HE Geoffrey Peter Tooth, Australian High Commissioner to Kenya
Background: As Australian’s Ambassador, residing in Nairobi this is his 5th trip aboard MAF Aircraft. Purpose of the flight is to go to Wajir County to look at drought impacted areas in the current Horn of Africa crisis. Members of the Australian government are travelling with World Vision - one of Australia’s premier NGOs that deals with aid issues for which the government provides funding to. One of their projects is in Wajir and with wider funding to activities in other areas of Africa.
Aims: To continue to assess the full extent of the crisis to ensure taxpayers’ money is being spent effectively. Also to help determine what more the Australian Government can do to help with the crisis. Dadaab has become a magnet, drawing people from the rural areas that are in need of so much care.
Most of today’s MAF passengers will be spending the night before flying onto the Dadaab refugee camp tomorrow morning. Geoffrey expects there will be more upcoming MAF flights in the near future, recognizing that MAF is one of the few organisations flying into more isolated areas of Kenya and South Sudan.
Perry Mansfields, World Vision - Global Management team
Background: The Global Rapid Response team deploy anywhere globally within 24-72 hours’ notice. Once Kenya became a multi-country response it became a Global Response task. World Vision uses a size scale term known as a Category 3 meaning it affects more than 1 million people or more than half the population of a given country.
Aims: As Senior Relief co-ordinator operating with the Global Response (GR) team of 4, based at different location points around the world, they help facilitate personal capacity gaps and funding gaps with many divisions working together through logistics, finance, HR and communications.
Seeing firsthand the distribution in Wajir (today) and also in Dadaab (tomorrow) helps to understand the context better and answer forthcoming questions of the response efforts being made.
Difficulties: The most difficult part of the job is that the hours worked in one day increase as time passes. On a personal level however, actually seeing the beneficiaries means you work harder when you get back to the office.
About MAF: Perry is very familiar with MAF and knows MAF has been around since 1946 from recent conversations with his online course professor whose Father use to fly with MAF in back in the 1970s. He thinks that MAF helps World Vision by helping them move in the direction they need to go and by continuing to pray for them.