Aid Worker Diaries

Children run and play as the skies above Leer airstrip in Unity State of South Sudan rumble. The clouds swell, it slowly gets grey and the sun retreats. Many children in the conflict prone border areas would not sing for the rain to go away. Roads drink the rains and get overly soggy and impassable, which helps quiet the drums of war. In these places it rains peace.

As the children play they remain oblivious of the growing number of people in their small haven of peace that is taking in humanitarian workers and other community members from neighbouring counties like Bentiu, that have suffered aerial bombardments in the last couple of weeks.

“We were having morning prayers on Tuesday (April 24) when we heard the sound of planes, then a lot of gun fire and blasts. It was clear that Bentiu was under attack,” recalls Moses Ntambara World Vision’s Commodity Officer for Unity State an area that is currently highly vulnerable.

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Kigali, Rwanda - 14/05/2012 - Emergency teams from CARE International in Rwanda have mobilized to meet the humanitarian needs of thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to seek safety in neighbouring Rwanda.

Ongoing fighting between Government forces (FARDC) and rebel soldiers in the North Kivu Province has led to a large number of civilians fleeing into Rubavu District in the Western Province of Rwanda.

By May 12, 2012, more than seven thousand Congolese refugees had crossed the border into Rwanda, and were received by the Government of Rwanda’s Ministry of Disaster Management and Refugee Affairs (MIDIMAR), who sheltered them at Nkamira Transit Center.

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March 24, 2012

By Kent Alexander

Driving from Niger’s capital Niamey to the town of Konni for five hours through the sand-swept, arid Sahel region, I listened to the audio book The Hunger Games. The novel opens with a scene of bleak poverty in a post-apocalyptic town called District 12. Dirt, grime, threadbare clothing, scarce food.

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Zahira lives with her husband and six children in Rafah, a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Gaza.  She lost a child a year ago, which deepened her husband’s depression so that he had to quit work. 

‘Look at my home, we have no paint on the walls, no windows.’ She signals through a doorway half draped with a shawl to an open room: ‘There is no roof on this room.’

Many houses in the camp are built with corrugated iron and other recycled building material and many are incomplete.  The wall separating her home from the sand road is made up of a variety of rags tied together.

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The Etawantaw family live in Tin’Akoff, a village in the far north-east of Burkina Faso, five kilometres from the border with Mali. This region is known as the Sahel. It is dry and dusty for most of the year. As it is hard to grow food, most people who live here are pastoralists, raising cattle, goats and sheep. The region is plagued by regular droughts. In 2011, the rains failed again. As a result harvests were lost and there is a major food shortage for both people and livestock. People in this region mainly eat millet, sorghum and meat.

Tahya has five daughters. She and her husband used to have 50 cows and goats. They lost many of their animals over the last five years due to drought and sickness. The rest they have had to sell to buy food to survive. This year they have no animals left to sell and no form of income to buy food.

“To be able to provide for my children, I have to go out and beg for food from others. Or I depend on my neighbours for food. If the children don’t eat at the neighbours, they eat nothing.”

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Mehrnigor Halimova, 38, single mother of 2 boys, lives in the village Pakhtakor, Vakhsh district, Tajikistan.

Mehrnigor’s husband migrated to Russia to look for work to support his family 15 years ago, but never returned. He settled there with another woman and has two children with her. He rarely sends money to his Tajik family, and when he does, it’s minimal.

Poverty and high unemployment in Tajikistan have forced an estimated one million Tajiks to Russia in search of work - many of them men - leaving behind the women to care for families.   These women are forced to provide for themselves in this traditionally patriarchal society.   They are often deterred from work or even pursuing an education, and frequently face violence.

When Mehrnigor’s husband left, she was at the mercy of her mother-in-law, who decided her fate. Mehrnigor was given the choice of either living at her brother-in-law’s or being homeless. She reluctantly moved in with her brother-in-law, soon becoming a victim of domestic violence.

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Benite Joseph is one of many people in Haiti who lives below the poverty line and whose family is unable to eat every day. Benite lives with her four children aged between nine years and 16 months under a tarpaulin perched on a very small ledge about 400 metres above the main road in Fonds-Verettes, Haiti, near the border with the Dominican Republic.

