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.