What Disaster Response Needs to Save Lives is More Volunteers

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

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

Annapurna Region, Nepal, 2007

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

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

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

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

Durbar Square in Kathmandu, 2007

Durbar Square, March 25, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are the volunteers we need more of.

Swayambhunath (Monkey Temple), 2007

Swayambhunath (Monkey Temple), March 25, 2015

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

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

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

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

Kathmandu skyline, 2007

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

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

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

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

1. Awareness-Raising (as a conversation)

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

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

2. Invest in National-Level Response Structures

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

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

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

Civil Defence personnel working with an NGO DRR program in Guatemala

3. Drill, Drill, Drill

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

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

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

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

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

4. Give, Give, Give

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

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

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

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

5. Post-Disaster Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

This is Not an April Fool’s Post

“10: In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified humans, not hopeless objects.

Respect for the disaster victim as an equal partner in action should never be lost. In our public information we shall portray an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their vulnerabilities and fears. While we will cooperate with the media in order to enhance public response, we will not allow external or internal demands for publicity to take precedence over the principle of maximising overall relief assistance. We will avoid competing with other disaster response agencies for media coverage in situations where such coverage may be to the detriment of the service provided to the beneficiaries or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries.”

-The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief (taken from the Sphere Handbook, 2011 Edition, p.370; Emphasis mine)

It takes a lot to floor me. I’ve seen a lot of dumb stuff in the humanitarian industry. I’m moderately immune to dumbassery these days, and tend to keep my righteous indignation in pretty good check too.

However, a document came to me via a colleague in a partner NGO recently. Said colleague works in a specific emergency context involving refugees and refugee camps, and a fundraising office of said NGO had approached them with a request to bring in a TV crew and do some filming of the refugees and their crisis situation.

Not an unusual request, and under the circumstances of trying to raise both awareness and funds, generally a good idea.

As long as your fundraising office has at least half a clue about international standards of humanitarian fundraising guidelines, as outlined in the Red Cross Code of Conduct excerpt quoted above.

I won’t say much more. Instead, I’m going to lift excerpts directly from the media brief that the fundraising office provided, which instructed the country program exactly what stories they wanted to source for the commercial TV crew they were going to send.

Call me mean-spirited, but I have left the grammatical errors in the original request in place, because I think it adds to the flavour.

Detailed Story Request:

Children under 12 are suggested for the story case main character. If the child is too old, we lose the effectiveness.

Case Examples:

1. Disease/Injury

– AIDS infected, parasite, virus infection and so on. Because of these infections, the child is severely suffering. Please look for disease case that can be seen visually [in the original document, this word is in bold and in red text- MA] such as Elephantiasis, sand flea, one’s arm or leg amputated to protect from further virus infection, severe skin disease and so on. Disease that is so heart-breaking just by looking. Diarrhea and fever are dangerous for children under five but in filming, it is difficult to catch the seriousness of the symptoms because we cannot see from outside. [in the original, underlined and also in red- MA]

With me so far? They talk a little more about emergency medical cases and ‘serious injuries or burns’, and then:

2. Early Marriage

– Because of early marriage… she is not at school getting education but in household to live as young wife.

– She is originally from very poor family and that is why she has to accept early marriage. However she is suffering from disease and her babies are malnutrition and have other diseases.

Are you sure that you want to bother sending a TV crew all the way over here, or shall we just send you some shots of a sad looking kid and you can put your own voice-over onto it, because it seems like you already have the story figured out…

Onwards, and under the section on “Child Headed Family”

– A very young child who is in an age to receive full love and care from parents, but unfortunately the child has no parents (or parents who are very sick) and has to live as the head of the family…

– This child really wants to go to school as her friends in the village but could not go even near to the school. She really desire to get education and better life for the future.

– The child is very young but very loving and attractive child.

Obviously poor kids need to be visually appealing. Cuz, fundraising.

The list goes on. Then towards the end, the fundraising office explains that they want to ensure that “our potential donors can feel the same pain and sadness as if they witness the situation.”

I can think of some ways that could be arranged.

However, to avoid any potential misunderstanding (because it may not have been clear in the run-up), they conclude with a summary of exactly what they’re looking for:

-Children or households in serious poverty

-Children and family suffered by disease, water contamination, inflammation, aids, malaria, malnutrition, etc.

