills up and down your spine in the first place) have set a global challenge- write and share a piece of Humanitarian Zombie Fiction.

I don’t post much fiction. As in, any. So this is definitely a stray from the path for me. But I thought, what the heck: I like aid, and I like zombies, and I kind of like writing too. And although I had lots of better things to be doing with my time, I did it anyway. So here ya go.

This little story is dedicated to @daggyvamp, aka Narrelle Harris, because it’s her birthday today, and because I don’t personally know any author who relishes the undead- and musing on the grisly transition towards deadness- quite so much as Narrelle does. Also, because once upon a time, Narrelle had a toe firmly dipped in the aid world, and I’m still waiting for her to write that sitcom… You can find Narrelle’s excellent and darkly humorous vampire novels The Opposite of Life and Walking Shadows linked right there, and I highly recommend them. You can also find one of her zombie-themed short stories in this compilation. Happy Birthday Narrelle!

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

From the roof of the white Land Cruiser, Jarrod watches the treeline for the first of them to appear.

It’s eerie in the late morning stillness. The boreal forest towers above them, cold and alien. Shafts of light catch in the drifting mist that’s burning off. The twittering of birds is at once familiar, but oddly disconcerting in the furtive, restless way the chimes bounce off one another.

The UN flag hangs limp. It’s as blue and pale as the cloudless sky.

Olivia touches his arm and Jarrod flinches. Looking down, he sees the rich hues of her fingers against the pale, almost translucent skin of his arm.

“Try to relax,” she intones quietly. “I know we’re a long way from home, but we’ve all done this before.”

The armoured vehicles are stationed in a broad ring about the distribution site. Jarrod can see the gunner atop the nearest. He’s looking out into the forest beyond the cleared circle. His head is swinging, side to side beneath the blue helmet, his thumbs twitching on the cannon grip. Jarrod can see a trail of sweat dampening the man’s dark temples. Mesh wire is clamped over the thick reinforced windows in the forward doors, and the white of the side panels is startling in the diffuse sunlight. The initials U.N. are stenciled in thick black lettering on the flanks.

Everyone’s either on a vehicle or in one, except Francois. The crusty old Malagasay, Head of Mission, stands with his arms folded in the middle of the ring, just at the foot of the flag. Crates of relief food pile behind him. He’s a picture of defiance, snowy whiskers against skin as dark as the forest soil, veined eyes behind narrow shades. Always the shades. Hiding those eyes that say he’s seen it all. The old-timer cut his teeth thirty-some years ago as a self-professed young-gun, first in Darfur, then later in responses like Haiti, Somalia, Azerbaijan, Mexico. Places that mean so little now, but he wears them like they’re badges, like military medals of honour. The staff still speak of him in revered tones, like he’s some kind of guru. He’s been in this since the start.

He’s wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved button-down. His nod to the locals. Jarrod feels a warmth at the old aid worker’s presence. It’s reassuring to have someone familiar in this foreign landscape, a figure so confident facing something that sends stronger men loose at the bowels. Someone from home. Yet even the thought of home startles Jarrod in a way he’s not anticipating.

This might have been my home, another time.

“They’re coming,” Olivia says quietly. She was Ugandan, once. She’s a stout, athletic woman who’s taken a motherly affection to Jarrod since he arrived at the fort a few weeks back. She’s speaking English to him, and he can’t tell if it’s because she’s just used to being out here, or whether she actually thinks Jarrod speaks better English than Kiswahili. Truth is, until he was deployed a few weeks back, Jarrod’s barely spoken English since he enrolled in Kofi Annan University six years ago.

They’re a long way from Antananarivo now.

“How can you tell?” he asks her.

“Listen.”

Jarrod listens. All he can hear is the blood throbbing in his ears. The birds overhead. Odd, needle-shaped leaves on the tall trees- firs, he’s heard them called- seem to swallow sound. He’s never seen trees so tall, so straight, so close together. So dark. Like anything could be hiding in them. Staggeringly different to the bulbous baobabs back home that are now sparse, but for all that scarcity, fiercely guarded in their spreading glory.

Home.

That word again.

Then a flash of movement.

A gunner spins. The mounted turret makes an oiled hiss, and the man’s shoulders bunch beneath the blotches of camouflage. But the figure coming out of the trees moves slowly, and as Jarrod watches, the gunner’s grip relaxes. The gun stays trained.

“They’re jumpy,” Jarrod observes, to nobody in particular, but quietly hoping for some sense of comfort from Olivia.

“They should be,” she murmurs, then adds, as if realising his intent a mouthful too late, “But they’re good. The Haitians and the Dominicans, they’re some of the best troops we have in DPKO. They work well together. You know, Dominica held out for a long time. Nearly became a refuge as well. It was…” she hesitated, her voice tailing off like the fading mist. “Unfortunate.”

But Jarrod’s attention is now on the figure emerging from the treeline. No, not one figure. Several. Moving slowly. Stiffly. Something uncomfortable about the gait. Not the easy lope of a youth in sandals beneath a tropical sun, or the scurry of children as they tumble over one another in the dust. These figures are stumbling into the clearing. Hesitating before the outposts of gleaming white half-tracks. Even at a distance, Jarrod reads the flickering of an emotion: Fear? Relief? Or perhaps it’s simply the acknowledgement of constant insecurity, and the echoes of the question ‘why’ growing quieter with each passing year.

The first into the kill-zone is a woman. She’s emaciated, pale, her t-shirt hanging loosely off a body that might be considered tough under circumstances of diet and healthy labour, but which overwork and undernutrition has left brittle and unforgiving. Sharp angles. Stubborn.

There are three children with her. One is an infant, hanging wide-eyed from a makeshift carriage on the woman’s back- metal poles tied together with threadbare canvas. The others are young, though it’s hard to tell how much-so, as they’re equitably underfed. One has a crop of orange-blonde curls, a little girl who could be six. She’s in a tattered dress with holes worn into the fabric. Her little brother has a mop of startlingly black hair against fair skin, a swollen belly, and limps where his sister leads him.

“How far did you say the forward delivery point is from the refuge?” Jarrod asks.

“About six miles,” Olivia replies, dropping back into Kiswahili with him.

“Damn.”

“Mmm. We do our best. But you know what Sphere says about standoff distance and noise protection. They don’t want any chance they might lead-”

She tails off as Francois steps forward and begins jabbing his hands decisively. He signals the guards to open up the perimeter fencing. It isn’t much to hold anything off, just a ring of coiled razor wire, but it might prove to be enough of a delay for the gunners to get a bead on, and that has to count for something.

The ballet is orchestrated in an odd, otherworldly silence, all hand-gestures and furtive movement. Jarrod listens to the birds, knowing from his security training that when they fall silent, it’s time to pay attention.

*

Olivia hops down off the roof.

“Coming?”

They’re pouring through the opening now. Jarrod’s amazed at how many are arriving. Like a hot-season storm, what starts as a few drops becomes a patter, then a stream, then a torrent. In just a few minutes he reckons there’s a couple of hundred of them in here, all survivors, all haggard. He follows Olivia into the clearing, exhilerated, more alive than he’s ever felt even though he knows he’s never been more vulnerable.

He keeps his distance. He recalls what Francois warned him about.

“Remember, they’re desperate. Some of them won’t have seen anything but bush food in several weeks. Rabbits, rats, even boiled leaves. There’s not a lot left in the forests these days, between the survivors, and, well…”

“They get that we’re here to help, right?” Jarrod had interrupted.

