“Welcome
welcome! We heard on Al-Jazeera that the Red Cross is the best.
We are very happy you are here,” said the owner of a small
teashop excitedly to Red Cross aid worker Andrea Neale as she
purchased a bottle of cola in the heart of Gereida’s market
district.
The reason for the shop owner’s excitement lies one kilometre
to the east of the town, in Sudan’s remote western province
of Darfur. It is here on the outskirts of Gereida, on what used
to be paddocks and sports fields, that a vast camp housing some
40,000 internally displaced people can be found.
Curving round the town in a giant crescent, the camp is home
to some of the victims of what the United Nations has described
as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in 2004.
Access
Last August, Andrea travelled over 14,000 km to help set up
a Red Cross medical clinic in the camp at Gereida. But it was
another Australian nurse working with the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) who, along with the Sudanese Red Crescent
Society (SRCS), virtually stumbled across the thousands of displaced
in Gereida.
“Back in mid-July, the ICRC received information that
people fleeing the fighting had arrived in Gereida,” Neale
explains. “We found these people in a part of Darfur that
at the time was off limits to other international aid agencies
operating in Sudan.”
“Security is a constant concern and it was just considered
too dangerous. But during a humanitarian crisis the Red Cross
is known for being the first in, last out, and was determined
to check out the situation in this area.
To this day the Red Cross continues to negotiate with all parties
to the conflict for access to parts of Darfur that are difficult
to access. So it was decided to send an ICRC/SRCS assessment
team to Gereida, including Australian nurse Chris Foletti,”
she adds.
Gereida
What Chris and the team found there was shocking: 12,000 people
huddled together in schools and other buildings. “The
local community was very good and had provided them with food
and shelter. But Gereida’s population is only 30,000 and
when 12,000 people turn up on your doorstep desperate for assistance
you’ve a crisis in the making. So the Red Cross team mobilised
rapidly to provide blankets, plastic sheeting as well as food,”
Neale says.
The local authorities arranged for the displaced people to be
moved from the schools to a makeshift camp just outside the
town. But first they all had to be registered. “The Sudanese
Red Crescent were excellent and did this very rapidly,”
says Andrea.
Each family then received a month’s supply of food rations,
including beans, oil and lentils. In addition, the Red Cross
gave each family essential household items such as blankets,
water containers and cooking utensils. They also received enough
plastic sheeting to build an improvised version of an African
hut called a tukul.
But people fleeing the violence continued to arrive in Gereida,
some on foot, others on donkeys, horses or carts. In a matter
of weeks the population of the camp had risen to 40,000.
Desperate for more aid, the Red Cross arranged for a convoy
of 25 trucks loaded with relief items to reach Gereida in early
September. Despite the arrival of the rainy season, which transformed
roads to mud and turned the two-day journey from the regional
capital Nyala into a six-day haul, the Red Cross soon the set
to work providing aid to the vulnerable.
It also prepared to open a clinic in the camp to meet the diverse
health care needs of people in the camp, including providing
clean water. It is a unique operation run jointly by the Australian
Red Cross and British Red Cross under the auspices of the ICRC
and Sudanese Red Crescent.
“We’re set up for this kind of operation,”
Andrea says. “Not only has the Red Cross built, staffed
and stocked a primary heath care clinic for some 40,000 people
living in the Gereida camp, it will also support the hospital
and clinic in Gereida for the local population.”
The clinic
Opening a clinic in the middle of nowhere takes a great deal
of effort. Andrea spent eight weeks in Darfur during August
and September, visiting Gereida four times to work out how to
overcome the logistical challenges of setting up a primary health
care clinic in a region with no electricity, very little means
of communication and limited access to safe drinking water.
Gereida is a lush green savannah at this time of year, the landscape
dotted with Acacia trees. “It’s beautiful,”
says Andrea.
But, with no sealed roads, the trip to Gereida is difficult
and bumpy. Andrea described how when she finally got to the
town after a long journey hunched in a four-wheel drive, she
was greeted by screaming children.
“There are only a couple of cars and people travel by
donkey in Gereida so when we arrived in town it was quite an
event,” she says. “The kids were dancing round our
vehicle shouting ‘Kawaga, kawaga!’ White person,
white person! Dozens of excited children met us. After a long
and uncomfortably journey it was really good to see them.”
Getting down to business
After a quick meal consisting of goat meat and potatoes, washed
down with a cool drink and a slice of water melon, Andrea met
local community leaders to discuss the Red Cross plans.
Meetings with the local authorities, elders and government officials
took many hours. “It’s a long process. Every meeting
starts with a cup of tea and lengthy introductions. It can take
quite a while before getting down to business. It’s not
at all like conducting business in Australia but it is important
to be respectful of local customs and cultures,” says
Andrea.
While negotiations continued, Andrea sought locally trained
medical staff from the town to work in the camp clinic. “They
may have fled in fear of their lives but they are still committed
to their communities and happy to assist them in crisis.”
