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

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1. Posts worth reading – 1 April 2012
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3. Online training: Tech Tools for Emergency Management

As anyone who has working in the humanitarian sector knows, our love for acronyms is pretty ridiculous.

In Haiti we even printed the most important ones on the back of t-shirts so that we could look them up more easily. The problem was – most of the changed so quickly that the t-shirt production couldn’t keep up.

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And compared to my co-workers I have it easy. Since I’m working for the IASC Shelter Cluster I get to work at the UN’s logistics base – and there’s aircon there. Most of my colleagues from the Red Cross Red Crescent have to work and endure the heat inside improvised offices inside an abandoned construction project.  At least it helps us to understand better what the Haitian’s living in tent cities all over Port-au-Prince are going through. Though our living conditions are of course much, much better.

Shelter, shelter, shelter

My first week in the job was … interesting. Coordination by itself and shelter as a topic are incredibly complicated and since I’m now tasked with communicating (competently) about the aggregated work of all agencies doing Shelter in Haiti I am struggling with a steep learning curve. Shelter is simply connected with everything: land rights, livelihoods, disaster preparedness, tenure, debris removal – you name it, shelter is somewhere in the mix. And the topics of land rights in Haiti and debris removal by itself are already enough to drive you insane. But to be able to build shelters, the humanitarian community has to help the government to fix these issues. Which is why I suddenly found myself at a “presidential taskforce” – I even met the president.

It’s the small things

And then there is all the other things that make life interesting. Like traffic – which means that going to a meeting can take two hours – or  the fact that I still don’t have an entry badge for the UN base because they ran out of ink. And apparently you can’t get ink (or that ink) in Haiti. Other surprising things: hearing the call to prayer at 4 am, being expected to know the streets of Port-au-Prince well enough to guide a driver, being considering the most capable French speaker on the team.

I also gave my first tv-interview in Haiti. Unfortunately it was on my second day and believe me when I’m saying that I was not comfortable speaking with an Al Jazeera journalist who has been here since January. But hey – it can only get better. And the most important thing is – I have extremely competent, experienced team members  who I genuinely like. The rest will come.

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Coordination saves lives

05:30 am at the IFRC base camp.

The UN cluster system is a result of the “Humanitarian Reform Process”. In a nutshell someone realized a few years ago that it would make a lot of sense in large scale disasters, if all agencies knew what the other agencies are doing and if they coordinated their activities.

At the same time the idea was born that it’d be good to have one more or less permanent lead for each group or cluster of activities so that when a disaster happens you don’t have to find out who is coordinating the coordination.

So, for logistics for example, the people to call are always WFP, for nutrition it’s always UNICEF etc. For shelter it’s a little bit more complicated  but in essence my employer, the IFRC, is the cluster convener in natural disasters.

In Haiti, more than 50 agencies are currently working to provide shelter to the people who have lost their homes in the 12 January earthquake – from “Architecture for Humanity” to “World Vision” .  As a cluster convener (or lead) the IFRC is not telling them what to do and where to do it, but tries to make sure that efforts aren’t duplicated, resources aren’t wasted and that standards differ radically.

• The Shelter Cluster is tweeting under http://twitter.com/shelterinhaiti
• The Shelter Cluster’s website in Haiti is: www.shelterhaiti.org

Since shelter is such an essential thing in Haiti, the cluster also has a dedicated communicator – and for the next three months that will be me.

To be honest – I am little bit nervous about it. It’s a pretty big job, an enormous responsibility and living in a tent for three months in the middle of the rainy season is not going to be a pick nick either. But it’s what I want to do. How I’m doing while I’m doing it is what I will write about for the next few months.

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1. Behind the scenes of the American Red Cross Digital Operations Centre

You’re an aid worker with 10+ years experience under your belt. You earn a pittance but it works for you because you are non-resident at home so you don’t pay tax, you are catered for on assignment so you don’t pay rent,and your mortgage is covered by the people renting your place because you are never there. You can’t hold down a relationship for more than 3 months and you secretly know that despite what you tell him/her it’s really not because you’re only ever there for 3 months… it’s because you can’t live without the independence.

UN convoy in Chad; UN Photo/Olivia Grey Pritchard

Things are ok now but you’re approaching 40. What should you do? What does the future hold? Are you one of the new world order of aid worker gypsies?

Welcome to your future – these are your life options:

Option 1. You go back to a headquarters job. Instead of doing what you want to do, you now advise people who are doing what you used to do. You earn the same more or less as you did before, but your costs of living shoot skywards because you’re now paying tax, rent/mortgage and utilities…

You consider sharing accommodation and, bingo, you’re a student again and like a student can’t afford to do 1% of the things you think you would like to do.