Francois had spread his hands and shrugged. “People are fearful. We come in, we go out again. This is their reality. You know, there’s a lot of resentment. But mostly, desperation. You never know what people in that situation might do. And they’ll be armed, remember. They know not to bring their weapons in sight of the distribution. But the men’ll be out there, just a couple of hundred paces out, watching for their wives and children, their old men to come back. I’d hate to think what would happen if they thought they weren’t getting what they were entitled to.”

Jarrod could see them now. It was a fair overview. Wives and children, old men. A few able-bodied males- young men who looked close to Jarrod’s own age- had come in to help with the distribution itself, to haul the pallets around and assist some of the elderly or the slow with their burdens.

“I don’t understand,” he’d asked Olivia after their first distribution, back at the fort a couple of weeks back. “Why don’t they all gather here? There’s protection. We can get supplies and services to them, and they never need to leave the perimeter.”

He’d cast his eyes around the scene even as he’d said the words. The concrete walls. The squalid courtyards at the feet of those overcrowded condos. Nightsoil stains from glassless windows. Smoke eminating from cracks and holes where people burned refuse to keep their shelters warm. The smell. The constant clamour. In the far distance, the Bitterroot Mountains rising sharp and jagged and snowcapped into the sky.

“And you could ask why these ones don’t come to us,” Olivia had responded, looking up from where she squatted over a child’s scrawny pink arm, the measuring tape showing that he was just on the healthy side of malnourished. “There are always those who try. But for so many of them, this is home. And no matter how hard it gets, they won’t leave.”

Jarrod had made some noise indicating his lack of understanding.

“I don’t expect you to get it,” she had gone on in her melodic Kiswahili. “You’re one of the placeless. You were born in the camps, weren’t you?”

Jarrod had nodded. His father had been a surgeon, which had pushed the man to the top of the waiting lists. That had been before Jarrod, when his parents were newly wed, then thrust into the chaos, that destruction and terror that had seen a world torn down. Madagascar had taken them, an ark that even then had only so many places, and the foresight to ration them. At terrible cost to those unable to board. But for Jarrod’s family, it had been a beginning, of sorts. A fragile salvation.

Working in the survivor camps, Jarrod’s father had earned UN, and later government, contracts, eventually enough to rent them the small flat they shared with another family set back on the new developments among the lower hills, and later buy it freehold. The jagged skyline of Antananarivo today was a far cry from the coloured jumble of two- and three-story houses along the ridgeline that stills from the turn of the century showed. The towering slums of condominiums- frequently unpowered and unwatered, that swayed sickeningly when the cyclones barrelled through- were no paradise. But neither were they the camps, those ramshackle neighbourhoods that nearly thirty years on were still hives for desperation and disease of every kind but that one, overlooked by the tower-blocks like passers-by ignoring a dying derelict on the street.

“I don’t think they were as bad at first. Not when we were there,” Jarrod could recall his mother telling him one afternoon, as he stared from forty-three stories through shafts between the concrete trunks, down at the mess. It hung with brown smoke even on a day like it had been that day, wispy clouds against a burning heat-haze. His mother’s Kiswahili was affected, a little drawled, like her mouth was never quite willing to accept that it had to speak it. “Back then there was hope. Perhaps it was only temporary. And there was a sense of, oh I don’t know, it was almost paradise, back then, before the towers, when there were forests, and the elation of having survived. But now, the quarantine, the waiting lists, the wire and the guards and the watchtowers…”

She had tailed off, but something had lit inside Jarrod. A curiosity, at first. Nothing more. But it grew, at first into a hunger to know what it was like inside the camps and finally, when he saw firsthand the quarantine zones and the struggle to survive that so many failed, a passion to help.

Now, Jarrod drops into a crouch and pauses, getting his bearings in this growing maelstrom of humanity. He’s seen the camps. Seen the survivors in Fort Bitterroot, and over on the Eastern AirHead where the camps still feel a little like actual settlements, like the chaos of life in Antananarivo, only colder, more frantic. But this is different. He can sense the hunger. The fear is tangible, like a sweat, pervasive and inspiring and almost dizzying. There is something basic, primal, utterly desperate about the people as they come in. Grown women in bare feet, some of them in dresses so ragged they fail to protect their dignity. Children as filthy as any he’s seen playing in the gutters in the poorest of Madagascan slums. Young girls, teenagers, with lifeless eyes, slack jaws, the signs of a lifetime of poor diet and terrors unspoken.

Everything here is different. Even the soil, dark and loamy and moist, so unlike the red crumbly dirt at home. He had wondered. Wondered whether, coming here, he would feel a connection to the place. After all, he’s white, just like these people. He wants to feel something, some connection, some kinship. Wants the smell of the earth that he grinds between his fingers to awaken some sense of familiarity, a little voice that says You’re here, you’ve made it. But he remembers the first time he saw an American out here, one of the survivors at the fort. They locked eyes, and Jarrod gave what he hoped was a smile, though it felt uncertain. The man, a little older than him, just stared back. It wasn’t hostily. Just a blankness. No recognition.

You’re not one of us. You’ve not survived like we have. Just an outsider, scrammed in here, and you’ll scram out again when your shift’s over.

He breathes the cool highland air and tastes the acrid scent of the pines. Flavours of wood settle on his tongue like a grit. He hears birds he’s never heard before singing. Sees the pale skin of the troop of survivors stumbling towards the food stash. He wonders, if it all ended tomorrow, and the world righted itself, would he have a place in this land.

Could I die here?

*

It all goes ahead in silence. Words are spoken with heads leant in. Children are subdued. Babies muted. Jarrod wonders whether it’s because they’re malnourished, or if they sense the same terror that hangs like a blanket over the quietly milling knot of dulled colour.

He sees Juarez, the force commander, pacing the circle, checking with his men, eyeing up posture and readiness. His eyes are never still. He soaks in everything, that man. Never misses a detail. He pauses for just a moment, to ruffle the head of one of the sniffer dogs- a black lab- the first line of defense. Then he’s striding again, one eye on the survivors, another on his men, and somehow, both of them on the forest at the same time, on those dark trunks behind which anything could be lurking. Behind which, somewhere, something surely is.

He climbs a stack of pallets and watches the distribution for a few moments. Each pallet is pre-packed with tins of vegetables, condensed milk, cans of cooking oil, salt. It’s a monthly ration, to be shared among households of a predetermined size and number which is stamped on the base of the pallet. A short distance away, sacks of dried corn in 110-lb sacks are being handed out. Distribution staff with hand units read the ID chips of each sack and pallet as its passed over, then scan the wrist-band of the receiving survivor. Once, Jarrod understands, there would have been networks that such information could have traveled along, same as the data towers that dot Madagascar’s spine like a porcupine’s quills. But any such infrastructure would have fallen derelict some twenty-odd years ago out here. They’ll upload it when they get back to the fort and it’ll be transmitted, then collated centrally and checked for discrepencies. But the World Food Program runs a tight ship. They’ve been doing this stuff for about eighty years now. The systems are waterproof.

A girl reaches the front of the line. He can’t tell how old she is, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She’s got long white-blonde hair which she’s clearly brushed through and tied back in a tail before setting out, but the walk’s left renegade strands smeared down her cheeks. Her grey eyes meet Jarrod’s for just a moment. He can see dirt streaked on her sallow face. A figure clings to her leg, and he sees a toddler with the same colouring, naked except for a t-shirt. A little brother perhaps. Or her child. Her eyes fall away. There’s no flicker of connection. Just a hollow resentment.

