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.

Arrival in Garissa.  Tuesday afternoon revolved around an inter-agency meeting chaired by the District Commissioner, and good contacts were made with the key half-dozen UN agencies operating in the field. Everyone seems very keen for extra coordination and information management capacity and so Nigel took the decision to re-locate the full MapAction team to Garissa. 

Back in Nairobi.  Meanwhile, Jonny and Emerson reported having a productive time. Emerson has been giving technical support to the National Operations Centre in Nairobi and will now stay on there for a few days longer to finish the job.

Meanwhile in Garissa.  Wednesday in Garissa was spent consolidating relationships with all the agencies and NGOs – UNICEF, WFP, CARE, MSF, WHO and so on –and implementing our proposal to staff what is now called the Flood Relief Coordination Centre (FRCC). This will be a shared facility and we have been given an empty bungalow-type building in the WHO compound to set up operations. 

Thursday.  Up early this morning (Thursday) to do the last preparations for the coordination meeting at 0800 where we will ‘launch’ the FRCC.  More information tomorrow.