Here's the thing...

[If you ever ask yourself why you read this blog – just remember that this is the sort of value-added material that you can get nowhere else!] 1. Start early. Go to the market around noon where you will find hardly any food – there’s no refrigeration so dairy products are out and the nomads have taken the animals away for the rainy season so no meat either. 2. At the market you will find (in alphabetical order): limes, onions, oranges, peanuts, potatoes, and, literally, nothing else. 3. Buy onions. 4. Return home and raid the ‘emergency evacuation’ food in the storeroom. Take out cans of: pineapple, tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms. Also take a jar of curry paste, some rice and a tin of ‘chicken luncheon meat.’ 5. Read the directions on the curry paste that calls for yoghurt and chicken. 6. Vow revenge on the dolt who ordered the ‘emergency’ supplies. 7. Decide powdered milk will work in lieu of yoghurt. 8. Find a can opener. When you realize there isn’t one see step 6 and beg a logist...

It was cool tonight in Garsilla. The rains have come – settling the dust, bringing temperatures down below 30 C, and inviting the multiplication of a thousand and one flying insects. Four of us sat outside after dinner in the dark listening to the drone of another NGO’s generator and discussing the war. Being out in our field bases it becomes easy to glean a lot of information from locals who know exactly what is going on. This information will only turn up later in security briefings and in the media after the fact. In this case, we were discussing a massive rebel offensive that has the possibility of wreaking havoc in the region. We knew when it was planned to happen, the rebels knew, the government knew, the people knew and yet there was a terrible inevitability about it. In the end, all we could do was shrug our shoulders and look up in the sky and talk about how you prepare communities for heavy artillery fire or air bombardment. And this is how you prepare them – you don’t. You c...

My office smells like something has crawled into the walls and died.

Every now and again I’m stopped by a phrase that I can honestly say I never expected to hear in my lifetime. (Tops among them are, “I’m really crazing a non-alcholic beer” and “Don’t forget about the wildebeest migration.” This last one really cracked me up. ‘Don’t forget’ would imply that I knew anything about the migration in the first place and that I knew whether it was something to be seen? Avoided?) The most recent was at a UN coordination meeting where it was announced, “the acute watery diarrhoea meeting will be held directly after the camp coordination meeting.” With a straight-face my base manager looked at me and said, “I don’t want to go to the watery diarrhoea meeting.” “I’m not going,” I say. “You go.” This exchange took place in unsmiling solemnity. There is a cholera outbreak in Darfur. Only, we’re not allowed to call it ‘cholera’. We have to call it ‘acute watery diarrhoea’ for a whole number of political reasons that I won’t go into because they infuriate me. Cholera’...

10. Logan International Airport...seriously, people, the floors are so clean you could eat off them. 9. Starbucks Coffee. You say evil, global capitalists I say, yummy mocha frappachino! 8. Food. Ok, granted there's better food in a lot of other places but there's quite a lot of decent food here. 7. Being able to accomplish more than one thing a day. Today I checked off about four things I had to do - and one of them even involved a govt. bureaucracy. It was beautiful. 6. Television. Say what you want about Hollywood but I'm finding 398 channels deeply entertaining at the moment. 5. Nice people. I'm not sure whether I find the general level of optimism, happiness and kindness comforting or disconcerting but in my less cynical moments I quite enjoy people being nice to me. 4. The USD. It's pretty. 3. Walmart. I won't go into my theory on how the American desire for cheap goods is complicit in the continuation of the war in Darfur but I will say that sometimes you...

I had a conversation today that might seem odd to be having at work. A guy I work with and I were discussing some of the accidents our vehicles have been in. This wasn’t unusual, in and of itself, vehicles crash. We even refer to the crashes in the third person, like ‘the car crashed into a tree’ as if it crashed of its own accord. Into trees, into ditches, these cars flip and roll. By far the majority of humanitarian aid workers who are killed die in these types of accidents rather than in the violence all around. We were discussing one vehicle accident in particular – vehicle 13 – that was severely damaged in an accident. It rolled three times. Luckily, no one was hurt. My friend had gone back to investigate the scene hoping for some clue as to the cause of the accident. There was none. It was a flat road – no sand, no ditches, no curves or hills. It was inexplicable. The next day another organization’s vehicle flipped at the same spot. People went back to talk to the villages around...