In response to a number of increasingly loud complaints, I thought I should blog a bit.
In fairness to me, I've been working 14+ hour days, at the end of which sitting down at my computer and writing some more isn't at the top of my list. That honor belongs to Season 4 of Mad Men.
To be honest, maybe what I mean by "increasingly loud complaints" is "I finished all of Season 4 of Mad Men and now I don't have anything else to do after work."
A brief update for those who don't know (and I'll try to go back and fill some of this in in the next few days): I was in Kenya working on some monitoring and evaluation stuff, went to western Kenya for a few days for work, had an amazing safari and beach vacation with my wonderful boyfriend, and then was asked to be part of an emergency response team to Dadaab Refugee Camp in northeastern Kenya along the Kenya-Somalia border.
In case you haven't seen CNN (Sanjay Gupta AND Anderson Cooper have been here, it must be serious), The New York Times, etc., Dadaab has been around for 20 or so years and is the largest refugee camp in the world. But starting a few months ago, as drought turned into famine in Somalia and the political turmoil and insecurity there prevented any significant amount of food or other aid from entering, Somali refugees have been pouring across the border into Kenya. As many as 1,700 people a day have been showing up in Dadaab needing food, shelter, medical care and so much more. This has, of course, put a strain on existing services in Dadaab, especially given that the people coming to Dadaab are in terrible shape--dehydrated, malnourished, unvaccinated, sick, broken-hearted. There's a tremendous need for both money and people to implement new services to make sure that their needs are met. That's why I'm here: my organization is going to be providing the health and nutrition services in a new camp that that is opening up in the next few days to house all the new arrivals.
As you can imagine, things can get pretty heavy around here with all that's going on. You see a lot of awful stuff, the days are long and there is tremendous work to be done which has to be done now. Peoples' lives literally depend on you getting that work done.
Which is why I thought I would ease back into blogging by telling you about the bat that lives outside my window.
I should start by saying that I am tremendously lucky to have a room at all, and I'm not clear exactly how it happened. Accommodation is a hot commodity in Dadaab right now, since new organizations (like mine) have come and existing organizations have brought more people. There are significant security concerns (Al Shabaab, the same people making it impossible to deliver aid in Somalia) here, especially for Westerners, so everybody stays in a large United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) compound with a secured perimeter. But this means that it can't just expand. Instead, every new organization that comes is squeezing in, mostly by pitching tents everywhere.
I spent the first week I was here in a safari tent with a roommate and the next few weeks in a Coleman camping tent. The camping tent was totally fine except for that there is a fierce wind here and there's no trees or anything to stop it, so when it hits the side of your tent, things can get ugly. I literally had to get up in the middle of the night to restake it into the sand most nights (strangely, sand doesn't hold the tent stakes well in 30+ mile per hour winds). But the area where our tents were got full and, with more people arriving to take our spot there the next day, I went in search of more space to pitch tents. I ended up stumbling onto two rooms at another agency (plus room in the yard to pitch several tents as more of our staff come---I'm the sole representative of my organization right now, holding down the Dadaab fort). As the only person here I've claimed one of the rooms as mine for now, but it's back to the tent as soon as other people come and this gets turned into an office.
So anyway. I was (and still am) quite pleased with myself for tracking down these rooms. But there's a downside. There's a bat. It lives in the tree right outside my room. It makes a high pitched squealing noise for 5 seconds every 30 seconds all night every night. At someone's suggestion (in full disclosure: this someone was a relatively high ranking employee of the American government, which may explain something, either about governance in America or about the suggestion, I'm not sure which), I've named it Hermione in an attempt to build a positive relationship with it and not want to kill it all night, every night. It hasn't worked.
(Side note: What has worked is my development of a pitch-perfect imitation of the bat's noise, which I unfortunately chose to demonstrate to a group of people at a goat grilling get together on Saturday. Further side note: I had already disgraced myself at this gathering by being handed a prime little chunk of goat meat and promptly dropping it into the sand because it was scalding-straight-off-the-grill-finger-burning hot. My apologies to all involved on both counts.)
The first night I was convinced the bat was in the ceiling because a) the room reeked of bat guano (a distinct and awful smell) and b) the sound was so loud. This was especially distressing to me because, as a public healthnerd advocate I have a subscription to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for a little light bedtime reading. This esteemed journal recently had an excellent report of a man who was bit by a bat, thought nothing of it, and then died a slow and agonizing death of rabies 9 months later.
After sleeping for a total for 47 seconds that first night, I was able to clear up that the bat was outside, and also move to the room next door (also rented by my organization) that seems to be upwind of the bat guano and smells delightfully fresh. Now I'm just left to be haunted by Hermione's sweet bat song, serenading me to sleep each night, and, of course, to provide the entertainment at all events in Dadaab with my impersonation of Hermione (it's a real crowd pleaser).
