Tigris-fun

The Tigris River in Iraq flows from Turkey and Syria in to Iraq and all the way to Basra on the coast. Throughout this conflict it has played a significant role. Bridges crossing the river have been blown up by both sides over the last few years, initially to halt the advance of IS and more recently by IS as they have sought to halt the Iraqi army progress.

As areas on the western side of the Tigris were re-captured, the various military forces have put in temporary pontoon bridges to allow access from the east to west initially, and now freedom of movement in both directions. These bridges are few and far between, and single file. They are quite a bottle neck for all of us trying to work on the western banks. Due to security concerns, until recently, agencies have been reluctant to have staff staying on the western side. The bridges have pretty early curfews, making it fairly impossible to get out and across to the east in an emergency. As the western banks have been obliterated by conflict we are talking about areas where there are no functioning hospitals, no clear system of security – lots of different militias are still present, no electricity, water shortages etc, etc. So you can see why we didn’t want to face a situation of stranded staff.

More recently things have improved, and we have made the decision to allow expats to overnight in the area in the week. Travel times are a bit insane and so it means that their working days are currently fairly short. However, in order to get to this point we needed to identify a suitable house, and make the necessary safety upgrades – things like putting in CCTV, raising walls, hiring guards, creating a safe room for staff to retreat to in an attack etc.

Meanwhile, we have been having a LOT of rain. This is excellent for the farmers, less good for those people living in tents, and fairly difficult for us. Pontoon bridges don’t cope that well with significant rises in water levels. Over the last couple of weeks we have had many frustrating days where we have either heard in advance that the bridges have closed, or have got all the way to the bridge to find it closed. This has massively impeded our ability to operate smoothly, we have had to delay assistance to families simply because we couldn’t reach them.

The rain has stopped now, but yesterday we heard that the water in a big dam up-river just north of Mosul city is dangerously high and so the military are planning how to open the dam to allow the water to flow out. Of course this is a potential nightmare. Either they release the water quite quickly, with the bridges removed before hand to avoid damage, but cause some flooding; or they release the water slowly and leave the bridges in place risking damage and periodic closures. So yesterday we started to make contingency plans. Despite it being a weekend the team pulled together marvellously. We have a huge number of ‘critical relief item’ kits (think mattresses, blankets, stoves, kitchen sets, hygiene items) which we are planning to distribute to some newly displaced people on the west bank. On the west bank we have a warehouse but the contract was ending today. So we quickly decided to move our kits from our warehouse this side to our warehouse that side and pay for an additional month of storage. If the bridges close again we won’t be able to get the kits trucked over. The team worked in to the night last night loading up the trucks and today they successfully delivered the kits to our warehouse on the west bank. This is no mean feat when it also involves multiple check points and various different permissions letters.

Today I went with the team to the west bank to do what we could to get our new guesthouse (for which we literally just got the keys) up to a good enough standard for expats to camp in it for the odd night or two if the bridges close again. This meant taking fire safety equipment with us and installing it, changing all the locks, purchasing locally a load of things like foam mattresses, blankets, drinking water, dry snacks (there’s no kitchen in the house yet to cook), toilet paper etc etc. We also rapidly hired 3 temporary guards and trained them in their roles. The other safety upgrades will be done in the next week or two, along with kitting the house out with proper furniture and equipment. We also agreed to try and hire a boat in order to move staff across the river in an emergency. There are a number of fishermen in the area so we found a contact and went to see his boats and test them out – checking where the boat will dock each side of the river (I say dock, it’s really just wedging it on to a muddy swamp area). We quickly contracted his boat to move our staff from one bank to the other whenever needed. The hunt continues for lifejackets and/or life floats – these are fairly unusual items here.

We had a mere 4 hours on the west bank today, so I’m coming away pretty chuffed with what we achieved. Should the bridge close again tomorrow, we’ll now at least be able to continue our activities without further delays. Days like today remind me that there is no other job as varied, as crazy and as fun as this one. Now we just need to provide some wellies for the staff using the boats so that they can squelch through the mud from car to boat J

Enjoying 'testing' out the boat 

Waiting

This week I've been thinking about waiting. So many of my friends and family are in seasons of waiting. Waiting for job security, waiting for babies, waiting for house moves, waiting for illnesses to be cured. Waiting will always be a part of our lives, and it can be incredibly hard to deal with. But for most of us, we know that there will be an end to the wait. The outcome may not be what we had hoped for, but there will be an outcome. We will get an answer of sorts. And we tend to have options that we can consider and make informed choices about.

