Scribbles

Traditionally, we have always been a “real men’s outfit”, since we started with our team, FITTEST, several years ago. FITTEST. “Fast IT and Telecoms Emergency and Support Team”. Pretty sexy, no? We are the ‘special forces’ of the humanitarian organizations. We’re the ‘dudes’ they send in when an emergency occurs, before anyone else is sent in. Or is allowed in. Somalia flooding, Darfur refugee influx, Pakistan earthquake, Tsunami, Iraq war, Hurricane Mitch, Afghanistan war, Angola, .. You name it. We’ve been there, done that.. And not only “been there”, but also “been there before the rest”. We’re the dudes who fly in with equipment to build the basic infrastructure with electricity, communications, IT services, so that other relief workers can do their work. I mean in short, in case you did not get my drift yet: “WE ARE THE DUDES !”

Think of us as razor short hair, safari jackets, bagged tropic trousers, sturdy mountain boots, minimum six feet tall, bronzed by the sun in seven continents, honoury member of frequent flyer schemes on at least ten airlines. And that only in the past three months. You get the picture? That’s us. I mean, “WE ARE THE DUDES. Yeah!”..

And now, these women… Grrr.. These women… This girlie figures, with their high-pitched squeaky voices, platform shoes or tower heels, and their (flap with your hand with a floppy wrist) their, their… delicate manners, manicured nails… We need four of them to lift one of our toolboxes… And we carry two. In each hand that is. Ha! But now, those tiny things… They took over the office. They run the outfit now…

“Can anyone tell me where the FFFF**K I can find plain white paper?”, I hear from the corridor again, “I refuse to print my mission report on f**king pink paper!”. One of the women chuckles: “Pink Rules!”

It was not so long ago when we had no women in the team. As the unit grew, and we moved our base from Kampala to Dubai, we needed more support staff… In came Judith, then Anisa, then Lorraine. Sure, understandable, these were all administrative staff. We could even get used to the idea they did all of our finance and travel. But then Amel joined in, and took over procurement. Bouran came in and she took over the management of logistics and warehousing. And so on. And so on. They moved in swiftly and quietly. They worked long hours, without making a lot of noise, like we, the dudes did. And before we knew it, we had more than twenty of them.

Twenty women. They became the backbone of the office. Brave women, standing up against ‘The Dudes’, twice as tall and three times as wide as them. They looked up, with their finger pointing sky-wards: ‘No, you will NOT get your ticket before you fill in your previous travel expense claim !’. or ‘No, you can not get into the warehouse to take whatever you want. Fill in this request form, and we will get it to you’. Finger sky-wards… Each time, the FITTEST technician would look down at those tiny little things and grunt his teeth “These… women… “ but in the end they would all shrug their shoulders, and .. comply.

It was an interesting process to see these two parts of the team becoming one, as time went by.. The male and the female part. The mountain boots and the high heels. The ‘North Face’ and the ‘Louis Vuitton’s. Not only did we, the dudes, start to print on pink, but the ladies also got us to wear pink FITTEST T-shirts. But the dudettes also started to wear the macho yellow-print-on-dark-blue with just as much pride. Symbolic of the female side of the dudes and the male side of the dudettes joining together..
Not only did Astrid help the guys pack their suitcases when they were late for a flight again, and would Anisa and Lorraine always succeed in putting together a surprise birthday cake, but soon they also joined us on missions. Cecelia in Kinshasa, Larisa and Nadia in Baghdad, Sophie in Banda Aceh and Beirut, Ekram in Khartoum and Damascus.

Cheers to you, the dudettes of the world ! This is an ode to you. Combining being a mother and a wife, with a professional career. Juggling your professional time between all three jobs: two at home, and one at work. My hat off to you. It is much easier being a man in this world, than a woman. It is always much easier to be a dude than a dudette.

‘The Jihadis’ is not their real name. I also censored the name of the country this all happened in. You never know…

Once while I was on mission to [that country], the Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited the key people in our office for a formal evening dinner, and our staff asked me to come along.. You need to know I always dress very casual, and of course, I had no suit nor even decent shoes with me. ‘No problem’, said the lady who invited me, we will find you something. So in the evening I attended the dinner with a borrowed outfit: shoes from a colleague, shirt, tie and jacket from someone’s husband and a pair of trousers from I-don’t-know-where. I looked formal. Like a formal vagabond.