– Situation which was born by extreme poverty

– Sad, abysmal, inhumane scenes and stories that happened by local issues such as conflict, disaster, early marriage, etc.

Final emphasis mine.

So that you don’t damage anything, I am told that the TV crew visit did not go ahead. And I sincerely hope that somebody’s head of fundraising got a firm shoeing.

As the language in the brief suggests, there is a cultural element in play here. Different nations and cultures do have different expectations and standards around what is and is not acceptable in the public domain. Anybody who’s seen an Al Jazeera (Arabic) news report following an Israeli incursion into the West Bank knows that the Middle East has different thresholds for violence on the evening news than you’d expect to find on the BBC.

None the less, the issue of human dignity should be a universal one. The Red Cross Code of Conduct- and other guidelines more specific to humanitarian media and fundraising- are signed by international organizations- I stress that word international– recognizing that we are a global community, and it is simply not appropriate to exploit human suffering simply because our cultural norms say it is okay to do so. Not if we want to remain a part of that same international community, and be treated with any respect whatsoever.

I really wish this was an April Fools Day post. Unfortunately, this level of ignorance still thrives, even within the international aid community.

Troubleshooting

I walk back to my office after a meeting.

“Tibeb has been trying to call you,” Teme tells me. She’s one of my Monitoring and Evaluation officers and is running a mission about two days south of the capital, checking on an emergency food program. “She is wanting to stay in the field to complete her work until the 31^st. But the driver has only been authorized to be out until the 29^th.”

Teme explains that when the request was put to fleet management, a mistake was made on the driver request form and the earlier date entered. So I guess there’s some issue with fleet management wanting the vehicle and driver back. It wouldn’t be the first time that there are hiccups between what my field staff want, and getting the resources from the shared services guys.

I go down the two flights of stairs to have a chat to Girma, the fleet manager. I’ve never seen anyone so consistently smiley as Girma, and he greets me warmly. Although we’ve had issues in mobilizing vehicles at times, I know he’s dedicated to finding fixes and he has always been reasonable when I’ve discussed with him.

“The problem,” he tells me, “Is that on the form, she only asked for the driver until the 29^th. So now she wants the driver until the 31^st. But the driver only took out per diem until the 29^th, not the 31^st, so he won’t stay longer.”

I frown. “So have him stay out, and he can be reimbursed for the two extra days.”

The per diem rate clocks in at a little under ten bucks a day for that location. I’m confident that between them, the team are going to ensure that the driver doesn’t starve.

“I know. I said that to finance. But they say it’s against policy. It creates all kinds of problems. They say if he comes back and tries to claim per diem after the fact that he can’t be reimbursed.”

I raise an eyebrow. Creates all kinds of problems? We’re an organization that measures its in-country budget in multiples of ten million dollars annually. I don’t see how $17 constitutes all kinds of problems.

“He’s out doing work,” I say. “Of course we’re going to reimburse him. There’s no question about that. If finance are going to push the matter I’ll pay the per diem out of my own pocket.”

Girma grins his habitual smile. “I know. But finance.”

Girma and I walk down the hallway to finance. He shows me to the desk of the particular finance officer responsible for this edict. He starts to re-hash the conversation the to of them had earlier. I don’t let him get all the way through.

“We will reimburse him,” I say to the finance officer, directly, in a voice that indicates I’m not asking for his permission.

He doesn’t put up any real resistance. “Well, you’ll need to sign his acquittal form.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be around next week to sign it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

And that’s quite literally all it took.

It’s troubleshooting little things like this (as well as much bigger things) that fills time out here. It’s not difficult. But in an organizational culture where the drive for compliance and the tyranny of petty systems takes precednence over ensuring our project work goes ahead, it’s a constant tussle. Without my intervention (and in a society like this where rank trumps protocol, all I really need to do is show up and give my verbal instruction), a systems-compliant finance officer would have cut short the work being done by my field-team actually engaging at the community level and trying to improve the quality of the work we do. By simply standing at his desk and saying that I’d approve an exception to policy- what ridiculous policy I’m excepting I’m not entirely clear- the problem is solved.