This is my life. What do you know of it? Go back to your island.

*

Olivia’s overseeing the health tent, which is an insulated inflatable, double walls and an airlock, to keep the sound in. Jarrod zips up the outer layer, unzips the inner and steps through. In here he can hear the soft grumble of a supressed pump, and the bawling of infants.

Out in the open,they’d just be bait, he thinks to himself.

The makeshift clinic is insulated, but people still talk in quiet murmurs. Force of habit. A mistrust of the technology, perhaps. Olivia’s at the bloodwork desk. A male nurse who’s been brought in from Bitterroot pricks each child’s index finger as they’re presented. Some know what’s coming and start howling even before the tiny needle has had a chance to penetrate. The smear gets read on a handset.

“Clear,” Olivia says in English with a smile. “You have a healthy child, ma’am.”

The woman gives her a hunted look, as though the pronouncement is some kind of curse, or perhaps its Olivia’s dark skin that unsettles her so. She waits near the exit lock for her child’s crying to settle down and stares out, as though summoning the courage to pass through.

The next in line is a young teenager, not more than fifteen. She has loose dark hair that hangs in strands over a narrow face. Hazel eyes. Dirty, greyed-out skin that needs more washing, more care. Her infant is listless and doesn’t cry with the finger-prick.

“How old is he?” Olivia asks, as the nurse runs the sample.

“Seven months.”

“She yours?”

The girl’s eyes shift unhappily and she looks at the floor as she nods. Jarrod looks at the child’s skeletal arms and thinks he can practically see the bone through the pale wrap of skin.

The handset chimes, a tiny whistling noise.

“Oedema,” Olivia says softly, switching back to Kiswahili. “We’ll need to evacuate this one.” She straightens up and fixes the girl with a smile, speaking soothingly in English. “We need to get some more help for your child. You can both come with us to Bitterroot. Do you have a husband? Do you need to ask permission to come?”

The girl shakes her head but looks anxious.

“I tried to feed her,” she protests, and gestures unconsciously towards her flat, limp chest. “I try, but nothing… nothing comes.”

Her voice is thick, slow, her accent strange to Jarrod’s ears. Nothing like the clipped sing-song language he’s used to hearing from his colleagues, from his friends in Antananarivo when they speak English.

“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Olivia gives her best motherly smile and touches the girl’s face. “It’s not your fault. We’ll get you fed and your little one sorted out. Just come with us.”

*

They leave as the afternoon is lengthening. The light is taking on yellow hues, and catching in the beads of the damp air. Jarrod is starting to feel like he’s never spent so long without a clear view to the sky. Even though the clearing itself is broad, and ringed by an open stretch giving line of sight and fire to the treeline, the imposing firs hem them in, shrinking the circle of crisp blue overhead.

“We’ll take two half-tracks and the two thin-skins,” Francois says as he steps away from Juarez. “We’re better off getting back to Bitterroot early. I don’t want to get caught in the dark in these Land Cruisers.”

They’re old vehicles, but trusty. Patched together from a thousand cannibalized husks. Scavenged from the African mainland, then shipped on over on the salvation barges. Nobody knew what states the vehicles would be in over here. They’re around. Abandoned everywhere. But rusting. No one in Madagascar knows how to repair an old GM. But every tinker in the slum can do up a Cruiser.

They leave the rest of the convoy- five half-tracks and half a dozen flatbeds- packing up the distribution site as the recipients melt back into the forest. The survivors have a couple of critical hours of light left to get back to the refuge. To make sure they’re not followed.

There’s a peacekeeper for each of the truck cabs, and firepower in the half-tracks too. They’ll be okay if they have to be out after dark, Jarrod tells himself. Though truth be told, he’d rather be riding in one of the armoured vehicles than in the bouncing thin-skins. The four-by-fours are an old legacy, Olivia tells him. Francois is a traditionalist.

The engines are muffled. They run quiet. Windows cracked, eyes open. Jarrod sits in the back of the second Cruiser. There’s a half-track behind him. The other fronts the convoy. Flags taken down. No need to attract undue attention with colour and movement. Apparently the white is harder to see in the daylight. Something about their eyes. Something about processing bright tones.

For the first hour or so, the track is pitted, just a set of old depressions carved into the forest. The trunks are close, and foliage scratches against the flanks. The gunners in the half-tracks duck into their hulls to avoid being swept off their perches, and Jarrod feels exposed. He tries not to stare out of the windows, to see something that isn’t really there.

Don’t be really there.

They hit asphalt. It’s a relief, of sorts. The road widens and a thin strip of light-leaching sky appears between the crowns. The shadows are deepening with the rolling of the miles. The gunners are out of their hatches, back on the mounted weapons, by parts bored and anxious.

The road’s in terrible repair. Roots jut up from underneath and it heaves like waves frozen in a storm. The bush grows thick to its very edge, gnawing at the artificial stone, enclosing the way like a corridor. Like a tunnel. Nobody speaks. With the windows slightly open, they can sometimes hear the birds over the sound of the murmuring engines and the hiss of rubber rolling on tarmac, the crackle of the treads of the armour.

Once, the roadway opens out a little. A natural clearing where a vast tree has slammed across the road. The leading halftrack slows to a halt. Francois’ Land Cruiser draws up alongside. He gets out. Stretches himself nonchalantly. As though this were just a jungle laneway in the Madagascar that once was. He talks with a soldier in the forward vehicle, gesturing with his hands, the only clue to the nature of the conversation.

“What’s going on? Why have we stopped?” Jarrod asks.

Olivia shrugs. She reaches forward, taps the driver- a fair-haired local- on his shoulder and signals for the handset. The teenaged mother watches on, wide-eyed and wordless. The infant is limp in her cradled arms.

“What’s happening?” Olivia asks in English- another protocol hangover.

“Just some disagreement about the route,” drawls the driver from the thin-skin up front.

“Disagreement- are we lost?” asks Jarrod.

“I didn’t see any turn-offs to disagree about. They’re just men. Disagreeing because they like to.”

Olivia casts a glance around them, at the still bush, at the lengthening shadows merging into one.

“Don’t worry,” she says, just a little too cheerfully. “We’re still on track.”

*

The forest is darker the next time they stop. The sun’s gone behind some hills. The conversation is briefer. Francois is visibly wary when he dismounts.

The third time, he doesn’t get out at all. Just speaks to the soldier through the cracked window. That’s when they turn around.

Back when they could still send things into space, there used to be some global location system. Jarrod’s learnt about it. Like so much of what went on, before. They still have the old HF radio kits for communication. But they won’t get a signal through the trees.

The headlights show the back of the first Cruiser, dirty grey in the wan light. Ahead, the half-track rolls forward, retracing their steps. Above them, the sky is now just a lighter strip between the jagged black tips of the firs. Every now and again, Jarrod can see the passenger in the back seat of the Cruiser- a Malawian named Cecil- turn around and stare back at them. His face reads little expression, but his eyes are oddly round in the artificial light.

Jarrod can feel his heartbeat.

The sensation is a frustrating one. He wants to be back at the Fort. Wants to be off the road, away from the trunks that hem them in, wants to be safe. Their wellbeing now lies in the hands of other people. Entirely. Somebody else’s decisions and somebody else’s mistakes. He’s trusted Francois, but now the old aid veteran seems to have let them down. They’re rolling through the forest in the dark, somewhere they shouldn’t be, and the brittle silence tells him that everybody knows it. His mouth is dry and he can feel the perspiration making his back clammy where he rests against the seat. He’s twitchy.

