For most of the past week, I’ve been here in the compound all alone, like a big boy. (Ok, there are two guards on duty at all times, and the office is full of national employees during the day.) Anyway, we are in between the departure of several members of the coordo team and the arrival of the new ones. Effectively, I am the coordo team during this period.
The most important thing I’ve had to do during this time is facilitate the arrival from some stuff across the Chadian border. Get ready; it’s a long story.
As you know by now, West Darfur is full of camps housing internally displaced populations (IDPs) from the countryside since 2003. These people have fled their home villages due one conflict or another (it’s complicated) and continue to do so in some areas. As they no longer have a livelihood, they are dependent on humanitarian organizations for all their basic needs. Food distribution is done by some of these organizations on a monthly basis, but new arrivals sometimes get left out of this process. And sometimes, the families might sell part of their distribution to pay for other basic needs. Add onto this the lack of rain this year, which means a reduced crop harvest.
We are seeing a higher level of malnutrition cases in our clinic in Zalingei than last year, especially in the age group of under five years old. This is alarming because kids in this age group who are undernourished are much more vulnerable to other pathologies than kids who are in a normal weight/height range. In other words, they are much more likely to die. We have set up an ambulatory treatment center to help combat this malnutrition. Even we have been caught unprepared for the number of patients arriving for treatment. The result: we are on rupture of the product we use to treat these kids.
Up until recently, these cases had to be treated in hospital conditions, because the product used to help the kids get back up to their proper weight was a powdered, enriched milk product, which must be prepared fresh (at least four times a day), using clean, disinfected water (which is usually not available at home). Recently a new type of treatment came out. It’s a ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), which is also based on powdered, enriched milk, but in a long-conservation paste form, with the taste of a rich peanut butter, in a foil pouch. It can be distributed and taken at home, freeing up hospital resources for treatment of the more complicated cases.
This product, called Plumpy Nut (ain’t that cute? Plump-peanut!), is what we are short of. We can order it (it’s made in France), but the shipping and customs clearance time is over a month. It turns out that our colleagues in MSF-France in the neighboring country of Chad have a stock of Plumpy Nut that they don’t need right now, that they can give us. The Chadian border is about 50 kilometers from here.
That’s where my work came in this week. This product is classified as a drug, so it’s importation across borders, as in any country, is highly controlled. I drafted a letter this week, which was signed by the general director of the state Ministry of Health, asking the federal Humanitarian Aid Commission in the capital of Khartoum to ask the aid of the federal customs office in clearing 1500 boxes of Plumpy Nut for entry into Sudan from Chad. You must remember that Sudan is Africa’s largest country and has a pretty poor communications system. So once the letter was signed, I had to find a scanner in town (found in one of the UN agencies), send a scan of the signed letter via internet to our capital office in Khartoum (fortunately, it was one of the two days this week that high-speed internet worked – a scan is pretty big!), send the original letter by plane to Khartoum, and ask one of our staff to take the letter to the Humanitarian Aid Commission, who was expecting it. The state director of the Ministry of Health is great! Not only did he sign the letter, he is also taking it upon himself to work with the local customs officials to simplify the importation. So we are hoping to have our treatment arrive within about a week.
That was my big task this week, but there are a myriad of other small ones; like checking on the refrigerators. Certain drugs, like vaccines, need to be kept between 1°C and 8°C at all times. All the electricity in the compound is provided by generators, which run from 8:30am-12:00pm, 2:00pm-6:00pm and 8:00pm-11:00pm. With all of these cut-offs, we chart the temperature twice a day. If we approach the outer ranges, we need to quickly prepare another solution to the storage.
