Mid-December musings

The absolute best case scenario in Jamam is that the new site that UNHCR have chosen is cleared of UXO and declared safe for refugees to resettle. They will then start demarcating the site into plots, blocks and communities into which to organise people. They’re talking about establishing a temporary ‘holding area’ in the new site before demarcation is complete, to ‘put’ refugees trucked/bussed in from Al Fuj (which will occur once the site has been cleared) and moved from the Jamam site.

But what really worries me is that UNHCR don’t seem to have a ‘Plan B’ – in the worst case scenario where the new site is found to contain too many dangerous UXOs to clear, or is unsuitable for any other reason. Where are they going to put all these people if this happens? A huge area around us was a battlefield during the war, so the chances of finding UXOs in the new site are high. MineTech can come in and clear them all but this will take some time. In the meantime the situation for people continues to get worse.

If there is significant delay from NPA/UNHCR, or the assessment is found to be unfavourable, then we will look at providing remote access to water from outside the new site to minimise the public health risk to the current refugees. However this also carries a risk – if the area from where we provide water has not been assessed by a mine action organisation, and also contains UXO, then people are at risk.

So, what’s the plan from here? 

We have a borehole in our compound that we can hook up to a water yard and tap stand outside the fence for them to access. We’re doing a pump test to determine the borehole yield so we know how much water we have to play with. We’ve spoken with the host community (Jamam town) to confirm that they will share their water sources with the community – in return for us rehabilitating their two non-operational boreholes and repairing the one with a water yard and diesel pump.

We have asked MineTech to come and clear the site for the tap stand to be placed, and also the route that the refugees use when collecting water from the tap stand, the haffir and boreholes in Jamam town. It’s also important that this is done because Oxfam staff, when going into the current refugee site to liaise with the community, need a safe route free from UXO. We’re also getting them to double check our compound! Nothing like working in an old battlefield...

What I’m still not clear about is how soon refugees will take to arrive once the site is cleared; UNHCR said they would begin moving refugees from Al Fuj immediately after this occurred, and also from the Jamam site. We also don’t know how long demarcation will take once the site is cleared and therefore how long refugees will be held in a ‘holding area’ in the new site.

I’m just crossing my fingers that NPA will successfully clear the new Jamam site of all UXO, UNHCR can get in there ASAP to set things up, and then we can then start drilling testing to determine water availability. They can then direct us where the boreholes should be placed; and people will be able to start being trucked from the border – and possibly even moved from the existing site next to us. I still don’t think they’ll move, though if there are food distributions, medical assistance, safe water and some of their own people in the new camp, maybe they will.

In any case, we’ve still got a lot of work to do just to provide emergency water for the refugees camped on our doorstep. But at least its something we can get in there and do, and see results quickly. We just need everyone else to play their part, and hopefully we can help these people – which is what we’re here for.

I departed Jamam yesterday with a mix of emotions – firstly, a heavy heart that I was leaving and that I wasn’t going to be involved in activities until my next visit, that things were progressing and I wasn’t part of it, and that a number of my colleagues were sacrificing their Christmases to stay and work. But on the other hand, I felt some relief to be getting out of there. I was exhausted after only 6 days there; the 6 hour bumpy journey to reach Jamam, the 4 hour return journey from Bounj, the long hot days in the sun, daily team meetings at 6pm and again at 8am the next day, the continual ups and downs and frustrations of not knowing what’s going on, together with a limited diet and sleeping in tents all combine to make Jamam a very tiring place to be. 

And lastly, I had Christmas to look forward to.

Doing some digging

We spent today in focus group discussions with the refugee leaders and separate women’s and mens’ sessions to find out their situation and needs. We first met with the refugee Chiefs and sub-Chiefs (who all brought their own personal bodyguards!) and then spoke to about 60 women in a big group (it started small but then grew too big, but everyone wanted to participate). My Arabic wasn't the best to begin with, and it's no better now, but we got some good info.

