The Society of Exploration Geophysicists and the Foundation Geoscientists Without Borders also made a trailer for the Kakuma podcast. Many of the photographs are by Josie Bauman from Quest University Canada who was half of the documentary film crew.
Besides the podcast being released on June 20, World Refugee Day, I was a Keynote speaker on the same day (serendipity or fate) at the geoscience conference in Vancouver RFG, Resources for Future Generations 2018. I had the great honor of speaking on Water Constraints with Dr. Jay Famiglietti, from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology - Caltech, and now the University of Saskatchewan; Dr. Jason Gurdak from San Francisco State University who spoke about the groundwater situation in California; and Nalaine Morin, of the Tahltan First Nation, who gave a water perspective from both her engineering and aboriginal perspectives. My talk was titled Looking for "Good Water in Bad Places".
While I found the talks of all the co-presenters powerful and engaging, I found the presentation of Jay Famiglietti profound....very, very important stuff. Dr. Famigilietti presented an overview of the 15 years of data collection and interpretation of NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). With no fanfare or hyperbole, he simply went through the results which show conclusively, on a world scale, in an irrefutable fashion....our groundwater resources are being depleted worldwide, the depletion of groundwater resources is where we grow most of the food in the world, the ice caps are melting, and sea level is rising in an inverse manner. We all know this, more or less, but it is too easy to ignore until you see the big picture with factual support.
Dr. Famiglietti will now be a Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. Great catch for Canada.

PBS/NOVA has picked up the film "The Good Nazi" for viewing on all Public Broadcasting Stations in the United States. My understanding is that NOVA, being a science documentary series, will expand the science portion a bit. In Canada, the original production of "The Good Nazi", will show on Vision One. Dates and times have yet to be announced.

The trailer is riveting! I have not seen the film, but my understanding is that the cinematography is exquisite, and the personal story lines of child survivor Sidney Handler, author Michael Good, and Major Plagge are very powerful....and some good geophysics of course.

When the sun sets tomorrow, the evening of Wednesday April 11, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) will begin and continue until the evening of April 12. In Israel, Yom HaShoah is truly solemn, most dramatically illustrated by the 10 AM siren where everything stops for 2 minutes, and even the highways are quiet with thousands of people standing outside their vehicles in silence and pensive thought.
At 9:30 PM on April 11th in Israel, on KAN Channel 11, a movie my colleague Alastair McClymont and I worked on will premier, “The Good Nazi.” The movie will depict the war time efforts of a Nazi and Wermacht officer, Major Karl Plagge, to save Jews from the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania by issuing them work permits to labor in the motor vehicle workshop HKP unite 562. He even had a famous list of the Jews he tried to keep alive, like Oskar Schindler's List. You will have to see the movie, though, to decide for yourself if he really was a good Nazi.
Also showing in Israel the evening of the 11th, for the first time, is the Hebrew language version of “Holocaust Escape Tunnel.” This movie will also show on NOVA l PBS, at 9 PM, on all PBS stations across the United States. Holocaust Escape Tunnel, which premiered a year ago, describes the end of Jewish life in Lithuania, the beginning of the Holocaust, and the truly unbelievable escape of the “Burning Brigade” from the Ponar extermination site.
Sponsored by Dr. Richard Freund and the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at University of Hartford, Alastair and I worked at both sites. As the movie “Holocaust Escape Tunnel” describes, at Ponar, we discovered the then near mythical escape tunnel. I have not seen “The Good Nazi” as it is premiering in Israel, but at HKP 562, we used some of our techniques honed in Colombia from “Finding Escobar’s Millions” to search for the “malinas,” or hiding places the Jews built to conceal themselves from the SS when the Germans retreated from Vilna.
At HKP 562, Alastair and I had an enthusiastic geophysics crew of Merav David from the University of Harford, Josie Bauman from Quest University Canada, Abe Gol (the son of Shlomo Gol, one of the leaders of the Ponar tunnel diggers), and Abe’s cousin Johny. I know we are all very proud to have played some part in telling these stories, and are very grateful that NOVA and Associated Producers supported the high quality production that these two movies surely manifest.