This area is about 50 miles from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Its steep hillsides made chalky and barren from years of deforestation cannot retain rainwater; so many residents have lost their homes to waves of flooding caused by hurricanes – long before the 2010 earthquake.

The Joseph family’s hardship is primarily due to the structural economic problems that predate the earthquake. With no land of their own to farm, her husband was forced to seek work as a day labourer to earn just $1 a day. As the agricultural economy continues to decline, Benite’s husband took the risk of travelling to the Dominican Republic without papers to join a construction crew. But at the end of the job, instead of paying him, his employers called immigration authorities who summarily deported him.

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In 2012 countries across the Sahel region are once again facing a serious food crisis. This ecologically fragile region is becoming increasingly vulnerable to insufficient rainfall, and fluctuating livestock and food prices that are affecting millions of herders across this region of Africa.

The market garden set up with the help of Oxfam in Kassira, a village in Chad’s Guera district, runs from December to March/April. 

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In January, 2012, Justine MacWilliam, project manager for AmeriCares Health Worker Safety Initiative, traveled to Bugando Medical Centre in Tanzania to see first-hand the remarkable achievements that Bugando’s workers have made in improving hospital safety during the three-year pilot initiative. Here, Justine provides a glimpse of the life-saving culture of change the initiative has created among hospital staff.

"Many of Tanzania's health workers haven’t had adequate training on preventing the spread of hospital-related infections and injury."

Saturday, April 28th, is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, a day to raise awareness about the importance of preventing injury and disease related to workplace hazards. Hospitals everywhere pose workplace hazards, especially in developing countries, where health workers risk their lives each day on the job.

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As a programme officer with the GAVI Alliance, Nilgun Aydogan is responsible not only for helping south Asian countries apply for funding to introduce life-saving vaccines but also for monitoring the effectiveness of their immunisation programmes.  In March, Nilgun was invited to Myanmar’s new capital Nay Pyi Taw to help the health ministry monitor the success of a nationwide measles campaign.

Day 1

Vaccination days are a cause for celebration in Myanmar – and the Buddhist temple in Pyinmana township, near the capital Nay Pyi Taw, is no exception.

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“It will take months, perhaps years before health facilities are fully repaired."

While most of the communities I visited received a great deal of support during the response phase, there were plenty of crucial gaps apparent several months after the disasters.

In Joplin, where the damage was well-chronicled, the extent of destruction to the city’s health care infrastructure was shocking. Government funding has been made available to restore some of these facilities, but it will take months, perhaps years before they are fully repaired. What happens to people who need care in the meantime? Two providers in Joplin were able to resume services with the help of our grants – ensuring that uninsured and underinsured children and seniors gain access to medical care over the next 12 months.

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They have no twitter army, no righteous war being waged for their rescue. They are visible; they are out there on the streets. From ruthless lanes of Dhaka to dangerous dark alleys of Rio, tens of millions of children the world over are daily fighting hunger, violence and abuse just to survive and scratch a living on the streets.

As the world marks the International Day for Street Children today, children in street situations serve as a grim reminder of how one of the most marginalised and vulnerable groups in the world continues to be deprived of their basic rights; failed by governments, institutions and societies.

The overwhelming neglect of street children is evident by the fact that we do not even know how many of them exist. There has never been a credible assessment of street children’s numbers nor any collective effort to address the issues that continue to blight the lives of millions driving them onto streets. The frequently cited UN global estimate of 100 million children growing up on urban streets is now outdated and widely disputed. Many believe the real number to be much higher and rising due to rapid urbanisation, migration and general growth in world population. Add to these socio-economic, political or cultural factors that also push children on the streets.

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“We used to use this land to graze goats,” Catherine recalls, “but goats die in the droughts, and they cost 3,000 shillings [about $35] each to replace. A packet of seeds only costs 350 shillings [about $4].”

Catherine Nakwawi is from Lodwar, a town in Turkana, northernKenya, which was one of the areas most severely affected byEast Africa’s worst drought in 60 years in 2011.