What we learned in terms of water was that the refugees are accessing a haffir (a big pond built for cattle) for their drinking water, which is incredibly dirty and muddy, green from algae and quickly drying up due to hot weather. Another twist in the saga is that a passing nomadic Arab tribe, the Felata, are paying the host community to access the haffir for their cows. So they’ve added extra competition to a rapidly dwindling resource. Basically, the refugees are drinking contaminated water and its giving everyone diarrhoea. It's a terrible situation.

To compound the problem, the water issue is difficult. The host community has three boreholes (handpumps), two of which are broken/dismantled, and they therefore don't have enough for themselves. So naturally they don’t want to share it.

But the issue is of their own making. The Jamam community has refused to repair their boreholes over the last few months, even though we’ve trained pump mechanics and given them tools to do it. There is a feud about payment of the mechanics by the community – the Chief himself even told people not to collect money because Oxfam should come and fix it for them. The other borehole, which has a water yard and a pump attached to it, is also not operating.  The oil company PetroDar donated fuel for the community to use in the pump, who subsequently sold half of it, and when it ran out they refused to buy more. Plus they won’t even repair small parts of the pump, like the filter, which is currently the only other hindrance to use of this system. So much for long-term sustainability of water points! This community is really stubborn. So of course they are willing to share their water. It means someone comes to fix the boreholes for them. 

As for food, people don’t have the money nor the means to find it – there isn’t much around for the host community as it is. There is a real lack of food here in this little centre. As for a clinic – i don’t know what will happen with this, but someone (hint hint, MSF) needs to either set up something here, or visit regularly with a mobile clinic. I’m hoping they can send some medical expertise in soon because there are some very sick people here.

We had a Commissioner’s representative for the refugees come into our compound today, yelling and screaming about why Oxfam doesn’t repatriate critically ill people to the clinic in Doro. I think we should, but it would start a landslide of desperate people at our door, which we can’t sustain. So when we put him onto our Thuraya sat phone to the Commissioner in Doro, a car arrived within 2 hours to ferry the sick people to the clinic. Thank goodness.

Security is also an issue for them. There is a SPLA military barracks not far away, and there are soldiers moving up and down past the refugee camp and our compound. We also have ongoing security concerns about these guys because they’re always drunk when returning to their barracks from town, and they bother the refugee communities by making lots of noise and entering their houses uninvited in the evenings. The military police have to round them up every night.

As for progress in Doro, frustrations abound there too. Our drilling rig has hit rock at 24m in the first attempt, and at 22m on the second, and is now out of temporary casings to undertake further drilling. We are trying to mobilise resources to begin drilling a third site, in a completely new area that will hopefully yield water. The problem with this is that until its activities in Doro are completed, our drilling rig will be further delayed from reaching Jamam. In the meantime we're trying to get the parts to fix another one in our compound, but it seems like we don't have the complete kit to do it.

So things are slowly coming together, at least in terms of understanding the needs of the Jamam community and what we can do about it. We must finish providing water to people in Doro first with the drilling rig, but in the meantime we need to provide water as quickly as possible to these people in Jamam.

An (angry) update on the situation

I’m especially annoyed tonight because we’ve discovered that UNHCR have completely panicked. They suddenly realised (despite having been informed some time ago) that there is unexploded ordinance (UXO – or bullet casings, remnants of other ammunition, bombs etc) on the site that the Jamam refugees have settled. “Why didn’t you tell us?!” – indignantly. We did. We had. They didn’t listen.

The authorities have claimed the site to be safe, and it is the best site for miles around because it doesn’t get flooded during the rainy season – but there have been some minor incidences of people being injured due to UXO being set off by the host community burning grass, or refugees making fire. It’s a bit scary, considering our compound is right next door. Where the refugees have settled used to be a military barracks, which is why the UXO is there, and the broader area was a battleground during the war.

We already knew about the presence of UXO, and had informed UNHCR of the reported accidents when they happened. MineTech, a mine clearance organisation, had even come to the site and cleared it of any surface UXO they could find (they found 45 items). The problem is that UXO can be under the ground and may be set off by people unknowingly walking on it, or by setting fire to the grass which makes it explode, or by digging – even kids discovering curious metallic objects is dangerous, because they can trigger them to explode if they play with them or hit them with other objects. 

