… and so too should anti-abortion activists, environmentalists, political activists, Christians, and all other groups. The United States is founded on the belief that all men [women and children] are created equal and have the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have to work together to protect these rights, protect our neighbors, and build the country that we want to live in. Can you imagine the shame of knowing that a neighbor had imprisoned women in his house for years and you did nothing to help? That your talk encouraged someone to open fire on a health center that offered abortions? Or that you had a friend who became such an extremists that he shot innocent people in the name of your religion? Are we not our brother's keeper?
Daniel O’Neil
thoughts and reflections
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What would I do if I was in charge of the American Red Cross?
After I published my post last week on the American Red Cross (ARC), a few people have asked me what I would do if put in charge of it. Given all of the bad publicity that they have generated with their response to each major disaster, they certainly need to change their approach and to rebuild trust. The ARC plays a critical role in disaster response. They have an incredible ability to raise funds and are part of a broad international organization that has branches in nearly every country. They are perfectly placed to provide leadership on disasters all over the world.
So how do they pull themselves out of their deep hole and reestablish their leadership? I would suggest focusing on the following three areas:
- Figure out what they are best in the world at doing and focus on it: The ARC seems to try to be all things to all people. They provide emergency kits, build shelters, feed people, finance grants, rebuild communities, and on and on. Sometimes they work through the local Red Cross, sometimes they set up their own organization and work around the local partner. Instead, I would have the ARC keep only a small number of high level experts who would implement only through the local Red Crosses and other partner organizations. The role of the ARC team members would be similar to the role of the OFDA staff. They would provide technical assistance to their partners and review grant requests. By being in the field and focused on implementation, they could help their partners be flexible in their approach. Given that the ARC is an NGO, they ought to be the most flexible of the funding organizations. By having highly trained people in the field, these experts could be trusted to guide the funding decisions.
- Embrace Radical Transparency: Since the ARC will be subcontracting out most of the work, it will be easier for them to be very transparent. Their management costs should be around 10-20% of the donations that they receive. This would cover all of their home office costs and the costs for their field teams. The rest would be given out in grants. They can require that all funded proposals are published and have an open database that tracks the results. Financial data should only be published at the line item level (showing for example how much goes into all salaries but not showing how much an individual is paid). In this way, it will be clear not only what the ARC is doing but how their money is spread around. After all, the money being spent isn’t really the ARC’s money—it is money donated through the ARC to help the disaster victims. By having the funded proposals published, other organizations can see what is being done and better understand both how to coordinate with the implementer and how to learn from the funded approaches. This would encourage learning by doing and improve the quality of proposals over time.
- Publish Evaluations Consistently: Because the ARC is focused on being the best in the world at what they do and on being radically transparent, it only makes sense that they conduct thorough evaluations and publish the results. Yes, these will highlight mistakes and shortcomings and will sometimes be embarrassing both for the ARC and for their partners. Implementing projects in a disaster or post-disaster environment is tough. You have to move fast which means making mistakes. But we shouldn’t be repeating the same mistakes. If the ARC committed to conducting thorough evaluations and publishing the results, the ARC could help share best practices and prevent repeated mistakes. Besides, as most politicians have learned, the best way to avoid a public scandal is to own up to your shortcomings.
The ARC ought to be a very powerful force for good and a key actor in every major disaster. Instead, their brand seems to be continually weakening. Each scandal hurts not only the ARC but every NGO who ends up painted with the same brush.
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If only the American Red Cross was as efficient as the US Government…
Inspectors assessing the earthquake damage in a house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Propublica and NPR have done an admirable job of trying to figure out what the American Red Cross (ARC) has done with the nearly half a billion dollars that they raised for the Haiti earthquake. However, I fear that Senator Charles Grassley will lead this in the wrong direction. The ARC should be encouraged to give out the money that it raises rather than trying to do it all themselves.
As we’ve seen with nearly every disaster, the ARC does a great job of raising money and a lousy job of using it. Even in domestic disasters like Katrina or Sandy, the ARC seems poor at delivering results. Imagine how much harder it is to set up a large organization in a foreign country in the middle of a disaster response. It is just a recipe for failure.
