The set-up is quite impressive and I think shows what you have to invest, if you are serious about making social media monitoring an integral part of your emergency response operations – unless you rely mainly only the distributed power of volunteers in the crowd. I really hope that AmCross will also make this amazing resource available to other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

And while I can’t see OCHA ever having the resources to build something similar for UN agencies, I  would hope that they at least schedule a visit and take a look.

• Behind the Scenes: The Digital Operations Center of the American Red Cross

Related posts:

1. Posts worth reading – 1 April 2012
2. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
3. Online training: Tech Tools for Emergency Management

Obstacles

Admittedly things didn’t start well: at first six children who were on our list to be repatriated lost their home and we had to find a new place for them to live. Then, in an example of absolutely no coordination and lone-wolfmanship, another organization took the same children from their new home and moved them to a refugee camp against their will where they had massive problems getting food. Then, the baby of  16-year old child whom we were supposed to bring to Ivory Coast got malaria and had to be hospitalized, and finally, at the last minute an agency put new bureaucratic obstacles in our path, clearly without the best interest of the children at heart. (I’m still mad).

Happy moments at the border

However, all of that frustration melted away when we picked up the children at the morning of the repatriation and took them to the border. The good-byes were warm and heartfelt and the excitement of the children was tangible. I know that I will always treasure the moment at the border when we handed the children over to our colleagues from ICRC Ivory Coast and the joy I felt when I got a text-message later that day, saying that the children had arrived and had been warmly welcomed by their families. After all, these children were not anonymous cases for me, but I was involved in registering some of them, following up their cases, talking with them about their hopes and fears and finally organizing their repatriation.

Communication makes a difference

One of countless Red Cross Messages.

All of this made me think about what it is we do when we are “restoring family links”:

Physically bringing people back together by providing transport and travel documents is the exception. In the majority cases we help with so called “Red Cross Messages” and by providing people with free phone calls so that they can tell their family members where they are, how they are, or simply that they are still alive. Sometimes it takes many months, before they get an answer to a message, for example when the recipient has moved to a different part of the country and it takes time and effort for my colleagues to find them.

What makes this service so special is, that we are not presuming that we know what is best for the affected people, but that we give them the means to decide themselves what is best for them; that is something very empowering and a different mindset than behind many programmes that provide material assistance.

Putting refugees in control of their destiny

Of course I know that this type of protection work is just a niche and that relief / shelter / food programmes which sometimes have to serve tens of thousands of people within a few days or weeks cannot approach things from each individual’s point of view. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s incredibly rewarding to be working for an organization that puts the individual in control of his/her destiny.

I have read a lot of Red Cross Messages (they are open, similar to postcards, and we are required to read them before transporting them). Many of them simply say: “I’m glad to hear from you. It’s safe in our village. Please come back”, and I was thinking about how much of a difference these few words can make to a refugee living in a strange country where he can’t speak the language and is dependent on the aid of others. These few words mean that he now has a choice, an alternative. He himself can decide to stay where he is, or to go back home and rebuild his life.

Being part of this process – be it the actual repatriations or just the conveying of messages – is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life.

Related posts:

1. Why this isn’t “just a job”: An amazing story from Ivory Coast
2. Doing harm

My current work involves taking the details and photos of children who have fled to Liberia from the Ivory Coast and who have lost touch with their parents during the flight. Using the information we get from the children, my colleagues in Ivory Coast then try to find the parents. Sometimes the information we collect from the children is very detailed, but very often it is quite meager, particularly when the children are small, so finding  the parents can be very difficult.

Therefore, every time you manage to tell a child that we have found his or her parents and that they are alive and well, it is a special moment. But I cannot even imagine how my colleague in Ivory Coast felt, when she recently arrived in a small village with the file and the photo we had prepared for her:

As soon as she showed the photo of this boy to people in the village, they got extremely excited and immediately went to fetch the father and aunt. And when they saw the photo, they cried out – first in shock and then in joy. The father almost fainted and the aunt actually fell into some kind of trance and then stayed unconscious for a while – something that must have absolutely terrified my colleague (first aid training notwithstanding) since she still didn’t know what was going on and why people were reacting so strongly!

Once things had calmed down, she learned that everyone in the village had been certain that the boy had died; in fact they had been so convinced that the father had already organized the funeral – and here we come, showing him a photo of his son, alive and well, together with a short, handwritten letter. Can you imagine what that must be like? Can you imagine what it would be like if that was your child or your parents? I would probably have fainted, too.

In the coming week we will now be able to tell the boy the happy news and then hopefully bring him back to his parents very soon.

Never mind the frustrations, the hardship and the long hours: there is no other kind of work where you can have moments like these.

Related posts:

1. Rural Liberia: Where mobile phones are still a rarity

In many villages, satellite phones are the only way to make a call - and even that doesn't always work.

This is my first time in Africa. However, the one thing that all my colleagues with Africa experience had told me was: “Everybody has a mobile phone.” This made sense to me based on my experience in Haiti where, even though the country is extremely poor, many people even had two mobile phones, one for each network. In Liberia – not so much.