The birdsong is a clamour of ecstasy outside, the dying chorus before nightfall. Right now, it’s so loud it masks even the passage of the four vehicles. When it fades, there will be quiet. They will lose one more sense, one more early warning. And in the crisp forest air, the sound of their passing will carry.

*

The avian chatter fades with the last of the light. The indigo of the sky, now barely discernable from the black trees, shows there’s no moon out tonight.

“Shut the windows,” Olivia says. Her voice is soft, a deep bass rumble all but lost in the hum of the suppressed motor. She doesn’t look around as she says it. In the rear seat, Jarrod snaps his windows shut.

Nothing to hear now anyway.

An eye on the road, the driver reaches forward and pops open the glove box. When his hand returns, it’s gripping a pistol which he lays on the consul behind the gear stick.

“Where did you get that?” Olivia chides him. “You’re not supposed to have a weapon!”

The driver snorts. “You people don’t carry guns, that’s your choice. Me, I figure y’all’re stupid.”

“We never carry guns,” Olivia tells him, tells the world in general. “It’s not how we do things. We’re here to help.”

“Them Lyssa-ites, whatever you call ‘em, they don’t care if you carry guns or not. Y’all taste the same to them. But tell you what, ma’am, I ever get done with mine, you’re welcome to pick it up and use it yourself, no hard feelings, ‘k?”

Olivia sniffs and the driver focuses his attention on the road outside.

A loud smack echoes through the cabin and Jarrod jumps, but it’s just a branch bouncing off the roof. He gets that they don’t carry guns. Gets that they’re humanitarians, that they don’t want to frighten the survivors, don’t want to risk starting a fight. He gets that killing isn’t what they do.

But right now, with the darkness outside and the light from the last half-track illuminating him through the windows of the thin-skin like he’s in some shop-front display, and a crushing sense that they’ve lost the Fort which makes it hard to breathe, Jarrod really, really wants a gun.

“Olivia,” he says, “What exactly is it that-”

Something flashes out of the forest and they hear the metal clang as it slams into the flank of the first thin-skin, an impact so fierce that they see the lights rock from side to side. There’s time for the driver to stamp the brake. Olivia gives a squeak as she catches her breath. Jarrod feels a disorientating prickling sensation down his head as the blood flees from the skin of his face.

The vehicles stop. There’s a brief moment of silence. Nobody moves. Shadows crawl as the foremost half-track continues to roll ahead.

“Dear Jesus,” the young mother whispers, clutching her arms around her starved child.

Then Olivia screams “Go! Go! Go!” and suddenly the forest is moving, pouring in on them, and like magnets to a chunk of iron they can see shapes tumbling, tearing out of the treeline, slamming into the Land Cruiser in front of them, five, six, seven, eight of them, at full tilt and still coming. The driver kills the lights and throws the engine into reverse with a grinding of gears and a scrambling of tires on the rough asphalt, and Jarrod sees the fading image of the creatures hanging off Francois’ vehicle, scrabbling at the metal, pounding at the glass, imprinted on the soft tissue of his retina.

Their flight is short-lived as they slam with a jolt into the half-track behind them. The mother wails. The driver is cursing, swearing, fumbling for his gun. Something barrels into the vehicle and rocks it hard on its suspension. They hear the faint sound of shattering glass. The engine stalls. They’re struck again, and then again. Then with a pop, a window bursts inwards and cold night floods in.

“GET OUT!” Olivia howls.

They’re shrieking as they come now, like the wail of a kettle boiling on a gas stove, and the snarl of a cornered hound, and the screams of a cat slowly being crushed in heavy machinery. It’s ear-splitting. Paralyzing. Jarrod wants to be sick.

The gun on the half-track opens up. Jarrod sees lines of tracer walking off into the forest, and by the flash of the muzzle can see more of the distortions pouring forward, arms flailing, fingers hooked and nails clawing. The driver has his gun, fires two rounds through his window before hands seize him and haul him screaming into the darkness, pistol and all. In the blinking strobe of the machine-gun, Jarrod can see the rear doors of the Land Cruiser in front of them have been sheared off, and the dark shapes are crawling over one another in a frenzy to fit inside, crammed like meat in a sausage press. The vehicle is rocking from side to side, but if the occupants within are crying out, their voices are drowned by the howl of the once-were-humans.

They’re crawling in through the shattered front window. Olivia kicks out with her boots. In the headlights of the half-track, Jarrod catches a glimpse of grey flesh, raw putrecense, of a gnarled hand with broken, clawing digits and darkened with fresh fluids. Then he can feel rounds punching into the seething mob outside, the visceral sound of soft meat giving before fast, hot metal. A bullet smashes through the back window, and he’s shaken from his stunned trance, coiled as he’s been on the back bench.

“Come on,” he urges, looking behind him. The mindless creatures are still pawing at the front window. The back is clear. He reaches for the frail infant. “Give her to me.”

The young girl stares at him, eyes already blurry with tears, and hesitates.

“Now!” Jarrod yells. Olivia’s grunting, lashing out with her feet as fingers scrabble for a prise on her legs from the front seat. The girl passes the child over, and Jarrod tucks her under one arm, reaches for the back door, and shoves it open.

“Follow me!” he yells, not turning to see if the young mother is with him. For the briefest moment, he knows he’s done something terribly, terribly stupid. He’s alone. It’s dark. They’re everywhere. The thunder of the machine-gun is ear-splitting, and the little girl in his arms, light and spindly as she is, begins to cackle an ugly cry. Then he’s reaching for the railing on the side of the half-track, just a few paces behind, and yelling to be heard above the roar of the weapon as he realises he has only one hand to climb.

Something seizes him out of the darkness. He spins, crying out, but it’s the young mother. She’s tumbled out behind him and is trying to rip the child out of his arms.

“No! Climb! I’ll pass her up to you.”

He looks. Olivia is crawling frantically over the back seats of the Land Cruiser, reaching for the exit. Jarrod can see shadows behind her, a writhing bush of limbs in the splintered light. He can see her face, twisted with more terror than he’s ever seen in human expression before. Then a silhouette darts between them, and in that moment, they both know.

“My baby!” the girl cries out. She’s scrambled onto the hood of the half-track, ducking beneath the lance of flame as the gunner puts out burst after burst into the horde of creatures. Jarrod reaches the child up, and as he does so hears a scream from Olivia. It’s defiant, a war-cry as she fights back, kicking and scratching, and for the briefest moment, Jarrod’s filled with the sense that he can cross back to her, fight them off with her, seize her and drag her to safety. But he doesn’t move. Because he knows its a sick fantasy. And then her screams change, and grow gutteral, animal, and he can hear the snap and tear of shredding flesh beneath her shrieks.

The roar of automatic fire splits into his mind, deafening, agonizing, and his first thought is to scream at the thoughtless gunner who’s fired so close to his head. When he stumbles out of his flinch he sees one of the shapes staggering away just paces from him, head cleaved open by a well-placed round.

“Get up here you stupid mzungu!” yells a voice. He leaps at the railing and hauls himself up onto the armoured vehicle, and feels clawed hands slapping at the metal his body had been in contact with just an instant before. The yowling is all around them. The young mother is still crouched on the hood, cowering beneath the spear of fire put out by the machine-gun.

