The Chaos of Relief

Some signs of improvement today....the makeshift emergency hospital at the UN compound finally shifted to a proper medical facility where proper hygiene and treatment could be assured. Kids in their ad hoc outdoor settlements ate MREs (meals ready to eat) then slid down a hillside on the plastic trays. We delivered medical supplies to refugees in the Dominican Republic and prepared to receive large quantities of donated relief materials in Port-au-Prince...hopefully the terrible supply chain bottlenecks ease in the coming hours and days. The shock is wearing off and some semblance of normal street life has returned as a few businesses reopen, tentatively. But vast swaths of the population continue to sleep in the open air, on streets and in any field where they can stake a claim. The grief over what has happened here has only just begun.

We see an enormous amount of generosity flowing into the country. The increasingly interconnected and aware citizens of the world are quite amazing in their reaction to disasters. The media loves a good emergency...cameras are everywhere. It supplies a feast of emotional imagery and fascinating stories of tragedy and survival. If it stopped there, at stories, we could fault humanity for crass voyeurism or addiction to an emotional fix. But the reaction to what people have seen in the news about Haiti, and so many disasters, has revealed quite wonderful things about human nature -- that people want to take action to help care for their brothers and sisters, suffering far away in an unknown land.

I'm sitting in the middle of the result of all this caring. Over the years, countless institutions and organizations, some nonprofit, some for profit, have emerged to channel the generosity of the world into responses to emergencies. They scramble for attention and peddle their approaches, trying to look unique but fitting into the consensus on how things are done -- even as 'creativity' and 'innovation' are officially encouraged. It's an alphabet soup of acronyms and clever names, logos, and branding. And lots of aggressive, if charming and fun, people.

Relief work helps people in desperate situations -- it's a far cry from the days when whole populations suffered alone, without attention. However, my feeling in observing the ant farm of relief, all moving around chaotically yet somehow achieving common ends, is that the results aren't good enough. Better leadership and true coordination mechanisms need to emerge, and survivors should not be bit players in their own futures. It's insulting and ruinous to their long-term recovery. We all speak that language, but it's just so much easier to get stuff out and design how people should live. But we'll get up tomorrow and talk to Haitians about how they want to live.