“Many people in the affected community are highly skilled
and Red Cross aid workers always try to utilise the skills and
experience of the local people. So we asked local community
leaders to invite midwives, nurses and other health staff to
come forward to work in the clinic. It makes our job a little
easier but also empowers the local community,” she adds.
Working with the community
Years of experience in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan
have taught Andrea many important lessons. The one she knows
the best is that during humanitarian crises you have to support
the local community too.
“The 30,000 local people living in Gereida are also affected
by the conflict. Trade has been disrupted, which means the local
economy has been badly hit. So although our primary focus is
the well-being of the displaced who have fled their homes, we
cannot ignore the needs of the local population,” says
Andrea.
So in Gereida, the hospital and clinic will receive medicines
as well as training for existing health staff from Red Cross.
“We’re strengthening their health service so that
when the crisis has passed and those living in the camps have
returned home, the people of Gereida will be left with a better
health system than they have now,” she adds.
Tackling water-borne diseases
Disease can be a big killer in camps like that on the outskirts
of Gereida. Poor sanitation and lack of basics like clean drinking
water can be a problem. But Andrea is confident the steady flow
of aid workers from Australia arriving in the town since the
middle of August prevented a potential health crisis.
“The first priority for us was to vaccinate against measles.
Measles is highly contagious and it can spread through a vulnerable
population like wild fire. So getting the kids vaccinated was
a must.”
Meanwhile logistician Greg Platt organised the construction
and preparation of the clinic and arranged for it to be stocked
with medicines to treat respiratory illnesses, diarrhoea and
malaria.
“Preventing outbreaks of disease is one of the priorities,”
says Andrea Neale. “The work we have done so far should
ease the burden on the medical team who can now focus on primary
health care. It’s basic health care really but in the
middle of the Sudan the availability of medicines to treat diarrhoea
can mean the difference between life and death.”
Two Australian nurses, Anne Winborne and Maree Dunn, staff the
clinic. Since it opened in late September, they have continued
to see many people each day mainly for diarrhoea, malaria, eye
and skin infections.
Water for life
Another Australian Red Cross worker ensuring good health for
the camp residents is water engineer Maarten Van Herk. Born
in the Netherlands but now living in Melbourne, Maarten’s
extensive experience in getting clean water to remote communities
makes him ideal for the job in Gereida.
When he arrived in mid-September his first task was to continue
the work of the ICRC team and connect the camp and its clinic
with a series of clean drinking water taps. According to Maarten
this involved constructing a kilometre-long pipe from the town’s
drinking water supply to the makeshift camp.
“I’ve done this kind of work before in Pakistan
and Afghanistan but it’s always a challenge. But people
need access to clean drinking water so we had to get this done
as quickly as possible,” adds Maarten.
Besides clean drinking water, sanitation has been improved in
the camp. The aid agency Oxfam is working on this. Since early
September, the British based organisation has installed hundreds
of latrines. But this is just the start and plans to educate
people in the camp about hygiene are underway.
The camp is large. Andrea says walking through the camp can
take many hours, but it is nonetheless well organised.
“It’s amazing. The sheiks and elders from all the
villages that have been destroyed have got together to decide
who will settle where in the camp.”
Despite the suffering currently endured by people all over Darfur,
Andrea says it is a privilege to have been in Sudan for eight
weeks. “Setting up a clinic, organising aid trucks, feeding
people and tending to their medical needs is what the Red Cross
does best. To be part of it is something special.”
“You see images of camps like this on television and in
newspapers but to be there to help, to see it with your own
eyes, makes it quite extraordinary,” says Andrea.
And despite the terrible hardship of the people, they are always
grateful to see you. “Many of those I spoke with share
their stories of how they escaped the violence and made their
way to the safety of Gereida. They have suffered so much. The
excessively violent nature of the conflict has left many of
them in abject misery, facing humiliation, ill-treatment, sickness
and death.”
“In many cases their homes and livelihoods have been destroyed.
It is very tragic and very sad. But being able to offer even
a little bit of help to people is really satisfying,”
Andrea concludes.
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More
than one million people have been displaced since the
Darfur crisis began (p12212)
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Australian
Red Cross nurse Andrea Neale helped to set up the Red
Cross medical clinic in Gereida camp (p12205)
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Volunteers
from the Sudanese Red Crescent distribute blankets, plastic
sheeting and other relief items to internally displaced
people (p12206)
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Not
only has the Red Cross built, staffed and stocked a primary
heath care clinic for the 40,000 people in the Gereida
camp, it will also support the hospital and clinic in
Gereida for the local population (p12207)
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The
provision of safe water is crucial for ensuring health
and hygiene in Gereida camp (p12208)
Besides clean drinking water, sanitation has been improved
in the camp, with hundreds of latrines have been installed
in the camp since early September (p12210)
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