Qayyarah Airstrip Emergency Camp - One Year On

This week we had a little party in the camp to celebrate the teams' work over the last year. I can't believe what they have achieved - we started the year with a skeleton staff who had experience from working with us in some Syrian refugee camps - maybe 10 people total to open and run a camp of 3,000 tents at the time. They had to manage a camp that was still under construction and was therefore a building site with all the dangers that brings, whilst receiving sometimes hundreds of arrivals at a time (most often in the middle of the night), recruiting and training new staff members (99% of whom live in the camp), building relationships with local government, trying to understand how things like garbage disposal were managed, ensuring that they referred traumatised families for assistance, managing distributions of critical items to arriving families, agreeing basic rules of operation for the camp among all the agencies that operate in it. The list goes on and on. A year later we have a pretty slick team of about 170 staff who manage the day to day running of the camp, including all the water and sanitation facilities, and are the lead Protection team in the camp (ensuring that all residents are treated as they should be, can access services, are provided with legal assistance and psycho-social services).

So to celebrate all that they have done, I went with a crowd to host a party. We gathered all our teams for an hour or so to have speeches, eat cake and take A LOT of selfies. I have never been in so many photos in one place. But what a joy to see this incredible team take a break and celebrate together - the smiles said it all.

Here are a few interesting stats on the Qayyarah Airstrip Emergency Camp on it's first anniversary:

• 108,512 have called the camp their home at some point. The average population at any time over the last 6 months has been around 45,000.
• We have provided around 472 million litres of clean drinking water - equivalent to 188 olympic sized swimming pools.
• We have collected around 15,444 metres cubed of garbage - equivalent to 137 double decker buses. 
• There is one toilet per 27 people.
• There are 560 registered shop keepers doing business in the camp.

Our staff are on call 24/7 for all sorts of things to ensure the camp keeps running well. Some examples are:

• New arrivals are met at any time of day or night by the camp management staff and where-ever possible immediately allocated a tent and given critical items such as blankets.
• We have a generator operator on call to fix the massive generator that ensures that we have street lights at night, and a very small electrical connection to all 10,000 tents - this allows people to charge phones for example.
• We have a store keeper on call to open our on-site warehouse (very, very big tent) so that we can find spare tent parts and other critical items at any time.
• Protection staff are on call to assist with any personal crises or to intervene with security officials where needed - for example if a resident is arrested that team will accompany the resident to ensure fair treatment.

Some photos from the party:

Fun setting up for the party

Zainab clearly cracking a joke!

Selfies, selfies, seflies

We had a few cakes with various photos from the year printed on them

Botan - my incredible Camp Manager giving a speech. 

My turn for an off the cuff speech

Listening to the speeches

Sinan my amazing Water and Sanitation manager for the camp giving a speech

Attempting a group photo

Zainab and Asia - two of our senior female staff on the camp teams. Zainab is an engineer and in charge of all infrastructure (roads, drainage, lighting etc), and Asia is in charge of all hygiene promotion (ensuring everyone knows how to prevent cholera spreading for example) - these ladies absolutely rock in what is truly a man's world.

Slippery Slopes

Over the last few weeks and months we have had a huge turn over of expatriate staff in my programme. Not in the area that I oversee, but in our central office. As this is literally across the road from my office it has quite an impact on me too. Changing staff is a constant in our work - it's normal to only work a year or two before moving on. But we have had an exceptionally high number of people complete contracts within a short space of time, leading to lots of newbies.

One of the things this naturally leads to is many discussions where you explain how and why things have been done by the person before them; and of course people seeing things with new, fresh eyes often have ideas of how to improve things (as do internal auditors!). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's made me very aware of the natural defensiveness that rises up when we feel we are being criticised for work we feel has been done to the best of our collective abilities.

It has got me thinking about the incredibly fine line between defending and becoming defensive. It is important as a manager that when necessary I step up and defend my team. If I know they have worked hard, have overcome challenges, have made decisions which at that moment in time were what was best; it is hard to hear that criticised and it is my job to defend them against that. I have to be the buffer so that they can feel empowered to do their jobs. I also have to protect them, particularly the long-suffering local staff, from needless process changes. However, what a slippery slope it is to becoming defensive. Which is an ugly place to end up. It's one thing to explain the rationale behind previous decisions, but it's another to shut yourself down to any possibility of improvement or constructive criticism. Defending people and decisions, when necessary, is a good and right thing to do, but becoming defensive is just simply bad attitude. And there have been days recently where I have got so worn down by the constant questioning that I have definitely slid in to being defensive and therefore also communicating poorly.

So this has led me to thinking about how I make sure I stay on the right side of that line as much as possible. I think it has to be a daily decision to think the best of everyone, to keep an open mind, to accept that questioning how things are done is a natural part of a large change in staffing, to grow a thicker skin so that I can hear the meaning and heart behind the words without being oversensitive to the way they are delivered. I still need to be the buffer, but that doesn't mean that I dig my heels in and insist that nothing changes. Easier said than done, but I hope I'm improving!