Jarrod clambers up to the hatch in the roof and sees a dim light glowing from the hull within. He wants to weep. Wants to throw himself down. But he turns instead, reaching out a hand to the young mother. As he does, a shape hurtles out of the night behind him, and he hears a grunt from the gunner, and then a howl of pain. A sea of darkness surges around the vehicle’s nose.

“MOVE!” he yells, reaching again for the child.

The girl looks at him from where she cowers. She hesitates. Her eyes are pale and round, lips trembling, body rigid. Jarrod can hear the struggle taking place just behind him on the roof but he doesn’t take his eyes from hers.

“Come on,” he urges through clenched teeth, as much to himself as to her. “Come on.”

Gingerly, almost timidly, she stretches her arms and passes the child to Jarrod. Jarrod seizes the little girl and pulls her tightly to him. He half-turns to slide into the hatch, and the girl straightens where she stands, finally finding her determination to move, and claws seize her ankles from below. She gives a prolonged wail and plunges backwards into the void. When Jarrod turns back, he’s in time to see her pale form disappear beneath a mob of writhing shadows on the asphalt, frenetic in their excitement as they mob over the quivering flesh.

He leaps down the hatch and lands heavily, rolling.

There’s a loud clang as the hatch is bolted shut, competing with the whine of dancing stars that fills his head. When he sits up, he’s aware that he managed to shield the infant in his arms as he rolled, and that he’s staring into the muzzle of a large handgun.

“Where are you cut? Where are you cut?”

The massive Haitian peacekeeper holding the pistol is bellowing at him, and Jarrod balls up around the infant. He’s aware of a second uniform struggling with a bulky shape down the gunner’s well, of moaning, of the hammering of flesh and bone against the armoured hull.

“I…” Jarrod stammers. The second hatch slams shut, and the sounds of howling diminish slightly. He can feel the vehicle rocking in the frenzy of the physical assault, tipping on its suspension. He glances inadvertantly over at the second soldier, crouched over the gunner and shaking him.

“Are you bleeding?” the Haitian roars, and Jarrod’s focus is back on the ring of darkness that is the muzzle of the gun.

“I’m not hurt. I’m not hurt!”

He holds up one hand to show his extremities, then shifts the infant and waves the other. He lifts the little girl. Her oversized head, more skull than face, lolls, but she is unblooded.

The Haitian spins from Jarrod and looks to his comrades. The gunner who has been dragged back inside the half-track is lying curled and twitching, his face and torso riven by tear-marks and gashes. He’s whimpering. When his hands come away from his face briefly, Jarrod can see one of his eyes has been gouged out.

The Haitian gives a tremulous sigh. The other soldier is a Dominican. He’s breathing hard, the exhileration of terror.

“Step back,” the Haitian says.

“Please,” his companion replies.

“It’s the only way. You know it is.”

The Dominican closes his eyes and turns his face away. The maimed gunner senses what’s going on and flinches. His blood is red, his palms are pink, but beyond that Jarrod has no idea what his background might be. The stricken soldier raises one hand to shield himself, and the Haitian squeezes the trigger. A roar pressurizes the tiny cabin, plugging ears already ringing from the thunder of the machine-gun. The contents of the gunner’s head splash thickly onto the metal hull and his arm drops, instantly limp. Wedged as he is in the corner, his body absorbs any ricocheting fragments. Red blood drains out of his skull, and the two peacekeepers avoid it superstitiously.

*

For a while they sit there in silence. The Haitian is sweating, beads standing out on his dark skin, his eyes wide and pale in the dim light cast by the instruments board. The Dominican is weeping softly, staring at his dead companion but not touching him, save to periodically pat at his booted ankle. Bodies continue to slam against the hull outside. The shrieking does not abate, but it’s somewhat muffled by the thick metal. The infant is putting up its frail, crackling mewl, and does not appear to be the least bit assauged by the rocking of the truck on its suspension.

“We’re not moving,” Jarrod says.

“Your driver punched a hole in the motor when he slammed back into us. The towbar was welded to the chassis.”

The Haitian falls silent, staring blankly at the interior flank. Something scrabbles at the slits at the front of the cab, hissing through the narrow gap at the prey it can sense inside. The air outside is cool, but it’s muggy in the claustrophobic half-track.

“So what do we do now?”

“We wait.”

A fresh wave of impacts slamms against one side, jolting Jarrod forward where he sits cross-legged on the floor. He counts five or six, hard, with purpose.

“They’ll come for us, right?”

The Haitian says nothing. Just stares. Jarrod turns to the grieving Dominican, who senses Jarrod’s stare.

“Right?”

“Sure. Of course.” The Dominican tries on a smile, but it comes out more as a grimace.

The creature on the hood is still hissing, a wet, gutteral sound that gurgles at points, growls at others. By the faint interior light, Jarrod can see it’s peering inside. An eyeball, distended and grey-green in colour, is staring back, rolling with fervour. A snapping, snarling sound renews as it recognizes what it cannot yet reach. Filthy digits reach in, two of them snapped, bone exposed, and scratch for purchase against the metal interior.

“Zonbi,” the Haitian mutters, then crosses himself and looks away. He takes the pistol and drops out the magazine, checking the rounds before slamming it home again. He glances back at the creature still trying to find a way through the impossibly narrow slits, and Jarrod can see the man thinking about it.

“How many do you have?”

The Haitian shrugs. “Not enough.” Then he shares a look with the Dominican and adds, “But enough.”

There’s a rattling outside. Something, maybe several somethings, pawing at the exterior handles.

“What are they doing?” Jarrod asks, rocking the young child awkwardly in an effort to keep her calm.

“Trying to find a way in, of course.”

“I thought they couldn’t think.”

Another shrug. “Lyssa desolates the cerebrum. Pieces of cerebellum and spinal column remain intact, enough to support life. Who knows what else?”

“I was told…”

“You were told what they thought you wanted to know in order to accept the assignment,” the Haitian says curtly, and doesn’t elaborate.

There’s a renewed scrabbling outside. A fierce shaking. The beast at the window has been joined by a second. This one has four fingers all chewed fleshless, the bones gnawed into sharpened points like a claw, like four tiny sculpted daggers. The fingers explore the slit. Then the creature retreats. A short while later, when Jarrod hears a tapping sound on the roof, he imagines those same jagged bone-tips exploring for weakness.

The Haitian crosses himself again. The front of his uniform is drenched in a deep ‘V’ of perspiration, although the air that seeps into the hull is cool. With each fresh hammering of bodies against the half-track his eyes widen and roll, and a pink tongue rolls out to lick his top lip of moisture.

He’s fiddling with the gun. He and the Dominican are sharing more glances. Jarrod tries to focus on the little girl.

“What about her?” the Haitian mutters. The other shakes his head.

“No way I’m going to God with that on my conscience.”

“It would be a mercy.”

“Will she even know about it? She’s so small. She looks half-dead anyway.”

“They wouldn’t care. They’d crunch her like a chicken. She still feels pain.”

Jarrod looks up. “What are you talking about?”

The two fall silent. After a while, Jarrod sees the Haitian is praying. He’s pulled out a crucifix that shares a chain with two dog-tags, kissing it then pressing it to his forehead. Then he looks up and says,

“My home has gone. I’ve always known I wasn’t going to die there. But I hoped I would at least be with my family. That’s my home now.”

