Working in "The Field"

Around a month ago, I was dispatched on my first extended trip into the field, and I would like to tell you about some of those experiences. I still have to analyse them myself, so perhaps you can help me.

First of all, what do I mean by working in the “field”? I certainly don’t mean going camping in nice green pastures where the cows eat grass, trees sway in the wind and farmers chase you off their land. These things do happen here, but that is beside the point. There are a couple of definitions of the term “the field”, and they all depend on where you are standing at the time that you define it. Lets say, for example, that you are standing in London. You work for the Red Cross. For you, working in “the field” means moving to any other country where you are running an aid programme. Therefore, if you come to South Sudan you are now working in “the field”. Have a look at my friend's definition of "the field" for another point of view.

When you get to the field, things change. You realise after a few days that working and living in Juba is nothing like it is elsewhere in South Sudan. Juba has roads (sort of). It has shops. It has restaurants. It has lots of things to buy and eat and consume. It has barbers that will give you a shave and a massage. It even has city supplied electricity. Occasionally. You have now come across a new definition of “the field”, and it is one that no longer includes you. Within South Sudan, “the field” means working anywhere that is away from your main office. For those organisations with a base in other major cities, the definition has to change a little to mean working away from those offices too (although one might like to keep that quiet. It sounds better if you can claim to have been working for months in “the field” when what you have actually been doing is living in air-conditioned opulence).

I live in Juba. For me, the definition of “the field” means everywhere else. We were commissioned to conduct a nation-wide survey on radio listening habits. All of the researchers in the company were dispatched to different areas of the country at the same time. Some packed out landrovers as if going on safari (I was one of these), others were sent in planes. One of us at least had to use a boat to get to their final location. We all had several locations to visit, many teams of data collectors to train, and new friends to make. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

That is because it was. The first part of the trip was comparatively easy for me. I got to stay in a hotel with mostly working generators. I got a room. It had a television. It worked. I told my colleagues this and they instantly hated me. One of my co-workers was in an area where the roads were so bad with mud from recent rains they managed to spin the car 180 degrees while going 15 miles an hour. Another was supposed to conduct a survey in a village that no longer existed since the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked it several years ago. A third has, I am told, spent most of his time walking.

But don’t worry. My troubles started pretty soon. The biggest challenge we face in the field is the team of people we have around us. We employ local people to conduct the surveys we carry out. The team we employ can make or break the project. If you get a good team, things go excellently. If you have one or two trouble makers on board, then you will encounter huge problems. On this trip some of my Data Collectors were brilliant. Most, however, I fired for stealing memory cards from the smart phones. I nearly fired another after I caught him lying about his work. My boss is now threatening to call me “The Terminator”.

I had to move from my first cushy area to a Panyagor, the county capital of Twic East, and there things altered. It is a small town that runs along both sides of the north-south road that runs from Juba in the south, to Upper Nile State in the far north. The phone charging stalls had power, as they rely on small petrol driven generators, but that was about it. The largest (and only) NGO there had a main generator that was broken. So was their other large generator. Their small back-up generator was broken too. They were down to a couple of solar panels that barely worked. This was the beginning of a theme for this trip. Generator repair men are hard to come by, and the spare parts even more so. The roads in this country are hell, so the people and parts don’t get around.

All this meant that I finally got a taste of what it is like, trying to work in a western way in the bush. In short, it does not work. I have phones to charge. A computer that needs power. I have papers that need light to be read. I had a small hut that was so bloody hot I could not work inside it without dripping sweat, even at night. As a result I tried to work outside during the night.

That was a mistake. I found chair to sit on. A table to use. I have a netbook with good battery life so I can carry on working. I was as prepared for work as possible. The problem is that no-one else has power that late at night. This means I was happily sitting there, in the dark, a computer on the table in front of me. Insects like computers. They think a small moon has just landed on earth, and they fly and hop and jump merrily toward it. Try as I might to write up the reports from the day, I found it impossible to work as insects from hell bounced off the back of my head in their scramble to get to my computer screen. When they got there they obscured my work, adding extra meaning to the prose on the screen:

“We left Bor at Bluebottle and arrived in PanyaMosquito pm. Left the data collectors in Stickinsect and drove out the meet our contact the Big Hairy Fucker…”

When the Big Hairy Fucker’s friends came to the party and started investigating my face I decided to do what everyone else in the lodge was doing. Stop working, get some tea, sit in the dark and chat.