This little story- which took place this morning- is a microcosm for many of the challenges we face trying to ensure our field operations keep rolling. Without constant- constant– attention, the procedural requirements, paperwork and red-tape rapidly grind activities to a halt. In many ways, I have no particular skillset that isn’t greatly outweighed by the experience and ability of my field teams, in terms of actually providing assistance to the communities we work with. I see my main role here as making sure that the systems work to support my staff, not get in their way. And then I get out of their way as well.

This compliance culture is nobody’s fault, per se. It’s a culture common to many INGOs and, I don’t doubt, a plethora of other organizations as well. In fact, I understand that government offices generally have it much worse. And to be honest, I’m lucky enough to be working in an organization where I have a Country Director who backs me up, so I can be confident of stepping into a situation like this one (or, more importantly, one where we’re trying to push through high-level organizational change to improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and impact of our field operations on a much larger scale), and when I tell staff to move the red tape out of the way, I know it’ll happen.

Sometimes after some negotiation…

It is, of course, a fine balance. On the one hand, administrative systems were designed to increase transparency and limit corruption. Driven first by donors, it is now increasingly pushed by the risk-averse inertia of organizations themselves, who are terrified of being publically caught out with inadequate systemic controls, fearful of the loss of donor funding that would presumably follow. Large government donors, with increasing layers of demands, don’t make this any easier either. Sadly, what we end up with is a wag-the-dog scenario where we end up putting so much emphasis on the controls that it becomes unwieldy to operate.

Aid organizations have a responsibility to seek a balance- ensuring appropriate accountability while maximising the speed and quality of field work. Donors, too, need to recognize that the more demands they place on implementing agencies- heavy reporting and fiscal requirements and micromanagement of tasks and activities- the more this can be detrimental to the communities we all exist to serve.

My heart is in operations. Helping stuff happen. Which is why I love this job. I get to push things out of the way, try to ensure a reasonable measure of accountability, but free up my teams to go do what they’re supposed to do and deliver our programs on the ground.

Of course, it’s also why I hate this industry sometimes. Because I watch, first hand, as administrative procedures delay funding and operations, occupy time and effort, and ultimately bog down our work until it becomes less efficient. And communities don’t get the services they’re owed.

Today, though, I’m just pleased I won’t be seeing Tibeb back until after the weekend.

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.

Bureaucracy at its Best

(I came across this piece that I wrote a couple of years back while working for a different organization to the one I am currently with. Something in the article must have tripped a self-preservation failsafe in my brain and I decided not to publish. However I feel like sharing it now, so here goes.

Incidentally, I do also have to say, to my former organization’s credit, that in the months after this post was written, steps were taken to simplify some of the processes mentioned below, one specific improvement from my perspective being the hiring of someone whose job it was to oversee that system- poor soul- and to whom I owe a great deal in Administration Karma.)

My Dad got an email the other day.  Former aid-worker turned UN professional, he now works as a consultant on international public health.  He’s been contracted by a large and well-known United Nations agency (which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but for the sake of this post shall be referred simply to as the United Nations Young-People-in-Distress Programme) to run a training course in a small mountainous Hindu kingdom in south Asia.  Because the course is to do with training public health workers, another large and well-known UN agency (which we shall refer to as the Global Physical-Well-Being Office) is also involved in the workshop.  My father, having been contracted by the UNYPiDP to do all the preparatory work for the seminar, spent the previous six days doing just that, and putting considerable effort into it.  So when the office emailed him that night informing him that in fact staff from the GPWBO had already done all of that work and that he would simply be required to provide a closing summary at the end of each day of the workshop, he was, as they say, miffed.

In fact, Dad was shocked.  He [obviously and quite rightly] felt as though he’d been treated very unprofessionally, and, given that he has a signed contract to back his position, plans to address the issue through official channels.

I, in my position working for another nameless international aid-sector organization, was sadly not shocked at all.  In fact, I could see such a thing happening quite easily in many of the international organizations I’ve come across.

The fact is, the tyranny of bureaucracy has seeped through international organizations like oil through the Gulf of Mexico.  For those on the outside, it leads to criticisms of organizational incompetency- examples on a micro-scale include my Dad’s story; on a far more sinister scale, the massacre at Srebrenica during the Yugoslav breakup similarly had roots (at least partially) in bureaucratic complexity and mismanagement (for possibly the best account of this history, read Dr. Sheri Fink’s fantastic War Hospital).  For those of us on the inside, it can be frustrating, disheartening, disillusioning.