Jarrod can feel the accusation. He listens to the howling, roaring mob outside. The metallic tang of blood mixed with the death-stench of spilt bowels. Feels the cold metal beneath him, shaking with the unrelenting impacts. Remembers the glaze of a tropical sun on the harbour, and the scent of spices and woodsmoke in the Old Quarter, and the spiralling eddies of hot wind worrying garbage ahead of a summer downpour.

This place was never my home, he wants to scream out.

Instead, he strokes the child’s head and says gently to her unknowing face, “But we’re not going to die here, are we.”

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

Aaand, if you read this far- congratulations! I haven’t titled this story, because I suck at titles, but if you’ve got any good suggestions, stick ’em in the comments section below and if I like one, I’ll credit you with it!

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

Long Distance Relationships: Keeping the Home Fires Burning (Guest Post)

Guest-post by @MadamInsideOut, whose self-titled blog about matters of the heart and mind can be found here.

A couple of months back now, I wrote a piece on Long Distance Relationships from the perspective of an aid worker, and the way that my family and I deal with the challenges that arise. It seemed to stimulate a fair amount of conversation- not least of all with my wife, MadamInsideOut. Because her experience of this is different to my own, I asked if she would share some of her thoughts and experiences on what it’s like to be in an LDR with an aid worker, when she has to stay home and look after our eight-year-old by herself.

M.I.O. wrote this as I was on my way back home for a visit. At the time of her writing this (Valentine’s Day), I had been out of Australia for 3 months- 96 consecutive days, during which time I had seen my wife just 10 of those days, and my eight-year-old stepdaughter precisely none. In fact, with our current schedule, I’d been at home less than 5 weeks in 5 months. We’re really getting a workout in the LDR stakes at the moment.

Without further ado, here’s what my brave and lovely wife has to say about this all.

Incidentally, it is very nice to be home for a bit.

 

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

I put my husband on a plane to Ethiopia over thirteen weeks ago. This is our longest stint apart yet, never ever to be repeated. He has missed our second wedding anniversary, Christmas, the new year, his birthday, the birthdays of most of his family and the Mayan End of the World. (This was the sort of event I would have really liked my husband around for, as you may have gathered, he is handy in a disaster.) He arrives back the day after Valentines Day. So we miss that too. Yes, there is a strong theme of missing here.

Sigh.

Mr Morealtitude asked me to write something on maintaining a relationship long distance from the perspective of the home-front. Ultimately, there isn’t anything unique about our general situation, as demonstrated by the 2000+ hits Mr Morealtitude’s last post generated in the first few days of its release. Long distance relationships are as ancient and common as our need to hunt, gather and go to war. Recently I read Charles Frazier’s, Cold Mountain; an achingly beautifully tale of two lonely hearts living through a separation during the American civil war. Phew. It hurt. The mutual throb of longing, the challenges for the vulnerable Ada, left to fend for herself with no food, no money, no knowledge on how to run her farm, waiting, watching the horizon. The struggles, snares and wistful yearning on the long road home from war for Inman. No way to connect. Hoping. Longing. Striving. Both finding a way, but not without significant struggle and grief. We are lightweights comparatively, but some of those feelings are universal. Despite the fact that we have more props than ever to manage separation from our loved ones, being apart is still fraught with challenges.

There is just nothing that can replace the physical presence of your dearest one.

In saying this, I actually really enjoy my own company. I’ve lived and traveled alone and my dad traveled extensively whilst I was growing up. And, while these experiences have helped in equipping me to survive our time apart, I love hanging out with my husband. I really really don’t like it when he’s gone.

As was mentioned, we find that any time apart under 2 weeks can be deemed as somewhat healthy and manageable. Beyond that, forget it. Five weeks out from sharing life with my numero uno compadre, love and life mate, we’re seriously stretched. Maintaining contact with Morealtitude at odd hours of day or writing lengthy emails gets difficult to fit in with the demands of doing everything. A disconnect sets in. My legs officially turn to jelly from exhaustion. All the meals in the freezer mysteriously disappear. My old friend, adrenaline abandons me and I crumple into a weary little shell of a person, rather than the otherwise required ‘Mama Extraordinaire’ persona.

I was a solo parent for 4.5 years, so I thought I would take slipping back into this over-functioning space on occasion in my stride. Not so. The issue being that as a family we establish a healthy rhythm and interdependence with each-other, and when MoreAltitude boards a plane, we wave goodbye to both him and our rhythm. I handle the initial shift with relative ease, however our daughter does not. Suffice to say, having children and needing to maintain a long distance relationship makes things much trickier to manage. Morealtitude and I never had the luxury of courting each other without the additional needs of a little person in the mix, so I can only speak from this perspective.

I must say, I have great admiration for my own mother, as she brought up four children, whilst my dad travelled regularly, loving (and hating) his various international adventures. My Mum was the stabilizing influence in our family. I credit her with any semblance of sanity or consistency I may possess as an adult. It has also become very clear to me that she played this irreplaceable supportive role to my dad’s travel at great cost to herself.

However, there was also a cost for my dad. In order to provide for us, he missed out on milestones and cuddles and the comfort of home cooked meals with his family around him. He slept poorly on lumpy pillows, in stark hotel rooms or with strangers and had to power on, despite a weekly scratchy phone call with his wife saying she had no money for groceries or that the children were sick. Not being able to physically be there for your family in a crisis is a very frustrating, even heartbreaking thing for a functioning loving adult to deal with. Dad always came through though. Always. He was ultimately motivated by his love for his family.

My husband also has such noble motivations- although there are some serious questions emerging around the reality of continuing this line of work with the, at times, conflicting needs of a family. He is an amazing person and a wonderful husband. He puts us at the centre of everything he does. He is generous and caring and wise beyond his years in knowing how to nurture a family. His advice around maintaining long distance relationships is fabulous. He has taught me a lot. He is a brilliant communicator and despite whatever stresses he may be experiencing whilst in the field, he has an excellent ability to be present and understanding of whatever issues are occurring for me a million miles across the oceans. He still manages to be right there in spirit. Many times, I have felt the challenges on my side of the world are petty or mundane compared to fighting poverty or implementing medicine and food distributions. But Morealtitude is always genuinely interested, appreciative and validating of my experiences and will indulge them more so than I will let myself. This is marvelously helpful. I imagine it would be very easy to get resentful or feel insignificant if he could not do this. After all, challenges are challenges, no matter where you experience them.

And there are genuine challenges with being the one left behind. It can be difficult not to feel as though you are missing out on the adventure. Difficult at times not to detect pangs of resentment, when your life resembles your own version of the set of Groundhog Day. Particularly between the hours of 5-9pm when dinner needs cooking, the kid gets whiney and wants entertaining and feeding and attention and washing and, and, and. And there’s just you with your two hands, one in the sink, the other manning the stove; probably an additional foot artfully applying a band-aid. It becomes exasperating when your kid refuses to sleep alone for the 95th night in a row, but you know they will immediately right themselves upon your partner’s return. Doing those evening stretches alone night after night can be overwhelming and a more than a little lonely. I’m talking specifically about a loneliness that can only be quieted with adult company. That variety of loneliness tends to surface during those marathon evenings, or when an important decision just has to be made without the consultation or inclusion of your humanitarian husband who is in a 6 hour meeting with the United Nations several continents away. A very real exhaustion can set in from doing everything solo, where you had a partnership before.

