Richard Wesley

Not everything goes smoothly with a humanitarian interventions. Being representations of a rich white western aid organisation certainly means that as an expat here there is a dollar sign halo ever present. This causes conflicts over pay for starters, and then other things like demands for blankets for the watchmen, gumboots of the logistics workers, and endless pens for the nurses. Most of the time it is not a problem but quite often conflicts occur. In Wamura I have been trying to use only contract staff (ongoing employemnt) with no daily workers (paid for the day). This enables trust and loyalty to develop with staff, and avoids some of the walking dollar sign feeling being an expat. One of the other problems associated with being in control of seemingly unlimited resources while dealing with people with very little, is the 'cheaters'. Woman and babies who try, and succeed, in getting around and through the system twice or more times, picking up drugs and food on each round....

One part of the mission we have been preparing for, and now running, is the big SFC (supplementary feeding centre) program. Effectively this involves handing out a months worth of family ration to everyone within a certain criteria. One family gets 25kg of famix, five one litre bottles of oil and five very large pieces of soap. We were expecting about 200 people at each of the five locations we already run OTP's and so I had stockpiled literally tons of food and oil in the preceding week. The big week certainly was an eye opening to behold. The whole team arrived back from each location in quite an exhausted state, having screened hundreds of mothers and children, thousands over the course of the week. Everyone ending up longing for Saturday and the end of the week. Screening involves a MUAC check and then, for some, a weight and height measure as well. Once accepted in the program, but before getting food, there is the paracheck to screen for malaria, a visit to the doctor and the...

The mission here consists of three sets of staff. There are the expats; running around organising things. There are the inpats; Ethiopian medical staff and translators who have been recruited to help and moved here from other parts of the country, we have about ten here now. And then there are the local local staff from Wamura; the guards and cooks and cleaners; the numbers keep changing but I think we've employed about 60 now. Our expat team started very small in numbers of expats, Florence the nurse, Cameron the doctor, and me for the logistics. We swelled in number over the next weeks with the arrival of Damien, an experienced nutritional nurse, another US nurse Leslie, an Australian doctor Matt, and then two further French doctors Claude and Agnes, and two French logisticians, Anne Marie and Abdel. With visiting coordination people from Sodo and Paris, the food bill certainly shot up, along with the queue for shower (don't think hot steamy room, more bucket of c...

Every now and then something just corners you out of the blue. For me here it was a normal midweek afternoon soon after I arrived. I was alone at our base at the Wamura health centre, busy organising things, with the medical team all off in an outlying village doing their screening, admission and treatment program. The first of the 10 truck convoys had arrived, been unloaded and left the evening before, which I guess would have been talk of town and a front page advertisement for our program. I noticed more mothers and babies hanging around mid morning than usual. By midday when I walked out of the office, I was greeted with fifty or sixty children, with fifty or sixty mothers eyes on me. Malnutrition here is surprising in that it is not immediately apparent. The fields and hills are green and beautiful, and people generally look poor, but well and happy. So much so that up to this point the whole project had a surreal feel for me. Working my way around the crowd that had ga...

It's the wet season here in Ethiopia and the rain comes and goes each day with alarming regularity. Even if the morning dawns fine and still, by the afternoon the heavy rain can make doing anything pretty much impossible. Still, it certainly give me time to catch up on the office administration. For a couple of mornings we awoke to sound of rain and collectively all rolled over and went back to sleep. The problem is not so much getting wet, or even getting covered in mud, it is the paralysing effect the rain has on the roads. The last sealed road is many hours travel away. Around here all roads are carved out of the hills sides and consist either of bone jarring rock, or raw clay. In dry conditions the clay surface is fine, hard and fast travel. When wet though, even with a light shower, the surface becomes slick with a film of wet clay. On an attempted trip to the next town of Lasho the four wheel drive vehicle I was in almost made the top of a small rise before the wh...

When I first heard of the mission here and the phrase 'nutritional emergency', I cynically thought it another phrase like IDP (internally displaced person) which has largely replaced 'refugee'. An IDP is a refugee in in their own country, whereas a 'real' refugee finds themselves displaced into another country. Either way they are refugees to the layperson. So a nutritional emergency must be a famine I thought, not enough to eat, so supply some food, then head for home for a spa. It turns out though that it is not quite that simple. Here in this south western mountain area of the country the fields are full of crops and things appear fertile and productive. But unfortunately the subsistence living in the area is always so close to the edge that even a small loss of harvest due to too little rain, or too much rain will result in a small shortage of food. Not really noticeable in the general population, but first detected by surveying the under five yea...

So, three different jobs in three days, now I really don't know if I have been promoted or demoted! I awoke in the morning and was told that it had been decided, sometime after I went to bed, to open a new field project in a place called Wamura. A doctor, nurse and myself for logistics would leave immediately. I grabbed my small bag, and then starting grabbing things from the store that I knew would be useful for a setup, some blankets, a satellite phone and computer, a water filter. Then it was into the four wheel drive and onto the road into the mountains. The hills around here certainly are amazing and really remind me of Nepal, with little ridge line villages with spectacular views off each side down into the green valleys below. The roads wind there way up and down, with alternating rough rocky sections on the ridges, and soft clay and mud in depressions, or where waterways cross the road. On arrival we were hosted in the local health centre by the very helpful hea...