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A large “Welcome to Peshawar” sign greeted me as I got off the motorway from Islamabad.  I could not help but think how different the two cities were.  The federal capital lies at the foot of the Margalla range, lush green and welcoming, a quiet city with its wide, tree-lined avenues and neatly planted gladiolas.  Peshawar, on the other hand, is loud and bustling as the city buzzes with activity.  The mountains in the backdrop are barren and steep – protecting the city from the violence that is a common feature on the other side.

I was in Peshawar as part of the Save the Children team to assess needs of the Internally Displaced People (IDP).  The government of Pakistan has been clamping down on militant groups in the Khyber Agency, part of the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), since mid-January. Hundreds of thousands of people are said to have fled or are fleeing. Many may not have a place to stay, food to eat or money to see a doctor if they are sick. Majority of them are now seeking shelter at Jalozai camp or are living in Peshawar with extended families, friends or in rented houses.

As I crossed the heart of the city towards the main road that led to the Tehsil Bara in the Khyber Agency, traffic dwindled and it was hard not to miss the significant drop in the number of people wandering the streets.  Nevertheless, we continued down the dusty, winding road that would bring us to a small settlement in Cheeni Village.

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“Six weeks have passed since Cyclone Giovanna hit the east coast of Madagascar, and the humanitarian situation is becoming more and more clear.  Needs assessments carried out by the United Nations, NGOs and the Malagasy Government came in and they offer precision regarding the affected population and its needs.  But even without quantitative data, the passage of time has allowed us to see who is able to get back on their feet on their own and who needs outside help to return their lives to normal.

This week, I returned to the Giovanna-affected zones for the first time since February 22-23.  My objectives were to thank and encourage our team, which has been working non-stop since the days immediately following the cyclone, and to get a sense of the evolution of the humanitarian situation.  I traveled to Vatomandry and Brickaville Districts, those that were the most affected by the wrath of the cyclone.  Accompanying me were emergency operations manager Mamy Andriamasinoro, communications officer Katia Rakotobe, and emergency officer Emmanuel Lan Chun Yang of CARE France.  We made an effort to visit some of the villages that I visited five weeks ago, in order to have a clear basis of comparison and evaluate the evolution of conditions on the ground and our activities.  My visit brought many issues surrounding the response into sharp relief.

In Andranofolo, a hard-hit village just south of Vatomandry, we revisited a young woman named Voahanginirina.  When we had seen her previously, she was living in the precarious fallen wreckage of her house with her three daughters aged eight, four, and three.  When we visited this time, the ruins of her home looked even worse.  Consequently, Voahanginirina, who is barely over 20 years old, made the wise decision to move her family into a little structure that once served as their kitchen.  It doesn’t give the family much space, but it is safer than where they were before.   The family of four makes do with Voahanginirina’s meager earnings from making and selling baskets.

In the same village, we came upon Rose-Marie, a 73-year-old widow using the roof, which is all that remains of her home after Giovanna, as a simple lean-to-like shelter with the two grandchildren she cares for.  Demonstrating that she is doing her best to make a good life for her grandchildren under difficult circumstances, she proudly showed us the neat mosquito net hanging inside her tiny makeshift dwelling.  Rose-Marie makes the best living she can collecting and drying reeds from the nearby marsh, which she sells to people like Voahanginirina for basket weaving.

The next day we returned to Andovoranto, in Brickaville District, where Giovanna made landfall on February 14.  Things are slowly returning to normal for many in that small seaside town.  But those without extra resources or family to help them remain in quite dire straits.  For example, we went back to see a widow named Marie-Jeanne, who once had a sturdy little wooden house, but a direct hit from cyclone-force winds left it a twisted, misshapen remnant of what it once was.  Marie-Jeanne lives with two of her three children in this house that is slowly crumbling around them, closer each day to collapsing completely.  Marie-Jeanne ekes out a fragile existence selling charcoal to neighbors who are only slightly better-off than she is.

As CARE moves forward with our response to Cyclone Giovanna, we cannot help everyone, nor should we. Many families suffered a lot in the wake of the cyclone, but have nonetheless been able to rebuild their homes and reestablish their livelihoods, thanks to their own resources or the support of family and friends.  But some people, such as Voahanginirina, Rose-Marie, and Marie-Jeanne, need a little bit of outside help to regain safe and decent housing and get their lives and their livelihoods back on firm ground.  These are the types of people that CARE will continue to work with in coming weeks and months as we continue helping people rebuild their lives.