I try and offset this by using the opportunity to invest more into my family and friendships. I find it easier to do this in summer than in the hibernation months of winter. I’ve been asking myself to watch that I’m not completely holding together all of the relationships my husband is absent from and unable to fully invest in, although my being anchored at home inadvertently maintains a connection and may help his return home to be a little more seamless. That is okay with me, but I have seen this dynamic become unhealthy when the traveling partner loses meaningful connection socially at home. I think this is a strong reason for jobs requiring extensive travel to have an expiry date.

As time wears on, daily details can really get swallowed up by the miles between us. Details of which we would normally share or witness together can be vaporized by opposing schedules and time zones. We have to work hard to keep the intimacy from flailing – which we absolutely do.

So, you might ask, how exactly does one keep healthily connected to their crusading globe trotter and keep the home fires burning without getting resentful? A few thoughts…

• Empathy: I’ve covered this one a fair bit already. Empathising with what your significant other is experiencing is profoundly important in managing your relationship long-distance. Our communication centers around this. Honestly expressing, listening to, connecting with and validating each of the others experiences is vital. That is not to say that we don’t sometimes talk utter nonsense and laugh and joke. We just talk – or write. For the most part, words are really all we have. We keep building shared experiences this way. We do this on a daily basis. If I ever start feeling sorry for myself or resentful of the distance, I just think about the hard stuff my other half is experiencing and what he is sacrificing. And, if he is enjoying himself, I am grateful, because I like him and I want him to be happy. That usually sorts me out. We are in the same boat. We’re just at opposite ends of a very very large canoe. Oh and if you are the one away, try not to post your experiences on facebook before you have had a chance to tell your partner what has happened. I’m talking specifically about pictures and captions like this, Morealtitude:
  

  Facebook caption accompanying the original posting of this photo: “For those who noted my comments about flying in and out of Somalia on a jet with a shattered windshield, THIS is what I was referring to. Yes, at 22,000 feet. Thank you, UNHAS.”

• Be Mature: Own your reactions. Ultimately your responses to the separation are only in your control. Do what you need to do to look after yourself. This might mean seeking extra support from family, friends or professionals. In doing this, look after your partner as well. Express your feelings, but don’t hurl them at your loved one as something they need to fix. Try not to blame or punish your partner or freeze them out while they are miles away – or in the same room for that matter. That stuff is really unfair and destructive.

• Be Deliberately Active: Know what you need to get through, make plans, so you don’t slump into sad-feels and find it all too much. I like filling my house with people – our daughter is happiest when surrounded by energy, I also like to cook, so I try and hook up lots of dinners and visits in advance. We had a lovely friend staying with us this time and her company made a world of difference. Take the empty spaces and fill them with other things. Things you like. Get out. Exercise. See friends. Meet people. See a show. Do the art gallery. Be spontaneous. Take the kids to eat ice-cream on the beach. Then keep doing that stuff when your other half gets back, but include them. It’s a nice way to bust out of a rut and experience your hometown anew.

• Be Flexible: Go with the flow. Some days, connection may not be possible. It just is. Save up your stories for when it happens. Similarly many of the routines that we establish with Morealtitude home just don’t work when he is gone, so we shake them up, mix them around. Things are a lot more fluid, including meals and bedtime. Our daughter sleeps in with me at nights. It drives me crazy, but not as crazy as having her scream and whimper half the night for weeks on end because she is scared and she misses her step-dad. I pick my battles.

• Sleep: Obviously this is a corner stone of sanity. However, I have somehow found myself becoming a terrible sleeper when Morealtitude is away. When he is gone, I avoid bed because I am wired and anxious and struggle to wind down. I’ve found a few useful tools. These include completing a relaxation meditation – free from the internet- and, my most recent find, audio books. These are calming, they slow my thoughts down and stimulate my imagination in a healthy way. The more I sleep, the better I cope. It’s not rocket science, but it gets mixed up when you’re apart and you need strategies to help make it happen.

• Visit: If you can make it happen, it is incredibly useful to get out to the field and take part in your partner’s world. Obviously it is not possible on most trips. It has taken us over 3 years to make this happen with all the various pieces in play. Recently I visited Morealtitude in Ethiopia. The first hand insight I gleaned from this trip into his work and all of the various complexities he faces was invaluable. It has made a HUGE difference, as it has helped me gain a more balanced perspective of humanitarian work and our situation on the whole. I connected with my husband’s daily realities with all of my senses. In that 10 day trip, I witnessed the impact my husband was having on huge programs – which made the struggle of the previous 8 weeks worthwhile. I also saw the nuances of the aid industry. The questions. The two steps forward, three steps backward daily dance of humanitarian work. I ditched my first world guilt, as I realised that human suffering is human suffering, no matter where it occurs – this sounds obvious, but it was an important perspective shift for me. Just, if you can, DO IT!! 

What about when they get back?

Of course you are beside yourself with excitement and relief to have them back. But, it can be a bit weird and take a bit of adjusting to. You’ve just spent the last X amount of weeks figuring out your own systems and making it all hang together without your partner and suddenly they are back ready to slot into all those spaces you’ve managed to fill. The systems you had together have been remodeled. I have friends who need to spend a couple of days in a stand-off-ish space until they readjust, as they feel a sort of resentment at having been ‘abandoned’. I personally don’t experience this, but I think it’s very understandable. My parents used to have a ripper fight after every trip. That is not our style of re-entry, but it shows it can be turbulent.

It just takes a few days to reconnect properly, there is probably jet lag and fatigue in the mix. We just try and be gentle and patient with each-other. And, yep, you guessed it. We keep communicating. The shift to having more modes of communication other than words at our disposal, is um, advantageous. We can give gifts, we can do stuff for and with each-other, we can say how much we appreciate what the other has done for us whilst we’ve been apart (recommended) and we can touch (highly recommended).

Dagnabit. It is so much better to have the full suite of expression available; to physically share spaces, dreams, doldrums, laughter and life.

So tell me, why do we do this apart thing again?

Reflections on a Refugee Response: Dolo Ado

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Things

Some time ago I was asked to contribute to a discussion about improving the Humanitarian sector. If there were any three things I could magically change about our industry, what would it be?

Well, better late than never I guess.

I had intended to have this post written up for World Humanitarian Day on August 19^th, but unfortunately in the days leading up, I found myself flat on my back with a neck injury and found it hard enough to get to the toilet, never mind write for the interwebs. So, sorry about that. And also my total lack of engagement around the whole WHD online campaign. Now I feel like the guy who didn’t wish anybody a Merry Christmas.

[Full disclosure: this year, I hardly wished anybody a Merry Christmas]

If I could snap my fingers and change three things about the Humanitarian Industry, these are they:

1. The Right People in the Field (and lose the dross)

Humanitarian work (whether emergency or long-term development focused) happens at the field level. It is, above all else, a service industry that revolves around support provided to community members by staff mobilized through our programs. The guys who operate at that level are essentially the fingertips of our agency. They are the face that communities see and they are the ones who ultimately make the decisions on a day-to-day basis that affect whether or not programs see success.

They are also the bottom rung on the organizational ladder.

*WRONG*

We have this crazy idea that there’s a hierarchy of importance in the aid industry. The field pleb who carries out community mobilzation meetings to talk about how to go to the toilet without getting cholera is at the bottom. Then there’s the program manager who reports on the daily activities to their boss, an area manager of some kind. Most likely, these guys are locally hired, maybe even national staff from somewhere else in the country if they’re in management roles. Some of them are totally awesome. Some of them haven’t finished high school, or are useless. Some of them haven’t finished high school and are still totally awesome.