Option 2. You go work for the UN. Keep the job you love and the lifestyle that goes with it. Your salary jumps to levels that used to get you all riled up after a few drinks back when you used to work for “honest”  down-to-earth INGOs. Now you’re cynical about them all and aggressively defend your need to raise a nest egg to plough the way for the family/dog/cottage/brats you’re planning. You’ve done your bit after all. You do this for a while before you realize you sacrificed every dream you ever had in this work and can no longer look yourself in the mirror.

Option 3. You find something suitable in the commercial sector and live happily ever after. This only happens to 1/10,000 aid workers and if you’re a logistician, forget it.

Option 4. You retrain and change course. You take a massive pay cut. Your skills and experience in aid work go unused and unappreciated. You marry someone who will never fully understand where you are coming from and why you are quiet for long periods of time. If you haven’t left it too late to have kids, just remember – dysfunctional.

Option 5. You write your memoirs and someone makes a movie out of it starring Leonardo De Caprio / Angelina Jolie. You become an even more arrogant git, lose all your friends, and make a lot of cash. This only  happens to 1/100,000 aid workers and will definitely not happen to you!

Option 6. You become that lonely, jaded expat sat at the bar in some third world piss pot letching over young locals and making snide remarks.

Option 7. You decide to set up home but not in your own country. Forget moving back to London, Paris, New York, Munich but head for the Balkan Adriatic or one of the emerging Eastern European States before the property developers get there, and develop a serious liver problem.

Option 8. You hit the road along with thousands of your cohorts with visions of huge bands of ex-aid worker families roaming the European countryside in caravans, plastered with “No guns on board” stickers and of course pulled by white Toyota Land Cruiser hardtops and pickups, scratching out a life by erecting latrines and living under plastic sheeting. You take stock count of everything you come across….. and from time-to-time you seek charity.

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In this list I am focusing on courses that offer specific skills for humanitarian aid workers and not on more general courses that can also be useful for people working for an international organization or NGO, such as general administration, photography etc..

1. Humanitarian relief, peace and security operations at the Peace Operations Training Institute

The Peace Operations Training Institute focuses on everything you might need in a so-called “complex emergency.” Here you find courses in Mine Action, Civilian Military Coordination, Global Terrorism or Ethics in Peacekeeping, to name  just a few. If you are working for a non-profit than you can take most of these courses for as little as 50 USD.

2. Diplomacy at UNITAR

The United Nations Institute for Research and Training (UNITAR) offers three strands of e-learning coursesat irregular intervals: Public Finance and trade, Multilateral Conferences and Diplomacy and Governance in Urban Sanitation. The courses take up to eight weeks to complete and many of them are free. The most expensive course I found was 400 USD. You will  have to apply and explain why you should be admitted to this course.

3. Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace

No, this is not a bunch of hippies getting together. The University for Peace is a UN mandated graduate school for peace and conflict studies. UPEACE will accept applications for their distance learning programme from January 2010. There is no information about the costs yet, but I expect that the UN will offer the course at a very attractive fee.

4. Development Studies at the University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham offers two distance learning courses: “Poverty Reduction and Development Management” and “Public Administration and Development”. You can either enrol into a masters programme or do a postgraduate diploma. The MSc takes two years to complete. As you can imagine, this doesn’t come cheap. The courses start at 6,000 pounds (~ 10,000 USD).

5. Logistics at the Fritz Institute

The Fritz Institute offers three courses, all of which have something to do with logistics: “Humanitarian Logistics”, “Humanitarian Supply Chain Management” and “Humanitarian Medical Logistics Practices”. I’ve only heard good things about these courses. Prices vary and the Fritz Institute offers some scholarships for individuals.

6. Human Rights with the Human Rights Education Associates

HREA organises a large number of specialised human rights trainings via distance education for human rights practitioners and development workers. The courses cost 725 USD. In addition to English many are available in French and Russian. I even found one course in German.

7. How to care for a Swine Flu victim at the International Red Cross Red Crescent

Last but not least, my employer has recently launched an e-learning platform that is open to the public. Among the free courses are one that teaches you how to care for a sick family member (it’s built for H1N1 but is just as useful for the normal flu) and one course  (40 hours) that introduces you to the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. The courses are free, more courses will be added over the next year.

What other distance learning or e-learning programmes and courses do you know that should be part of this list?

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