There are good reasons for this bureaucracy- at least in principle.  Fears of mismanagement of donor funding, coupled with increased calls for transparency and financial accountability (and, ironically, organizational efficiency) all require systems to manage, observe and report back on organizational performance, all of which require administrative systems to govern them.  We have systems that govern our programming functions; systems that govern our financial operations; internal audit departments to oversee and check that we are being compliant to our systems; legal departments to ensure that we are compliant to larger legislative requirements; and external audit contractors, to ensure that our internal audit departments are indeed doing their job correctly.

I’m not making this up.  And any of you who work for (or have recently worked for) a reasonably-sized company in the Western world will probably be able to identify with this setup.  It’s an unavoidable side-effect of our increasingly risk-averse world.

And it’s tiresome.  It’s fiddly.  It can seem irrelevant (and frequently probably is).  And to someone whose idea of a good day in the office is bouncing around in a Land Cruiser between IDP camps, it’s a form of slow, soul-destroying torture.

Part of my current role involves ensuring that money that’s raised by our donors gets to specific emergency-related projects in the field.  We have our own internal accounting systems which govern these transfers and avoid my needing to have anything to do with banks.

Several years ago, my part in ensuring this transfer of money occurred involved reviewing the project, then sending an email to my direct supervisor stating the project name and identifying code, the amount of money to be sent, and the source from which the money was to be drawn.  My supervisor would then forward that mail to the accounting team with their approval.  Job done.

Today, the process is as follows.

1. The field designs a project and budget (in line with international standards such as Sphere, the Humanitarian Accountability Project, the Red Cross Code of Conduct, Do No Harm, and our organizational standards relating to the project management cycle) and sends this to me.

2. I review this project and budget, making suggestions or asking questions as appropriate and requesting a revised draft (if necessary) from the field.

3.  At the same time, I enter our project database and create a new entry for this project, including a brief summary, necessary budget information (including breakdown of direct and indirect costs), target sectors, target recipients, start and end dates, reporting schedules, and an internal project identification code (I also need to get an international project identification code, but I have to ask for this from the field; the field have to ask for this from our international office, and this can take anywhere from 72 hours onwards).

4. This should also trigger a request to have a new entry created on a separate documents database, which will then be created sometime over the next 24-72 hours (although I sometimes have to follow this up with an email).

5. Using the internal project identification code, I enter our email database and create a new folder, into which all emails relating to this project are now stored.

6. Once the documents database is updated, I then need to store the budget and proposal (in separate entries) together with pertinent information such as the documentation type, date received from the field, and any comments or expectations around a revised version.

7. The field sends a revised version back to me, and I save the revised documents into our documents database, and make any necessary changes to our project database.  If I change budget figures, the system will not let me save changes until I have written an explanation for why the figures have changed.

8. I can now request that the funds be authorized through the projects database, using a combination of two drop-down menus and a button to request authorization.

9. If the budget is below a certain threshold, this can go to my direct supervisor for approval.  If the budget is over that threshold, I have to create a special memo from a template saved within our system which is then sent to senior management for approval.  This memo consists of pertinent project data, a project summary, a justification for how this project fits within the strategic goals of the organization, and a recommendation (should this project be funded or not?  Duh…)

10. Assuming the project is approved by the appropriate level (where that level has checked a box on the project database), the ball is bounced back to me and I can then enter the approval date into the project database and click another button to request the actual transfer of funding.  This is the end of my responsibility, and something shoots off to our finance department telling them to transfer the money.  I have no idea how this works or what they do.  And quite frankly, I don’t want to.

If I haven’t completed certain steps (such as saving the documents on the documents database) the request won’t be processed.  If some information has been entered erroneously and needs to be changed, or if there are changes from the field, parts of the process need to be repeated.  Because the system is effectively ‘locked’- i.e. the database program will not allow you to request the funding transfer or request approval if other steps haven’t been satisfactorily completed- it is difficult and time-consuming to circumvent the steps.  Likewise, if your project or request doesn’t fit neatly within the parameters of what a ‘normal’ project should look like (the system is designed for long-term development projects, while most of mine are short, rapid emergency projects), then it generally involves a lot of running around and fiddling with things, with three or four people taking time out to manage the system until it fits.

Seriously, this kills me.

