Earthquake Taxes Capacity of Donors and Charities to Provide Relief Aid

The catastrophic earthquake that devastated parts of Pakistan and India this month has strained the ability of many international relief organizations to raise funds from American donors, many of whom feel overwhelmed by appeals for what has been an unusually high number of major disasters this year.

So far donations to about a dozen major relief groups for the 7.6-magnitude temblor — which may have killed as many as 40,000 people and left more than a million people homeless — have totaled $13.1-million. If donations continue at the current pace, these groups would receive only a fraction of what was raised for the Indian Ocean tsunamis, which totaled $1.3-billion, or for Hurricane Katrina, which to date comes to $1.8-billion.

Save the Children, which has been providing tents, blankets, and other supplies to Pakistanis in Muzzafarabad and other cities rocked by the quake, received $1.3-million in the 10 days after the earthquake struck. By comparison, the group had raised $5-million just five days after the tsunamis swept through South Asia last December.

Mark Melia, a fund raiser at Catholic Relief Services, in Baltimore, said he worries that with so many natural disasters, it’s easy for donors to lose sight of the magnitude of the South Asian earthquake. His organization had raised $1.1-million for the earthquake as of last week.

Mr. Melia said his organization plans to acknowledge the large number of emergencies this year in its appeal to let donors know that the charity is “appreciative of whatever they can do.”

“If the earthquake had happened before Katrina and the tsunami, that’s the largest natural disaster since Hurricane Mitch,” which slammed into Central America in 1998, said Mr. Melia. “But it’s the third in a year, so it’s sort of like, ‘Here we go again.’”

Muslim Groups

Some nonprofit officials, however, remain optimistic that the American public, or at least segments of it, will contribute in large amounts to help the earthquake victims.

“Every disaster hits home to a different population,” said Jennifer M. Norris, a spokeswoman for Relief International. The Los Angeles charity has raised $350,000 so far, and Ms. Norris said she expects that amount to grow as the charity makes efforts to solicit Pakistani Americans who live in California.

Later this month, for example, the group will hold a fund-raising event at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Orange County that will feature a performance by Pakistani musicians.

Islamic Relief, in Burbank, Calif., said it has received a large outpouring of gifts from Muslim Americans, in part because the disaster struck during Ramadan, the religion’s holy month.

“Most mosques around the country have been fund raising for us,” said Arif Shaik, a spokesman for the group, which has raised $1.4-million in online donations. The group has yet to count the contributions from mosques or gifts that have come in through the mail or over the telephone.

Some international aid groups said the outpouring of generosity from the American public to last year’s deadly tsunamis will help, rather than hinder, fund raising for the earthquake.

For example, Mercy Corps, in Portland, Ore., has raised $1.8-million in earthquake donations. While such contributions have not arrived as quickly as those after the massive waves hit, the group has 90,000 new donors due to the tsunamis whom it can ask for help this time around, said Susan Laarman, a spokeswoman for the group.

In addition, the organization has been buoyed by $500,000 grants from the Intel Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its Pakistan relief work.

Lurma Rackley, a spokeswoman for CARE USA, in Atlanta, which has brought in at least $536,000 for earthquake relief, said the aid group is also currently trying to drum up donations from corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals for the mudslides in Guatemala and El Salvador, which have received minimal attention from the news media. So far CARE has received $66,000 for that calamity.

That disaster, which was triggered by Hurricane Stan, killed more than 700 people and left hundreds of thousands without homes. “We’re reaching out to people who are interested in that part of the world,” Ms. Rackley said.

For the earthquake, the American Red Cross, in Washington, has received $1.2-million. The Red Cross may face more difficulty raising funds for the South Asia disaster than other charities because — according to a recent survey — the American public is growing less confident in its abilities.

In a July survey by the Robert Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, 6 percent of 1,820 Americans it polled said they lacked confidence in the Red Cross. That figure rose to 10 percent in a survey of 1,003 people taken this month.

Sleeping Under the Stars

Relief workers say they hope that as Americans learn more about the extent of the devastation in South Asia, the charitable giving will pick up.

“We have reports coming in of towns completely flattened and destroyed by the earthquake,” said Gregory Beck, regional director for Asia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus for the International Rescue Committee, in New York. “Every place that our four teams are moving, there are massive amounts of people who are without shelter, who are just sleeping out under the stars.”

The shelter needs will be exacerbated by the major snowfalls that are expected in the next two to three weeks as winter begins.

“There were snow-dusted mountains just over where the aid workers were working,” said Ms. Laarman of Mercy Corps. “People who survived the earthquake may not survive the next few weeks.”

Ms. Laarman said one encouraging sign was that Mercy Corps relief teams were reporting that the Pakistani government has been successful in clearing roads, allowing the group to begin using trucks to carry emergency supplies into the region, rather than having to rely on helicopters. “That’s like the only good news that we’ve heard,” she said.

As the roads become passable and areas more accessible, aid workers said they are not sure whether earthquake survivors will stay and try to ride out the winter or whether they will move to the country’s urban areas to seek services.

“I would expect most people are going to want to try to stay there, because they’re mainly small farmers with livestock and small plots, and traditionally those are the people who want to remain on the land,” said the International Rescue Committee’s Mr. Beck. “But how they’re going to survive the winter — at this point, I don’t know.”

Some organizations and their workers were victims of the disaster themselves.

All of Church World Service’s staff members in Pakistan survived the earthquake, but one worker’s wife and children died when the family’s home collapsed. The relief organization, based in New York, also reported that its office and health clinic in the Mansehra district of Pakistan was damaged in the quake.

Many charities said the massive scale of the disasters that have occurred in the last 12 months has meant long hours for their employees, but so far they have been able to get people to the areas of greatest need. “Our emergency-response teams across the world are stretched thin, but they’re not broken,” said Mike Kiernan, spokesman for Save the Children. He said its earthquake efforts have been helped by a training program that started four years ago that teaches its development workers in Pakistan and elsewhere to provide aid during crises.

But while emergency response efforts abroad are holding up so far, back home in the United States, Save the Children staff members at its headquarters in Westport, Conn., are facing an avalanche of work as they deal with the administrative and logistical challenges of orchestrating the group’s response to several large calamities at one time.

“Our headquarters team has a lot on our plate right now,” said Mr. Kiernan. “We’d be hard pressed to handle another major disaster.”