​From 1986 to 2007, Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) killed about 100,000 people in Acholiland in Northern Uganda, abducted and enslaved about an equal number, and displaced 1.7 million from their villages. About 2 million people lived in 200 displaced persons camps, with the largest holding more than 50,000 Acholi. Yet in our two weeks working in approximately 25 villages all over Acholiland, we did not see a single marked mass grave, see any remaining housing structures from the camps, or see a single marker or monument memorializing the violence and terror…until we went to Atiak.
Until January 17, I had never heard of Atiak. It is in the far northwest corner of Amuru District, 30 km south of the South Sudan border. Atiak sits at the end of Acholiland before one enters into the West Nile area, an ethnically and linguistically very different area. One of the female students had done an outstanding job of organizing the community engagement for a well repair there. Two communities were contributing a substantial amount of cash toward the well repair and the exploration program. They would supply and cook for us a goat at each site. They would supply labour. And they desperately needed the water. As a few of us, including myself, were somewhat done with the long, dusty drives, I was looking for any reasonable reason not to go to Atiak. Its remoteness, though, was just one more reason why the villages near the town were good airbenders.
Atiak, itself, had been one massive camp through the last 10 years of the LRA insurrection. If one looks on Google Earth at the 2007 image, you will see thousands of tightly packed mud huts. Today, none of those camp huts remain. The town center sits at the intersection to the road to Adjumani and the South Sudanese refugee camps. I guessed that there would be at least a coffee shop to succor the many NGO workers that must drive through there on the way to the West Nile. We saw neither foreigners nor a coffee shop. But more surprising, and only 50 m from the only functioning public well, there is a concrete monument with a large plaque, and on the plaque is a very long list of names.
In April 1995, a year before the government began to place the Acholi into concentration camps, LRA rebels entered Atiak. The LRA, who themselves were Acholi, and who even had a senior commander from Atiak, accused the villagers of falsely blaming the LRA for ruthless maiming and for not supporting the LRA cause….though that cause was never quite clear. To prove the villagers wrong, and to punish them, the rebels then rounded up villagers, and students and teachers from the technical college.
The LRA segregated very young children, the elderly, and the pregnant. They shot the rest, ordering the survivors to clap and cheer the rebels on. More than 250 were killed that day, with the names from the students of the technical school being on that plaque. The Atiak massacre prompted the Government of Uganda to break off relations with Sudan, as the rebels had found some refuge across the border. This, in turn, further encouraged Sudan to support the rebels, at least for a while.
While for me, seeing the plaque was unique, the story of villagers being trapped in an untenable position between the government and the LRA was not. While Musseveni’s army was preoccupied in a faraway conflict in the Congo, the Ugandan government pushed the creation of village militias armed with bows, called the “Arrow Brigades.” They were no match for AK47s, and the LRA rebels would chop off the hands of these primitively armed farmers. Women were encouraged to blow whistles if they saw rebels in the bush; the LRA would chop off the lips of anyone who would signal their advance. The LRA would even cut off the legs of anyone seen on a bicycle as they might provide warning of an impending attack.
The work went very well in Atiak. We repaired a well that had been drilled in 1986. While trapped in the Camp until 2007, the villagers had neither the means nor the money to maintain the well. The repaired well will provide water to about 100 households (approximately 550 persons) in a cluster of villages near the town site. We geophysically sited another well in a highly prospective location, which we expect to be drilled within the next 6 weeks. Colin Miazga once again managed the exploration group that day.
All the photos are from Paul Bauman, and all are of Atiak.

November 8, 2017
Colin Miazga and I had been planning since June to do a water exploration program in the Nayapara and Leda refugee camps. In June, 2017, the population of the former was about 14,240 refugees, and of the latter, 19,230 Rohingya. But with the final round of violence beginning August 25th, Nayapara increased to 35,000 Rohingya, and Leda to 23,000 Rohingya. We moved up our start date, and expanded our crew to five. Our goal was to supplement or replace the surface water supply with a groundwater supply. We believe we have succeeded, though drilling and well testing will be the proof.
Today we moved to the Kutupalong Expansion site. Here, there are about 2000 wells, and almost every well finds water. But the wells are shallow, and largely contaminated by e. coli and other pathogens. Our goal here is to explore for deeper and better protected aquifers. Before August 25th, the refugee population of the Kutupalong Expansion Site was 99,705 Rohingya. Today, it is about 450,000. Or rather, 450,000!!!! You may have heard it or read it, but the repeated phrasing is true, people as far as the eye can see, in all directions.
We had to walk a 1.5 km obstacle course with our equipment to get into the exploration area. We hired Rohingya to carry the lighter equipment. Colin, Alastair, Chris, and Eric carried the heavy gear, including the 35 kg cable reels.
Think Chalmun’s Cantina in the pirate city of Mos Eisley of Star Wars. Think the dystopic future of Mad Max. Imagine the foothills of Nepal, but clear cut of all trees and rhododendrons, dusty, post-apocalyptic. The area was jungle, inhabited until 3 months ago by Asian elephants. Think of a city built of plastic tarps and bamboo. A dense, urban ant colony where everyone cooks with wood, and not a chimney to be seen. No wonder respiratory infections exceed water borne diseases. And though the Rohingya seem to be gentle and quiet people, the cacophony of the white noise of 450,000 people simply living is like being in a chicken coop.
Working in the camps in the south was a good warm up, so I only got choked up once in Kutupalong today, and for good reason. An elderly…very elderly woman was crossing one of the rickety bamboo bridges with a massive load of firewood balanced on her head. The Burmese army altered the demographics by removing a significant percentage of young men, leaving many elderly women and young children to fend for themselves. There was no way she was going to be able to make the large step off the bridge without stumbling or falling. I moved ahead to grab her arm and steady her. But before she could take the step, one of the 20 year old Polytechnic students transferred the entire mass of firewood off her head onto his shoulder, lowered himself from the bridge. He continued walking with the woman and her firewood to her tarped bamboo hut.
A CTV film crew had an extra day after filming Bob Rae’s visit. They spent the entire day with us, filming the march in and out, interviewing us all, capturing some fantastic footage of manually drilling a water well to 100 m depth from a bamboo drilling rig, and providing a welcome distraction to everything around us. Somehow they will boil it all down to a two minute clip likely to appear in the next few days.

