Tom Elkin's blog

Thursday: Processing 15,000 new refugees in 24 hours…

2010-10-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

So our two days ofmeeting people working on the frontline of FTR work had been extremelyinsightful and interesting, but the one thing we had really been lacking wastalking to someone who had experienced the chaotic and overwhelming nature ofan emergency response situation. i.e. The kind of situation that RapidFTR is primarily designed to helpwith. Since the entire plan forthe first week had had to change at the last minute, it wasn’t looking like wewere going to get this opportunity. But out of nowhere came the realisation that Fatouma, our incrediblymodest guide from UNICEF Gulu for the last 48 hours, had actually worked withUNHCR during two very big refugee influxes about a year ago. Interviewing her turned out to be oneof the most helpful moments of the trip…

Fatouma had been basedat an initial registration point close to the border during a massive influx ofrefugees from the Congo in November 2009. With only a handful of aid workers to handle the situation, 15,000 new refugeeshad arrived in the space of 24 hours. Usually all new arrivals must be registered before any aid can be given(for instance, to check that they are genuine refugees, and not simply Ugandannationals looking for benefits) but with that many people, regular process goesout the window. Priority numberone was trying to provide shelter, water, and food to everyone.

The strategy fordealing with unaccompanied children was to initially just keep them in aseparate area of the camp, where they could at least be watched over andmonitored. In such a refugeescenario, still less than a kilometre from the border and the danger ofviolence they were fleeing from, the aim of the Government is to relocatepeople to a transit point at least 50km away, within 48 hours. Fatoumamentioned that trying to fill in the bulky UNHCR manifest for registering thesechildren before they were relocated wasn’t always possible. They also frequently missed theopportunity to capture a photo of the child on registration, which made theprocess harder later on. She wasexcited about the portability of RapidFTR, meaning she and others working toregister children would always have the means necessary to do this on the spot.

Eventually, childrenand adults alike were all registered and entered into an inter-agency database. (It took four days to process everyonein the line.) Everyone was taggedwith a wristband, which had a unique ID number / barcode. This ID could be instrumental in tyingthe data collected using RapidFTR with the records maintained by other organisations. Given the potential importance of thisID, it was good to also learn that these wristbands have barcodes. Potentiallya barcode reader could be a massive help, in order to ensure data integrity.

Wherever possible, it wasimportant to follow up with all registered children within 48 hours ofarrival. This included childrenwho had already been reunited with a family member or relative. The aid workers need to check on the wellbeing of the child, and to see if bringing the child back into the family unithad caused any issues. Theimportance of this follow up work reinforced an idea that we had already pickedup from discussions with GUSCO and KICWA: the introduce a follow up form typeinto RapidFTR; or to make custom forms repeatible, so that they could be filledin multiple times. Because of the hecticnature of such emergency situations, another idea is to build in some kind ofalerts / reminder system into the mobile app. E.g. A child registered over 48 hours ago hasn’t had anyfollow up: advise the aid worker of this. This might integrate nicely with the follow up form concept.

There had not beentime to erect a photo wall for tracing purposes during either of these refugeeinfluxes that Fatumar had worked at. This raised some interesting questions about exactly how RapidFTR mightbe used by UNICEF or other NGOs in such a situation. Hopefully the ability to search on a device, and possibly amini photo wall view, make a massive difference to getting children backtogether with their families as quickly as possible.

Wednesday p.m. Omiya Anyma

2010-10-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

After a nutritiouslunch of starch, starch, and yet more starch (also known as Matoke, Posho, and Kalo),with a liberal dousing of Bo, a green, leavy sauce (a bit of a Godsend, giveneverything else tasted largely of mush) we drove about another hour to Omiya Anyma, a longterm IDP settlement camp.

Starch: the cornerstone of any nutrious breakfast...

Omiya Anyma now hasabout 3,000 residents, and conditions are pretty good. About four years though, it had over20,000 people living in the same amount of space. Huts were literally built touching wall to wall. There was no room for propersanitation, latrines were overloaded and spilling out right in the middle ofliving areas. Awful hygiene led todisease outbreaks and all kinds of problems.

We met with the campcommander, who’s team is responsible for running pretty much every aspect ofthe camp, including trying to match up unaccompanied children with theirfamilies / communities. The wholeteam was made up of local people: no NGOs were at the site for the first fiveyears. Their method of FTR waspretty straightforward: anyone from a particular village was asked torendezvous at a particular spot at a particular time. Family groups were placed in areas ofthe camp according to which distinct/sub-county/parish/village they werefrom. Each sub community offamilies was responsible for gathering Record taking was limited to recordingnames on paper: the biggest priority was just getting the head count right, sothe right amount of aid supplies could be ordered. All information was stored on sheets of paper or exercisebooks. There was no mainselectricity at the camp: the only source of power is a number of small solarpanels, prinicpally used for charging mobile phones.

