Comms visit

Late April, early May we’d planned a trip to Somalia with some communications people. We have been needing to expand the visibility of both our work in the country as well as the growing humanitarian needs. We had been discussing this for months and, as it goes, the intensity of the planning increased as the trip drew nearer. 

I’ve hosted this sort of thing before. The key at the outset of the planning is to start the process of matching expectations. There are a number of reasons that visitors, particularly those who work in visibility related activities, might not understand the constraints being thrown at them by a context like Mogadishu. If you don’t have much experience in field work of this kind then you make a lot of unrealistic assumptions about what can be done, how easily you can move around, how welcome you might be, how much time this sort of thing takes, etc. On the other hand, if you have loads of experience filming/shooting photos of humanitarian work, you tend to think that what applies in other contexts will apply to this one. The tricky thing is that some of it does and some of it doesn’t. Happily, our guests were flexible and we were able to pull it off, not entirely as expected but mission accomplished.

Given that the Somali week begins on Sunday, the plan was to catch the early flight from Nairobi that morning, arrive, go through immigration, exit the airport and head straight out to start gathering content. There were a couple of concerns right out of the gate. One was that due to the increased number of attacks of late, certain parts of the city have been on lockdown as the security forces try to root out terrorists. There were some other constraints as well that I can’t mention here but I can say that we really couldn’t know what we were going to be able to do until the last minute. On the upside, uUnpredictability works to your advantage as well. 

At the airport it was decided by my security guy (I’ll refrain from using his name since he wouldn’t appreciate that) that we would head out to a hospital that we support which is located on the other side of the city. Visiting the hospital was my idea, assuming we could pull it off, so that our guests could see the city right at the outset. We had other alternatives that were closer and didn't necessitate traveling across Mogadishu but it’s an amazing place and I felt they should see it. Beautiful. Tragic. Dirty. Old. New. Chaotic. It’s a feast for the senses.

For the most part people like us have to see the city through bulletproof, tinted glass. You can’t stop and mill about the neighborhoods. You have to keep moving. Anything that stops your motion, usually traffic jams and checkpoints, is a concern. We never take the same route twice and we generally avoid main roads. The problem is that random checkpoints are set up, even on side streets, that necessitate frequent turnarounds. Navigating across the city and avoiding trouble is tense as well as fascinating. An armed escort vehicle leads the way, quick starts and stops, sudden turns, while our vehicle and the trail escort follow.

the team setting up - the rest of the photos aren't mine (probably obvious)

We eventually arrived at the hospital. The team was better prepared than I anticipated. We had received specific ideas of what the visitors wanted to accomplish, much of which required some pre-positioning on our side. The health team hadn’t really communicated well regarding what was set up and what wasn’t. I was happy to see that the staff and beneficiaries were in place to receive the team.

This brings up one of the more challenging aspects to doing this sort of thing. One of the key objectives of the communications visit is to show not only the good work that we are doing but also the desperate need on the ground. For the latter, it’s impossible to do it without some pretty uncomfortable tasks. One is to have staff talk to those who are suffering and request that we photograph them. This is a rather awkward request to say the least. There are some rather strict rules that govern how peoples’ images are used, particularly those of children. Though many people tend to ignore these rules, one needs to be careful. It could come back to haunt the organization who shoots random photos of beneficiaries without permission.

But not only is seeking permission awkward, moving forward with the photography and filming can be uncomfortable. Propping up a malnourished child and shooting loads of photos is not a nice experience for the child and even worse for the mother. She didn’t choose to have a child that was underfed. She was in desperate circumstances that led to what has happened, whether she fled conflict or drought. You desperately to not want them to feel as though they are being exploited.

Journalists around the world face this situation every day when photographing disasters of various kinds. Hurricane victims who lost their home. Do they really want photographers buzzing around? I thought about this during the visit. There are obviously differences in the level of intimacy of that is being breached. There are also differences in how the survivors are viewing this sort of invasion. In some cases, particularly when the survivors have experienced some sort of injustice, they might even be craving cameras, wanting people to assist in exposing to the world what has just happened.

In our case, the moral imperative was to get help to the needy. This can’t happen without telling the story to outsiders. And telling the story in a compelling way means actually showing people what is going on. More often than not, beneficiaries are on board with this. They want and need assistance. They’re willing to cope with visitors documenting what they are going through in the hope that they can continue to get aide. But I would think it’s not easy. You don’t want to be in this situation. You want your children to be well fed, healthy and happy. You don’t want to broadcast your current condition to the whole world. You just want the situation to improve. You want access to water and food. You want to be able to work to feed your family. And yet you’re stuck in this health facility, hungry and desperate, possibly sick. You’ve likely already lost other family members as a result of what caused you to flee your home. And now someone has flown from another country to take your picture and ask you a ton of questions. You just want life to be like it was when times were better.