On that note, Hermione has started in, so it's time for me to douse myself in mosquito spray and crawl under the mosquito net for another good night of sleep. I promise I will write more tomorrow, as per popular demand (er, pending release of Man Men Season 5 or something...).
In fairness to me, I've been working 14+ hour days, at the end of which sitting down at my computer and writing some more isn't at the top of my list. That honor belongs to Season 4 of Mad Men.
To be honest, maybe what I mean by "increasingly loud complaints" is "I finished all of Season 4 of Mad Men and now I don't have anything else to do after work."
A brief update for those who don't know (and I'll try to go back and fill some of this in in the next few days): I was in Kenya working on some monitoring and evaluation stuff, went to western Kenya for a few days for work, had an amazing safari and beach vacation with my wonderful boyfriend, and then was asked to be part of an emergency response team to Dadaab Refugee Camp in northeastern Kenya along the Kenya-Somalia border.
In case you haven't seen CNN (Sanjay Gupta AND Anderson Cooper have been here, it must be serious), The New York Times, etc., Dadaab has been around for 20 or so years and is the largest refugee camp in the world. But starting a few months ago, as drought turned into famine in Somalia and the political turmoil and insecurity there prevented any significant amount of food or other aid from entering, Somali refugees have been pouring across the border into Kenya. As many as 1,700 people a day have been showing up in Dadaab needing food, shelter, medical care and so much more. This has, of course, put a strain on existing services in Dadaab, especially given that the people coming to Dadaab are in terrible shape--dehydrated, malnourished, unvaccinated, sick, broken-hearted. There's a tremendous need for both money and people to implement new services to make sure that their needs are met. That's why I'm here: my organization is going to be providing the health and nutrition services in a new camp that that is opening up in the next few days to house all the new arrivals.
As you can imagine, things can get pretty heavy around here with all that's going on. You see a lot of awful stuff, the days are long and there is tremendous work to be done which has to be done now. Peoples' lives literally depend on you getting that work done.
Which is why I thought I would ease back into blogging by telling you about the bat that lives outside my window.
I should start by saying that I am tremendously lucky to have a room at all, and I'm not clear exactly how it happened. Accommodation is a hot commodity in Dadaab right now, since new organizations (like mine) have come and existing organizations have brought more people. There are significant security concerns (Al Shabaab, the same people making it impossible to deliver aid in Somalia) here, especially for Westerners, so everybody stays in a large United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) compound with a secured perimeter. But this means that it can't just expand. Instead, every new organization that comes is squeezing in, mostly by pitching tents everywhere.
I spent the first week I was here in a safari tent with a roommate and the next few weeks in a Coleman camping tent. The camping tent was totally fine except for that there is a fierce wind here and there's no trees or anything to stop it, so when it hits the side of your tent, things can get ugly. I literally had to get up in the middle of the night to restake it into the sand most nights (strangely, sand doesn't hold the tent stakes well in 30+ mile per hour winds). But the area where our tents were got full and, with more people arriving to take our spot there the next day, I went in search of more space to pitch tents. I ended up stumbling onto two rooms at another agency (plus room in the yard to pitch several tents as more of our staff come---I'm the sole representative of my organization right now, holding down the Dadaab fort). As the only person here I've claimed one of the rooms as mine for now, but it's back to the tent as soon as other people come and this gets turned into an office.
So anyway. I was (and still am) quite pleased with myself for tracking down these rooms. But there's a downside. There's a bat. It lives in the tree right outside my room. It makes a high pitched squealing noise for 5 seconds every 30 seconds all night every night. At someone's suggestion (in full disclosure: this someone was a relatively high ranking employee of the American government, which may explain something, either about governance in America or about the suggestion, I'm not sure which), I've named it Hermione in an attempt to build a positive relationship with it and not want to kill it all night, every night. It hasn't worked.
(Side note: What has worked is my development of a pitch-perfect imitation of the bat's noise, which I unfortunately chose to demonstrate to a group of people at a goat grilling get together on Saturday. Further side note: I had already disgraced myself at this gathering by being handed a prime little chunk of goat meat and promptly dropping it into the sand because it was scalding-straight-off-the-grill-finger-burning hot. My apologies to all involved on both counts.)
The first night I was convinced the bat was in the ceiling because a) the room reeked of bat guano (a distinct and awful smell) and b) the sound was so loud. This was especially distressing to me because, as a public health
After sleeping for a total for 47 seconds that first night, I was able to clear up that the bat was outside, and also move to the room next door (also rented by my organization) that seems to be upwind of the bat guano and smells delightfully fresh. Now I'm just left to be haunted by Hermione's sweet bat song, serenading me to sleep each night, and, of course, to provide the entertainment at all events in Dadaab with my impersonation of Hermione (it's a real crowd pleaser).
On that note, Hermione has started in, so it's time for me to douse myself in mosquito spray and crawl under the mosquito net for another good night of sleep. I promise I will write more tomorrow, as per popular demand (er, pending release of Man Men Season 5 or something...).
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