Instead, the ARC should follow the example of the US Government’s disaster response agency: the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). As soon as a disaster hits, OFDA sends a small team of experts to help assess the situation and to review funding requests. They focus on working with organizations that are already on the ground with a solid track record of success. Because they are on the ground, they understand the situation and can work with their grantees to ensure that proposals make sense. The field team is senior enough that they can frequently review proposals on the spot.
This model allows OFDA to quickly get funds injected into where they are needed the most. They keep their overhead low by focusing on channeling money to those who can use it effectively. Their field teams are able to work with their partners to keep projects moving. By channeling money through other organizations, they build local capacity and make it easy to wrap up their work as quickly as possible.
The ARC’s problem is that it establishes a large bureaucracy that is unable to implement projects directly and very slow to issue subgrants. I did succeed in getting a large grant funded through the ARC, but it took nearly 10 months to get it worked out. Once awarded, we were micromanaged from beginning to end. I have worked with funding from a wide range of donors and found the ARC to be the most difficult. We did succeed in repairing 4,000 houses for the ARC and the work was of higher quality than what he had done for OFDA and others, but it was a soul-sucking process that left all of us exhausted.
I would love to be able to support the American Red Cross. With their incredible name recognition, they have enormous potential to help. Instead, their repeated and very public failures make it that much harder for everybody else to raise money and help out.
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Why is the Ebola Response considered a success and the Haiti Earthquake Response considered a failure?
The International Response to the Ebola Outbreak was a huge success. Back in September, it seemed as if the Ebola outbreak was spinning out of control. When the death toll didn't seem high enough, the stories became that the toll was under reported and stories that the outbreak could plunge Liberia back into civil war.Remember the September 23 New York Times headline: Ebola Cases Could Reach 1.4 Million in Four Months, CDC Estimates?
Instead, the number of new cases began to decline in late November. By late December, they had slowed to a trickle. Liberia has only had 12 cases in the last 21 days. Guinea and Sierra Leone are down to less than 200 new cases a week. The total case load will likely not exceed 25,000. This dramatic turnaround was a direct result of the strong international response.
Three activities were key to stopping the spread of the Ebola:
- Community Awareness: Ebola was spread through contact with the bodies of those that it had killed or were dying. Funeral rites had to change. People had to be convinced to give their loved ones over to foreign doctors draped in protective gear. Physical contact had to be limited. Changing attitudes is hard, but this was key to slowing the spread of Ebola. Some organizations took this on as a primary mission through radio messages and posters that still blanked Liberia. Others added this component to their work such as distributing Ebola awareness information to the farmers with whom they work.
- Safe Burials: An Ebola victim is hardly contagious until he is so sick that he can hardly move. His body remains highly contagious long after he has died. Touching the body of an Ebola victim is one of the easiest ways to contract Ebola. Traditionally, mourners would hug the corpse of their loved one to say goodbye. Stopping that practice was a key component of the community awareness. But bodies still had to be disposed of. In Liberia, the US government funded a large program to provide safe burials for all Ebola victims. This was very dangerous work and done very effectively by Global Communities. It is probably the reason that Ebola disappeared first in Liberia even though it had been hit the hardest.
- Constructing the Ebola Treatment Units: As the Ebola outbreak was growing, there was not enough room to treat the victims. The few treatment units were overwhelmed and the centers were forced to turn away people who were clearly very sick. Building more treatment units became an international priority. Once there were enough treatment units to house those who needed care, it was possible to isolate those sick with Ebola and prevent them from contaminating others. It also became easier to trace their contacts and seek out others that might become sick.
I believe that a decade from now, we will talk about the Ebola response as one of the great victories of foreign assistance. The international response was critical in turning the tide on the epidemic. Those people who went to Liberia to help and those who stayed in country are the heroes that saved West Africa and the rest of the world from a terrible disease.
The response to the Haiti Earthquake was also a great success and yet is frequently portrayed as a failure. Five years after the earthquake, Haiti’s economy is stronger than it has been in decades. There is more electricity, government services function better, and there are even twice as many international-standard hotel rooms. Does the International Community not get any credit for helping to rebuild Haiti?
