Where there is no toilet (& sewage treatment options when there is one)

Human poo & pee causes more death, malnutrition and economic problems than any other single issue; yet like animal manure, can be a source of nutrients that can build health soils, regenerate landscapes.  This is the first of a few blogs where I'll explore consequences of terrible sanitation, better treatment options some of the radical new approaches to changing habit and practices that work, and some that really don't.

When there's no toilets in a community people "go" in the open, behind bushes, buildings, wherever they can find.  If you visit lots of villages you soon get that whiff of exposed poo, and if you spend a bit of time with that community you get to understand what happens when people are in such close and regular contact with their "wastes", from the high levels of diarrhoea and a host of other water borne diseases they live with (and pay for in money for medicines and visits to distant clinics).

Nepal earthquake: emergency shelter and earthbags

In this blog I discuss earth-bag construction as an option for shelter recovery in Nepal. I start off with a quick overview of how the humanitarian coordination is going with the relevant links to access this info for those people unfamiliar with the system.  So skip down a bit if you want to get straight to the earthbag issues, links, etc.

An earth bag school under construction in Nepal, before the
earthquake. This one, a school, built by the local community with design and
training help from Edge of Seven, others shown below.
Critical points are: these are extremely earthquake resilient, energy efficient
and require a fraction of the logistics of importing bricks and cement up the damaged roads, etc. 

Shelter, jobs and social stability in Lebanon

Last month I went to Northern Lebanon, on a short mission with CARE International, to help them figure out a strategy to deal with the dire housing problems faced by Syrian refugees.  To short cut to this presentation (more pictures than words, go here).  Almost immediately I was blown away by the scale of the crisis in Lebanon: a country of just over 4.2 million people is hosting almost 1.5 million refugees.  That's around a third of the population! Meaning that Lebanon now has the highest per capital concentration of refugees in the world.

Tripoli, looking East over the mountains towards Syria

Imagine Britain or France taking in 20 million people, and the kind of impact that would have on public services that people often complain aren't good enough as it is.  Well, it's not really any different for Lebanon, except that their public services have been in worse shape than those in rich European countries.  Talking of Europe, it appears that the entire EU block has offered asylum to a grand total of 134,000 Syrian refugees, so around 10% that Lebanon has taken.  Yet the population difference  is so great it means that Europe is offering refuge to 1,000 times fewer refugees compared to Lebanon.

Shelter after floods in Pakistan. Part 1. Sabina's story

This is Sabina, who I met during one of about 30 field trips I made in Sindh, Pakistan during my time working there, chatting with Mustafa from the local NGO, HANDS

Mustafa and Sabina.  I think they were talking abotu that solar light she's been using every night for over a year.  And the price of vegetables on the market if I remember rightly.  She said she can afford to buy veg only twice a month and grows none around her house.  She could absolutely grow food in raised beds outside her window.  That has to be (already is) the next addition to the way we work...

HANDS had found Sabina's family and community, displaced and in desperate need of help, after major flooding in September 2012. They brought it to the attention of DFID - the British agency for international development - for whom I was working as a humanitarian advisor.

Solar lights - saving money, increasing safety.

In an earlier post I talked about the rationale of including cheap solar lights in future emergency relief kits distribution: it just makes so much sense. We (DFID) supported 12,000 of these last year through CONCERN and their local partners in Sindh. I went to visit these some of these communities a year later and the lights, made by Toughstuff were still doing well and people said they appreciated them so much. Many folk were using them to charge mobiles too.  This was part of our 2010 response.

Following intense rains in 2011 another few hundred thousands families lost their homes and livelihoods, so we launched more support and response.  (Again DFID being in the top 5 donors, yeh!).  This time we're supporting the reconstruction of more than 30,000 houses, but also distributing around 28,000 lights. This time using illumination products. These cost around $7 per unit (at this scale), so about half the price of the Toughstuff ones.  The difference is that they can't charge mobile phones, but we decided that it was more important to reach as many families as possible with the limited funds we could put forward.

Here's a video IOM put together about their response:



It's not our role to tell our partners where they should buy their products, I just made it clear that they should include these in the kits, or give us a good reason why they shouldn't be included.  Here's the deal: after disasters NGOs and UN agencies provide shelter and non-food items (NFIs), among loads of other sectors of support (health, food, etc.).  Shelter is a huge issue and there are many different options, which are we'll have to talk about another another day. But NFIs are also the subject of huge debate, in fact there's been over a decade of efforts to standardise these kits.  Obviously they depend on the climate, but they usually include blankets, sleeping mats, jerry cans (for storing water), cooking sets, mosquito nets, soap, hygiene kits, and so on.  These can cost a lot of money, and when there are millions of people to help, it can quickly diminish a few million pounds.  So, what are the critical items? How do we decide? Should we accept what the NGOs propose or should we request justification for every item so that more families benefit from something? These are hard decisions, but I think it's good that we have these discussions.