Overall I feel like the team was sensitive to all this. In addition to showing need, there was also an attempt to show success stories. These people were a bit less reluctant to be photographed for obvious reasons. A child that was near death, put on therapeutic feeding and now healthy. That’s awesome. There was also the highlighting of community health workers, volunteers who support their communities by supplementing some of the work done in the clinics (tracking chronically ill patients, identifying possible health issues in the community, sensitizing their community on hygiene and other important topics, etc.). We followed them to their homes, interviewed them about their successes and challenges and overall shedding the spotlight on an often unsung contribution to the well-being of communities.

In addition to the clinic and visiting CHWs, there were also visits to encampments of people who have been displaced by conflict or drought (like refugees but people who stay in country). We operate health facilities in these areas. Initially they were temporary, in the hopes that the people could return to their homes. Some have now been there for years and their temporary homes have become more permanent. Structures are often very crude and, because they are generally on private land, they are frequently evicted by the land owners if another use for the property is identified.

Currently in Somalia drought is setting in. Again. Severe drought reached pre-famine conditions as recently as 2017. There was no time to fully recover before the current drought began. Displacement numbers are likely to be big over the coming months. The challenge is to get the international community to be aware of the looming humanitarian nightmare – to generate resources to mount an adequate response. And that is why we need the visibility provided by this visit. Let’s hope that this generates some traction, to get them some help.

Hell’s Gate

This could have been a separate trip but it ended up being just an excursion from our camping trip. In fact it’s very close to the camping area and it made a lot of sense to spend some time there. We could have spent a lot more time than we did but it was great to go see it and get a better idea of what it is. Now that we know, we will likely go back at some point.

Hell’s Gate is named after a narrow break in the cliffs, once a tributary of a prehistoric lake that fed early humans in the Rift Valley. It was established as a small national park in 1984. It is known for its wide variety of wildlife and for its scenery, including a couple of large columns and a rather beautiful gorge. The park is also home to three geothermal power stations and a Maasai Cultural Center. It has its own campsites which could be an option for us next time (though I do enjoy being by a lake).

We ventured out after lunch on Saturday. We were planning on having dinner in the restaurant at the campground so we didn’t need to hurry back to prepare food. We drove with another family in two cars the short distance to the park entrance. While we sat in a queue of vehicles awaiting our turn to pay the entrance fee, our windows were down. It was warm and the air was dry. Baboons of all sizes were milling about the entrance area. All of the sudden a rather large one jumped into Kiran’s backseat windows. She screamed and it realized it wasn’t a great idea and jumped back down. Poor Kiran was a bit traumatized. It is a bit scary.

A few minutes later one of them tried to do the same thing in our friends’ vehicle just in front of us. Pretty aggressive creatures.

With our fees paid we eventually were off and running. Quite quickly some pretty amazing landscape comes into view. The walls of the gorge provide some beautiful rocky walls. The grassy area on both sides of us provided us with views of zebras, gazelles, warthogs, buffaloes, etc. It was crazy to see how quickly the landscape changed from where we were by the lake just a few minutes before.

Our friends had been there before, many years prior, so they had a general idea where they were going. So we followed with no real sense of what we were going to see or do. Eventually we made our way to a parking area where we would be able to walk down into a narrow gorge. There seemed to be dozens of men wanting to escort us. We kept rebuffing their attempts to take us down through the gorge and eventually a young, skinny guy stuck with us long enough that he ended up being our de facto guide. In fact he ended up being somewhat useful and interesting.

One thing that he was able to tell us was whether or not the route we were taking was navigable for children. This was important since we had several with us. He also was able to tell us to avoid a waterfall coming from one of the cliffs, which was in fact toxic discharge from one of the geothermal power stations.

But overall it was a nice walk down through this gorge. There were a couple of hot springs coming out of the ground, too hot to even touch until the water flowed closer to the main stream. We followed it for some time before heading up a trail that would take us back to the parking area.

Once back in our vehicles, we decided that we needed to make our way out of the park and head back to our campground. It was a short excursion but definitely gave us an idea what it was about. Worth returning at some point.