In both cases, there was great chaos in the response. In Haiti, one of the biggest wastes of money was building camps and temporary shelters that ended up housing people who had never lost their home in the first place and became very difficult to close. In Liberia, one of the biggest wastes was the construction of the Ebola Treatment Units—although desperately needed in the beginning, construction of new ones continued long after the need for the units had disappeared. There were still units being built in January when there were only a handful of cases of Ebola. In both cases, once a need is identified and projects are funded, it is very hard to redirect that funding.
I loved that Time magazine named the Ebola Fighters as Person of the Year for 2014. I think that those who responded to the Haiti earthquake and those who donated to support it deserved the same honor in 2010.
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Proudly Passionate at 50
Carolle’s present for my 50th birthday was to take me to see Queen perform. Freddy Mercury is gone and instead they have a young replacement, Adam Lambert. It was great fun to hear the song that I’ve known since high school and to be with a crowd of thousands cheering and singing along. What made the concert special was that Adam Lambert seemed to be genuinely happy to be performing and honored to be singing with Queen. The guitarist, Brian May, has been playing and singing the same songs for 30 years and still seemed happy to be on stage. Having completed my first 50 year,, that is the attitude that I hope to keep—proudly passionate for the life I lead and the work that I do.
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Getting Lucky in Bangladesh
Here in Bangladesh you have been very lucky. It has been two hundred years since your last major earthquake. But for how long will your luck last? With its proximity to an active fault, very weak soils, dense population, and poor controls on construction, the next earthquake will be a terrible disaster.
I repeated these lines over and over while working our booth at a safety conference for factory owners in Bangladesh. Dhaka is a scary place for earthquakes. Very little of the construction is designed to resist even a small earthquake. The government’s own reports highlight the risk—with a 6.0 earthquake (10 times weaker than the 2010 Haiti earthquake), 70% of the buildings will be badly damaged including the hospitals and other emergency facilities. Roads and rail lines would be damaged. The airport would be closed. Hundreds of thousands of people could die.
This was my first visit to Dhaka. I spent five days talking with people at the expo, visiting factories, and driving around the city. I came away with very mixed feelings and a deep fascination for the country.
Having spent so much of my time in Haiti, I naturally found myself comparing Dhaka and Port-au-Prince. Both are poor cities with weak infrastructure and both are struggling to grow and modernize. Dhaka is a dramatically bigger city with bigger assets and much bigger problems. Traffic has been Dhaka’s bane for many years. From early in the morning until late at night, traffic crawls through the city. It can take three hours to get from one part of the city to another. Pollution is another bad problem—a heavy haze that hangs over the city.
At the same time, the city is growing well. A handful of overpasses are being built. There are beautiful new buildings. I felt a strong sense of optimism and hope—that Bangladesh was moving forward. The quality of the buildings is also improving. Many of the new buildings appeared to be well built. Perhaps if Bangladesh can remain lucky for another 50 years, then perhaps be ready for the next earthquake.
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Lying wasn’t Greg Mortenson’s biggest sin
On Tuesday, Greg Mortenson reappeared after the scandal surrounding his books and charity to apologize for lying. “I stand by the stories. The stories happened, but … not in the sequence or the timing,” Mortenson told Brokaw. If his only fault was rearranging the facts, then I would never have cared. After all, All Marketers are Liars Tell Stories.I don't mind that he changed the truth around a bit to make a good story.
What really upset me was finding out that he didn't run a charity focused on building schools in Afghanistan. Instead he ran a self-promotion company. Jon Krakauer's book, Three Cups of Deceit, was more damning of how poorly run the Central Asia Institute was than of the poor story telling. He showed how the Central Asia Institute seemed to exist more to promote and purchase Greg's book than to build schools. Rather than Greg's book being a source of income for the Institute, a large portion of the Institute's budget went to funding Greg's book tour and purchasing, at full market price, Greg's books. Many of the schools that were built weren't even being used.