So when it came to this 2011 response, our first main partner was the International Organisaiton for Migration, a really professional outfit that has enormous experience in Pakistan, a really committed, mostly national team, supported by a few solid internationals. They come with really quite reasonable overhead costs, which is increasing important to us (very few international staff costs, flights, and all that admin horror of daily mail doom).  They did a sterling job running the shelter cluster after the 2010 floods, and are doing that same job this year, again really well.

One light and such a difference!

IOM's procurement unit did a market survey on different solar light units and initially proposed a chunky unit costing around 15 pounds.  After a fair bit of technical review we agreed to go for the illumination unit which gives pretty good light for at least 6 hours a night, at one third the cost! For the 18,000 families we intended to reach this meant a saving of almost half a million pounds:) We also slashed cooking sets (as most people had recovered a few cook pots). This saved another 360 grand (pounds sterling). Together, these savings meant another 2,500 families could be reached.  When you meet one of these families you know why every one counts.


I just wanted to bring this up to show how we're dealing with this value-for-money issue (a new DFID-buzzword). But really relevant in these times of economic woe, and particularly when DFID is defending its position in the light of budget cuts in other areas of life in UK.  So it's fair enough that we make sure every pound spent makes sense, and where savings can be made they are made.  And where possible we do more for less, reach more people for the same money.  I suppose we're custodians of people's money in this way, we have to make the right call. I hope this programme is an example of this in action, but I'll leave you to decide if that's the case or not.


More photos of these units in use were taken by IOM's team on the ground recently and are here: https://www2.dropbox.com/home/solar%20lights%20pakistan

On bringing sunlight to the darkness

I need to write more.

Every passing week I see a growing pile of months that represent the chunk of my life I've lived in Pakistan I wince at the stream of writings that could have been; horrified by my lack of recounting of stories of the peoples and places, ideas and opportunities, chance meetings, inspiring moments of passion in dance or music, children, community.

They say something about the longest journey, first steps, no time like the present and all that.  So yes, now is the time, and I'll try to write in the moments between multiple events and busyness..

Where to begin?  at this stage i usually get distracted by searching out pictures of recent ventures into the real Pakistan (Islamabad is lovely, but worlds apart from the bustling, noisy, dramatic and heady rest of the land). Not that there is one land, it's like several countries, meshed into one, officially for only 60 years, but really for thousands of years before that in an incredible history that makes our simple dwellings in Scotland a thousand years ago seem like the stone ages compared to what's been transpiring around here.

But today we're here, in the present. I'm still part of a team of advisors and managers of British taxpayers aid money to help flood-affected people rebuild their lives. My first time with DFID the department for international development (and rather an honour at that to be honest). A donor, one of the biggest donors out here, and it's been a pleasure to see how seriously the whole "institution" takes the quality and targetting of our limited aid budget.  How efficiently they handle the information flow to Parliament and the beaurocracy which has allowed us to focus completely on the best, most cost effective and lasting types of emergency aid and, later on, investment into 'early recovery' projects.  Having spent years on the other side of the table, as an operational organisation, asking donors like DFID for money, how we portion it out. How there's no influence or interference from commercial interests - like British companies being favoured for contracts from UK aid cash.  Apparently Clare Short dealt with that sillyness years ago, and it's stuck ever since. British NGOs aren't favoured over any others either.  Furthermore, I don't feel that we're under any pressure to make funding decisions based on UK foreign policy; it really is based on degree of humanitarian need, levels of coverage by other organisations and donors (filling the gaps), finding the most cost-effective solutions, those that also empower recipient communities, maybe even improve the dire nutritional situation, promote women's rights and represenatation, possibly reduce their vulnerability to abuse and attack, things that build community resilience to future disasters, and so on.

There's just so many issues out there, which is partially why I've never decided on what to start writing about. One at a time right? Small steps.

Let's start with a conversation I had with Farrah a couple of days ago.. Farrah runs a local NGO (called CCHD) that's been involved in womens' rights, advocacy and now with UNHCR setting up legal advice centers around the country, in an attempt to offer some level of representation to people who don't have access - to justice, aid, legal aid, advice.  It's such a heavy task. Protection, and the entire legal safety net that we so take for granted in the "West" is shocking by its absence. Only then do I get a glimpse of what it all means.  Where do you start with a case of sexual abuse, if the legal system doesn't have the will or means to deal with it? How can you protect the victim who has told her story?  Especially in an Islamic culture - which has got to be one of the most gentle and justice-oriented religions out there, but there's so many other layers in society, tribal, family honour.