Camping - Naivasha

“Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” - Walt Whitman

In March we ventured out camping. Sleeping in the woods (or in a campground) is by no means new to us but we had yet to attempt such a thing in Kenya. I camped on a few occasions in Tanzania but not with my own equipment so it's been more of a challenge to include it among my regular activities. For obvious reasons, camping is not a big draw for Africans. As one Tanzanian woman told me, "Many of my country work their whole lives to escape a life that resembles something like what you call camping." Fair enough. There's a deeper vein that I could probe there, with some assistance from Walt Whitman, but I'll refrain from doing so right now.

We’ve discussed it on numerous occasions and sort of assumed that the only cost effective way to obtain gear was to schlep it in on one of our trips to the US. In the end it turned out to be a combination of good friends that were planning a weekend of camping and the relatively recent opening of a sporting goods store with pretty good equipment and not very expensive. It all came together and we just decided to make it happen.

There are few things I like to do more than be out in the woods. I prefer to be in the mountains but I’ll take whatever woods I can get. Given that Priya likes to camp, I suppose that it’s a bit surprising that we didn’t prioritize it sooner. Part of it is that in Burundi, it’s less of a thing. Some expats do it but it’s not as common. The other part of it was that almost the entire time that we were there we had infants/toddlers. That’s certainly not a show stopper but it can complicate things. And it’s less of a situation where you’re investing in the kids since they would have no, or little, memory of the experience.

So now we’ve crossed that threshold. The girls will now remember things. We’re cognizant that what we do gets stored in a bank just like the experiences that each of us acquired over the years. I very much enjoyed it growing up: camping, hiking, sitting by the campfire, roasting s’mores, backpacking, getting dirty, etc. Annual camping trips to the US, even with the incorporation of backpacking last year, isn’t enough. We needed to step up our game, and also start bonding more with our family’s adopted country.

Another thing I’ve neglected to do since we’ve been in Kenya is read about the place. Everywhere I’ve moved, I’ve invested a considerable amount of time buying books and learning about the history, politics and culture. When we moved here, I confess that most of that time has been spent on learning about Somalia: a) because it’s quite fascinating and b) because my job depends on it. I assumed over time, however, that I would eventually pivot towards learning more about Kenya. But it hasn’t really happened. I likely know more than a lot of people but it’s a far cry from what I would have anticipated.

So last month we made arrangements with two other families to meet up at a campground on Lake Naivasha. I’d been to the lake a few times, even stayed at a hotel there for a week for work meetings, but never camping. It's anywhere between two to three hours from Nairobi depending on what part of the lake you are going to. This time it was about a two and a half hour drive, not entirely pleasant due to road construction, aggressive and/or slow drivers, etc. but we made it in one piece.

Priya navigated us to the campground, sort of on the other side of the lake from where I’d been before. It’s a beautiful setting with lots of trees. Though different parts of the lakeside vary in the wildlife that is prevalent, the campground area was mostly limited to vervet or colobus monkeys (huge fan of the latter), and hippos. The hippos are rather an important feature of the campground. They sit out in the water with their eyes poking out during the day and then emerge around sundown to munch on the foliage. Though they allegedly kill more humans in Africa than any other mammal, they were not a threat. The campground has set up an electric fence (in fact it’s just a wire) that seems to serve as a deterrent to prevent them coming further inland than just the twenty or so meters they’ve been allotted along the shore.

We were the first to arrive. We wanted to make sure that we were there in plenty of time before sundown to do the inaugural constructing of the tent. Generally speaking it was pretty intuitive. One thing that didn’t quite go as planned was the sleeping layout. We bought these cots rather than opting for pads or an inflatable mattress. I’ve never used cots for camping but I have to say, the old school technology is pretty sweet for car camping. And it keeps you off the ground in situations where there are tiny critters roaming about or dampness from rain. It's something we may need to adopt when camping in the States.

But when we went to set them up in the tent, we discovered that the listed width of the tent and the listed width of the cots (x 4) didn’t quite measure up as advertised. The tent just wasn’t as wide as we thought and we ended up needing to improvise. Fortunately the tent had an enclosed “porch” area that easily fit the fourth cot. As such we were able to put me there with the ladies on the inside. It’s not ideal but it worked.

We spent just two nights but it was great. The large posse of kids had a fantastic time and so did the parents. We did all the normal things one does when camping (by a lake). We cooked our own food, boated, chased away greedy monkeys, etc. On the second night we cheated and ate at a restaurant at the campground (particularly good, by the way). One side event that we did was drive to nearby Hell’s Gate. But that deserves its own blog entry.