As Seth tells in All Marketers are Liars, everyone tells stories that have shades of untruth to them. Rearranging the facts to make a better story is fine as long as the central story is true. The real lie that Greg Mortenson told was claiming that he was trying to improve education in Afghanistan. Instead, he was just trying to get rich. This is why the Central Asia Institute has lost nearly all of its funding.
By contrast, Kiva managed to survive largely unscathed when its great untruth was exposed. Kiva claims to allow people to lend directly to small businesses in poor countries. Their website is full of stories of micro-entrepreneurs who need a little cash to grow their business. You can pick someone with a compelling story, lend them money, and when the loan is repaid so are you. It seems like a fun, easy way to help out. Except it doesn't work that way. Back in 2009, David Roodman showed that most entrepreneurs are funded well before their page even appears on the Kiva website. If the entrepreneur defaults on a loan, the intermediary organization that facilitates the loan repays it. There really isn't any link between the donor and the entrepreneur.
Big scandal, right? No. Kiva quickly admitted that this was indeed the case and that it was a matter of logistics. The entrepreneur needed the cash quickly. It didn't make sense to make them wait for funding to come (or not come). Yes, the intermediary organziations would repay loans but that was to prevent occasional defaults from disqualifying them from managing future loans. Kiva was in the business of funding micro entrepreneurs, just not quite how they had originally described it. So Kiva is going strong while the Central Asia Institute is nearly closed.
We all tell stories and no story is ever completely true. If the Central Asia Institute was doing great work in Afghanistan as Kiva is doing with microfinance, I would have easily forgiven Greg for playing with his facts. Instead, I feel as if his whole story was just a con.
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The Haiti Earthquake Damage Assessment Program
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, it seemed as
if the city of Port-au-Prince had been completely destroyed. There was talk of
relocating the capital or of bulldozing large swaths to make way for new
construction. As the rubble began to be cleared, it became clear that for each
building that was severely damaged, there was another with only slight damage
and a third that was basically untouched.I brought Dr. Kit Miyamoto of Miyamoto International,
one of the top seismic engineering companies in the world, to Haiti a week
after the earthquake to help with the early response. Initially Kit focused on
the main government buildings including the National Palace and the different
Ministry offices as well as the main private sector buildings including the
hotels and factories. PADF had Kit train two engineers to evaluate the houses
used by all of PADF’s staff in an effort to help them to rebuild. As we began
doing these assessments, it became clear that many people were sleeping under
tarps not because their house was actually unsafe, but because they were afraid
that it was. We realized that we could get large numbers of people out of camps
and tents and back into their homes if we could convince them that their house
was safe.We had been working closely with the
Ministry of Public Works (known by its French Acronym of MTPTC) and proposed to
them the possibility of conducting a detailed assessment of the buildings that
had been impacted by the earthquake. The Ministry of Public Works embraced the
idea. Miyamoto brought in the United Nations Operations (UNOPS) with funding
from the World Bank, and PADF obtained funding from the United States Office of
Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA—part of the United States Agency for
International Development—USAID).UNOPS obtained their funding first and set up the basic
operations. They established the basic infrastructure that was used throughout
the program including the use of GPS-enabled PDAs as data collectors and the
central database.Miyamoto developed a slightly modified version of the ATC20
form, the standard form used in California to rapidly assess earthquake damage,
for use in Haiti. They then began training Haitian engineers to conduct the
evaluation. The trained engineers were equipped with a PDA and sent in groups
to completely canvas a neighborhood. At each structure, the engineer would use
the PDA to take a picture of the building and the GPS coordinates. They then
inspected the building, going through every room, and completed a short
questionnaire on the building directly on the PDA. At the end of the
inspection, each building was spray-painted with a highly visible tag that
indicated whether the building was safe for use (“green-tagged”), damaged, but
stable (“yellow-tagged”) or unstable (“red tagged”). Each engineer was able to
inspect an average of 10 structures a day. At the end of each day, the data was
downloaded directly into the central database.Initially, owners were reluctant to allow the engineers into
their homes and were suspicious of the program. PADF worked closely with its
partners in the poor urban areas and had to convince the people in their
neighborhoods to trust in the program. As the program grew and became better
known, owners began seeking out the engineers and asking for advice.Another important development as the program progressed was
that the Haitian inspectors became very familiar with the different types of
damage caused by the earthquake and the importance of better construction
techniques.Through this program, over 400,000 structures were
tagged—nearly every building in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area that was
impacted by the earthquake. The assessment showed that 53% of the houses were
safe for use (green-tagged), 26% needed minor repairs to be made useable
(yellow), and only 24% were unstable and needed either major repairs or to be
demolished and rebuilt (red).One of the striking points that the assessment brought to
light was how widespread the damage was. Rather than having a core area of red
tagged houses surrounded by rings of yellow tagged and then green tagged
houses, nearly every neighborhood is a mixture of green, yellow, and red tagged
buildings. Furthermore, through an analysis of the levels of damage suffered by
the different types of buildings, we found that residential buildings, schools,
and churches were the hardest hit and commercial buildings fared best.The final map showing the distribution of the green, yellow, and red tagged houses.
