Blogs

• Mike McKie's South Sudan blog ( 2 Articles )
  

  Mike spent part of his childhood on a sugar plantation south of Khartoum, near the market town of Kosti that sits on the river Nile, where he regularly fished. After leaving Sudan as a boy, he returned some 20 years later in a professional capacity, engaged at first with humanitarian operations in Darfur and later with non-government agencies in southern Sudan. On leaving Sudan for the second time, Mike worked with the United Nations (UN) in the West Bank before being deployed by the Stabilisation Unit to Afghanistan and, most recently, Pakistan.

  Returning to what is now the world's newest republic, Mike will be supporting United Nations Development Programmes (UNDP), providing stabilisation and governance expertise to their current DFID funded State (province) Stabilisation Programme, ultimately helping the government of South Sudan improve service delivery. Challenges abound and he looking forward to them - as well as having a third crack at fishing the Nile for its mighty perch!!

   

   

• Martin Cunningham's Afghanistan blog ( 2 Articles )
  

  Martin Cunningham is a UK Chief Inspector with Kent Police, and is seconded through the Stabilisation Unit to EUPOL Afghanistan for 12 months . He has 31 years policing experience, 9 of which was in the Royal Military Police, during which he served for 2 years in Northern Ireland and also policed the East / West German Border from 1985-1987.

  He has a degree in policing and is an experienced public order and firearms commander. During his time in Kent police he has run many operations and projects, and also ran the Force Control room for 10 months.

  His role at EUPOL Afghanistan is the training of police commanders at the staff college, in Command Control and Communication. The courses are designed to take the theory of Leadership and Command and translate them into practical police leadership within a policing environment in Afghanistan.

   

   

• Andy Udall's Palestine Blog ( 1 Article )
  

  Andy Udall is a serving Police Officer, (Chief Inspector) with the West Mercia Police, formerly based at Telford, Shropshire in command of the delivery of Local Policing.  His service with West Mercia saw him working within the Operations Support Dept and later, the Force Operations Dept with significant experience in Command and Control, working as a Force Duty Inspector and then in command of the Force’s Roads Policing Unit and also as a Silver Firearms Incident Commander.  He is married with two children and at the age of 47 years and with 28 years police service, decided he wanted a total change in his working environment and needed fresh challenges.  He certainly got his wish and through the Stabilisation Unit, is now seconded to the EUPOL COPPS, (European Union Police Co-ordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support – (what a mouthful – only Brussels could think of that one !)) mission, based in Ramallah, Palestine, where he arrived on 16th March, as the mission’s expert advisor in Command and Control.  He is the first UK serving Police Officer to serve on the mission.  He lives in Jerusalem and travels daily to Ramallah, but his activities take him to all locations within the West Bank. (The EUPOL COPPS mission is not mandated to cover Gaza).  As he works through the challenges, daily frustrations, cultural differences and social activities of mission life, he hopes to share his thoughts and experiences with you.

   

   

• Tim Gurney’s Afghanistan Blog ( 16 Articles )
  

  Follow our Stabilisation Advisor Tim Gurney as he gets to grips with life in Khaneshin, Helmand, following his 18 months in Nad-e Ali and Marjah districts.

  So, you retire from the British Diplomatic Service after 35 years and 10 overseas postings. You then manage a scuba diving centre in Indonesia for a year. What do you do next? For Tim Gurney eating lotuses for a living in North Sulawesi and diving every day was just too easy a life. So he became a Stabilisation Adviser. In Helmand. Was it too much nitrogen? Tim happily points out that he had to have a psychological assessment to get the job so claims he knows he's not bonkers. But you have to wonder, right?

  Tim headed out to be the Stabilisation Adviser in the northern sector of Nad-e Ali in late September 2010 to work with 2 Lancs, 3 Para and then 42 Commando in Patrol Base Shazad. For Tim it was a return to Afghanistan having been the UK's Deputy Ambassador in Kabul in 2003-05. "Working on the ground at the tactical level is so different to being in the slightly rarified atmosphere of an Embassy, " says Tim. "Being able to work with people and see the situation so close up in fascinating. It's so raw. I can really appreciate just how difficult life can be for Afghans. We have made significant progress since I was with the Embassy. But there remains an awful lot to be done." Tim moved to Marjah and worked with the US Marines in September 2011 and then to the district of Khaneshin in February this year.

   

   

• Hamish Wilson's Afghanistan Blog ( 26 Articles )
  

  Follow Hamish Wilson as Stabilisation Advisor in Helmand here

  Hamish Wilson has been working as a Stabilisation Adviser for the districts of Musa Qal’eh, Now Zad, and is currently in Lashkar Gah supporting the Provincial Reconstruction Team’s Operations Department.

  He became a Deployable Civilian Expert (DCE) in 2009 whilst serving as Livelihoods Adviser and Operations Manager for DFID Afghanistan’s Helmand Alternative Livelihoods Programme. He took on that role fresh from a humanitarian assignment in Darfur with emergency healthcare agency Merlin. He has served in a wide variety of operational roles with NGOs, donor agencies and the private sector, tackling issues such as disaster management, HIV/AIDS, economic development and organisational reform.

  In previous lives he has instructed wilderness expeditions in North and South America, served on mountain rescue teams and worked as a management consultant with a variety of corporate consultancies. He is now a director of his own development consultancy.

   

• Kosovo Diary ( 3 Articles )
  

  Jonathan Carroll is a practising Barrister in the UK. He is deployed by the UK Government’s Stabilisation Unit, a tri-departmental unit owned by the Department for International Development, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence, to the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX).

   

• Haiti Blogs ( 8 Articles )
  

  Read here about Paul Biddles experiences as a Prisons Advisor in Haiti.

   

• Taxing Times in Helmand ( 4 Articles )
  

  Llewelyn Williams is the Finance Manager for the Helmand Food Zone programme. As a tax inspector at HMRC and a member of the Civil Service Stabilisation Cadre, he was selected for a six week deployment to the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). His was the fastest ever deployment of a cadre member. In this blog, Llewelyn recounts what it’s like to be deployed for the very first time.

• Policing in South Sudan ( 3 Articles )