So this is the reason UNHCR are dithering about establishing the site in Jamam. They’ve had to work out what to do now that they don’t believe they should set up a camp on a site with UXO. Fair enough. But why didn’t they tell us earlier? Why don’t they get MineTech to come and clear the UXO from around people’s homes?  

What they have decided is to move people to a new site, about 1km up the road from our compound.  They have marked it out, got permission from the authorities to use it, and are currently organising for NPA to come in and assess it, given that it may also have UXO on it. More delays while they assess and clear the site.  Plus this site floods during the rainy season. Nice. Why not put suffering people into a place that will turn into a swamp in a few months’ time?

Regardless of a new site, I don’t actually believe that the refugees already in Jamam will want to move. They have been running from the bombing for four months. They are already weak from lack of food and water, and sickness such as diarrhoea. They continue to become weaker and weaker from continued lack of food & water and ongoing sickness due to drinking contaminated water. I completely don’t blame them if they don’t want to move.

Anyway, there are 4,000 people sitting outside our compound with nothing, and we aren’t doing anything to assist them – and neither is anyone else – because everyone is only just starting to get their shit together in Doro. It seems that the people in Jamam have been largely ignored – because they are not in an official refugee camp.

The key reason the Jamam refugees are being ignored is because UNHCR have stated that they will provide no assistance to them. Distributing food, providing water or medical assistance would encourage them to stay in their current location, which is unsafe due to the presence of UXOs, and UNHCR do not want to be held responsible should any accidents occur on the site. They’ve also advised that we shouldn’t provide any assistance to the refugees either.

But how can we sit by and watch people suffer when we have the means to assist them? Risk or no risk to the organisation, these people really need help. So, regardless of what UNHCR advise, we are still going to provide emergency water to them. They are people in a dire situation. We have to assist.

Frustration Frustration Frustration!

We visited the camp in Doro today – the first one I’ve ever been to. An old waystation marks the entrance to the camp, where UNHCR, when they eventually turn up again, will resume registering new arrivals. The MSF clinic is also near the entrance. In the meantime, hundreds of people have amassed outside, hoping that someone will come and take them in. Jerry cans stretch for almost one hundred metres from the two nearby boreholes and women report waiting for up to six hours just to get water. It does look however like WFP will soon start distributing food, as there were workers unloading sacks of sorghum from UN trucks into their warehouses at the old waystation, and the Oxfam drilling team was on the ground and preparing to sink the first borehole.

The camp is a hot, dry, dusty place with a lot of people wandering around with nothing to do. I should point out that it’s the men and children that seem to be wandering around; the women are working hard, all day, as usual, mostly on their way to collect water. People have really set up makeshift homes with whatever they were able to carry or find locally. Interestingly, the main tribe of people there had thrown together ramshackle homes that really did look temporary, but the small group of resettled Maban people were more organised, having built proper homes with wood and grass, and even constructed bathing shelters for themselves.

We had gone to meet with the community about future hygiene promotion sessions and to establish who the community volunteers were, but our plans were spoiled by immunisations of refugees by the medical personnel. The first disappointment soon grew into frustration as more and more plans were sidetracked for various reasons over the next few days. We spent a lot of time moving up and down between Jamam and Doro, meeting with authorities, missing chances to meet with other organisations and finding out very little information. When you’ve seen people suffering in a place like Doro, and hardly anything is happening on the ground, it’s difficult to deal with.

So I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with the whole thing, mainly because we are in such an information limbo and cannot seem to make any concrete decisions about a way forward. 

What I’m also finding difficult, and confusing, is that I’m here to assist with our longer-term Public Health activities. We are still doing them, but our attention has been diverted due to this emergency. We have an Emergency Preparedness and Response (EP&R) team that is mobilised for these kinds of situations, so they are co-ordinating everything; but they are also borrowing our PH staff to assist. I’d not been involved in the discussions on the response prior to arriving, so my knowledge is pretty basic – but I’m here, and I want to help, even though it’s not really my role – and there is already a PHP leader within the EP&R team. 