The dinner was held at the palace from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was an astonishing building, almost straight out of the movies. Beautiful carpets, lavish furniture, and luxuriously decorated walls in the huge banquet halls. While chatting over our after-dinner tea, out of the blue, the people from the Ministry asked if I could give them a presentation on emergency and disaster preparedness systems we use in our organisation.

A few weeks later…

I am both nervous and excited. It is the first time, the government reached out to us, asking for assistance. They even arranged the needed paperwork for me to bring the ‘sensitive equipment’ needed for the demonstration, into the country: Radios and modems, and all kinds of stuff that would normally get confiscated the moment you step off the plane.
I am used to get slightly harassed going through their customs check, even with UN papers, but this time, I give them a set of papers the government sent us. I can not read what was on it, but they all go a bit pale while looking at it, and for once, I get the red carpet treatment…

The day of the presentation itself, our staff set up a nice conference/meeting room in a fancy old-style hotel. Our meeting room is at the end of a long corridor. On the left side of the corridor, large windows overlook the hotel gardens. On the right, there is a line-up of doors all leading into meeting rooms similar to ours. All meeting rooms are separated with curtains, so if there is a bigger meeting to be held, they draw the curtains open to create a bigger space.

We have mobilized all our local staff for this important happening. The ladies prepared a long table with refreshments (all non-alcoholic of course), and kosher food (eh.. well not really kosher, I guess, but you know what I mean: ‘politically correct and culturally sensitive’ food)… The interpreter and all the electronics for the real time translation of my speech are tested and ready for our esteemed guests… Who are of course fashionable late. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour.. I start to wonder if all preparation efforts are going to be in vain, and no-one is going to show up. I walk to the entrance of the long corridor and see some pretty official looking guys stepping towards the meeting rooms. They all look very serious. They have some heavy looking dudes with bulky stuff under their jackets, behind them. “These must be our guests”, I think to myself, and walk towards them, holding out my hand, to greet them. I hear one of our local staff rushing in behind me, whisper-shouting “Peter!?”. At that moment, one of the bulky-jacket dudes leaps forward, pulls me by the hand I held out, and pushes me firmly onto the side of the corridor. I just stand there, perplex, while the whole official delegation rushes past me. The one huge dude keeps standing in front of me, drilling his dark reflective Ray Ban sunglasses deep into my eyes. Nobody else thinks I am worthy of a look.

It only takes two minutes before the delegation stands up, walks out of our meeting room and rushes into the meeting room next to ours.. None of them blink an eye, except one of the ‘huge dudes with a bulky thing under his jacket’, who says a few snappy words in the local language to one of our staff, as he passes her. “The guy said they were in the wrong meeting room.”, she smiles.
Soon enough our government delegation (the real one!) arrives, and we start. It was a bit difficult though as the curtains separating our meeting room from the one next door are not insulating the noise very well, to say the least. It is almost like I am standing in the midst of the heated discussion they have in the next room. I wonder what they are talking about… My audience understands exactly what was happening amongst our neighbours, but all through my presentation they never blink an eye.. Neither do I. But I keep on thinking how many of the people in the room next door would be on the ‘Top 10 Most Wanted’ list of any Western government.. I wonder if they would have liked my presentation?

A month later I was in Dubai, looking at a few sand dunes where the city was to be built, with Peter whispering in my ear: “One day, all of this will be yours, my son.” (Why me?)

In the Dubai office, everyone kept laughing at “my HQ tie”. They all run around in T-shirts and sandals, many of them in shorts. I managed to keep my tie on for two weeks, and then gave up. I stopped wearing shoes after a month. And they made fun of my red face when I tried to lift one of the FITTEST telecoms engineers’ toolboxes (which they carry nonchalantly from their Dubai base around the world). My red face also had something to do with the fact it was over 40 degrees in the shade.

