Nigel’s final diary entry for the Kenya Mission - 20 December 2006

Capacity Building with the NOC.  It is Wednesday and we’re packing up. Yesterday we were kept fairly busy: in the morning we ran a three-hour workshop session for the NOC staff, covering principles and practice of information management in emergencies.  We included two short break-out sessions to get the delegates (eight in all) to think in practical terms about a ‘real’ situation.  The package seemed to be well received and successfully got the eight delegates debating various priorities and methods for gathering and appraising situation data. 

Nigel’s diary entry from Nairobi, Kenya – 17 December 2006
 
The Field part of the Mission is complete.  The field part of the mission has now been completed. Darren and Chris hitched a ride by UN aircraft from Garissa back to Nairobi on Thursday while Nigel, Emerson and Jonny drove the faithful Toyota back to the city on Saturday morning.

Nigel’s diary entry from Garissa, Kenya – 13 December 2006

The rains return.  After several dry days the rains came to the Tana River basin again last night. Roads that had begun to dry out are now turned back into quagmires.  No distribution of food or other essential supplies has been possible by road today – so the two MI-8 helicopters based in Garissa are the only lifeline to the hundreds of villages and IDP camps on both banks of the Tana River.  But fuel for the helicopters is running low and they are expected to be grounded tomorrow unless the fuel ordered from contractors in Nairobi reaches Garissa.

Nigel’s diary entry from Garissa, Kenya – 12 December 2006

Situation.  With mostly blue skies and no rain for about 5 days, it is hard to see how the forecast of rains into January is going to come true.  Some roads are drying out, although a few attempts by The Red Cross and others to get trucks out on the main roads north of the Tana River have resulted in marooned vehicles and abandoned journeys.  However, a few of the big 6-wheel drive trucks, lightly loaded, have made it to Dadaab, where 160,000 Somali refugees live in long-term camps, but it will be a while until the road network opens up – even if it stays dry.

Nigel’s diary entry from Garissa, Kenya – 7 December 2006

Nigel and Chris to Garissa.  Nigel and Chris travelled to Garissa on Tuesday – a four hour drive – with Magnus Nilsson from UNDAC. If you take the road east out of Nairobi and go straight for 320km you arrive in Garissa.  It feels more like being in Somalia than Kenya and has a frontier town atmosphere. The transition is quite sudden as the fertile uplands turn into thorn scrub and the temperature rises to the mid-30s plus and is pretty sticky.

Diary update from the UK Base - Monday 4th December

A busy start.  Nigel and the team have been busy all day and did not have time to write a Sitrep, but here is a brief picture from our contact with them today.

Nigel’s first diary entry from Kenya – 3 December 2006.

Sunday 3 December.  From the vantage point of our hotel room ‘office’ in downtown Nairobi, Sunday seems to be given over to church meetings. You will scan the Sunday paper in vain for news of the flooding that has hit more than half a million Kenyans. Reported deaths at ‘only’ 21 so far isn’t a headline-grabbing figure; perhaps this will change as the reported figures catch up with what must be happening on the ground in the north and east of the country – many areas yet even to be reconnoitered by air, let alone visited by aid agencies.
 

Having just over 24 hours to prepare for a deployment is luxurious by MapAction standards but work still expands to fill the time available. But the kit, including two satellite modems as we understand local internet access is patchy, is now packed into four Peli cases. The team - including the vital UK base component - is now hard at work assembling GIS data from a variety of sources world-wide.

Although we've had a useful briefing from the UNDAC Kenya rep in Nairobi, the UN team there are developing plans to ramp up coordination support to the government agencies. We are a key element in those plans. They include the possibility of strengthening the coordination centre in Garissa which is the gateway to the badly affected north east corridor. We expect to be pretty busy from the time we land in Nairobi at 06.30 tomorrow.

The deploying team, Nigel, Jonny, Chris and Emerson, are looking forward to getting started.