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A Cry for Help. Or at Least Email
Published July 02, 2009 @ 04:48PM PT
There are many wonderful things about July. Canada Day. Independence Day. Bastille Day. The birthday of Haile Selassi I.
And, of course, an inside look at your favorite NGOs and UN agencies.
Pulling together a blog series on what's good and what's not-so-good about working for various aid agencies.
Quality of programs. How they treat staff. Bureaucracy. Support, or lack thereof. Endless strategic planning. No strategic planning. Security awareness. Reporting burdens. Accountability, or not so much.
Am doing my best to gather information, but would love to cast as wide a net as possible. If you work - or used to work - for a humanitarian or development NGO or UN agency and would like to write down some short (or even short short) thoughts about the experience, positive or negative, please send them to mkleinman@change.org.
I'll aggregate the answers, and do a different post for each agency. Each response will, of course, be completely anonymous.
(And, if anyone has any thoughts on the blog - things you'd like to see more or less, suggestions, recommendations, painless criticism - please send it along.)
Resource Page: Rape as a Weapon of War in Congo
Published July 01, 2009 @ 06:01PM PT
Just a quick one - following this morning's piece about rape in Congo, thought I'd pull together a short resource page of various Humanitarian Relief posts on the topic:
Overview of the Situation
- Congo: "The Rape Capital of the World"
- Violence Against Women in Congo (including a discussion of relevant Congolese law)
- Deconstructing Sexual Violence in Congo
- Stopping Sexual Violence in Congo: Some Realism with Our Rhetoric
More information below, including community-based responses to rape, survivor testimony, perpetrator testimony, and a bibliography of further resources on gender-based violence:
Wednesday Award for the Worst Place in the World
Published July 01, 2009 @ 09:01AM PT
First, and most important, I'd like to apologize to the Democratic Republic of Congo for missing your birthday yesterday. I always mark June 30th as Congolese Independence Day on my calendar, but this year it just slipped my mind. Very embarrassing.
That said, Happy Birthday! Hope you like the card.
And, as a special birthday present, we hereby give this week's Wednesday Award to the Congo. Much deserved as well.
Continued fighting between the Congolese military (loosely speaking) and the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) - not to mention various Mayi-Mayi militias - have forced as many as 800,000 people to flee their homes in eastern Congo over the last six months.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post:
"[T]he deputy to the commander in charge of the operation is an ex-militia leader and wanted war crimes suspect known as the Terminator. Villagers say soldiers are killing people accused of collaborating with the rebels. And in scenes that conjure the brutalities of Belgian colonial rule, commanders are forcing locals to carry supplies across the forest, killing those who collapse from exhaustion.
'Pastors, teachers, students, everyone must carry, and not for one day, for weeks,' said Kalinda Hangi, a former teacher who has filled a notebook with names of people killed by the rebels and the army in his area. 'They make you build their tents, take water -- if you don't obey, they kill you.'"
And then there's northeastern Congo, where the Lord's Resistance Army has killed 1,200 people - and abducted 1,500 children - so far this year.
As much as anything else, the Congolese conflict is marked by rape. A recent survey by World Vision in North and South Kivu found that "almost half [of the women interviewed] had a close friend who had been raped, or had been raped themselves."
The blog Texas in Africa provides an excellent, relatively succinct explanation of why rape is so pervasive:
Photo Essay: Portraits of Instability
Published June 30, 2009 @ 08:20AM PT
Foreign Policy has published an excellent photo essay entitled Portraits of Instability, providing images from some of the most fragile - and failed - states in the world.
The order of the photos tracks the recently-published Failed States Index, with a photo for each of the states headlining the list, from Somalia at number one to East Timor at number twenty.
[Photo of Afghanistan Balazs Gardi /VII]
Some Not-Depressing News About Humanitarian Security
Published June 30, 2009 @ 07:59AM PT
Finally, some not-depressing news about humanitarian security. International Medical Corps (IMC) has just released a short study entitled Security Management in Humanitarian Agencies, which finds that NGOs are finally beginning to devote increased resources to staff security.
According to the report:
"The findings of this survey suggest that the area of NGO security management is undergoing a considerable amount of professionalization with the creation of more security‐related posts at the field and headquarters levels...Furthermore, agencies are investing more in areas such as security training, formal incident tracking, redaction of security documents such as manuals, standard operating procedures and guidelines, and are also exploring various collective mechanisms between agencies to manage security effectively."
(Bonus - the report also has graphs.)
Though the sample size was relatively small, the most surprising finding was that field staff seemed more satisfied than headquarters staff with headquarters' awareness of security incidents:
"Around one‐third (34.50%) of respondents based in the headquarters compared to one‐eighth (13%) of field based respondents feel that their headquarters’ awareness in security incidents needs improvement."
I only have the report as a pdf. If anyone is interested, send me a message at mkleinman@change.org and I'd be happy to forward it along. The main findings are below:
Moving Thoughts
Published June 29, 2009 @ 08:50AM PT
When planning a move in San Francisco, perhaps best not to schedule said move the same day as the Gay Pride Parade. Especially when one's new apartment lies a block off the parade route.
The move has since been temporarily rescheduled.
All of which gave me plenty of time last night to remember other transportation-related life lessons, such as:
- In Los Angeles - surface roads, surface roads, surface roads.
- In Mosul, don't make eye contact. Also best not to laugh at an Iraqi policeman wearing a cowboy hat that looked as tho it had once been owned by the Village People. Or Barbra Streisand. Especially if said policeman is currently screaming at you to pull over.
- In Nairobi, it's useful to remember the exact location of the various unmarked speedbumps on major roads. Especially, say, near the intersection of James Gichuru and Gitanga.
That speedbump was my white whale.
- In Kabul, armored vehicles always have the right of way. (Also best not to dwell on the amount of fecal matter in the air. Then again, who doesn't love open sewers?)
Re-reading this, I fear I've failed the Nicholas Kristof inadequacy test. So it goes, so it goes. We'll return with our regularly scheduled humanitarian-blogging manyana.
[Photo from www.bestgaytoronto.com]
Links on a Monday Morning. Including, Of Course, Afghan War Rugs
Published June 29, 2009 @ 07:13AM PT
A few links to help your Monday morning procrastination:
- My genocide co-blogger Michelle has a fascinating post on the ecological footprint of genocide. And, bonus, satellite photos.
- An interesting donnybrook over at William Easterly's Aid Watch blog - first Easterly criticized a tour operator offering trips to the Millennium Village Project in Rwanda, with a post somewhat provactively titled: Should starving people be tourist attractiions? (One assumes the implicit answer is no.)
As an example of how the tours "dehumanize" the villagers, he points to a line in the tour brochure which reads "Please do not eat in drink in public. Many people in Bugesera Distract are still suffering from malnutrition…"
Then the tour operator responded with a long, balanced post - pointing out, among other things, that a) the rule noted above was actually developed thru participatory discussions with the community, and b) the profits from the tours were directed back to the same community.
(N.B. - I hate it when reality and nuance make it difficult to feel morally superior.)
- Chris Blattman's recent post NGOs: Please stop training, chronicling Blattman's discovery that 30% of the people in a small, impoverished town in central Liberia had already received peace trainings from various NGOs.
Blattman then sums up the wonderfully obvious: "These people don't have roads. Surely this can't be the best use of scarce aid resources?"
- An interesting post from the blog Our Man in Cameroon about corruption and complicity.
- And finally, from the Strange Maps blog: Afghan War Rugs. (Many thanks to GG for the link)
[Photo from www.strangemaps.wordpress.com]