But I would really like to get involved in this; because I find it interesting, because I want to learn and most importantly I’d like to be part of the response. I may just have to find a way to get involved during my short week here and skive off from my long-term program responsibilities for a couple of days... just for a few days before I leave for Malakal again. It’s too much of a good opportunity to give up.

Back to Jamam ... and smack bang in the middle of an emergency response

So, the bombing in the border region of Blue Nile (Sudan) and Upper Nile (South Sudan) states continues, which means that thousands of people are getting the hell out of there. Understandably. And coming here.

Bounj, the capital of Maban county where we are implementing Public Health and Livelihoods programs, is the destination to which these people are fleeing. They come with almost nothing; whatever they could grab at the time, whatever they can carry – plus their children, their old people, their sick and disabled people.

So when they arrive, they need the basics. They need clean water, sanitation, shelter and food. And unfortunately for them, because the humanitarian response is typically slow, they don’t get a lot of these things for some time. When you run away from your home with nothing but the clothes on your back, setting up a new ‘home’ in the open bush with no facilities and nothing to support you – perhaps not even anything to cut wood with to build a rickety shelter  – means that your situation is, to put it bluntly, F$CKED. To then not receive any help from anyone for weeks, maybe months, is even worse. Especially when these agencies (us included) are all in country and are supposed to be experts at responses like this.

Oxfam’s cause wasn’t helped by the mother of all f$ck-ups that was the decision to completely evacuate all of our staff from Jamam when the bombings first started. It meant that before we could send anyone back in to respond to the refugees, we had to send a regional security team to assess the situation and then mobilise everyone that had been sent ‘on leave’ from Juba. It involved about 3 weeks of downtime, and then a mad rush to organise charter planes and vehicle movement plans once we got the go-ahead to go back in. And it took quite a while to get everyone here.

In the meantime, while we were running away, the refugees were coming, and other organisations were moving to where we’d come from, coming to assist people that needed it. We looked bloody stupid.

So now we have to redeem ourselves. And now that I’m here, and have been briefed on the situation, I know that we have a good opportunity to do just that; mainly because of the complete dog’s breakfast of a situation on the ground. IOM (a UN-affiliated agency), UNHCR (the UN refugee agency, as their advertising so proudly states), GOAL (an Irish NGO) and Medecins Sans Frontier (MSF) are on the ground. But nothing has been done. Everyone’s confused about what UNHCR and IOM are doing because they’ve stated they’ll basically lead this response, but have subsequently disappeared off the face of the earth. So when we want to come in and support the response with our own activities, we find no-one here to update us on the situation, or share what they’re doing. So we have to try and ‘coordinate’ our response with very little information, and work out what role we should play. 

In essence, UNHCR have set up a camp in Doro, a town just outside Bounj, to cater for around 35,000 Sudanese refugees and South Sudanese Internally Displaced People (IDPs) fleeing fighting in Blue Nile State. That’s a LOT. Sure, it’s not Dadaab camp in Kenya, but it’s a big number of arrivals to respond to.

But right next to our compound, people have also arrived. The local authorities allowed them to settle here, and they have already built new houses out of local materials and even started digging their own latrines. UNHCR had apparently planned to officially set up (ie demarcate land and organise people) an official camp next to us, and start registering arrivals. Apparently it’s going to cater for 45,000 people. Four thousand are already here.

UNHCR have informed us that in the next few weeks, they are going to start sending people in buses and trucks from a town on the border call Al Fuj to Jamam, where there are around 35,000 people trying to get away from the bombing & fighting.

So, right on our doorstep we are going to have a refugee camp. And we are the only agency within cooee of here. Bounj, where the major response and all the NGOs are, is only about 65km away, but it’s a two hour journey on a shite road. So, Oxfam, it’s time to pull up your socks and do something about the situation in your own backyard. We are a WASH organisation after all, so we need to take the lead on water, sanitation and hygiene promotion.

