The next riots are scheduled for Saturday, Doctor Fyfe

I am now in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile, and where I am undertaking an audit for a UK Medical charity/NGO. Who, no doubt by habit, booked my flight as Dr Fyfe. I was worried that someone would get ill on the plane and I would be called to help.

Since this blog came to a shuddering halt in Afghanistan last year I have been working mostly in the UK but also fitted in small trips to Denmark, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ireland and France. I also had several weeks in Burkina Faso. 

The internet access looks a bit slow so I am cutting and pasting from word.  Well thankfully no one got sick on the plane, but there were a lot of very noisy young children bored rigid, crying, bouncing over everyone else’s seats. Getting out of the airport was relatively straightforward, compared to the weeks required to get a visa.  I was met by the logistics head and a driver. Audit points already: seatbelts not used in the back of the car. The logistics head explained that there have been lots of riots due to government spending cuts. Due in part to a massive drop in revenues due to the independence of South Sudan where all the oil is. Seems like a familiar argument.

I am in a Chinese Hotel called Blue Sky international, and had very nice Chinese food. The hotel is a bit basic and its biggest problem is that it smells of sewage or possibly gas and damp. Generally sulphurous. 

I took the precaution of only drinking fruit juice on the plane as I expect I will be low on vitamins for the next fortnight. I also nearly forgot that there is no alcohol in Sudan and almost ordered a beer with my Chinese food (by the way soup, rice, vegetables and various odd bits of beef – probably knuckles and chins) But very filling if a bit cold, as I turned up after the restaurant closed.

I have been given a security briefing to read, I have confirmed that the working week is Sunday to Thursday and I was told that demonstrations and thus riots are scheduled for Saturday so my movements will be curtailed. As it is 100 degrees out there i think this will be curtailing my movements more.

So I hope to visit the confluence of the Niles tomorrow before any riots. Otherwise I will be catching up on my Open University course.

Service is resuming

Two weeks in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, begin on Wednesday. There may be something to report... If there is I will follow up

Day 11 Around the Houses

My 8 year old son Jacob asked me today what is Afghanistan like? I guess it must be hard to picture what it is like in Afghanistan, so a good question from an 8 year old.

The first thing is that despite a war between soldiers of the Afghan government and lots of other armies on one side and insurgents/terrorists/armed opposition groups on the other life seems to carry on. The roads are busy with cars, motorbikes, yellow and white taxis, chinese solid iron bicycle and lots of traffic policemen trying to take charge of the chaos. There are lots of little shops and shacks selling anything from tins of Fanta to decorations.

The main roads are quite good and have tarmac but the side roads are muddy and rutted. There is a lot of construction going on from apartment blocks to ubiquitous 'wedding halls' which are giant glass structured edifices that appear to be 10 stories tall, sometimes with a shopping mall below. They have very large signs and are set back in gardens. As you might guess there is a lot of money in Kabul just now - I guess the symptoms of a war economy, an aid boom and the profits from the opium trade.

In terms of 'the war' the evidence is there: policemen carry machine guns, restaurants have two sets of locked metal doors so that you are locked in an ante-chamber before going in, where a man with an AK47 frisks you before letting you through the second door. There are armed Afghan soldiers as well as policemen in the centre. All important buildings have concrete blocks in front of their large walls to prevent car bombs and suicide attacks.

The people show the diversity of the Afghan heritage, some look like they are from Pakistan, some look like Iranians and some look Chinese. They are 99.9% Muslim whatever their ethnic group. There are lots of Mosques and every so often the call to prayer blasts from loudspeakers in the Minarets, the only sound that competes with the stray dogs barking.

What else? Helicopters flying overhead in pairs, mountains in the distance surrounding the city, every house and property is demarcated by a large (dunno 12') wall with a gate. Stray cats and dogs, dust everywhere except when it rains. With the rain the dust settles into mud and the city brightens up as the grey-palour of constant dust is washed down.

The most striking is the sense of space, buildings and properties have large grounds and the main throughfares are very wide. I'll see if the weekend will allow for some photographs.

Day 10 Grinding Through

I have been so tired today, I think the weekend working and travelling finally caught up with me. I was shivering with cold and tiredness: Kabul is soooo cold. So after a morning of reading the Job Descriptions of all the admin staff I went to lie down.

I was reading the job descriptions because I was keen to know who is supposed to travel to support provincial offices. One of the main complaints from my trip to Jalalabad was that people in Kabul were not giving them enough support. Obviously the security situation is making this worse, but it seems unfair that Programme staff should have to travel to Kabul but administrators in the capital are not as keen to travel.

I have also began to hammer through the numbers. The actual admin costs are not that high, the problem seems to be that a lot of the activity that is neither program nor administration is soaking up costs. Activities such as Strategy and Policy, Public Information, Monitoring and Evaluation and the efforts of Gender Advisors to tackle the historic problems in Afghanistan for instance the lack of education for girls under the Taliban means that there are far fewer qualified women. I think most development agencies would regard this sort of work as fundamental, but the difficulty is finding someone to pay for it.

Day 9 Stirring the Hornet's Nest

Whilst I was away my report had stirred up lots of controversy and debate. But strangely this was not over any of my main recommendations. The main controversy was over the structure of the newly merged programme department: I had added in a control function by moving various functions like reporting to donors and procurement and stock control from the admin departments to the new programme department. In my diagram I showed how this would fit in with the existing programme structure. I thought this was straightforward.