I do need to point out, for those currently recoiling in horror, that we can, when needs dictate, bypass this system.  Where we’ve just had a massive earthquake someplace and need to make the money available straight away, we can fast-track things, with permission from the top.  We wouldn’t let administrative systems compromise our ability to actually deliver life-saving assistance.  But to be honest, those situations are generally pretty rare, and most of the time I find myself having to trudge through this process every time I want to get money to my projects.

I do get- at least in principle- why we need to do this*.  Sort of.  Every stage of the process is observed, documented and accountable.  There’s no room for mismanagement of funds.  I can’t siphon ten grand off to my Cayman Islands “MoreAltitude’s New Camera Fund” account (for those curious about making a donation, I’m looking for a Canon EOS 5D Mark III).  When we need to report back to our donors on how we spend our money, we can account for both the destination, and the process by which the destination was decided upon.  And that information is publicly available in annual reports that are produced and shared.

However there are times, caught up in the throes of this many-tentacled beast, where I feel more than a little crushed by what feel like trivialities, when I take a look at what I thought I was supposed to be doing with my career.  But no.  I’m just saving the world, one mouse-click at a time.

*In an interview for a promotion some time back, I was asked to discuss some of my weaknesses in relation to the role.  I honestly admited that administration was a challenge for me (something the senior managers interviewing me were already aware of).  One asked me, very seriously,

“But you do understand why administration is so important, don’t you?”

“Weeell,” I replied with a smirk, “In principle.”

Apparently I very nearly didn’t get the promotion.

Photos:

1. Tuol Sleng Prison Cell, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

2. Ceramic Street Sign, Antigua, Guatemala

3. Luna Park, St. Kilda, Australia

4. Stalemate, Chessboard in Sunlight, rural Western Australia

In Which an Expat Aid Worker Talks Long Distance Relationships

My wife and I just celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary.

By celebrated, I mean, we shared a 25-minute Skype chat via grainy video, which had to be curtailed fairly promptly after staff started queuing outside my office door. It was a fairly frustrating experience for me, even moreso for my wife, if the expression in her voice was anything to go by as we hung up- and I don’t blame her.

This was certainly not how either of us envisaged sharing our second wedding anniversary, even a couple of months back. Being a full hemisphere apart, however, separated by oceans and continents and eight or nine time-zones, this is what it looks like. We haven’t seen each other for five weeks, won’t see each other for another four, and even worse, my step-daughter and I will be apart for several months.

It sucks.

It’s more than just the fact that we don’t get to communicate face-to-face. Which is, let me tell you, horrendous enough. The time difference is brutal. Finding windows in my work day that fit windows in her routine of managing our home and looking after our child tends to rob very much spontaneity. Because I’m out here sans famille, I’m fair game for the office here, which means the work piles up without my usual incentive for boundaries, and during the [oh so short] workday itself, I’m usually dashing from task to task- but the last thing I want to do is make my wife feel like I’m penciling her in to my schedule. Unfortunately, this is what it can feel like sometimes.

As well, rather than sharing a life, we now find ourselves separated by worlds and lifestyles. My wife carries the responsibility of both of us, doing the work of two people and keeping our life together at home. Meanwhile, I’m filling my days with almost nothing but work, in a continent she’s never visited, and periodically disappearing off to one of our project sites. I know that in the past, especially while on humanitarian missions, she’s struggled to reconcile the need to raise issues that she’s dealing with at home which she feels are mundane, while I have my hands full with so many more ‘important’ things in the field (not a true reflection, but I grasp her struggle).

My wife and I are no stranger to this dynamic. When we first got together, I worked for an NGO’s emergency response team and was deployable almost immediately, anywhere in the world, traveling about six months a year. Three weeks into our relationship, I was deployed at 48 hours’ notice to a typhoon response. I was gone three weeks, back three more, then deployed somewhere else for yet another three. Shortly afterwards, I stepped away from that particular role, recognizing that such travel was not conducive to the survival of a new relationship. That didn’t stop me being deployed for five weeks during our short engagement, to Niger- quite literally as far away from my then-fiancee as I possibly could have gone. I challenge you to try and plan a wedding on two different continents.

Somehow, she still married me.

I’ve been travelling less since the wedding. Generally my trips have been three weeks or less, a total of about three months a year. Absence is still a key dynamic in our relationship, though- and in that of my relationship with our daughter. In fact, it’s a feature of many expat aid workers- and other professions that travel frequently.

