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.
 

Our arrival in Nairobi.  On arrival in Nairobi yesterday we made contact with the small OCHA/UNDAC Kenya team and obtained from them an excellent situation briefing. We then visited the National Operations Centre (NOC) which although it is intended as the national ‘nerve centre’, at present has only very rudimentary facilities. There is not very much point in setting ourselves in there until it re-opens for business on Monday morning. So we caught up with the UN team for dinner and a nice (and useful) catch-up with two old friends from OCHA New York and Geneva. They are running the Somalia floods coordination from Nairobi rather than the more proximal, but currently less convivial, Mogadishu.

Preparations for an early start at the NOC.  So today we are undisturbed (apart from some light gospel singing wafting up from below) but keeping pretty busy with setting up our systems, adjusting data structures and starting to assemble the GIS data that we and the UK team grabbed in the 24 hours before we got on the plane. This adjustment of systems and procedures to the local environment is a prosaic but vital bit of all deployments and the fact that we have a day to get it straight before diving into the ‘real’ emergency is no bad thing. But we are keen to get stuck in as soon as Nairobi wakes up tomorrow morning.