Richard Wesley

Beirut is not the normal holiday destination that springs to mind when considering where to take a two week break, but it turns out Lebanon is a pretty cool place. Certainly the people are friendly, completely hospitable, helpful and generous, so much so that hitch hiking is a breeze. Even though most of the devastation of the 1980's era civil war has now been carefully restored or completely reconstructed, it is hard to shake the standard image of the country as a war zone. Admittedly the Israelis do seem to have a habit of visiting by force in the south from time to time, and Hizbola is the dominant political party in many parts of the country, but it really is very peaceful and safe for travellers now. Along the coast are crusader castles, inland a huge canyon with cliff side monasteries, then an amazing Roman era temple bigger than anything I've yet seen anywhere else, and there are even ski fields in the mountains, though we were a little early for the cold stuff, simply c...

In a bit of a surprise move it seems that my time in Ethiopia is coming to a sudden end. My visa runs out after three months in the country and cannot be renewed here, so it is a trip back to Paris (that much was planned for some time). However it seems that there are others here that can take over my job so I'm no longer required. Oh well, it was excellent fun while it lasted. The Wamura staff gave me an excellent send off party the night before I left. It was a great time with the most amazingly colourful farewell gift of a local traditional costume. Of course it had to be put on immediately and some dancing around the fire ensured. It was a good evening and I was glad that the speeches were kept to an absolute minimum. I'm miss the green hills of Wamura, it is a beautiful area, and I would love to take my mountain bike and return one day. Perhaps some of the local staff will still be living there even after the mission closes at the end of November, although many come from o...

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...