When famine strikes, a simple guide can save lives

[Editor's note: Richard Jacquot, deputy director of Mercy Corps Global Emergency Operations, represents the agency on the Emergency Capacity Building (ECB) Project, an effort by seven global relief groups to increase the speed, quality, and effectiveness of emergency responses. Richard helped the consortium developed the Good Enough Guide -- a basic guide of best practices for people confronted with extraordinary emergency situations. What follows is adapted from an email Richard wrote to his ECB colleagues remembering how, 25 years ago, he was able to use a similar guide to help famine refugees in Sudan.]

Richard and Sudee taking djabana (coffee) at the local cafe. Photo: Courtesy of Richard Jacquot

In 1985, my future wife, Sudee, and I were waiting for the decision of the UNHCR on a Red Sea Hill study we had carried out in Sudan. Every morning, we would go jogging in the delta near Tokar, northern Sudan, where cotton was produced during the British colonial times. We started to notice huts showing up in the delta near the town. Soon five huts became 30 and then 100s. We stopped one morning to check what was going on.

These were Adandouha and Beni Amer tribe people who had exhausted all their resources and came down from the Red Sea Hills in despair to search for food and survival. They were destitute, sick and scrawny. Sudee and I and our two colleagues had never dealt with feeding programs but we had to do something.

In our small library, we found an old Oxfam Handbook that showed us how to conduct a nutritional survey and how to run a supplementary feeding program. My only experience at that time was 15 years as an airplane engineer in the French Navy; Sudee and her colleagues were two-year nursing college graduates. We took the book and did everything it said, line by line, page by page. What we could not buy, we built. We conducted the survey, just as the guide said, and took the results to the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) in Port Sudan. We got two Bedford trucks of food for a supplementary feeding program. We had no food for general feeding.

Richard oversees access to the feeding program to make sure each child is registered so they can track their improvement. Photo: Courtesy of Richard Jacquot

I enrolled the seven tribe leaders, one of my best memories, in building and running the feeding center, and the women from the tribes to run the kitchen. The nurses provided health care and trained mothers in tube feeding. We did not have bracelets, so we wrote numbers on the kids’ arms. The first day, we had so many deaths I would not dare to try to remember, but every one of them devastating nonetheless. By the end of the week, the deaths had stopped and the kids, who were pushing their food away because the malnutrition had weakened their perception of hunger, were now eagerly eating their meals and wanted more.

A few days into the feeding project, the UNHCR and Oxfam heads of office passed by Tokar on their way to Eritrea for an assessment and were amazed by what they saw.

Two days later, the Oxfam rep sent us two beautiful orange feeding kits with scales and measuring boards and bracelets to replace our makeshift supplementary feeding kit and he came to visit regularly to see how he could support us.

The Good Enough Guide, which Mercy Corps helped develop with our ECB partners, is not for the expert. It is a practical, simple, straightforward tool for someone inexperienced in relief work so they can do a proper job to make other people’s lives better and maybe to save lives.