Our cyclone response activities evolve over time but the principal themes remain the same, focusing on food security, restoring safe shelter, and reestablishing transport infrastructure for economic activities as well as access to vital services such as health care.  We are grateful to USAID and private sector donors for giving us the wherewithal to hit the ground running and begin bringing our activities to scale.  We are currently finalizing plans with other generous partners, including the Government of France, who will help us to meet the most pressing needs of those worst affected by Cyclone Giovanna.“

John Uniack Davis is Country Director of CARE Madagascar.

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The thick calloused soles of the feet of the women with whom I sat in the tiny village of Maijanjaré in Niger, seven hours by road away from the capital Niamey, tell their own story. It is a story of many hardships, of back-breaking labour to dig a bit of land in extremely rocky, hard and dry soil in order to plant and hopefully harvest a bit of millet. It is a story of having to walk two hours each day to collect water. It is a story of women who have lost their husbands many years ago either to migration, working in another country where they have found new families, or to early death. It is a story of women who are widows and who tell us that without CARE’s Cash-for-Work project, they would be beggars now and are vastly relieved that for at least these few months, they do not need to beg.

These women are referred to as the elderly, and while they cannot tell us their age given that they don’t know it, they are probably in their late 40ies. The life expectancy for women in Niger is 45 years of age, an indicator of how tough life is in this part of the world. The women eagerly tell us the Cash-for-Work project, where they are paid a small sum of money to dig half-crescent shaped basins that will form natural reservoirs for the millet to be planted, has helped them to buy a small amount of grain that the government of Niger stores and sells at a subsidized price to community members during this very lean season.

Without food assistance and other support, over five million women, children and men in Niger are at risk of not having enough food in the coming months.

Already we are being told that people are reducing their food intake to one meal a day, and that the seeds that they have saved for the next planting season are being eaten to supplement their diets. The severe droughts of 2005 and 2010 are in very recent memory, with many people having gone into debt to survive those crises - yet people did not have enough time, productivity and stability to regain their livelihoods. The ‘elderly women’ of Maijanjaré will be amongst the first to suffer from this impending crisis if they do not receive help. But they do not want to beg for help. They are eager to work. They want to feel that they are helping themselves during this extremely difficult time.

The situation in the Sahel is a complex one and the small village that we visited is only a small microcosm of what many millions are living today in Niger. In times of hardship such as those, people used to migrate and find work as daily labourers in other countries. However, the conflict situation in Mali, the tenuous situation in Nigeria and the uncertainty and volatility of Libya does exhaust this strategy. Those in Niger are concerned, and wonder what the future holds for them.

Halima, one of the village widows shares with me: “We continue to be strong with CARE’s help and we hope that the rains will come on time.” Hope is a wonderful emotion and can carry one far, but it is not enough for the women of Niger. They must have the continuous support of CARE and others to help them through this very critical time.

It is important for us all to remember that during the food crisis in Niger in 2005, it would have cost us 1 U.S. dollar a day to prevent malnutrition among children if the world had responded immediately. By July 2005, it was costing 80 U.S. dollars to save a malnourished child’s life. Now is the time to help Niger --- not when it is too late to prevent what we know can be prevented.

Barbara Jackson is CARE International's Humanitarian Director.

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“I thought I was going mad. I drank a lot of alcohol at the time and so thought that I was ill because of my drinking, even when I was vomiting blood. During this time I lost a lot of weight – people told me I looked as if I was nearly dying.”

It is hard to believe that Ben Nyaigo Mochama, a 36-year-old tuberculosis (TB) patient, is the same person speaking to me today at Iyabe district hospital in Kisii, Kenya, which is supported by international medical charity Merlin.

Although still on medication he looks in perfect health and tells me that after struggling with TB since 2006 life is finally back to normal.

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Children are the most vulnerable in a storm. They are young and may not know what to do when a storm hits, where to seek help, or how to get to an evacuation centre – all of which are crucial in saving lives during a disaster.

That is the reason why we went straight to schools to remind them about emergency preparedness when we first received news that a tropical storm was about to hit Vietnam. Tropical Storm Pakhar is predicted to be a Category One storm commanding wind of up to 120km/h and bringing with it a storm surge of up to a metre high.