Anyway, Farrah and I talked about solar lights which she's keen to find out more about. I started looking into this last November when tens of thousands of people were still displaced by flood-waters living in spontaneous camps in any available sites, sometimes in more formal camps where the army or the humanitarians could provide decent tents, water supply maybe, some sanitation facilities, deliveries of food.  We'd visit these camps - always during the day. Our security regs are such that we don't get to see these places at night.  Having lived through war and displacement in Monrovia - Liberia - in 2003 I know fine what it's like: very dark. And scary, especially if you're a young girl, surrounded by strangers from other parts of town, or tribes.  With no money and stuff people just don't have the means for light. So you get whole transitional townships which somehow function day and night. And imagine trying to find a quiet moment for a little wash, or when you're bursting for the loo in those long hours of night, and those scary strangers have wickedness on their mind, and, hidden in the cloak of darkness they descend on those most precious and vulnerable among us, causing immeasrable harm and trauma. It's such a nightmare and it's happened in every camp setting I've ever been in from Bosnia to Aceh - and now in Pakistan.  And like most places, authorities would rather deny it's a problem, that it's happening at all, that the good people of these parts would never do such a thing.  But they do, we do. Men that is. There's monsters within us that we battle with and sometimes, stressed and when our social order is thrown upside down by disaster and displacement the monster takes over.

Knowing this, we have to create means for social protection that are specially designed for life in camps and humanitarian chaos. And one of these should surely be light. Imagine the bustle of five thousdand people in a scrap of land beside a wood and a lake, at night where you can hardly see what you're stepping on. Then see another vision of the same place: a village bright with tiny lights, paths illuminated, toilets in carefully chosen areas lit up and watchable, surrounded by rows of eyes disguised as shelters. Even if nobody's watching, the warewolf knows that someone could be... How much much difference would this make? Surely...

So back in November, charged with coming up with a plan for my country's portion of aid money for shelter, I worked with some of the great folk at Concern to expand the provision of emergency shelter kits (2 high quality tarps, 6 long bamboo poles, some warm blankets for the winter season, etc.). I think we were looking at around 35,000 families or so.  At this point I started looking into solar lights and presumed there was some local production facility. There could be, but it's a bit of shambles, and all the panels and lights they produce come from China and they just re-assemble them here.  At around $30 a pop.

Folks in one of hundreds of villages where we worked with
Concern and Rootworks, their local partner, who
are rebuilding houses here, so they can move
out of these tents, a year on after the floods in Aug 2010.

OK so back up a minute - first we decide we need to do something about the problem of scary men/ prowling spectares, and lets say we focus on light.  We agree that if there's any chance to reduce these horrors we should grasp them, we assume, on behalf of the tax-paying population that they agree (hope you're OK with that folks!).  Right, next we have to find a product that's going to last more than a few weeks, that's robust and reliable, simple and easy to use. It should be cheap - so we can buy lots of them. There's plenty of $500 units out there, with batteries and fancy battery boxes and so on, but then we'll only be able to help a few families, and they'll probably end up in the richest man's household.  No, they should be distributed to everyone, one per family.  So price should be low.

As chance would have some samples were dropped off to our offices in London and sent out for sampling. A relatively new company, and product really - a robust panel using thin-film solar technology stuck to a chunky bit of plastic, offering enough of a trickle of current to charge a light that holds 4 LED bulbs.  Pretty meagre light at first, but pressing the button a few times increases the brightness (while also reducing the time they can stay on).  Optional extras include fittings for most mobile phones, batteries, radios and so on.  Cost for the panel, cable and light only? About ten pounds stirling ($15 or so).

Talking to a family in Dadu, about their solar light (toughstuff) and how it had been amazing...

So we shared these with Concern and it turned out they had bought them before - in Haiti. So they bought 12,000 of them and gave them out in Southern Sindh.  Feedback was amazing: they were saving about $3 a month on candles or kerosene and a further $5 on mobile phone charging... They had figured out where to find adapters to fit their mobile phones, which meant they didn't have to pay to go to town to charge them.

OK, so these were distributed long after they had been in camps - they had returned already, so they were "late" in that regard.  But the "return on investment" seemed to be really good - i.e. the investment is paid back within a few months, after which they save money.

