Many responding to Haiti’s most recent disaster are seeing a new level of coordination among outside aid groups, demonstrating how much was learned from the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and the widely panned international response.
After that quake, which killed more than 200,000 people, billions of dollars and tons of supplies made it into Haiti, yet many have criticized the effort as a logistical nightmare, a monumental waste of resources and cautionary tale about over-reliance on international aid.
According to some stakeholders in Georgia, it seems so far that the response to the Aug. 14 quake that killed more than 2,200 people, coming just a month after Haiti’s president was assassinated, reflects lessons taken from the earlier debacle, especially in the way that the Haitian government has stepped up.
Ken Keen, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who led U.S. Southern Command’s joint task force response after the 2010 earthquake, traveled during the last week of August to the country again, this time as a civilian.
Mr. Keen, now associate dean of leadership at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, said there was a “heightened awareness” about the need to get the aid equation right this time, with better targeting and less duplication.
He traveled with actor Sean Penn’s organization, Community Organized Relief Effort, or CORE, which has been present in the country since 2010. The group focused on delivering meals and clearing rubble in some very remote areas near the epicenter on the southwestern peninsula that had been cut off from larger settlements as roads and bridges were knocked out. Churches and schools that would normally have been places of refuge were also destroyed. Gang activity made reaching the needy a risky proposition for aid workers.
“People are sort of screaming as loud as they can for assistance in areas we are helping, and some of them haven’t gotten any aid yet,” Mr. Keen said Aug. 31.
CORE and World Central Kitchen, which provided meals, insisted on letting local leaders take charge, and bringing in day laborers who would get paid for their relief work rather than outside teams, Mr. Keen said, a move he saw as indicative of a broader change.
He got more proof during a later meeting with Jerry Chandler, who is heading up the Haitian civil protection directorate and coordinating a response that many thought would suffer due to the country’s ongoing political strife.
Mr. Keen was impressed with “his decisiveness and awareness of what the needs were on the ground. I walked away with a sense that he felt empowered to do what is necessary, working with those in the international community who were responding and helping with the overall leadership. I didn’t always feel that in 2010, quite frankly.”
Henri Ford, a Haitian-American doctor and the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, said he has also seen a pronounced leadership shift: Acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon, played a key role in the 2010 response as chief of staff at the health ministry. Mr. Henry has helped orchestrate a truce with the powerful gangs that control many neighborhoods.
“This is not news for him,” Dr. Ford said on a call with the World Affairs Council of Atlanta Aug. 26. “For now, we have seen a different level of competency from the Haitian government, and that is encouraging.”
He added that NGOs are letting their egos take a backseat as they allow the government to take the lead, a welcome change from 2010.
“What I have seen is a willingness for people to truly cooperate this time. It’s no longer NGOs trying complete for attention and recognition” — or people parachuting in and potentially making the problem worse, Dr. Ford said.
See the full World Affairs Council of Atlanta discussion here:
MAP International has recognized the same trend. Even before the earthquake hit, the Brunswick, Ga.-based organization had sent 130 shipments including $170 million worth of medicines and supplies to Haiti in the most recent fiscal year alone, said Jason Elliott, director of emergency response.
Many of MAP’s ongoing partners started sending updates soon after the quake, asking for some specific items that could not have been conceived of when making orders for the considerable “pre-positioning” they had done in advance of hurricane season.
“When we start getting text and calls last Saturday, after the eequahtquka, we had partners on the ground that were actually getting us updates, letting us know, ‘We’re responding.’”
Hope for Haiti had been working in Les Cayes, the nearest major city; Food for the Poor was able to get trucks past gangs, and World Hope moved water with the help of military flights and other donated air lift. MAP itself has sent disaster kits filled with first aid and hygiene items.
Nick Kaufman, who is managing the Haiti response for USAID, said 130,000 homes look to have been destroyed, some in a “pancake situation” and others cracked substantially. The damage is still being assessed as the effort moves from a rescue mission to one of relief. USAID is working to provide food, plastic sheeting for shelter, clean water and sanitation and more.
“We are working to do this jointly with the Haitian government, which are really leading and coordinating the overall international and national response efforts” with assistance from the United Nations and other actors, he said.
Asked how the Haitian diaspora can help, he pointed to a USAID clearinghouse for information on disaster relief, the Center for International Disaster Information, which helps the public and the diaspora find reputable nonprofits and ways to engage. The response to this quake, he said, should be anything but shutting down.
“We need to harness that energy and focus it, and avoid causing a logjam or chaos, flooding the Port-au-Prince airport or flooding Les Cayes with things that aren’t needed or are a mismatch for the essential lifesaving needs on the ground,” Mr. Kaufman said.
Still, consulates in Atlanta are coordinating shipments of supplies in response to a call from their Haitian counterpart.
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Atlanta, which represents Taiwan, partnered with the Global Federation of Chinese Businesswomen’s local chapter to send a shipment of goods on the organization’s fourth anniversary. (Haiti is one of Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic allies.)
Barbados Honorary Consul David Cutting brought a donation of supplies, while Israel’s Consulate General, represented by Anat Sultan-Dadon, filled the back of a truck with boxes marked with hearts emblazoned with the Israeli and Haitian flags.
Gov. Brian Kemp sent a condolence letter Aug. 16, while Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms did the same on Aug. 20, according to the Haitian consulate’s Facebook page.
Mr. Henri, the Miami medical school dean, said those who work in Haiti are continually impressed by how Haitians continue to show remarkable resiliency in the face of a procession of unspeakable tragedies.
“Without question, we have seen calamity upon calamity, disasters upon disaster. That’s just the natural history of the Haitian people, but what inspires me is the fact that we as a people are resilient, even in the face of the worst disasters,” he said. “The hope of the Haitian people is absolutely unflappable, and this is why I know that everything we are doing right now eventually will lead to something positive, because we never give up hope.”
Visit the Haitian Consulate General’s Facebook page here.