Tuesday a.m. RapidFTR meets GUSCO

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.