Only 4 per cent of women have  access to a cell phone

Internews recently published a study showing that only 37 per cent of all male and only 4 per cent of all female refugees from Ivory Coast have access to a functioning mobile phone. Not “own one” but “access”! While you might argue that the refugees are probably in a worse situation than many Liberians, my feeling is that cell phone penetration among Liberians in rural Nimba is not much higher, either. (Obviously the situation is different in the capital Monrovia).

The main reasons:

• Many villages are not covered by the two big Liberian cell phone providers, Lonestar and Cellcom. Ironically villages that are right at the border sometimes fare better, because they are covered by MTN and Orange from Ivory Coast.
• The Ivorian phone providers block phones for outgoing calls if that phone has not been used for a while.  While this is also standard in a lot of Western countries – normally after one year of inactivity – apparently MTN and Orange block your phone if you haven’t used it to make an outgoing call for only a few weeks! And of course, the only way to reactivate it is to buy extra credit, which many people can’t afford.
• Some villages don’t have electricity, not even a generator, so people cannot charge their phones.
• In the villages where you have generators, you have to pay to charge your phone. This means that many people only switch on their phone when they want to call someone or when expecting a call.

Considering that many villages are in very remote areas and extremely hard to reach, this lack of phone coverage has direct implications for the delivery of aid. While in other countries, you can use mobile phones to inform communities about planned activities, in Liberia organizations sometimes have to find people from a certain village during market day in the next town, to pass a message to their community. While this tends to work quite well for news affecting the whole community, it can be more difficult when you want to reach particular people, especially refugees who might not be widely known in the host community.

 Sorry – moved houses

Take my work, for example: On a daily basis I’m travelling around the county to see children who have lost touch with their parents and for whom we have information regarding  their parents’ whereabouts. Sometimes this is just a short letter saying “Dear daughter, we are well. We are back in the village.” Sometimes it is a request to bring the child back to the parents (a service that the ICRC provides in some cases). Sometimes it can also be sad news, for example when a family member has died. The point is, we actually have to find and talk to the recipient of the message in person.

But a lot of times, when we arrive in the village where the child is supposed to be, he or she is either working on a farm (which can be a two or three hours march from the village) or we just find out that they recently moved to another community. But without any means of communication, there is no way to relay that information to us in time. As you can imagine, this can be quite frustrating and limits how many children we can see in a day.

“Mommy, I’m fine and I’m in Liberia”

Of course this also has implications beyond being an inconvenience for me and my colleagues: without means of communication, many refugees have not been able to tell their relatives where they are and that they are alive. When we go to the villages, we always have mobile phones and a satellite phone with us (whatever works) that people can use to call their relatives. So many months after their flight, I would have thought that the majority of refugees would already have had some way to get in touch with their relatives. But in a lot of villages that is clearly not the case and as you can imagine it can b very distressing not to know where members of your family are or whether they are even alive.

From what I hear from my colleagues, Liberia is the exception among many African countries and cell phone service here is significantly worse than in other countries. But is shows that mobile phones are not the one-size-fits-all solution that some people suggest it is.

Related posts:

1. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
2. Liberia: the importance of roads
3. Lack of communication fuels panic during riot

Doing their homework

One team of journalists who have really made an effort is the team behind “Inside Disaster Haiti”, which will air as of Tuesday in Canada. They had already been in touch with the Canadian Red Cross for a whole year prior to the earthquake, wanting to film a response operation. When the earthquake happened they were able to deploy with some of the first emergency response units and they came back a few times afterwards to film the progress.

Inside Disaster Trailer from PTV Productions on Vimeo.

Serious game gives a glimpse behind the scenes

An offshoot of the film is the “serious game” Inside the Haiti earthquake where anybody can play the role of a survivor, a journalist or an aidworker. It’s done fairly simply: you get shown a scene and then have to pick one of multiple choices, which will influence how the rest of the story progresses. But since it is based on professional-grade documentary material, I think that it actually leaves quite an impression and can help people to get at least a glimpse of the decisions that need to be made at in an operation like this.

I have worked as a journalist for almost ten years and found that part quite realistic. As for the aidworker-scenario: in the beginning I was really upset because their protagonist is someone who spontaneously decides to go to Haiti with some random, donated goods and without any training or useful skills, i.e. exactly the kind of person that most big organizations don’t want to see on the ground. But they actually manage to take this lack of experience and include it as part of the scenario. Which is brilliant because, after all, the people playing the game will have no experience.

And while it isn’t trying to give you an in-depth perspective by any means, I still think that it might open some people’s eyes to the complexities of the work. So, all in all, a big “thumps up” from me:

Check it out and play “Inside disaster the Haiti earthquake”.

Related posts:

1. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”
2. Photographer sues AFP for 120 million over Twitter-photos

Below you find a presentation I have given on two occasions on that topic. At the bottom of my previous post you can also download the social media staff guidelines.

I decided to use Camtasia this time to create a presentation that includes the audio, which is why it’s embedded as a YouTube video. Of course you can also download it from Slideshare as powerpoint without my explanations.

I hope you find it useful and please tell me what you think.

Related posts:

1. New project: Social Media in Emergencies Guidelines
2. Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind
3. Social Media as a Tool for Humanitarian Protection