For so many of the people that I am working with, and for others around the world this is not the case. There is no end in sight to their displacement. There is a whole generation of people who are being born in to displacement, and growing up with no experience of anything else. They live their lives in perpetual waiting. Waiting for someone to provide them with food. Waiting for water to be delivered. Waiting for an opportunity to earn a small income. Waiting for a school to open with a curriculum in their language. Waiting for their homes to be safe enough to return to, or for to receive asylum in a new country. They are powerless in their own struggle and that is one of the most hopeless parts of this. Their suffering is not of their own making, and there are no options for them. I can't tell you the number of conversations I have with displaced people which include an element of them asking for my help - help with day to day things yes, but also help on a much larger scale - can I manage to get their girls back who have been kidnapped? Can I request more international military intervention? Can I influence the UN?

When you have no voice, you are at the mercy of other's who do have a voice to speak for you. And in the meantime you get used to waiting. There is no other choice available to you. It's a struggle to bring any kind of hope in to those situations. Platitudes are pretty empty to families who have lost so, so much. All we can do is take our ability to have influence seriously in the way we live our lives. Don't squander your voice.
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My amazing WASH team!

So I'm back at work after a lovely week off. I really enjoyed my break, but I was also happy to come back to work. A week is a good amount of time as you don't completely forget everything that you were in the middle of when you left, and only so many crises can occur while you are away :-) Plus there's the added bonus of less emails and skype messages to catch up on when you return.

One of the activities that one of my Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) teams manage is the operation and maintenance of the WASH facilities in a couple of camps for internally displaced people. The biggest operation is the Qayyarah Airstrip camp which is housing 10,000 families - just over 50,000 people. The camp was built on an old, disused army airstrip, and the land alongside it. Therefore it has no access to any water network or other services. I thought I'd try and give you a flavour of what this team has to do in order to ensure that everyone living in the camp can access safe drinking water, toilets and showers; and that we don't end up with disease epidemics caused by dirty facilities and garbage piling up.

Water
In order to ensure that the residents have access to sufficient safe drinking water and sufficient clean water for washing and cooking etc; the team has had to split the provision in to two separate activities. To provide safe drinking water we have installed a huge water filter system in to our on-site compound. This machine filters around 6,000 litres of water an hour and we currently run it for 20 hours a day, which is it's maximum level. A water truck brings water from the nearest water pump out at the river and this water is then pumped in to a massive storage tank which looks like a very, very big paddling pool. The water is fed through the filter in to a different storage tank and then a different water truck loads up and delivers the safe water to designated drinking water points around the camp. As water provision is critical, we then have local staff positioned at the water points to ensure that families only take water from these points for drinking, and only use their 'drinking water' jerry cans so that there is no contamination of the water at household level. An average week sees the filter machine produce over 600,000 litres of drinking water used by both the residents and the workers in the camp.

The provision of clean water for washing and cooking (clean in this sense is not as safe to drink) is currently done through water trucking directly to large water storage tanks which are positioned in each section of the camp - every 20 tents shares 2 20,000 litre water tanks. On an average week we are trucking 12.5 million litres of water in to the camp. That's over 1,000 trips by water trucks. It's a fairly constant process as you can imagine! And not only do we have to receive and log every truck, but we also have to ensure the quality of the water by testing every truck load, as well as regularly testing water in our tanks. We have a team of 9 people working on water quality control and operation of the filter unit.

Separately we are also working on rehabilitating a large water treatment plant outside the city which ISIS destroyed when they retreated; and on upgrading the pipe network so that this will directly serve the camp with safe water.

Sanitation
Each 20 tents share two sets of sanitation facilities - each one has 2 toilets and 2 showers. There is of course no running water, so the toilets are squatties and the showers are jug style. In each tented community we provide cleaning materials and training on keeping the site clean. Most residents have come from areas where they had full sanitation like we would, and so it is an adjustment to living in this way and does require some training in order for things to stay clean and to therefore keep disease at bay. We have a team of 30 'hygiene promoters' who spend their days doing this training and spot checking facilities. They are also setting up 'sanitation committees' who will be responsible for sharing messages around hygiene in their designated areas. This becomes particularly important when the weather gets warmer and families struggle to keep food fresh leading to health issues.