It’s not a new thing for me, either. While I hadn’t been in many relationships prior to getting married (in itself part due to the fact that I traveled so much; we’ll ignore the fact that I’m a little clueless in the relationship department), pretty much all the relationships I did have were impacted, one way or another, by travel and distance. When I was a child, my own father- former EAW turned UN HQ staffer- would travel regularly. I literally cannot remember a time in my life that hasn’t involved regularly being away from loved ones.

So that’s my credentials of dysfunctionality out of the way.

I think this post has been brewing for some time. Pretty much any EAW will come up against the Long Distance Relationship (LDR, not to be confused by my supply chain colleagues with a Loss/Damage Report, although there are times you could be forgiven for confusing the two…) at one point or another in their lives, especially if they make a career of aid, and don’t do the wise thing of spending a few years in the field and then getting a *normal* job at home. The aid industry is full of people who’ve not been able to make relationships work with their transient or high-travel lifestyle.

A few months ago, @devxroads shot me a message asking for my perspective on what it was like trying to be an aid worker and a family man- unfortunately I was rushed off my feet at the time and wasn’t blogging, and I feel bad I didn’t contribute to the conversation. More recently, my dear friend, fellow TCK and very talented writer Lisa Mckay (author of two excellent books, the novel My Hands Came Away Red, and her memoir Love at the Speed of Email, about her own experiences of love, travel and EAWs) put out a question about managing long distance relationships, as part of an upcoming project of her own (that we are all very excited about), which also got me thinking.

So in brief, here are a few key pointers from MoreAltitude’s playbook on how to mitigate the risks posed by frequent travel when you’re in a serious relationship.

1. Communication.

Let me stress that for a moment:

Communication. Communication. Communication.

As often as possible, through as many different means as possible, as much as you possibly can. Any relationship lives and dies on the quality of the communication between partners, but distance not only reduces the available windows to communicate, it also compromises the ability to communicate well, because several communication channels (proximity, physical touch, body language, even expression and tone) are compromised. Therefore you have to overcompensate.

On a good day, my wife and I will communicate via Skype (written chat), email, SMS, and still try and have at least one video or voice call on Skype somewhere in there as well. It may not happen like that every day- especially if I’m in the field- but the more we manage regular, several-times-a-day communication, the more we feel better connected, and the more we share in each other’s daily lives. Even just simple little messages about what’s going on for you right now are important and mean something to the other person.

2. Spontaneity. If possible, try not to get locked into too much of a routine with communication. Sure, some of it is inevitable- especially where you have to make two busy lives overlap with massive time-zone differences. But just like a real relationship, when communication and interaction becomes routine, the relationship will suffer. Try and change the times, places and circumstances of chats and calls as much as you can, and where you can be spontaneous, do-so. Whatever happens, don’t let your significant other feel like they’ve become an entry in your daily task list.

3. Limit time apart. This is a total no-brainer too. This varies from couple to couple. For us, three weeks is our acceptable limit- and a lot of couples I know work by the three-week rule as well. I know my parents used it too, after one particularly gruelling 6-week trip by my Dad. It tends to strike a balance between what families can handle, and what people actually need to do their work overseas. Circumstances beyond our control have meant that A. and I are apart for longer this time, but we’ve generally been pretty good (one exception) at sticking to the three week thing. It’s for both our sakes- we generally find our coping ability matches pretty well. Ten days we can take in our stride. Things get painful around the 2 week mark, and by 2 ½ weeks we’re both pretty much done. We’ll push 3 if we have to, but we don’t like it.

This particular long-haul is just terrible.

4. Agree your boundaries ahead of time. Talk through how you’ll communicate before you separate, don’t expect to figure it out on the fly. Make sure you understand what your partner needs from you in terms of communication- and make sure you communicate your needs. Are you the sort of person that really needs to read a nice juicy email from your loved one every day? Does your partner need to hear from you at least once a day, even if you’re okay connecting every two or three days? Does your relationship really benefit from visual time on something like a Skype video call, or can you deal with a few days of seperation without it being a big deal? Sure, you’ll probably need to adjust your communication as you go along a bit, but make sure you’ve taken the time to communicate what you need, and learnt what your loved one needs from you in return- don’t let yourself make assumptions here. When I was growing up, my folks actually found it easier not to be regularly communicating. Dad would head out for ten days or two weeks, and rather than deal with the upsurge of emotion of trying to talk over a scratchy telephone line several times a week, my parents would go cold turkey until he got back. It worked for them. (Though since the advent of Skype, things have changed, and now they get regular link-ups whenever Dad travels).