Many may not be aware, as this is not a typical time for a storm to hit Vietnam. Fishermen have been told to stay clear of the costs, and people in the storm path to prepare for evacuation. Officials managing the dam have also been told to manage the water levels in reservoirs to ensure that the dam does not break. At this time of the year – the dry season – the dam would usually be filled up for irrigation and other purposes.

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Seth Berkley is chief executive of Gavi Alliance. The views expressed are his own.

Running a health system with Mozambique’s staggering level of disease burden would challenge even the world’s richest nations. An estimated 13 percent of under-five deaths are caused by pneumonia, there are very high levels of malaria, and HIV creates another crushing burden with prevalence rates of more than 30 percent in some areas with resultant tuberculosis epidemics.

Yet Mozambique is not only one of the world’s poorest countries. Its poverty is compounded by the lasting impact of a 16-year civil war (1977-92) that severely disrupted health services, and recurrent floods that continue to undermine a fragile network of health centres.

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“Just over a month has passed since Cyclone Giovanna struck the east coast of Madagascar and left thousands of lives in disarray.  The day after landfall, CARE led a helicopter overflight assessment of affected zones and we have been working non-stop since then to help people put their lives back together.  First, we coordinated the distribution of pre-positioned USAID plastic sheeting to 4000 households, about 20,000 people, whose homes had been badly damaged and destroyed.  We are now seeking funding for longer-term work helping the poorest and most at-risk to build inexpensive cyclone-resistant homes.  In the meantime, we are helping people meet their food security needs while simultaneously rebuilding key roads and such in and around where they live. 

Once plastic sheeting distribution was under way, we quickly began the painstaking work of distributing food to those most in need – the elderly, handicapped, or widows and other vulnerable female-headed households are being given urgently-needed food for their families with no reciprocal obligation of any kind.  But the majority of the food we distribute is given out in the context of “Food-for-Work” activities – those who are seriously affected by the cyclone but are able-bodied receive rations in exchange for making a contribution to rebuilding their communities. 

In the case of the Cyclone Giovanna response, we are focusing Food-for-Work on rebuilding footpaths and dirt roads that are necessary to restart economic life.  For example, after Giovanna made landfall in the small oceanfront town of Andovoranto, it became even more isolated than ever, with roads cut off and economic activity interrupted.  The people of the communities south of Andovoranto are working with CARE to rebuild the oceanfront road that heads 45 kilometers south to the district capital and major market town of Vatomandry.  In rebuilding this road, fishermen will ensure that they have a market outlet for their catch, thus restoring their principal livelihood.  While they are rebuilding the road, they will receive food rations for their whole families, thus providing essential short-term access to food.  In the current phase of our response to Cyclone Giovanna, we are supporting about 32,500 people with food assistance, most of this through Food-for-Work activities.  We are grateful to USAID and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) for supporting this important support to those most in need.

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The rising hills and the dipping valleys of the DRC are picturesque from the little cabin. Its nose slices through the low clouds with ease, although the turbulence increases with each.

This flight will only be 30 minutes. We will fly from Bukavu to Kitutu in Mwenga territory of South Kivu province. Kitutu is just 150 kilometers south west of Bukavu.

This short hop is necessary. Without the noisy, nose-propelled little caravan plane, this journey could take at least two days because of the state of the roads and the possibility of a truck getting stuck and blocking the way.

But Kitutu is not our final destination. This is the closest this little plane can get us. On this day, two journalists and I are heading beyond Kitutu to a village called Kakemenge. This village is a mere 250 kilometres from Bukavu. But this is Congo, so allow me to repeat this distance in other terms. By land, this journey takes not less than three days.

I’m grateful to the east for the shiny motorbikes. If you cannot find one, then you've too far. From the plane we hop on to the roaring masters of the jungle. Our riders are all enthusiastic young men happy to land this gig. It is hard for young people to find employment in this country. Most are lured to the mines by the “easy” income. Not many get out alive.

Over the top of the bikes roar symphony, the rhythmical honking just adds to the jungle music.

