Wednesday p.m. Omiya Anyma

After a nutritious lunch 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, given everything else tasted largely of mush) we drove about another hour to Omiya Anyma, a long term IDP settlement camp.

Starch: the cornerstone of any nutrious breakfast...

Omiya Anyma now has about 3,000 residents, and conditions are pretty good.  About four years though, it had over 20,000 people living in the same amount of space.  Huts were literally built touching wall to wall.  There was no room for proper sanitation, latrines were overloaded and spilling out right in the middle of living areas.  Awful hygiene led to disease outbreaks and all kinds of problems.

We met with the camp commander, who’s team is responsible for running pretty much every aspect of the camp, including trying to match up unaccompanied children with their families / communities.  The whole team was made up of local people: no NGOs were at the site for the first five years.  Their method of FTR was pretty straightforward: anyone from a particular village was asked to rendezvous at a particular spot at a particular time.  Family groups were placed in areas of the camp according to which distinct/sub-county/parish/village they were from.  Each sub community of families was responsible for gathering Record taking was limited to recording names on paper: the biggest priority was just getting the head count right, so the right amount of aid supplies could be ordered.  All information was stored on sheets of paper or exercise books.  There was no mains electricity at the camp: the only source of power is a number of small solar panels, prinicpally used for charging mobile phones.

We were entirely reliant on our companions from KICWA, Fred and Godfrey, to translate what we were saying into Acholi, the local dialect.  The was a clear peak in interest from the group we were talking to when we whipped out a Blackberry and a netbook to give a simple demo.  How much of this was because of the potential for RapidFTR making their work easier, and how much was just because we had suddenly produced a very shiny looking phone and portable computer, was hard to gauge!  But what was undeniably encouraging, was how Fred very ably described and demoed the application to the crowd himself: having only just learnt about it a couple of hours beforehand!  As usability and time-to-learn were two of the biggest unknowns of the project, this was another incredible milestone for the project.