The final stop on this journey was Ayod. As before in this trip, I was subject to the kindness of strangers as accommodation and data collectors were found for me before I arrived. Introductions to the county commissioners were made on my behalf. We were looked after. Everything was going so well. We were put in a compound that, you guessed it, had multiple generator failures.

I mentioned earlier that the organisations working in the field rely on the kindness of strangers themselves. Those broken generators? We promised to take one back to Juba for them, so it can be fixed.

As I write this entry, I am in the office of this final set of kind hosts. The solar power is working. We just had lunch of goat meat and rice. The breeze is blowing through the open windows and doors. There is a song bird warbling away on the chair next to me, trying to find his way back out again. A small flock of chickens had wandered in to inspect the floor for dropped food, and has now just left in disgust at finding nothing. I am glad to have ended up here, at the end of my field trip. The songbird and the chickens beat flies in your face any day.

The Kindness of Strangers

Working in South Sudan is hard for an organization of any kind. Operating in a country with no infrastructure to speak of, no power, no flowing water, bad roads, means that you or your colleagues will run into trouble regularly. Your car might lose a wheel on the roads, as mine recently did. You will have to stay in places with no access to water. On my most recent field trip we visited several county capitals, each of which had one well resourced NGO operating out of it. They were well resourced in comparison only to the huts and houses around them. But of these organisations, almost all were suffering from power failure. Their main generators needed fixing. Their back up generators needed spare parts. Their back-up back-up generators did not work. If they were lucky, they had a couple of solar panels which were only good enough to run a few computers while the sun was shining. 

Spare parts and engineers all have to come from Juba. This takes weeks, if not months. Each of the NGOs have difficulty operating in their respective environments. A task which would be made infinitely more difficult if it were not for the kindness and assistance of other NGOs around them.

When I began planning this trip, I was heading into unknown territory. Literally. The company had not been to any of the areas I was being sent to. The more I found out, the more I realized that OTHERs had not been their either. Jonglei state is one of the most underdeveloped states in the country. This should mean that they are getting the most help, but what it means in reality is that the NGOs do not have offices or staff there. Only a few adventurous organisations, mainly those giving food aid or working in emergency response and preparedness, have outposts in this NGO-less wilderness. I was incredibly fortunate that they did.

I contacted as many people as I could find, and chased down contact after contact. Eventually I found those that were living and working in the areas I needed to get to, and I discovered something brilliant. The NGOs help each other out. For free. This came as a revelation to me. Up to this point I had heard of and seen much of the politicking and arguing that happens at a management or coordination level. But the workers in the field face a different reality. If one needs assistance, or a place to stay, or advice, then it will be given happily. The only caveat is this: When someone comes asking you for advice and assistance, you should give it.

I could not have carried out my work without the help I received on this trip. When we arrived in Ayod, one contact had arranged a place to stay for us, facilitated meetings with the local authorities, and found a number of data collectors for me to employ on the project. All of this on top of organizing and managing the work that her own organization has to take care of. Indeed, she was unable to house us in their own compound as there was no shade for us to erect our tents, not water because the pump was broken and, you guessed it, no power as the generator needed a new spare part. She asked another NGO with a compound nearby to house us. They immediately said yes. As one of my new friends put it “We cannot work in the field without each others help”

We offered as much assistance as we could in response. We offered to ferry parts, people and anything else back to Juba on our return journey. Unfortunately the assistance was not needed. I feel guilty about this. I wanted to give a little something in reply for their kindness, but it was not needed.

NGOs work on a different set of ethics than the rest of us. I work for a consulting firm. We are a business. I wonder whether this matters to the NGOs and the people that help us. I know we are doing work for them. We assess their programmes, do the research they hire us to do, give them the knowledge they need to work. This means we are part of their world, so I guess we are deserving of their help and assistance. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that if they realize we are actually profit makers, they would not help so much. So please, keep this story quiet. I don’t want them to know…