And I needed to remember to make the radio contacts twice a day. We contact each of our sites by shortwave radio at 8:30am and 6:00pm every day of the week, and 12:00pm on Fridays and holidays. Some general info is passed on (for example the times of U.N. helicopter flights between sites – we are forbidden to take most roads outside of towns for security reasons), but the main reason for these contacts is to make sure that everyone is okay. Today, not one site responded! Since the mobile phone network wasn’t working either, I finally got each of them via satellite phone. Everyone’s ok! One site was tied up in a meeting and forgot. Another had turned down the volume of the radio so they could have another conversation on the satellite phone. And the radio on the last site didn’t capture my signal because of atmospheric conditions.
These things, along with my day-to-day tasks, kept me hopping. I have a lot of longer- term issues that I need to attend to, but they must wait. Sandrine, our pharmacist, returns from her break tomorrow, so we can split some of the tasks, including necessary meetings with the other humanitarian organizations in the region. The new Head of Mission, Medical Coordinator, and Logistics Coordinator should arrive at the beginning of November.
There are some advantages to being here alone. I was invited by the guards and the driver on duty today to join them for lunch. I know about five words of Arabic, and their English is about the same, but they had prepared a real feast. It was a pleasure to share a good meal and some time with them.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Eid Posting
My computer died Wednesday. I spilled some 7-Up on one corner of the keyboard. Even though we dried it off, the damage was done. It starts up, but the screen stays black; not very practical to work with. Fortunately, I learned on my last mission how to take out the disc drive, pirate the connector from my external drive, and then stock the data from the computer disc onto another computer. I got everything! It’s now on my own external drive, so I can work on other computers until a new one arrives from Paris.
Whew!
It’s Friday again, so we are off. That means that I will work less than 10 hours. And tomorrow is Eid, the end of the month of fasting, so it’s a four-day holiday for the office and house staff.
Tonight, we have invited the 2 expats from MSF Switzerland here in El Geneina to join the 3 of us expats from MSF France for dinner. It turns out that I know their newly arrived logistics guy from my last mission in Niger.
I have experimented a method of making a pie crust using vegetable oil, because we don’t find butter or lard here. It’s not bad. I’ll make a pie for this evening with the Swiss (who are both French – the only person here with a Swiss passport is our MSF France head of mission)
Sunday, we are getting together with the staff here for an Eid party. The meat for this party, a goat, is roaming around the compound somewhere for the moment, unsuspecting that these are his last days. The office and house guards will do him in Sunday morning.
Aside from the newly arrived (and soon departing) goat, we have Maurice. He’s a small hedgehog that the expats found when he was a baby. They raised him and he stayed in our living area, a screened porch, for a long time. One day he disappeared, but he has come back a couple of times this past week, just to say hi. There is also Bob, a bumble bee who lives under our dining table. Sometimes he is shut inside the screening at night, and he’s fairly pissed off when we open in the morning. There are also a variety of birds, insects and lizards who come and go, both inside and out, at they please.
This morning at 7:00 there was a lot of shooting. We’re assuming (hoping?) that it is to celebrate the last day of fasting. Anyway, it makes for a rude wake up call. The mullahs are singing “Allah Wakbar” continually. Tomorrow it’s over.
The expats turnover is in full bore right now. I have picked up the human resources responsibility, along with finance. A couple of people are leaving this week, and one more is out of here next week. We have some people coming in to fill the holes temporarily, but the permanent replacements aren’t yet lined up. Since coordination is already stretched pretty thin, I will not be moving to Nyala as soon as expected; not before the beginning of December at least. I was hoping to get to the field at the end of this month, but we need to have someone here at all times, and I may be the only one left for a few days!
On the security side, things are heating up for a couple of reasons. One is temporary: Eid. It’s like Christmas here; people need money to buy the food, party clothes, and gifts, so there’s a lot of theft. The other reason is more political. There is (I’m simplifying here) a lot of power positioning between the different factions before the new round of peace negotiations and the arrival of UN peacekeeping troops. There was tension in Nyala about 10 days ago, which erupted one morning in the market with no warning whatsoever. Zalingei, which has been pretty peaceful until now, has also had quite a bit of violence lately, including killings and kidnappings. Niertiti, which is at the frontier of the rebel zone, is always unstable; we have stopped going to our clinic in Thur twice a week because of violence on the road used to get there. Even here in El Geneina, we stopped using the 4x4s for a few days (these are frequent targets, especially the pickups, because they are in high demand), because a couple of guys were shot last week during the theft of a car.
