Aidworker in Chad: When things get hot

It is not always easy to describe what it feels like, when working in a remote environment where all of a sudden "things" run out of control.

I found this blog entry from a DFID aidworker, on mission in Chad. The text in combination with the video,... brings back some memories:

The first time I visited Chad in February last year, I picked the wrong weekend. It was the weekend that the rebels reached N’djamena.

The day had started normally enough – breakfast of dry pastries in the terrace restaurant overlooking the river Chari which snakes past the hotel. But by midmorning, a rebel column of 300 vehicles was 30km from the capital, and closing fast, and we were planning our escape on a crackly line to London. Across the river? A quick rush to the US embassy? Or a dash to the nearby airport to wait for the last Air France flight. If it came.

The airport had been secured by the French, and as we plotted our next move, we had an excellent view of the French fighter jets coming and going.In the hotel, the fighting grew closer. French soldiers arrived. (..)

I had got onto chatting terms with the lady who swept the hotel corridors. She was unfazed, and with a very Gallic shrug-of-the-shoulders, she said ‘We are Chadians; we are used to it’.
In the end, we dashed for the airport. The street had been abuzz with pick-up trucks bristling with government troops brandishing rocket launchers, but was now eerily quiet, like a Sunday in suburban London. We caught the last flight out.

It proved to have been a good move, as our hotel, so close to the Presidential Palace, came in for its share of small arms fire. In the video clip [Ed: shot after they left], I was astonished to see French troops in position outside my room. The remaining guests were huddled in the dark in the kitchen, where the cook was continuing to make omelettes. (Full)

Video courtesy Stop Genocide Now

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11 million people on the run in Central and East Africa alone

A sad start-of-year balance: violence, wars, political turmoil and natural disasters forced 11 million people in Central and East Africa out of their homes.

9.1 million became refugees within their own country ("internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian lingo). Half the IDPs 4,576,250 are in Sudan. 2,700,000 of them in the war-torn Darfur region.

1.8 million people were forced to seek haven outside their homelands, most of them hosted by Chad, Tanzania and Kenya.

Displacement in the region is triggered mainly by armed conflicts and natural disasters such as floods and drought. Frequently, several of these hit a country at the same time, creating complex humanitarian emergencies. Scarcity of resources, limited access to land and inconclusive peace and reconciliation processes create multiple challenges blocking the return home.

Humanitarian response to both acute and long-term displacement is often hampered by lack of access to the affected people due to ongoing conflict and persistent high insecurity including the targeting of humanitarian workers. (Full)

There are a total of 26 million internally displaced people throughout the world, and approximately 13.9 million refugees are forced to live in a country other than their own. (Full)

Picture courtesy ABCNews

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Aidworkers - life as it is

The New Yorker published an excellent snapshot of "Life as an aidworker" in an article titled "Lives Of the Saints":

Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.

This is what Aiméry Mbounkap tells me on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2007. Mbounkap works as a site planner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He is a robustly built man of about thirty, an architect by training and saturnine by disposition. We are sitting in the common room of a U.N.H.C.R. field office situated on the eastern frontier of the African nation of Chad, thirty-five miles from the Darfur border. Along that border, the U.N.H.C.R. oversees the operation of twelve refugee camps with a population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Sudanese who have fled to Chad to escape death, mayhem, and ethnic cleansing.

The rainy season in Chad ended more than a month ago. Now that the rutted, undulating roads are again passable, it is the season of war. Aiméry Mbounkap’s preoccupation with bad moments that arrive unexpectedly is the result of reports, as yet unconfirmed, about a column of Chadian rebels gathering to the south of here. The rumors have come from the nearby village market and they are perfectly plausible, given that war has broken out in Chad with near-seasonal predictability every year at this time in recent years.

This field office is one of six U.N.H.C.R. outposts ranged along the eastern frontier of Chad. The compound consists of two sandy, sun-scorched acres, several low, whitewashed buildings, and a cluster of thatch-roofed huts where seven international staff members live and work. The national staff—some thirty Chadian employees—report here to work every day but live outside the compound. (Full)

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More posts on The Road about aidworkers

Discovered via Aid Worker Daily
Picture courtesy Christoph Bangert

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