5. Don’t leave stuff unsaid before you go away. And try not to bring up big issues the night before you go away. If there are any major issues in the relationship, distance is a sure way to make sure they bubble to the surface. Talk early and talk deep, and get things into as healthy a place as you can so you can both leave each other in a peaceful place, knowing that the relationship is as strong as you can make it. Make sure you keep talking about intimate, serious stuff while you’re apart- you mustn’t stick to trivialities or the relationship will become shallow- but any of the big contentious issues, try not to have to deal with them while you’re away, as distance facilitates miscommunication, hurt and damage.

Pro-tip: If you happened to have been involved in an extremely serious security incident on a previous field posting, the time to tell this to your new girlfriend is not the night before you deploy to another emergency response.

6. Don’t even think about a long distance relationship unless you already have rock-solid communication skills with your partner when you’re together, and can talk honestly and transparently about things.

7. Consider the practical implications for the person left behind. This is important, because for the person travelling, although there are hardships, it can often be easier to deal with the seperation due to busyness, and being stimulated by new surroundings. The person left behind is in the same old place, but with a big hole left by the traveller. If you’re living together, what extra work is the partner left behind going to have to cope with (especially if you have kids), and is there anything you can do to help with that or limit the load? What about finances? Does the person remaining behind have access to bank accounts, know which bills need paying, and everything else required to keep life ticking over while you’re gone?

8. Try and make the last day/night together special. Do something romantic, get away, go out together- something nice that will create a memory you can both hang on to while you’re apart, and give you something to look forward to when you come back. Involve kids in this process too if applicable- but always make sure the couple gets time alone together somewhere in there.

9. Ditto for the return. In that first few days to a week, make sure you spend some good quality time together as a couple doing something you both love. Again, with kids, involve them, but also make sure they get packed off to the grandparents (or something) for an afternoon or a night, and have some one-on-one reconnect time. It’s something to look forward to, and also something to help get the relationship back into ‘normal’ space.

10. Manage your goodbyes. Every couple is different, but try not to make goodbyes a traumatic emotional thing- it doesn’t actually help anybody, and can create a certain dread around the departure well ahead of time, as well as leave both parties carrying grief after they go. If you’re the sort of people who can hang out at the airport, have a meal together, say a gentle goodbye, and leave it at that, then great. Otherwise, if goodbyes invariably lead to floods of tears and great heartbreak, think about keeping it short and sweet- catch a cab and say a quick goodbye at the front door, or get dropped off on the curb of the departure terminal.

11. Manage your expectations. LDRs are tough. Difficult things will come up. At times, you will miscommunicate, irritate each other, even hurt each other, and it will be an effort to fix that over distance. Expect to struggle and to have negative feelings emerge. Expect your partner to struggle, and expect to be surprised by the things they struggle with, because they’re not you so their experience is going to be different. Expect these things to come up when it’s awkward to deal with them, for example when you’re rushed off your feet and the last thing you need to deal with right now is an emotional issue with your partner. And be prepared to drop everything and deal with it, because quite frankly, if this is your spouse or life partner we’re talking about, nothing you’re doing right now is as important as that relationship.

Don’t expect things just to drop back into the way they were when you left. It takes time to readjust and settle back in. While you were gone, your partner was busy living the life you left behind, and things have changed. They’ve had experiences, and so have you. Depending on how long you’ve been away, anything from a few days to a couple of weeks is normal, and during that time, communication together may be strained, time together may have some residual awkwardness (even if there’s a lot of relief and happiness at being back together again). Depending on the personalities involved, intimacy may need to be rebuilt. If you travel a lot, your ‘normal’ may be that constant change, limbo, and the regular hellos and goodbyes that, depending on your personalities, may work fine, or may mean that the relationship never really develops the foundations of intimacy it needs.

Utlimately, unless you’re the sort of couple who need time away from each other (and those exist too), LDRs are not fun, so expect them to suck.