We were entirelyreliant on our companions from KICWA, Fred and Godfrey, to translate what wewere saying into Acholi, the local dialect. The was a clear peak in interest from the group we weretalking to when we whipped out a Blackberry and a netbook to give a simpledemo. How much of this was becauseof the potential for RapidFTR making their work easier, and how much was justbecause we had suddenly produced a very shiny looking phone and portablecomputer, was hard to gauge! Butwhat was undeniably encouraging, was how Fred very ably described and demoedthe application to the crowd himself: having only just learnt about it a coupleof hours beforehand! As usabilityand time-to-learn were two of the biggest unknowns of the project, this wasanother incredible milestone for the project.

Wednesday a.m. On to Kitgum; visit to KICWA

2010-10-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Wednesday morning wechecked out of the Alcholi Ber hotel in Gulu and hit the road again, drivingabout two hours north-east to Kitgum. I had begun to get a little weirded out that my 4 days of stubble hadstarted to look ginger… Had Iinherited some of the red hair gene shared by two of my uncles andcousins!?!? Alas, I found out whenI eventually had a chance to wash, my newly found facial hair was just full ofred dust from the roads..!

After arriving inKitgum, we headed straight to meet with another local NGO doing FTR work,called KICWA. This time round wesaved ourselves a lot of time by using a live demo in order to help explainexactly what RapidFTR did. Itturns out a picture is worth a thousand words; but a real life example is wortheven more. Today was to be anothermomentous day for RapidFTR, as we conducted our first usuability tests withreal end users!

Of the group of sixchild social workers, most had simple mobile phones; one had an old Blackberryphone. Our demo set up was twonetbook computers, one running the RapidFTR server; and a number ofBlackberries running RapidFTR, syncing to the server via wifi, to demonstrate ascenario where phone networks are unavailable. We were really pleased to see how quickly they picked up theuser interface, and the concepts of creating new forms on the web app on thenetbooks, and synchronising records between devices, etc. Winnie, who had never picked up aBlackberry before, was soon comfortably registering her colleagues on thesystem. And the more tech savvyamongst them were eagerly replicating their own paper forms for data collectionon RapidFTR. J

Zubair and I eachcaptured about two pages of really good suggestions from the team at KICWA onhow we can make RapidFTR more useful and more easily usable. Some highlights were: repeating formsto be used for follow up interviews with a child (which echoed exactly whatGUSCO had asked for); an alerts / reminders system to keep track on whichchildren need to be checked on; and the ability to switch between locallanguage and English versions of the forms on the Blackberry / web app.

They showed us theirown Access database, which they currently used at their main site for keepingdetails of all children they work with. This raised some useful discussion about how best RapidFTR will feedinto other existing systems / processes. (Given that RapidFTR is primarily a tool for rapid registration ofchildren in emergency situations.) Their ‘techie’ guy was clearly excited about even the very simpleapplication of using RapidFTR’s web app as a simpler, easier data collectiontool.

Separated at birth...?

2010-10-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

(Sorry Jorge, I couldn't let this one slip...)

Perhaps indicative ofquite how common Jacob’s plight is, we actually met with another former childsoldier at the same time. Issac, afamily friend, had been abducted in 2002. Fortunately Issac had managed to escape after a year. It was great to hear him laughing andjoking, clearly having put his experiences behind him. And we must thank him especially forpointing out that Jorge was indeed a spitting image of ridiculous auto-tuned rapper,T-Pain.

LMAO! Issac: thank you making my day! Nay, year!

Tuesday p.m. Meeting a family successfully reunited with their son

2010-10-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

After meeting with GUSCO Tuesday morning, we were extremely privileged to be taken by Pamela, one of their social workers, to meet with a former child soldier that she had worked with to reunite with his family.

Jacob was 11 when he was abducted from his family’s home by the LRA. After seven years in captivity, he finally managed to escape when his commander had gotten in trouble, and was forced to flee himself to avoid being killed. Even though he had been gone seven years, his family still held out hope for his return. Then one day in January this year, they heard his name announced on a local radio station. Some escapee child soldiers had been found by the Ugandan army. With no means to verify if it was their son or not, they set off at 5am the following morning and walked for several hours to find out if it was really him. It was an amazing thing to watch the expression of joy on his father’s face when he described the day he was reunited with his son.