We also have a smaller technical team who monitor and respond to any issues with the maintenance of facilities - replacing toilet locks, issuing new equipment, getting taps replaced etc, etc. We have a small warehouse on-site that is stocked with all the most common items they may need to use. On an average week the team will respond to over 250 issues.

Solid Waste Management
A camp the size of a town generates a lot of rubbish! And all of that has to be collected and disposed of. We have bins around the camp of course, but there is still a lot of litter. There is a weekly team of 37 people per day working on garbage collection as well as 7 trucks that do 14 trips per day each between the camp and the municipality disposal site.

Distributions
Periodically the team will distribute hygiene items such as soap to all camp residents, as well as cleaning item top ups to the nominated families in each community.

Most of the work we do in the camp on this project is done by camp residents who work on rotations - we hire them for a set number of days and then we select someone else so that everyone gets a fair chance to earn a small amount doing menial work. We then have our full DRC staff who are highly qualified and experienced technicians who oversee it all, including timesheets and payments for all those temporary camp staff. They are always looking at ways to improve the facilities such as putting in privacy screens, designating a single tap at each tap station as a hand-washing tap, providing hygiene education in the children's education centres etc.

So as you can see this is a very, very busy team! They work on a shift pattern 7 days a week and are led by a brilliant Project Manager who even if he isn't setting off for the camp at 7.30am as he's having an office day still turns up to send them off and encourage them. I couldn't be prouder of this team.

Self-care

Well I wasn't going to post from holiday but then Becca was keen for a cameo on the blog so here I am blogging from Croatia.

Self-care is a phrase we use a lot in this work and recently I've had a revelation. Bear with me as this will sound ridiculous. I have realised that I am the only person who can take responsibility for avoiding my own burn out. I hear you - 'yes Rachel, how has this taken you this many years to figure out?!'

This work is unrelenting in many ways, and because of the nature of it it's easy to feel guilty about needing breaks. But my boss won't moderate my working hours, my staff won't tell me to stop, there's always more that people need, there's always more I can do. So I have to make conscious decisions about my own lifestyle and I have to be disciplined in those choices otherwise I will reach burn out. I have to decide what is a reasonable number of office hours a week and only deviate from that when truly essential. I have to stick to the other plans I've made to stay healthy - taking exercise, eating proper food, getting enough sleep, making enough time for friends, carving out time to be creative, making sure I call family and friends at home regularly.

R&R is the one thing all agencies put in place to help staff avoid burn out. Depending on where you work in the world you will be sent out of the county on a regular break, paid for by your employer. For me at the moment I'm on a 12 week R&R cycle. Every 12 weeks in-country I do, I get sent out for a week. I get to choose where I go, and can claim certain costs back up to a budget limit. It's an excellent system :-)

So here I am on R&R in Croatia with the wonderful Becca. So many of my colleagues regularly take R&R breaks alone, but I would struggle to spend a whole week alone. It's a testament to how tired we get though that a lot of people literally stay in a hotel complex for a week simply sleeping and eating. Thankfully I have friends and family who seem ok with holidaying with a tired Rachel!

Invariably on R&R I look back over the last rotation and promise to look after myself better on the next rotation. I'll be more disciplined about limiting my overtime, I'll be better at exercise and cooking. I won't allow things to slide so that I get to week 12 and find that I'm back to eating cereal or crisps for dinner as I'm too tired to cook after 13 hour days. This is the benefit of leaving every 12 weeks - it's the purposeful opportunity to press the re-set button on the bad habits that have crept back in. And I'm grateful that as I look back I realise I am learning these lessons of self-care. I'm a slow learner but small changes have made big differences in the last rotation. I have started a Saturday Supper Club with a few friends as a way to do something fun and meet new people, I've kept up the Book Club, I've started running early in the morning as evenings weren't working for me anymore, I've managed to keep the freezer stocked with home made ready meals, I've done some knitting. The blog has helped me process events. The thing I have not done so well at is limiting working hours. I have still averaged 11 or 12 hours a day for 5 days a week plus a shorter 6th day. I don't have an answer to that, but the next break is only 10 weeks away (I'm claiming back 2 weeks from a long rotation before Christmas), so if all the other good habits stick, I'll survive the long hours.