The unintended consequence was that many people thought that I was proposing a final structure to the programmes department, which is in the middle of discussing its plans for the next four years. I wasn't, but obviously I had raised a lot of fears. I spent several hours today listening to everyone's special case and then carefully explaining that I really wasn't trying to impose a structure on them.

Tomorrow will be even more mundane as I pile through lots of job descriptions. If it is that bad I promise not to bore you with it.

Day 7 & Day 8 Jalalabad and Back

It is hard to talk about Jalalabad and not let the events of the journey back overshadow it, but I will try.

Jalalabad was lovely - warm, green, lush and very friendly. I met very interesting and experienced people who had been working for the same organisation for 20 years, providing safe water to Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan. I heard in detail all the work they did on drilling bore holes for pumps, using dry sand filtration to give people clean water, building reservoirs and lots of work on hygiene education. They also told me their gripes with the organisation: not paid enough, poor communication, slow to deliver materials; as well as what they liked - the quality of work, integrity and good leaders. This was all very useful for my mission to look at where admin is working and where it is not.

The Jalalabad office was a grand building - very oriental and wooden with my bedroom was on the top floor. I shared eating with the men, which involved sitting cross-legged on cushions with the food placed on mats for sharing round the room. As a guest I was loaded with food - fried fish, vegetable curry, rice, nan, beans, chips, fresh salad of mint and parsley and cucumber and never-ending green tea. Followed by local oranges and apples. This was so much nicer than eating by myself in Kabul.

I slept very heavily due to the food and warm weather. It even rained a bit which added to the fresh air.

I woke up in time for Sunday breakfast at 6.30 (Sunday is a working day) and had some more meetings before an early 'light' lunch of chicken, beans, nan, rice and chips. We then set back to Kabul for the expected 2 hour journey.

The 2-car convoy set off just after 11 and we expected a 2 hr journey. That was not going to happen.

Just after leaving Jalalabad we came across an enormous traffic jam as a very large US Army Convoy was on the road and blocking all traffic. This is the main road from Pakistan to Afghanistan which was already full of lorries and oil tankers. The journey I made down yesterday had been down very steep and winding mountain roads, cutting in and out of tunnels. So the same lorries on the way back were going to struggle up hill. After an hour we got past this convoy and speeded wildly ahead until... the next convoy. This looked serious, the road had simply ground to a halt. I received a text on my phone from the Security Officer

Attack on fuel tanker in the area Sarubi dist. kbl-jalalabad highway, puli astahkam area so staf is adviseded to avoid the area.

As we were already stuck on that highway in that area and had no chance of turning around or pulling over, and there wasn't another road to use we just had to plough on. Suddenly there was an explosion, I thought (hoped) it was thunder but my more experienced companions told me it was a shell. Everyone got out of their cars to have a look, apart from me.

At this point I was glad that I was wearing Afghan clothes, had a litlle woollen Afghan hat, had a 3-day beard and was sitting in the back of an old 4x4 with steamed up windows. I really did not want to be noticed in a crowd that was already pissed off that American convoys were taking over their road. So I sat still, locked the door and just rested. After over an hour the road was re-opened and we passed the remains of the tanker - it had burnt out but looked intact so I guess it was hit by bullets, not a bomb or shells. It was in a very narrow mountain pass so an easy target for any armed group. My more experienced colleague - a former mujahadein who had thought the Soviet soldiers in the 1980s pointed to various tell-tale signs of a gun battle.

After that progress was good and I returned to the more imminent danger of being in a car driven by a man who thinks a blind bend on a mountain pass is an excellent opportunity to overtake. We reached Kabul in the rain at 4.30. in one piece.

Looking back it was one of those days in your life when your chances of dying rose dramatically - whether through gunfire, being on the wrong end of an angry crowd or driving head-on to a similar madman who believes that car crashes happen when Allah wills it, his driving is irrelevant. The odds were much lower than normal, but still very much in my favour and in the favour of the tens of thousands of others making the same journey. Even so a day to forget and an experience to remember.

Day 6 Flower Street Cafe

As Friday is the sabbath day in Islamic countries, the office was closed. I wasn't looking forward to an entire day in a guest house with no other guests. However Gerry came to the rescue and took me to the Flower Street Cafe where I had real coffee and some Fajitas. Mexican food in Afghanistan - why not? It was good to get out and Friday afternoon seems to have passed peacefully in Kabul, although there have been reports of more problems in the North and West of the country.

I sent off the final version of my report to the secretariat in Europe as well as to the managers here and I read through various documents I had not caught up with during the week.

Tomorrow I will definitely be going on a two day trip by road to Jalalabad (heading East). I got the all clear from Jalalabad today: there was no trouble after prayers. However I have to take extra precautions, these are: I have to wear traditional Afghan clothing - enormous baggy trousers and long shirt (in pea green nylon) along with a flat woollen hat. I have also stopped shaving today, by Sunday I might look a bit stubbly. But the main precaution is that I have to travel in a two car convoy, with an empty car following behind me. If something happens to my car (anything from a flat tyre to, well, you know...) there needs to be a spare car to make sure that I am not stuck in the countryside. Nice that they are thinking about me (gulp).

The road to Jalalabad is apparently the very busy main highway to Pakistan and so should be safe and busy, I won't be winding through mountain passes and it won't be near where the fighting is,basically it is the opposite direction: but given that we are talking about an insurgency there really isn't a front line. However with my costume and travelling on a busy road in an unremarkable vehicle, I think I will be okay.

I'll let you know on Sunday.