To cut a long story short, it has occurred to me that we should include solar lights in all future emergency shelter kits - as long as they are low cost and robust.  The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been in charge of the emergency shelter sector in Pakistan since Aug 2010. They are some really committed and passionate folks there, and keen on the idea of light, and I'm so pleased to see that this year lights have been included in the shelter cluster's priority list of non-food items.

So, moving forward in time now (this story has taken months to finish) we have funded IOM to provide emergency shelter for 18,000 families (over 100,000 people) in the newly flood affected areas in Southern Sindh.  Each family will get a solar light. This time a different model - from illumination, which sell them at around $7.50 a unit, delivered to Pakistan. That's less than £5 each!

In two weeks I'm going to visit the people that received these lights and am going to find out what they think.  I'll finish or continue with this post then.

Granny, at 92, with one of her tribe of great grandchildren, in a tiny village flattened by water in Jacobabad, Sindh.  Poor, they may be, but look how healthy and positive and alive!

Pakistan floods, firewood and recovery

A school front door in Jacobabad.

The August 2010 floods in Pakistan dwarf any other humanitarian crisis for decades, well, on record probably (at least since we started this aid-effort thing. The measuring stick we can use to say "it's bigger than the last" is not how many people perished, but how many survived and need help to survive, rebuild, recover.

So in summer this year the monsoon rains opened up with all the built up ferocity of a planets' worth of energy, heat and smoke from a continent on fire (Russia, Portugal, etc.), droughts across Africa, floods in South America, a mighty freeze in Europe the winter before that has to balance out somewhere. And so it rained. The mighty Indus that flows from the craggy North to the desert South of this amazing country swelled and burst into irrigation channels built by the British a hundred or so years before, channelling water where it sholdn't have been, sweeping away decades of community. Luckily, most people had time to move out before the water (less than two thousand people died, amazingly few).

Camps of returnees, in the shadow of their former homes.  Jacobabad, Sindh. 

So, I joined the enormous humanitarian community in October to do my bit (it's what I do, rather did, before building things out of straw and mud) and in November had a look around in Sindh, the Southern province, home of Karachi, a port to the Arabian sea and beyond.  Here over 1.2 million homes are thought to have been destroyed, displacing over seven million people (more than Scotland entire!).

We decided to visit Dadu and Jacobabad, the two districts al of which lost the most houses - about 150,000 each, and see how people were coping. Photos say more than I could... First we stopped in at a camp, for a few thousand folk

Cattle, we're told are people's biggest asset. They fled together and live as an extended family. Cows cost a fortune here and loosing one could cripple your finances. They eat straw mostly, which has go to be fairly nutrient-less, but hey.

In the camp,
a hand pump at work, recently installed by
Root Work, a local NGO working with Concern
an Irish NGO, who in turn have British taxpayers cash,
via the UK's dept for int'l development.
Confused? You should be. 

So we travelled through Dadu, a district that lost around 180,000 houses (at 7 people per house that's a lot of people without a home).

Over here, there! Our village is ruined. there's nothing left.
Come and help out place (we were visiting some other community
of returnees. Our efforts are considerable (millions of pounds into all kinds
of services) but it barely touches the surface of the need. 

In the camps, possibly 10 to 40kms from their former homes, people can receive food, tents, health care, water... So there's an attraction to remain? Yes, but people don't seem to: as soon as their lands emerge from the flood waters they're off - partly to make sure someone else doesn't grab their land. There's a really entrenched feudal system of landlords and peasant / landless farmers here. It's hard to know who of these people owned their land, control their own destinies, but from what I've heard it's one of the biggest challenges. 

So, cooking: See the cow dung drying in the sun, makes for good cooking fuel, saves money. Stuck in camps people don't have access to their usual source of firewood, so they pay about $1 a day for sticks and roots.  This exposes a major problem here - inefficient cooking systems.  Local landscapes are denuded, there are literally millions of people cutting and chopping their way through the undergrowth and the canopy, to burn semi dry or just green wood to sizzle up their meals.  There's little evidence that anyone has mapped out the implication of this over the next five or ten years: what will happen if this continues, this size of population cooking their way through these few remaining trees?

Especially frustrating when you know that alternatives exist that really work: fuel efficient stoves (at least to slow down the disaster), solar cooking (ovens, parabolic water heaters, oil tank heaters, and more), biogas (cooking from the gas of our poo, or our cows poo, or both).  