Food – well, normally this is the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) responsibility and we can really only advocate for them to assist. It really depends on how organised they are (and at this stage I’m not holding my breath). Medical assistance – this is MSF’s game. Unfortunately everyone is focused on Doro at the moment. Sanitation seems to be covered by MSF, who is building 25 public latrines, and IOM has pledged to build 3,000 household latrines (lofty ambitions – and an interesting choice for a refugee camp).

Everyone also seems to think that as well as doing WASH in Doro, that we’ll take complete responsibility for Jamam – because it’s right next door; which is fine by us, as long as we’re supported in the areas in which we don’t have the expertise.

So, it seems that the plan is this. In terms of responding in Doro, we will initially assist with water and hygiene promotion, and then when the other organisations come on-line, scale back things there and focus purely on Jamam. While they don’t seem to be anywhere in sight, UNHCR should be registering newly arrived refugees and allocating them places to ‘live’; MSF have set up a clinic; GOAL are planning on hygiene promotion; IOM/MSF are building toilets and WFP is distributing food. 

In the absence of any reliable information or people to meet with, we’ve decided to focus on what we do best –WASH. We plan to undertake hygiene promotion activities in the camp initially, because its needed, it’s something we can do with very few resources, and GOAL aren’t on the ground yet. Even though it’s not a ‘tangible’ activity – as in it doesn’t involve building anything  - hygiene promotion is an essential activity in a crowded environment like a refugee camp. People are living in unhygienic conditions; they’re having to shit and throw their rubbish near their homes, and don’t have the water – nor the habit – to wash their hands. It’s the perfect environment for cholera, typhoid, and most commonly, diarrhoea. An uncommon and trivial problem for the majority of us, diarrhoea kills more children around the world every year than any other disease. Compound this problem by sticking a whole bunch of people into a small area with no facilities, and voila! You have a major problem. But it’s so simple to prevent! Can you imagine?

When it comes to water, we are the only ones with a drilling rig, so it’s essential that we put it to good use. We already have a technical team on the ground in Doro to drill two new boreholes, and rehabilitate three others. We’ll build water yards (which are basically large rainwater tanks on platforms where water is pumped) and attach tap stands to the tanks so that multiple people can take water. 

The team is ready to start drilling – as soon as UNHCR get their shit together and organise the camp properly. We’d done some initial community consultation and mapping to determine where the new boreholes should be drilled. But then we got word that UNHCR, despite their absence in the last week, were on their way back to demarcate the existing refugees, who had set up in the demarcated camp area, into more orderly sectors. This then affects the work we’d done on siting the boreholes in the most appropriate and equitable places to meet demand. Hopefully we don’t have to move them, but if the new camp layout means the boreholes aren’t in the right place, we’ll do the process again and make sure that the locations don’t cause conflict amongst the refugees.

Once this is done, we plan to move our rig to Jamam and drill two new boreholes in the Jamam camp to cater for those arriving soon.

All these plans could change however, depending on what information we can glean from other organisations, and especially if UNHCR emerge somewhere, and hopefully soon.  

So tomorrow is the key. We are sending a team to Bounj try and find out what is going on with UNHCR. We’ll try and meet with GOAL, suss out their plans, find out who their already-identified community volunteers are, and start involving them in Hygiene Promotion activities in the camp. GOAL have said they can have staff on the ground to do this within a week, but so far nothing has happened in this department – so we want to support the volunteers until GOAL can effectively do it. Then we’ll focus on Jamam.  GOAL have also said that they can’t get an emergency response team on the ground until about a month’s time, so in the meantime it’s up to us. The timing of Christmas doesn’t help our plans either.

We’ll do a reccie of the land around our compound, and talk to the refugee community, to determine the water and sanitation situation and needs of the people there, so we can target and plan our response for them.

We also have a barge on its way down the Nile with supplies of timber, pipes, hygiene promotion materials, plastic sheeting, submersible pumps, generators, you name it. 23 tonnes of materials and equipment for us to provide emergency water and shelter, build emergency pit latrines and bathing shelters, and carry out hygiene promotion activities. By the time it arrives, hopefully we’ll have a much better idea of where we should use these materials.

So, lots to do! Let’s see what happens tomorrow.