January 20, 2005 | Read Time: 6 minutes
After the emergency phase, charities focus on rebuilding
Relief charities from around the world have undertaken an enormous task in South Asia: helping millions of people who
have survived the deadly earthquake and tsunamis rebuild their lives and their communities.
While other disasters have killed more people, few have wrought such complete devastation on so many people, says Rudy von Bernuth, a vice president at Save the Children, in Westport, Conn.
“A drought may affect a lot of people, but it may not destroy their homes or their water sources,” says Mr. von Bernuth. “In this case, people have basically lost homes, incomes, water sources, infrastructure, everything. It is a mammoth catastrophe.”
Relief organizations are only now beginning to move out of the emergency-response phase in which safe water, food, and public health are the primary concerns, but they are already figuring out how they can build on what they discovered early on during the South Asia crisis and are looking to the long-term challenges ahead.
Ties to Local Groups
One of the first lessons for the Mennonite Central Committee, in Akron, Pa., is that steps it took several years ago to prepare for future disasters worked.
In the 1990s, the organization and the local charities it works with in India built elevated cyclone shelters in vulnerable areas along the nation’s coastline.
“They survived the tidal wave, and the people who were able to get there were safe,” says Dave Worth, resource network director at the Mennonite Central Committee. “I know that we’re going to be building more of those, because they worked.”
Officials at relief charities say that the experience of the last several weeks has reinforced the importance of building strong relationships with local organizations.
“They know the culture,” says Gail Neudorf, deputy director of the Emergency and Humanitarian Aid unit at CARE USA, in Atlanta. “They know the community, and they are able to move into a wider geographical area than we are in some cases because they have more access.”
Direct Relief International, in Santa Barbara, Calif., was able to get food, milk powder, and oral rehydration solution to the states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in India by wiring $20,000 to a health-care group it has long worked with.
“Everything doesn’t have to be done by a U.S.- or international-based relief organization,” says Thomas Tighe, chief executive officer of Direct Relief. “No one has a larger stake in the success of this relief effort than the people who live there.”
Interconnected Operations
The constellation of entities involved in responding to a disaster the size of the South Asia tsunamis is vast — the agencies of the United Nations, the national, state, and municipal governments of the affected countries, military troops, and relief organizations from around the world.
Making sure the voice of local organizations can be heard in the midst of the din is one of the biggest challenges in relief work, says Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Famine Center, at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass.
“Often they get steamrollered over in this huge international flow of funds,” says Mr. Walker, “yet of course, they are the ones who know the most about the local community.”
Other challenges stem from the interconnected nature of relief operations.
After the tsunamis, helicopter pilots from the U.S. military went to Indonesia to transport survivors who needed medical attention from remote locations to hospitals. Putting those kinds of resources to bear after a natural disaster is rare, and the pilots succeeded in locating injured survivors, says Mark P. Haselkorn, director of research at the interdisciplinary program on humanitarian relief at the University of Washington, in Seattle.
But, he says, the rescue missions led to serious overcrowding because the region’s hospitals weren’t equipped to handle the influx of patients. “It’s a very complex system, and if you throw resources at one part, then you create a problem in another part,” says Mr. Haselkorn.
An Unusual Challenge
The unprecedented outpouring of donations after the earthquake and tsunamis might present relief charities with an unusual challenge as they help survivors start to rebuild: the dilemma of having enough money.
“If you have one-tenth the money you need, obviously you build that three-room schoolhouse in that town that probably could use a six-room schoolhouse,” says Mr. von Bernuth, of Save the Children. “But if you have all the money you need, then you really want to think very carefully what is the ideal structure for your schooling system.”
Experts in relief and development hope that the influx of aid both from private donors and governments also will allow communities to rebuild in a way that will make residents safer in the face of future natural disasters.
For the most part, money for projects to minimize damage or promote preparedness is much harder to come by than money for relief efforts after a disaster, especially in developing countries.
Tearfund, a relief charity in Britain, reports a particularly vivid example in a recent paper called “One Disaster Too Many.”
Anticipating major flooding in its rainy season, the government of Mozambique in 2000 appealed to other countries and international institutions like the World Bank for $2.7-million to prepare for the impending emergency, and received less than half that amount, according to the report. But after the floods hit, the country received more than $100-million in emergency aid, and governments provided an additional $450-million for long-term rebuilding.
Problems of Urbanization
Taking steps to minimize the damage caused by disasters is going to become even more important, because one of the effects of rapid urbanization in developing countries has been to make natural disasters more deadly.
As more rural residents move to urban centers, cities are building in regions that are susceptible to landslides, on steep slopes, and on ground that shakes more during earthquakes, says Brian E. Tucker, president of GeoHazards International, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, Calif., that helps developing countries minimize the destructiveness of earthquakes and other natural disasters.
“These areas have been recognized as being undesirable, and so the older settlements avoided them,” says Mr. Tucker. “But then when the huge urbanization started taking place, newer and poorer residents found these places unoccupied.”
GeoHazards has done a study that illustrates the potential human cost of such land-use decisions.
Large earthquakes above 8.0 on the Richter scale struck northeastern India in 1897 and 1950, says Mr. Tucker. In each case, about 1,500 people were killed. The organization’s analysis of the region today estimates that a similar quake would kill approximately 45,000 people — a thirtyfold increase, even though the region’s population has only tripled since 1950.
The difference, says Mr. Tucker, is that in the previous disasters, people in the area were likely to live in one-story bamboo houses. Now they are likely to live in multiple-story concrete buildings that have not been professionally engineered, and are frequently built on steep slopes.
Says Mr. Tucker: “When bamboo one-story shacks get shaken, they don’t kill many people. But a five-story, concrete building that wasn’t well built kills 10 times more efficiently.”