The humanitarian machine is incredibly fixed into its way of doing things, but it can change. It's taken years but mainstreaming concepts around gender equality and to a lesser extent protection (human rights) is becoming more recognised.  Environmental impact is starting to appear as an overarching / "cross-cutting"  issue but most people and organisations don't understand the link between energy, environment and human communities so it's given lip-service and spin.  In fact, from an environmental perspective our aid operations are catastrophic. Consider the overall pollutants and carbon emissions of the millions of products we import from the far corners of the globe, the tens of thousands of air flights, air lifts, truck days and so on.  Do we count this up? No, don't even discuss it! We are, it seems, immune to the carbon magnifying glass. "hey, we're saving lives out here, don't hassle me with that tree hugging shit" is the general impression you'll get if you bring it up. 

People in return. It turns out that vast numbers of displaced just moved out to neighbouring districts which remained dry and found work, settled down with families or friends, and were not completely exposed and vulnerable. They managed. The network of family support is enormous, low profile, goes unrecorded and ancient.  Supporting all this is the diaspora who send millions of dollars worth of cash each month to their extended family back in the homeland. 

The traditional Katcha house, make of local earth and bits of straw. Most of these just melted away when the floods came and inundated the walls. Most brick walls that used mud mortar suffered the same fate, but some survived. The challenge now is to find ways to reinforce these earthen walls.  There's lots of work and discussions going on around this, but I'll have to leave it for another post. 

I seriously wanted to dive onto that hay cart and carry on our trip by those means. So it would take a few more days, or weeks, but that's OK.  Nice to see the wooden wheels still in action, and the hay stacked on carts. Like in Romania, though there they have horses and car tyres.
And their hay is cut grass, this is cut straw and has far less food/nutritional value than hay.
This stuff finds its way into the mud walls (otherwise they wouldn't hold together so well).

What remains, after this trip, is an amazing friendliness and warmth from everyone we met.  Despite everything that's stacked up against them: a brooding civil war, the meddling of our Western powers in their affairs, the crippling corruption and the injustices that rule their lives, they are happy to share a cup of tea and discuss ideas.

A talk about community at Andanças festival

Plastering weekend at Miriem's house, Galicia, with our
"community" of growers

Honoured, I am, to be asked to talk, to give a talk, at a festival in the North of Portugal called Andanças.  An incredible event in its own right, an entirely voluntary event, set in the same community each year in a small village just South of Porto in the North-ish of Portugal.

I had been contacted following a description of a weekend get together and work I had with a bunch of local friends from Galicia and Portugal.

My family, in Scotland. A community of us, that I only really
appreciate when I see them from afar... Kim missing:(

So I will talk about what we are doing in this "community" or group of friends, but I also want to relate to my history of work and life in all those places I have worked until now in humanitarian disasters.  A life that seems to have been left behind, swept away by the present, the urgency of now, the next bit of building we have to complete, and so on.  But I find it is creeping up on me, this past. It has defined me after all. I travelled and worked as an aid or development worker from the age of 20 till that of 40, with spells of other things here and there.  The people and communities I worked with in crisis fill me with a great sense of being, of living. Of being alive and proud to have contributed in a major way. I think I need to start writing about these stories, these moments and these people.  Andanças will be a start, albeit a talk.

So here is a summary of the talk I have put together, that I'll give with no photos or electronic slidage and all that. Just talk. I need to work on my Portuguese, and an outline of what to say.  Or maybe I'll just think about it and fire from the hip...

Andanças 2010

Palestra on Community

I will talk about a community that shares an international landmark, the river Minho. Here, friends and acquaintances from Southern Galicia and Northern Portugal gather to help each other build our houses, or to create gardens for local schools, or just to talk and plan a future that is less dependent on industrialsed products and globalised trade, and more reliant on local economies. A future where buildings are made from natural, local materials, that require a fraction of the energy to keep warm , where food comes from nearby valleys and is free from toxins and chemicals.

But what drives communities to change, adopt new and unfamiliar techniques? How can we find cohesion in a modern Europe surrounded by the distraction of television, internet, computer games, cheap energy and food in supermarkets that come from lands beyond our horizons.

I will tell of my work in communities affected by war and natural disaster, from the confilcts in Bosnia and Burundi, Eritrea and Liberia; to recovery from tsunami in Aceh and the Maldives. How in these situations, as an aid worker, I found moments of incredible community unity, strengh, determination. Under desperate circumstances such as these, I found people were able to create great changes, achieve unthinkable progress, adopt new practices and skills.

Attempting to unite these two different strands in the knowledge of modern threats and challenges faced by people around the world I will discuss community as I find it now, in my new home in the Vale do Minho, the advantages and challenges of peace and prosperity, and the urgency for us all to find solutions to global climate, energy and ecological crises.