Of course, if all was rosy, we wouldn’t be here! We realize that the context here is dangerous and complicated. We try to keep up to date on the security situation through contact with the other NGOs, the UN and the local population. We try to keep our security and evacuation guidelines up to date. And we stay neutral, which means that we are not a designated target. I have walked into town a couple of times, not at all feeling insecure. But we must remember to be cautious.
Whew!
It’s Friday again, so we are off. That means that I will work less than 10 hours. And tomorrow is Eid, the end of the month of fasting, so it’s a four-day holiday for the office and house staff.
Tonight, we have invited the 2 expats from MSF Switzerland here in El Geneina to join the 3 of us expats from MSF France for dinner. It turns out that I know their newly arrived logistics guy from my last mission in Niger.
I have experimented a method of making a pie crust using vegetable oil, because we don’t find butter or lard here. It’s not bad. I’ll make a pie for this evening with the Swiss (who are both French – the only person here with a Swiss passport is our MSF France head of mission)
Sunday, we are getting together with the staff here for an Eid party. The meat for this party, a goat, is roaming around the compound somewhere for the moment, unsuspecting that these are his last days. The office and house guards will do him in Sunday morning.
Aside from the newly arrived (and soon departing) goat, we have Maurice. He’s a small hedgehog that the expats found when he was a baby. They raised him and he stayed in our living area, a screened porch, for a long time. One day he disappeared, but he has come back a couple of times this past week, just to say hi. There is also Bob, a bumble bee who lives under our dining table. Sometimes he is shut inside the screening at night, and he’s fairly pissed off when we open in the morning. There are also a variety of birds, insects and lizards who come and go, both inside and out, at they please.
This morning at 7:00 there was a lot of shooting. We’re assuming (hoping?) that it is to celebrate the last day of fasting. Anyway, it makes for a rude wake up call. The mullahs are singing “Allah Wakbar” continually. Tomorrow it’s over.
The expats turnover is in full bore right now. I have picked up the human resources responsibility, along with finance. A couple of people are leaving this week, and one more is out of here next week. We have some people coming in to fill the holes temporarily, but the permanent replacements aren’t yet lined up. Since coordination is already stretched pretty thin, I will not be moving to Nyala as soon as expected; not before the beginning of December at least. I was hoping to get to the field at the end of this month, but we need to have someone here at all times, and I may be the only one left for a few days!
On the security side, things are heating up for a couple of reasons. One is temporary: Eid. It’s like Christmas here; people need money to buy the food, party clothes, and gifts, so there’s a lot of theft. The other reason is more political. There is (I’m simplifying here) a lot of power positioning between the different factions before the new round of peace negotiations and the arrival of UN peacekeeping troops. There was tension in Nyala about 10 days ago, which erupted one morning in the market with no warning whatsoever. Zalingei, which has been pretty peaceful until now, has also had quite a bit of violence lately, including killings and kidnappings. Niertiti, which is at the frontier of the rebel zone, is always unstable; we have stopped going to our clinic in Thur twice a week because of violence on the road used to get there. Even here in El Geneina, we stopped using the 4x4s for a few days (these are frequent targets, especially the pickups, because they are in high demand), because a couple of guys were shot last week during the theft of a car.
Of course, if all was rosy, we wouldn’t be here! We realize that the context here is dangerous and complicated. We try to keep up to date on the security situation through contact with the other NGOs, the UN and the local population. We try to keep our security and evacuation guidelines up to date. And we stay neutral, which means that we are not a designated target. I have walked into town a couple of times, not at all feeling insecure. But we must remember to be cautious.
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