working in a conflict situation

I hadn't yet had time to forget anything I'd learnt on the latest HEAT course when I was sent off to probably the most dangerous of all the places where we work in this region - the Central African Republic.  Not at all like my previous visit there (on holiday) in 2012, which I managed six months before the coup and subsequent civil war that has battered this poor country ever since.

& for once, my employers didn't try to restrict my travelling during this trip, in fact they were quite keen for me to visit one of the offices in the interior, so as to get a real understanding of the difficulties of operating in a region with no official authorities, no banks, no petrol stations, no internet providers, almost no phone coverage and a constant very real danger of attack by members of armed groups.  Whilst there is currently a shaky peace agreement, they all still have their weapons and have to steal to survive.

The above photo (snapped quickly through the car window - photography was highly restricted in this zone) shows an example of what is left of the buildings in this place (Kaga Bandoro) following six years of on-and-off civil war, whilst the photo below shows where the inhabitants now live - a field of mud holding huts housing some 15,000 people.

We are working there because the need is so great, with the bulk of our work being the distribution of food aid to the displaced people, but other projects including working to get children back into (temporary or refurbished) schools, reunification of separated children with their families, and provision of "child-friendly spaces" for children and youth to be able to play, to (re-)learn social skills and to recover from their ordeals (many children were made to fight with armed groups, others were raped).

But the strain on our staff was evident.  They told me how they can't sleep at night when it rains, as the sound of the rain hammering down on corrugated iron roofs masks the sound of criminals - all now armed - breaking into their houses.  That same rain blocked out the sound of criminals breaking into our guest house area a few months ago, so they were able to grab the night watchman and hold a gun to his head so that others were forced to open the door to the safe.  The driver of my vehicle told me about the last time the vehicle was robbed - how he had to lie face down in the mud for two hours whilst the criminals ransacked the vehicle, all the time shouting and firing their machine guns around him - and that was just 5km from our office.

I did not stay in the guest house, but in a very mouldy shipping container within a safe area controlled by various UN agencies, and I was only allowed to visit projects located close to town and along routes recently checked by a MINUSCA patrol (the UN peacekeepers, who were a very obvious presence).  They told me that there was no history in that area of aid workers being killed, raped or kidnapped, that the motive for attacks was always just robbery and so if we were unlucky, I should not resist a robbery attempt but meekly hand over all my possessions.  Being on an overseas work visit, I would have been covered by work's insurance policy in any case, unlike our local staff.  & thankfully I did not have to put my Hostile Environment Awareness Training into practice.

Sadly they didn't allow me to go drinking or dancing at the bar 'La Cohesion Social', even though grenades, guns and knives were all supposedly banned there.

HEAT again

For the third time since I've been in this job, I had to undergo a course of Hostile Awareness Environment Training.  There was some being run locally in my region, but this was just a two-day course taken by recently trained colleagues, and with the countries I'm required to go to now including such hotspots as Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria (the north-east), Cameroon and the Central African Republic, I thought I would be better off taking a full one-week course.

It was held in a military camp just outside Nairobi, with mock villages, crashed cars, and plenty of places for rebels to ambush us (and for soldiers at checkpoints to force us out of our vehicles and make us respond to their demands for 'gifts').  A couple of days in the classroom, a day learning (revising) emergency first aid - and the fun bit, two days 'in the field' dealing with situations such as the one in the photograph above, where gunfire suddenly breaks out and you have to decide what to do.   In the above case I wanted to hide in the long grass just out of view of the picture, but decided I should go with the crowd and run - only to find we'd all failed to notice the signs of landmines and run straight through a minefield.

In fact several times I found my instinct was to do my own thing and not follow the crowd, something I didn't really get feedback on so I don't know if it would save my life or put me at more risk.  For example when we'd watched a film one evening only for 'rebels' to suddenly storm the classroom and leave with hostages, everyone stayed frozen on the floor waiting for them to return - but remembering that the windows were very large (and we were on the ground floor), I escaped through a window ...  Hoping that I never have to test out this tendency in real life, anyway.

Some of the course involved our captors using their power over us to make us run, jump, roll on the ground, sing, even get 'baptised' in pools of mud.  This is me, about to be forced to lie down in that muddy puddle.  They said afterwards that it was to get us to experience and understand what could happen to us; I have to say that I didn't find it difficult - if someone pointing a gun at me says to do a star jump, I do a star jump!  But it was interesting that some fellow course participants who had been through real life situations of such danger (particularly those working in Darfur and Somalia) found some parts of the course too traumatic to take part in as they were reminded too closely of what they'd been through.

I didn't like to trivialise things by asking them whether at the end of their real life ordeals, their shoes had ended up in the same state that mine did at the end of this course!  (& no, I couldn't claim a new pair on expenses)