A few minutes out of Kitutu town, the road turns into a footpath; soon after, it is one deep rut –the only thing that fits in is the motorbike’s tyre. My backside is numb by now and so is my face. The wind and dust have numbed all feeling. We’ve been going for over one hour now. Mostly sliding and sloshing through murky grey sticky mud, the possibility of landing flat in a ditch looking ever so realistic. I occupy my mind with the raw beauty of the jungle.

The bumpy and winding track soon dips, forcing my numb limbs to work extra hard to keep my body on the bike. A vast mass of dirty brown water brings an unexpected but welcome relief to my aching limbs. But at the same time it raises a great deal of concern; for there is no bridge.

This is River Elila, one of the many that snake through Congo, eventually joining the spectacular River Congo that pours into the Atlantic Ocean.

A few minutes and a motor-driven wooden boat docks. Motorbikes go on first, then goods, and last in are people. We watch one trip, perhaps this will help build confidence; luckily the dugout canoe whose rims are inches above water quickly reinforces faith in the boat. We are on, the throttle sends us darting across the strong current and in just two minutes we are docked; and relieved.

Back on the bikes for another excruciating 40 minutes before my rider triumphantly announces that we are now in Kakemenge. I look forward to getting off the bike. I’m not sure whether to be grateful that we’ve arrived safely and impressively without a dot of mud on us; or just be glad that I could finally get off the bike and rest my aching body.

Later in the evening while resting on the luxurious sofas in the Oxfam base and sipping some warm primus, I cannot but salute the aid workers who make this trip every so often; sometimes in heavy rain, they tell us.

Oxfam is busy laying pipes to bring water from the catchment hill overhanging Kakemenge to villages as far as 80 kilometers down the road; People in Need is providing primary health and maternity services at a reduced cost; their clinic treats over 300 people every month, while the Association of Volunteers in International Service (AVSI) has helped those people returning to the village to recover their livelihoods.

All these organisations face huge logistical problems in bringing supplies and aid to the people who have suffered the effects of conflict in the past.

The local people have shown immense resilience. With continued peace, good governance, and support from aid organisations, they will no doubt be on the way to recovery. After all, Congo is rich in uncountable ways.

Seeing Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva on a motorbike the next day gave me a sense of comfort. But as soon as her helicopter took off, I groaned in anticipation of the return journey.

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Sendai, Japan

In the last year the tsunami-ravaged coastline of Japan’s north-east has undergone a clean-up never seen before in human history for its sheer scale and speed. From Ishinomaki to Onagawa, Shichigahama to Kesennuma, the landscape has been drastically altered as Japan presses on with the world's costliest disaster recovery to date.

Town after town has been razed to the ground. Houses, schools and busy markets have all disappeared. Almost everything that was damaged has been flattened and cleared. The horizon is now marked with towering stockpiles of scrapped cars, recovered metal and millions of tonnes of cleared debris. Some colossal industrial units, however, will take longer to dismantle. The great fortresses of Japan's economic power- they stand like grim mausoleums, annihilated by the brute force of tsunami waves that tore through their steel ramparts as if they were made of paper.

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HIV and AIDS also has a huge impact on older women in Africa. They are often widowed by the illness or are stigmatised because of their status. They may have lost many of their children to HIV and AIDS related illnesses, resulting in them becoming the sole carer and provider for their orphaned grandchildren.

Daily struggles of older women

Kate Bush sang "a woman's work is never done" and my experience this week certainly reinforced just how true a statement that is. I was privileged enough to visit Siaya District, Kisumu (Western Kenya) to meet HelpAge Affiliate KESPA (Kenya Society for People with AIDS). 

I was there to do marketing training and collect stories of four older women who had been part of the programmes delivered by the KESPA team. The interviews looked at the daily struggles the older women faced as they cared for orphaned grandchildren and how KESPA's work had helped them. 

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Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) makes it a priority to provide life-saving, emergency obstetric care in both acute and chronic humanitarian crises.

Fifteen percent of all pregnancies worldwide will experience a life-threatening complication. The most critical moment is delivery: the majority of maternal deaths occur just before, during, or just after delivery, often from complications that cannot be predicted. It is at this point that the provision of quality obstetric care is vital to save women's lives. The majority of maternal deaths are avoidable when access to emergency obstetric care is ensured.