...from a November 7, 2017 short interview interview I had on the Calgary eyeopener.

An October 26 interview with CBC Radio and TV about our upcoming water exploration program in the Rohingya Refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh. As of today, there are about 830,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled from Myanmar, with 620,000 having arrived only since August 25. The monsoon rains are ending, and they will need to move to yet undeveloped groundwater supplies.

Calgarians helping Rohingya refugeeshttp://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/calgary-eyeopener

November 4, 2017
It is always very clear over the first day or two of an exploration program which individual is the most important member of the team. The learning curve is very steep for all 5 of us Canadians here. None of us speak more than a few words of Bangla. We do not have enough knowledge of the Bengali script to differentiate between the sign for a maternal health center and a tire repair shop. As we pull our cables through cities of plastic sheeting and mud, we have to constantly be aware that these are people`s homes; though, we do not have the cultural or language skills to properly excuse ourselves or ask for permission to pass.

And as we try to make sense of our results, we need to ``ground truth`` our interpretations and fancy 3D visualizations against existing wells of known locations, depths, construction, flow rates, and water quality…but how do you find these water points when they might be inside a walled compound of the village head man, or inside a military post, or in a sunken concrete vault in the midst of a rice field.
Our four Bangladeshi Polytechnic students have neither the English nor social mindset to help us in this regard. While the UN water Channing Tatum and his friends have an overall conceptualization of the hydrogeology and water use situation, they are lacking on-the-ground details. Our field schedules and the already ongoing water and sanitation crisis do not allow for the needed month long methodical, patient, water point and water use survey over vast areas of refugee settlement.
As such, and as is often the case, our most critical staff persons become our Bangladeshi drivers, Shajahan, Adur Rauf, and Younus. They are our translators, social facilitators, cultural advisers, treaty makers, negotiators of property access, and of course very skilled drivers. They quickly guide us to existing water wells that fall on our lines. They ask permission for us to cross unharvested rice fields. They negotiate settlements if we create any minor damage during our field work.
We have now moved from the agrarian areas beyond the main settlements, and into the densely populated, spontaneous, makeshift, and registered refugee camps. We needed the warm up as combining the social and human challenges with the logistical and technical quandaries of the first few days would have been overwhelming. But we are now very much enjoying interacting with the refugee population. And we believe we are having some success, as we have crossed a few sandstone units and likely aquifers. We are now chasing these aquifers down to determine their extents, and where they may exist in closer proximity to existing surface reservoirs and emergency water treatment facilities.

And we even had a few minutes to enjoy fresh coconut juice and a spectacular sunset on the beach on our drive home last night.

On October 29th, Alastair McClymont, Colin Miazga, Eric Johnson, Chris Slater, and Paul Bauman left Calgary and Vancouver with 24 pieces of baggage, most weighing 32 kg, for a two week water exploration program for the Rohingya Refugees in southeast Bangladesh. We left before the sun rose on Thursday, arrived in Dhaka after midnight on Saturday (minus three boxes of cables), and were menage a trois with UNHCR and Oxfam logisticians and WASH (WAter, Sanitation, and Hygiene) officers by Sunday afternoon. There was a lot to sort out – where would we go, how would we get there, and what exactly would we do.

Jet lagged with the 12 hour time difference and the stress of moving 560 kg of baggage from Calgary to Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh, and none of us speaking a word of Bengali or Bangla as they often call the language, we worked in the more bucolic areas near, but outside the Nayapara and Leda Camps on Monday and Tuesday. Today, November 3, we began exploring for water on the edges of the camps themselves, beginning with Leda.
The geology has already pulled a few surprises, but so have the Teknaf Peninsula of Bangladesh and the people that live there, including the Rohingya refugees. We are just beginning to figure out the geology; and, we are just beginning to comprehend what has happened in Myanmar since August 25th, and what is now going on within the now 850,000 person Rohingya refugee population in the southeastern most corner of Bangladesh.