Things in Dubai move fast, soon we had to answer some critical questions:
• How flat should the warehouse floor be? (bo!)
• How steep should the warehouse entry be for forklifts? (eh.. like this?)
• What fire-extinguishing system for a computer room? (obviously not water..)
• What security measures at the entrances to control staff and visitors’ access? (body search?)
• How about explosives detection at the entrance? (a light bulb?)
• How do you verify the installation of the blast-proof film? (a hammer?)
• What kind of walls to install in the office, taking into account a possible change in layout in 24 hours? (Yellow ones?)
If you know the answer to all these questions, that proves my point: why me?

Luckily, we had sufficient in-house expertise in our organisation, and I don’t think I spared anyone from the Security, Procurement, Administration and Logistics sections in Dubai and Rome. With their help, we got the answers:
• “How flat? – triple 0.”
• “Explosives detection? – dogs”.
• “Fire extinguisher? – use the C02 ‘bomb’”.
• “Walls? – demountable wooden framed panels on anodized aluminum support
grid,” or something like that.

Three months after I arrived, the desert started shifting – pillars pointing out of the sand, walls and buildings taking shape. One warehouse, two warehouses, one office, two offices, guard houses, electricity complex, water complex, fences, roads, security systems. Even the long awaited fountain arrived. Then trees, grass, flagpoles.

I have always felt I was achieving something through my work, helping people, particularly in the field, in their day-to-day work. But I never actually saw the practical result, because it happened elsewhere. But here, I saw my words change a piece of land, our discussion become a new City, our vision become UN agencies working together.

My best memory? Just before leaving Dubai for Rome, I stopped at the Humanitarian City. I thought of all the people that helped me figure out why me?

Peter (“Can you build it faster?”), the boss (kind of), wrote:
It is all true. When we met H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, then the Dubai Crown Prince, he said: “If you want anything from me, talk to this man,” and pointed to Mohammed Al Gergawi, Chairman of the Dubai Development and Investment Authority. So I went to see H.E. Al Gergawi, whom I got to call ‘Mohammed’ after two meetings.

During our second meeting, he said: “Peter, I know you never wear a suit, so don’t put one on for me. Now, give me three things you want from Dubai!”. I named one. He said “not interested”. I named another. He said: “not interested”. Then I described building a compound for the humanitarian organisations geared towards humanitarian emergency response. Mohammed leaned forward and said: “Tell me more.” It was easy to explain our vision: Put humanitarians together and they will start to work together. And the work will be easier, faster and cheaper. So, what’s in it for Dubai? Well, Dubai makes money, it’s a regional business centre, a regional commerce and logistics hub. Let’s add: “Dubai, the city that cares”, let’s add a humanitarian vision to Dubai…

Mohammed said: “Give me a few days.”
Two days later, he called: “Let’s meet. I want to show you something.” He drove us around an old military base: many warehouses, small offices. “Would this do?” he asked. I was not enthusiastic. Too spread out, too old, too small.
Mohammed said: “Give me two weeks.”
After two weeks, he called: “Refurbishment of an old facility would cost too much; we will build from scratch. Give me a few weeks.”
In August 2003, someone in his office sent me an email: “Have money, will build. But bigger than a humanitarian base. Let’s build a humanitarian city!” They found a stretch of 300,000 m2, prime real estate close to the Dubai centre, and had a serious budget.
“Let’s build,” Mohammed said. “Let’s build!”, I said, and called Gianluca.

So we built it. We locked ourselves up with about twenty people from the government – budget, finance, engineering, marketing, project gurus, IT, architects, legal, etc. After half a day, we had a project concept, the basic design and cost estimate for our city. On January 1 2004 we started from a patch of land with nothing but sand. On March 1 (yes, the same year!), we had two fully functional warehouses. On 1 June (yes, the same year!), we had the office building ready, and our staff moved in by the end of August (yes, the same year!).

During the official opening ceremony, the visitors described it as the nicest, best thought-out facilities every built for our organisation. Equipped for 150 people, with training and meeting rooms, a storage area of 40,000 m2, including 10,000 m2 warehouses, it is the now largest humanitarian rapid response facility in the world. Meanwhile several other buildings and warehouses were constructed to make it a true Humanitarian city. It was built from sand to city in six months time. ‘With the compliments of the Dubai Government.’ Only possible in Dubai !

Text source courtesy of Gianluca Bruni and Caroline Hurford
Pictures courtesy of Gianluca Bruni