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"This couldn’t have come at a worse time – not that there is ever a good time for brutal fighting that burns people’s homes to the ground and sends them running in fear to another country. More than 130,000 people have been displaced by the fighting in Mali, and many of them have arrived here in Niger, a country that is already in the grips of a worsening food crisis.

Most families in Niger, especially in the areas along the border with Mali, are running out of food. Families have reduced the numbers of meals in a day. Children are going hungry.  The refugees are adding to the strain already being suffered here. But the people of Niger are amazing – they have almost nothing, but they are helping the refugees. They are sharing what little food they have. This is the culture in Niger. They help out how they can: a Nigerien will share a cooking pot with a refugee family, and the refugee family will use it, and then pass it on to another family.

Tens of thousands of Malian refugees have fled into Niger. There was heavy fighting last night, so more refugees are crossing the border. This will get worse. And as always, the ones caught in the middle are the civilians.

Their villages were burned to the ground. They have nothing to go back to except sad memories. Already the numbers are growing. CARE plans to help  the people who fled to Banibangou, and we were initially told there were 600 families – there were in fact 1,260 families (9,000 people), and more people are crossing the border as the fighting continues.
The refugees are in a bad state. Many of them are sleeping in the open. I saw a photo of a pot with brown sauce in it, and I said to my staff, ‘oh, so they are eating millet?’ But my staff said no – that’s muddy water. The refugees are drinking muddy water, because they have no access to clean water. We need to help them filter the water, or the refugees will start to get sick. Water is a real problem.

CARE is gearing up to provide clean water, food and emergency items to the refugees. But we need to help the Nigeriens in this community, too, because they are sharing what they have with the refugees. By helping the refugees, they’re running out of food more quickly.

This situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better."

Johannes Schoors is CARE Niger's Country Director

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“This continues to be a difficult cyclone season for Madagascar.  Two weeks after Cyclone Giovanna, Tropical Storm Irina crossed the northern part of the “Grande Ile” and then parked itself off the west coast, in the Mozambique Channel, dumping lots of rain and affecting weather throughout the island.  The severe weather caused extensive flooding and mudslides in the southeast part of the island, which had also been badly effected by flooding after Tropical Storm Hubert and Cyclone Bingiza in 2010 and 2011, respectively.  In one mudslide in the roadside town of Ifanadiana alone, 47 people died, and the current death toll for Giovanna, Irina, and associated weather is now at least 100.  But the number of lives affected by the storms far surpasses this number.

The town of Vangaindrano in the southeast has become, for all practical purposes, an island, and populations there are cut off from assistance and at great risk of crop loss as a result of flooding.  Devastation to crops would make the local populations very vulnerable in the medium term, bereft of livelihoods.  Our team in Vangaindrano is assessing the impact and we expect to mount an appropriate response.  We are also discussing a possible overflight with other key actors in order to ensure that necessary, coordinated assistance reaches populations in need in the southeast.

CARE Madagascar continues to be a key actor in the response to Cyclone Giovanna, which struck on February 14.  We have overseen the distribution of 397 rolls of USAID plastic sheeting distribution, which have permitted 20,000 people to escape from the elements and begin to rebuild their lives.  We are grateful to our colleagues at Catholic Relief Services (CRS), who played an important role in helping us to get plastic sheeting out to the needy populations of Brickaville quickly.  We are currently stepping up efforts to provide food to those in need. We are in the process of coordinating food for work teams to rebuild roads and restore access to villages cut off by Cyclone Giovanna, primarily by fallen trees and mudslides.  Through our current food for work activities, 6500 households, at least 32,500 people, will benefit from 342 metric tons of rice and other food, and we are in the process of obtaining additional commodities from USAID and the World Food Program to permit additional rebuilding of infrastructure and providing short-term food aid to families in need.

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Rhéal Drisdelle, director, Plan Niger

When I wrote back in January that we need to talk about the risk of famine in Niger, I had no idea then that an already very complex situation was about to see yet another twist in the tale develop.

Since then, thousands have left Mali for neighbouring Niger to escape the conflict between the Tuareg liberation movement MNLA local militia and government forces, leading to a growing humanitarian crisis particularly in the northwestern region of Tillabéri where food security is extremely precarious. 