At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got headquarters office in some European nation where white guys (and increasingly, I’m happy to say, non-white guys and non-guys) with thirty years’ experience in the industry have desk-jobs where they make decisions on how best to do our work. Some of these guys even started working as field plebs in some country office and ‘worked their way up’ to become senior managers, or technical experts, or sectoral advisors, or whatever it is they’ve become. Some of them are totally awesome. Some of them are a complete waste of space.

The thing is, we’ve got it topsy-turvy. We’ve assumed that our field works like a corporate model, and the further you get from the field, the more of an expert you are, and the better contribution you can make to the organization. When the fact is, when you’re stuck at some lofty level in a dysfunctional bureaucracy, your contribution gets watered down until, at the field level, it mixes with the hundreds of contributions from hundreds of other technical experts, and comes to pretty much zilch. Meanwhile, some local kid hired last year is running field activities and has never even heard of your innovative collaborative cross-cutting approach, and is just getting on with business.

I know some awesome field guys stranded in head offices, men and women who really know how to interact with and inspire a community. In fact, I know people like that at pretty much every level in the industry. I can list off passionate local field coordinators who really know how to communicate with their own people. Dynamic expat area managers who have an amazing and inspirational connection to their staff and the programs they’re responsible for. Maybe the best community engagement field worker I’ve ever met was a Latina expat who ran a multi-country disaster preparedness program in Central America. Man, she had communities eating out of her hand- they loved her.

I’ve also known a lot of space-wasters. People who’ve been promoted simply because they’ve put in the time, or because their brother works in the right ministry. Expat experts who’ve been around too long and are keeping a desk warm until their long-service-leave matures. Field workers who are ignorant, don’t care, or are abusive to the communities they’re supposed to be serving, and local area managers who’ve set up their own kingdom and are skimming off the top. Internationals who once upon a time made good field staff, but have had to return to home-base offices to raise a family, and are drying up inside and getting too cynical to be of much use.

This is due partly to an inherent trend to favour a corporate model, and partly due to perceptions of financial restrictions. Why would we pay an expat ten times what we can pay a local to mobilize at the community level, especially when the expat wants a place for their kids and the local has a better connection with the community.

Well, there is some truth to these constraints, but it’s not complete. You see, we need the right people in the right places. Sometimes, that’s gonna mean we need somebody from that community to be the face of our organization. Other times, it might be a national from somewhere else. In some circumstances, there might be an expatriate who is just the right person for that particular job- they have a way of interacting that inspires and provides leadership, and they have the right technical skill-set to really make a difference.

Basically, we stick some of our best field staff behind desks where they can’t be effective, and pay our lowest salaries to the men and women who represent the organization and are ultimately going to operationalize our plans.

Think about this. Our reputation, our impact, our very humanitarian imperative rests on the people we invest least in. Is this good business? No.

The industry needs to put its best people in positions where they can have direct operational control over field activities and staff, where they can represent the organization to our most important stakeholders- the community themselves. People who have the capacity to simultaneously implement best practice in gender, accountability, disaster risk reduction and complexity management.

We wouldn’t expect a high-school graduate in some western nation to be able to get up and run at this level. Why would we expect it of our field-staff? And yet this is the level we should be operating at.

So you need to pay an expatriate wage for a ‘low-level’ program manager sometimes? Okay, so what? I realise it will raise a few awkward issues around pay equity between national and expat staff members, but are you really going to let that stand in the way of maximising impact? Besides, it won’t always be the case- sometimes you’ll find the right staff member locally, too- but make sure they’re fairly paid for what they’re offering (not to get all communist on you here). But let’s have a career progression that sees our best staff encouraged and supported to operate at the field level, not some lofty height where they’re effectively useless, while staff who are not-yet-competent (or in some cases, simply lack the will or capacity to do any better) do our most important work and aren’t paid, recognized or supported accordingly.

Oh, and all those middle layers of bureaucracy, expertise and hamster-wheel box-ticking management? Plebs like me? Send ‘em back to the field or sack ‘em.

[Full disclosure: Since writing this, I’ve been sent closer to the field- yay]

2. Downward Accountability & Complete Transparency

A reminder that seems to need to be pushed out time and again in this industry: We’re here for the communities first, and everybody else second. None of this dual-citizenship where we have to treat our donors as equal stakeholders in the process. I’m sorry. You’re a donor. You’re not why we’re here, so get over it, and if you don’t like it, then don’t give. We exist to serve our communities. Period.

As such we have to not just talk accountability- we have to be accountable. Get our communities running their own assessments. None of this seeds-in-a-pile stuff, either. I mean, sure, if it’s the most appropriate way to get information and connect with the communities, by all means run with it. But please, half these guys have smart-phones now. You’re telling me you can’t involve them in your assessment process in a more sophisticated way? And if they’re not there yet? Invest in them so they can be.

How about getting them to help write your project designs? Contribute to discussions on how the project will be managed, and what indicators and outputs they want to see in their communities. Not just , “I want a well”. How about things like flow-rate, water quality, how to set up the distribution network, and safety issues? How about bringing them to meet the donor when you negotiate the project terms? Let them see your budget- including management costs. Do they see your reports? How about letting them write the reports? Do your communities lack the capacity to do that? Really? Do they? If so, you’d better put education at the top of your to-do list, cos take it from somebody who views reports for a living: It ain’t rocket science.

HAP International has a fantastic tool that prescribes the appropriate levels of accountability for a program to be truly answerable to the community it purports to serve, but like most systems it can become a tick-the-box exercise and be paid nothing more than lip-service. “Yes, we’re HAP compliant. There’s a little wooden box they can put complaints into if they want to.”

Let’s make it actually happen so that communities get to call the shots. I bet our programs would look pretty different.

On the same topic (and not wanting to be cheating too much here by adding extra things to my list), let’s be totally transparent and accountable to all our stakeholders, not just communities. Let’s let our budgets and reports be uploaded onto central publically-accessible databases. We bear in mind the need to protect certain information for the safety of staff, beneficiaries, or the organization- but we don’t hide behind this. Let our donor public see what we’re up to. Let communities and host governments see what we’re up to. Partner agencies. The UN. Donor governments.

It makes you squirm. And it would hurt at first. There’d be a lot of re-aligning of expectations on behalf of donors. A lot of re-aligning of employment on behalf of NGOs, for sure. But it’d settle. And we’d all be better off for it. And a lot more honest.

Of course, implicit in this assumption is intelligent donorship. Donors need to be able to look at what NGOs do, and what they are, and how they work, and within the context of this transparency, make appropriate decisions about how to invest in supporting communities in need- for goodness sake stop talking about ‘overheads’. We don’t have that yet. A part of that is due to the lack of transparency and the partial-honesty with which we treat our constituents. There are other factors in there too- particularly politics- which are harder to overcome.

3. Action Fitted to Context

Wow. We’re here again. Needs oriented! Make your programs appropriate to the context you’re operating in! Humanitarian imperative first! How many times do we have to have the same conversation? I guess as many times as we keep making decisions to prioritize things other than the needs context of the people we’re supposed to be serving. Do I really need to say very much more about this one? I sincerely hope not. Suffice to say, this isn’t happening. Not yet. If there was one thing I could change with a snap of my fingers, it would be this one. Easy. Done.

9 Events that have Shaped the Humanitarian Industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Biafran Airlift (1967-70)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. The Rwandan Genocide (April-July 1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 

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.