12. For the person staying behind- mix up the routine a little. Nothing is as lonely as going through the same routine as before but without your significant other. If you can, fill some of that space with other social engagements. If you’ve got kids, think about changing the routine a little for all your sake- maybe have dinner in front  of the television a little more often, or have them stay up a little later from time to time, eat out, or go away for a weekend. You don’t want changes to the routine to be disruptive to them, you want them to feel like life goes on, but you also want to compensate/distract from the absence of a parent, and also let them know, hey, things are a little different right now, it’s not normal, so don’t get used to it, and here’s a few things to make it a little better.

13. Think creatively. On this particular trip, we’ve asked a friend to come and live with the girls while they’re at home alone. It helps my wife feel safer in the house, gives her some adult company, and distracts the little one too. It’s been a great move and really reduced some of the pressures. If there’s someone (a good friend or a family member) who can be an additional part of life while you’re away, look into it. They may fill some of the gaps and ease the pain a little- or at least distract from it.

14. Kids make things a lot harder. You’re not just maintaining one long distance relationship, but two or more- each one its own distinct relationship that has to be supported. As adults we can cope with a lot- and we also have an element of choice and therefore control in things, which kids lack. Kids are resilient too, in fact they have remarkable bounce. They are also incredibly forgiving, even when you do put them through a hard time- but you must never take that for granted or exploit it. With a child, the dynamic changes, and spend very much time away- or regular time away- and that relationship will suffer quickly. The child may also be very unsettled which can put a lot of pressure on the parent left behind. We’ve really struggled with this dynamic in our family when I travel. Make sure in your communications arrangements you build in time to call when the child is present and awake, and it fits within the daily schedule. Granted, it makes things a lot more complicated- but there’s a lot more at stake, too.

15. For both parties, try and find the silver linings. What are the things that you can do by yourself that you enjoy, that maybe you don’t get as much time to do when you’re around your partner? It might be indulging in reading a book. It might be going out with your friends you don’t see much (equally true if you’re left at home, or if you’re the one travelling). It might be writing, or praying, or quiet time just pottering. Maybe watching dumb rom-coms or stupid action movies that your other doesn’t appreciate. But for each of you, try to make space in your apartness for those things, and give a bit of a positive angle to your separation, minimize the cost. It’s never a substitute for the other, but try and find the good spin.

16. Find as many things as you can to celebrate in your relationship as you can. Talk about your relationship, talk about your strengths together, congratulate each other as you pass milestones apart, and identify those areas that are going strong despite the distance.

17. Compliment each other. As often as you can. Say and write affirming, loving things about each other. Just because you’re apart, that doesn’t mean communicating those things to one another should stop. Make sure the other person knows you love them, and be specific about why. It’s so easy to forget that you’re loved when you’re a long way away, and a loving word from a distance from the person you care most about can make a huge difference to your day and keep that relationship sparking. If anything, this is even more important to focus on, because the normal little ways we might find when we’re sharing life together to tell each other “I love you”- in words or in actions- are missing, so you need to be very deliberate- and genuine- about doing this.

18. If you’re a regular traveler, try and stagger trips with as much time between them as possible. It’s very disruptive to be away for three weeks, back for two and away for another three. That time stable and together is essential for rebuilding intimacy, and if you leave again before you’ve reformed it, you’ll struggle to stay connected.

19. Did I mention “Communicate”?

20. Countdowns generally make the time go slower. Avoid them if humanly possible.

21. Long Distance Relationships suck. Avoid them if humanly possible.

A. and I are lucky. We married as a slightly older couple, with life experience behind us so we know our own characters, our needs, and how to relate maturely. We work hard at our communication, and even if things get difficult, we support each other and we make it through. Neither one of us enjoys being away from the other, and this is going to be a time apart we hope never to repeat. But for now, we just need to push through it, and we’ll make it work, because we’re determined to. We are deliberate about meeting each others’ needs over distance, and while we’ve got areas we need to grow in, we’re gentle with each other, love each other, and ultimately, can’t wait to see each other again.

Let me know your thoughts. What have I missed? Any other advice for couples who spend time apart on a regular basis? And should I try and talk @MadamInsideOut to guest-blog on her perspective on exactly what it’s like to be married to a travelling EAW? I’d love to know what you think or hear your experiences. Share them in the comments below. Thanks!