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You travel through the countryside in Mali, heading to Tominian district – about 400 kilometres away from the capital of Bamako, towards the border with Burkina Faso. You have six to seven hours to take in the world unfolding around you. The baobab trees with tortured branches; the mango trees – leaves heavy under the dust – guarding the roads; the empty, yellow or grayish fields, thirsty for water. ‘If we only had water, we could grow vegetables, crops here….But in places like this, you would have to dig 12-13 meters to get to some. And even then, you might not find any,’ comments Abraham, our driver, as if reading your thoughts.

You pass by markets stalls – shabby wooden benches and tables surrounded by shaky poles covered with hay roofs. Outside and not far from Bamako, you can see a palette of vegetables and fruits – melons, bananas, tomatoes, lettuce, oranges, apples, peanuts, baobab fruits – but as you drive further, deeper in the countryside, they become scarce – mainly baobab fruits or powder, and peanuts. Occasionally, you catch glimpses of a butcher, with one slab of goat meat hanging in the dusty, hot air. You can almost feel the dust in your eyes, in your throat, and you look away, ahead of you.

You ask Abraham what life is like where he lives and works, in Kolokani (60 kilometres North-West of Bamako). ‘Lot of the families there have nothing to eat,’ he says, adding that in many villages you can only see now women and children as the men have left, desperate to find work somewhere else to help their families. ‘How do people cope in the meanwhile?’ you probe. ‘Solidarity,’ he answers simply. ‘People help each other in these times. And as things get worse, we start selling our animals. The small ones go first – chickens, for example, then gradually the larger ones – the oxen, the donkeys.’

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Kristalina Georgieva is The Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response  of European Commission

I am just back from Brazzaville, where I walked through the ruins of Mpila. This was the densely populated neighbourhood which took the brunt of the massive explosions which rocked the Congolese Republic’s capital on Sunday.

The scenes of devastation were dramatic. Houses had collapsed like decks of cards, destroying everything and everybody within. People were gathering up what personal belongings they could salvage.

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During the initial stages of a conflict or natural disaster, those who are forced to flee are particularly at risk—women, children and young people most of all.

The Women’s Refugee Commission has identified 10 pressing needs that must be met during the first weeks and months of an emergency to ensure the safety and well-being of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs)*. Some 43 million people are currently uprooted from their homes by armed conflict and persecution.

1. Keep refugees and IDPs safe. Ensure that they are settled in a secure location away from borders and ongoing conflict.
2. Provide safe access to basic needs, including food, safe and appropriate cooking fuel, potable water, sanitation and shelter.
3. Communicate with the people most affected and ensure their safety whether or not they have legal status or official documents. Ensure every adult is provided with individual documentation that allows him or her to access key services.
4. Provide life-saving health care, including reproductive health care. Ensure there are enough health workers and all necessary medicines and supplies to prevent and respond to infectious diseases and other health needs. Establish priority reproductive health services for women and girls.
5. Prevent and respond to sexual violence. Protect women and children from sexual violence by ensuring safe access to food, cooking fuel, water, latrines and other basic necessities. Offer medical services and psychosocial support to survivors of sexual violence.
6. Reduce the transmission of HIV. Enforce use of infection control measures by health workers; make condoms freely available; and ensure blood for transfusion is safe by screening it for HIV and other blood-borne diseases.
7. Prevent excess maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. Provide skilled birth attendants for normal births; manage obstetric complications at health facilities; establish 24-hour emergency referral system; provide contraceptives to meet demands; provide clean delivery kits to all visibly pregnant women.
8. Identify vulnerable individuals with specific needs, such as unaccompanied minors, child- or women-headed households, pregnant women, victims of trafficking and persons with disabilities. Secure their care and physical security. Monitor, report and respond to violations against children.
9. Provide education to children and young people. Offer structure for children and restore hope and a sense of normalcy in a safe, adult-supervised space. Teach basic literacy and numeracy skills, and provide vocational training for young people.
10. Provide economic opportunities and preserve existing economic assets. Build on refugees’ skills, taking into account local market needs, to provide the best chance for a sustainable income. Protect women and girls from sexual exploitation by providing them with economic opportunities.

* A refugee has crossed an international border; an internally displaced person (IDP) has fled from his or her home but is still in his or her own country.

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