In Jacob’s case, the time taken from being found by the army and reunited with his family was just one month. This is indeed a happy ending after seven years apart from his family. It was certainly fortunate that his family had been listening out for announcements after all this time. If hadn’t heard his name on the radio, and they had moved at all in those seven years, the tracing process would have been much harder and much slower.

Even though it wasn’t directly relevant to the emergency response scenarios that RapidFTR has been primarily designed for, it was still very interesting to hear about FTR work from the family’s perspective. One thing we learnt from them is that once Jacob was abducted, there wasn’t anywhere for them to register their search for their missing son. We are now considering adding the ability to register parents (and other family members) to RapidFTR, and the potential for matching between child and parent records.

Tuesday a.m. RapidFTR meets GUSCO

2010-10-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

Tuesday kicked off with yet more meet and greet, this time at the UNICEF offices in Gulu. Nonetheless, pretty soon we were off to meet our first group of people actually carrying out Family Tracing and Reunicification work for real, with a local NGO called GUSCO. (Gulu Support the Children Organisation)

Given that Zubair’s and my current understanding of FTR work had been gleamed almost entirely from discussions with Jorge, who in turn had had to learn about FTR from people based out of UNICEF New York, this was a momentous occasion indeed. It quickly became apparent that each organisation has it’s own particular methods for doing this. GUSCO weren’t doing the kind of emergency response work that RapidFTR is primarily intended for: their recent throughput is about 100 children a year. However, it was still immensely useful to learn about their process and gather feedback from people working on the front line of FTR.

We spoke to a group of four GUSCO social workers, who work with children separated from their families, to care for and council them, and to help reunite them with their families. Children that come to GUSCO might have been separated from their families during mass migration during war and civil unrest, or abducted from their homes and forced to fight in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Some of them had been living in captivity of the LRA for years, and forced to participate in the most horrific of atrocities, so counselling was a bit part of their job.

The family tracing work they did was very hands on. The would ask the child, or the people who brought the child to them, which district/village they were from, then travel out to that village to speak to the community, to see if anyone could help them locate the family. (They specifically did not use photos to help trace the child’s family.) In some cases, children abducted to made soldiers no longer have living family members. Part of what GUSCO did was assess whether or not the child would be accepted back in to the community, since often atrocities that child soldiers were forced to carry out were against their own villages.

Currently GUSCO are only handling about 100 children a year, so the speed and efficiency benefits of RapidFTR were not so relevant to them. However, they still expressed a keen interest in how it could help them, especially in light of the upcoming Sudanese referendum in Jan 2011, which many people expect to spark violence and large numbers of people fleeing over the border into Uganda.

One very useful insight we took from these conversations was a specific example of how we need to tightly control access to any data stored about a child. Only the care taker who registers a child should be able to see details about that child. After the initial registration, a child would be assigned to a specific social worker, who would then also be able to see that information. This assignment is done by the social workers manager.

Sunday / Monday: hitting the ground running

2010-10-14T03:34:00.000-07:00

After a virtually non-stop 36 hours of code jam, night flight to Entebbe, and frantic equipment set up as soon as we arrived at the hotel, we finally declared ourselves “ready” at about 1.30am on Sunday night. After a bit of much needed sleep, we headed into the UNICEF head office in Kampala Monday morning, for a meet-and-greet and give a quick overview of RapidFTR to the child protection team there. So far so good! Well, except of course that Jorge’s bags still hadn’t turned up at the airport, so he had to head out to at least get a second pair of clothes before we headed up 300km to the north of the country.

So Monday lunchtime Jorge, Zubair, myself and Sean Blaschke (part of the UNICEF technical innovations team, who was accompanying us for the week) piled into a landrover for the long, dusty drive north.

Fortunately, worries of ambushes by bandits, and paths laden with mines, proved to be a little over the top -- probably just a result of the ultra-paranoid UN security courses we were made to do -- and we arrived in Gulu safe and sound just before dark.

Yet another Blog...

2010-10-14T03:04:00.000-07:00

Probably the last thing the world needs is another blog! But since my involvement in the RapidFTR since Feb led to a rather unique and amazingly interesting field trip to Uganda, I felt compelled to create one. If only to document the important experiences of the trip for anyone who might be interested.

Thanks to all who have been a part of this project, and the powers that be at UNICEF and Thoughtworks that made this trip possible.