Mombasa

I blogged about a trip to Mombasa a little over a year ago, the last time we visited. In it I devoted a few sentences to the city and its history. I won’t repeat it here. The only thing I’ll say about it is that it has so much potential. It’s quite dirty and tired. I’m told corruption is rampant and crime is bad. But is has the raw material to be an amazing place. It’s located on an island sitting in a bay extending into the mainland via bridges. Its interesting location and tropical climate make it what could be one of the most beautiful cities on the East Coast of Africa. But not yet.

arriving in Mombasa

We flew to Mombasa on a relatively small plane. Given that it is Kenya’s second city, it wasn’t necessary full of tourists. It felt more like a commuter flight.

the beautiful Indian Ocean

We arrived and promptly caught an Uber to where we were staying, about 45 minutes away. Interestingly we were a little over halfway there and we happened to see a friend of ours in a van, going to the same hotel. He wasn’t even on the same flight. We even chatted between the vehicles. It’s probably not coming across as much of a coincidence as it was…

one of the three pools

We’d been to the coast as recently as last September but we hadn’t been to this particular hotel since a year ago March. We’re still obviously at the point in our lives where we are seeking child friendly lodging. It’s unlikely that we would have chosen this place otherwise. The food is good. It’s a beautiful location. Has three swimming pools. The beach is nice but not fantastic. It’s a bit rocky and teeming with hawkers. I understand people need to make a living but it’s exhausting hanging out on the beach with the constant barrage of people trying to sell you things. Some other places have guards that keep the sellers at bay. I always think that if they set up a stand and didn’t stalk the tourists they’d probably sell more. Who knows.

Kinaya & Priya

Officially it’s rainy season and the weather report looked grim – at least grim for those wanting sun. I’ve spent many a rainy day at the beach and really enjoyed it. But it’s not for everyone. Also, the country is in much need of rain and getting soaked would have been better received knowing that it would be making up for a precipitation deficit. In the end, we had almost no rain. Good for our weekend but bad news for the country.

very cool looking residents of the hotel

We settled into our room, very close to where we were the last time. Wonder if they strategically put people with kids in the same wing of the hotel.

Kiran and Priya heading out to go snorkeling

Within minutes we were in our suits and swimming in the warm pool. The sun was setting and we wouldn’t have much time before dinner but it was definitely worth the quick dip. We have a pool in our apartment complex in Nairobi but the water is chilly and, of course, there’s no water slide.

girls taking in the entertainment

Food at this place is buffet style. It’s basically all you can eat. Drinks, including alcohol, is included in the price. It’s the sort of thing that prompts people to overindulge. I swear there were some people who drank their weight in beer over the course of the weekend. There were a few conferences/team building things going on (including our friend’s company). They were the rowdiest of the guests and, other than making some noise and occasionally taking over the “fun pool” (at the expense of kids who were relegated to the deep end or not swimming at all), they didn’t really spoil the weekend.

The primary kid-friendly amenity of the hotel is the kids’ club. During designated hours parents can drop off their kids and have a small team who assist them in doing art projects and various other activities. It gives the parents a nice break and it introduces children to other children staying in the hotel.

We stayed three nights and then caught an Uber back to the airport. All in all it was a nice break. Now back to the grind.

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.