What a day!

Yesterday was an incredible day .

An American surgeon who had finished his mission left at 7:00am for the Kigali airport. He had his ticket for Kigali > New York, but not yet the ticket New York > Phoenix. Since it was Saturday, there was no one in either the Paris or New York office who could give us the ticket info, so he left for the airport not knowing how he would be travelling from New York on Sunday. I went straight to the office and found his ticket which had arrived Friday evening at 10:00pm on our email address (with the security situation for the moment, we must all leave the office for the house at 7:00pm and we don’t move from there until the next morning). At 7:45am I was able to communicate his flight details by telephone and I sent the ticket to his hotmail address.

And we are cutting short the mission of quite a few expats, due to the insecurity in the region. Yesterday we sent off 3 people from Butembo up north. The commercial plane that arrived to pick them up first offloaded a lot of arms, apparently for the local militia. Our people decided not to take the plane. Good choice – planes supplying the various armed groups tend to become targets. We will no longer be using this airline. We loaded them and 2 others who should fly out on Tuesday into a car to go to the Entebbe airport near Kampala. It was a long shot - it is a very long drive and it wasn’t certain that they would arrive in time to take their 11:55pm flight.

Before leaving, the Angolan doctor informed me by phone that he had his visa to get into France for his debriefing, but not yet have his return ticket from Paris to Angola. The French immigration service probably wouldn’t let an African into the country unless he had proof that he would be leaving afterwards. So I got onto my crappy internet connection in the office, bought a ticket for him on my credit card and then communicated the ticket details to him by cell phone and sent a copy to our office in Kampala. The administrator there would print it and send a copy by taxi to the airport which is an hour outside of town.

Then I got a call that one of the nurses leaving Tuesday had not yet received her ticket from Entebbe to Paris. She and the other person scheduled to leave Tuesday wanted to see if they could get onto the same flight as the other 3, so she needed it. After scrounging around on a few computers here in the office, I found her ticket and sent it off as well to the Kampala office. The poor administrator in Kampala had just left after sending off the other ticket in a taxi. She had to return to do the same thing for this one.

Friday in Rwanda, there were demonstrations against France due to the arrest of a high-ranking Rwanda official on an international French warrant. So Friday evening we changed the arrival for one of my contacts in Paris from Kigali to Kampala. But now we had to get her from Kampala to here. And we had a local staff member we needed to send to Kampala who was booked on the aforementioned gun supplier airlines for whom we needed to change his flight. I was able to get a reservation for both of them on the only other approved airlines available to us.

Next problem: For our staff working at one site and who have families living in other towns, we do money transfers into financial cooperatives in those towns. Usually, it works – we deposit money here in Goma, and the affiliate in the other towns distributes the money locally to the recipient. The problem is that these cooperatives depend on local deposits to do the distribution. With the unstable climate right now, no one is depositing money so they have no liquidity to distribute the money. We deposited the money here 10 days ago, but no one has yet received their payment. Monday I must go to try to cancel the transfer and figure out how we can pay locally ourselves.

To provide health coverage for these same families, we have local authorized health centers. The family members go to be treated, they pay the bills and we reimburse them afterwards. The problem is that since they have not received the money transfers, they have no money to pay. So yesterday I found someone to go locally and negotiate for the centers to treat our people and run a tab for us that we will pay when we can get money to them.

With all this going on, we also have a problem of “migrating” staff. Some of our employees have fled the “hottest”sites – going to more secure areas like here in Goma. Of course, while they are here, we are putting them to work. Unfortunately, this drains the structures in the hot sites. We have been talking with these employees every day, trying to convince them to return, but we cannot force people to go back to an area which is not safe. The same morning as all the rest, I got a call from the team in Rutshuru. They were going nuts trying to keep up with all the activity in the hospital there, especially with the staff cut in half. Apparently, the rumour is that we pay them more here in Goma than in Rutshuru. We talked with the group here again and informed them that this is NOT the case. We now have at least 12 people returning to Rutshuru Monday morning.

In the middle of all this, the personnel delegates from Goma informed me that they wanted to have an impromptu meeting to discuss some issues (the same as usual – salary levels, working hours, the need for more staff, benefits, etc.). My response to their request was less than polite.

All of this before 10:00 am. I should have understood what type of day was in store for me when I was awaken at 5:30am by a telephone call from one of the staff asking if she could stop by the office to have a salary advance – another impolite response I’m afraid.

After a while, we got a call from the team going to Kampala. They had a good start, but when they arrived at the Congo/Uganda border, a truck broke down in the middle of the border crossing, blocking the route. They finished their paperwork and were ready to look for a taxi on the other side to continue their journey, but just at that moment, the truck was removed and they were able to continue in our car.

But at the end of the day, they arrived about an hour late for their flight. All is not lost – they are at least in Kampala, at an MSF site. Our doctor has his return flight reservation to Angola, and our nurse has her ticket for Tuesday’s flight. They should be able to get back to France fairly quickly. And today I can to the thousands of things I wanted to do yesterday.

Back in Town

I am back in Goma - Anne, a logistician, and I arrived yesterday, leaving two other people on the other side of the border. The town is pretty quiet - not as much circulation as usual and most of the commerces are still closed. We will keep the staff at a minimum for a while.

With the displacement of the population, there is a lot of work to do, but we are bringing people back slowly and cautiously because the conflict is far from over. There will be a lot of movement of people between projects, and some people will be returning home early because their profiles no longer fit the program. We had a two-hour meeting yesterday evening to plan the movement of the expats and the relocated staff - that's about 56 people.

We have started a new project, trucking water to the 20,000 displaced above Goma at Kibati, because this is the biggest need there. We are also doing mobile medical clinics for these people who have no access to medical care. Other actors are involved in distribution of non-food items, distribution of food, etc. It is important to coordinate between all the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO's) to maximize the aid provided to these people and to avoid wasted or duplicated efforts.

I am a lot more involved in the strategy for covering this crisis than I was in 2006 when we had a mini-version of the same type of conflict. It's a very interesting experience.