Taken together, these points reinforce the conclusion that
the poor quality of construction in Haiti was the main cause of the widespread
building failures.The most striking impact of the assessment was its role in
helping people to return to their green-tagged homes. The inspectors reported
that before the assessment, roughly half of the houses that became green-tagged
had been occupied. After the house was green-tagged, occupancy jumped to 80%
with most unoccupied houses being in neighborhoods that had predominantly
yellow and red tagged houses. -
The Our Border Program
From 2003 through 2010, I directed a program for the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) to improve
cross-border cooperation and trade in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands. It was a facinating experience as we worked on issues ranging from cross-border perceptions to cattle rustling to trade policy.We identified four problems as the most significant challenges for the borderlands
- Mutual
mistrust, misunderstandings, and the language barrier have caused both
countries to ignore cross-border opportunities and treat their border region as
if it were the end of the world rather than an important commercial crossroads,
which has in turn hampered development in the borderlands. - The
lack of clearly defined rules of interaction and effective mechanisms for
resolving cross-border problems are the greatest sources of conflict in the
borderlands. Fees for crossing the border, customs, and market space rentals
are not posted, encouraging arbitrary application. Because the enforcement of these
fees is so inconsistent and because of the innate mistrust between the two
sides, the person paying the fees assumes the worst of the person collecting
the fees. The arbitrary enforcement of visa requirements and random roundups of
undocumented workers are other significant sources of conflict. - Poor
physical and legal infrastructures are the greatest hurdles to increasing
cross-border trade and production in the borderlands. Although Haiti and the
Dominican Republic are one another’s second largest market for agricultural and
nationally manufactured goods, access roads to the border are in bad condition,
both countries’ customs and inspection facilities are terribly outdated, and
neither country has laws that facilitate imports across the border. - Poverty
and the consumption of natural resources are underlying sources of conflict
between the two countries in general. Dominicans are out-migrating from the
borderlands due to the lack of economic opportunities, while Haitians are
moving from other areas of Haiti to the border region and migrating across the
border.
The most successful efforts to resolve these problems came from initiatives that focused on technical issues and began with small
successes and built towards the bigger problems. For example, PAHO helped the
Ministries of Health to develop a system whereby a tuberculosis patient’s
treatment card was recognized in both countries. This allowed the patient to
continue receiving care and to ensure that the disease did not relapse despite
travelling across the border.This was the key to the success of the PADF’s
cross-border project. They worked with local leaders in both countries to
identify specific local problems and to reach across to their cross-border
neighbors to resolve it. A good example was cattle rustling. When the PADF
began working with the ranchers, the Dominicans complained that Haitians were
stealing their cows and Haitians pointed their fingers at the Dominicans. When the
OAS/PADF brought the two sides together to discuss this issue, the ranchers
came to realize that the cattle rustlers were actually a binational gang. Dominican
rustlers would steal cattle from the Dominican ranchers and then sell them to
Haitians rustlers who would smuggle the cattle across the border. Similarly,
rustling of Haitian cattle was done by Haitians who sold the cattle to
Dominicans. Once the Haitian and Dominican rangers and local authorities began
cooperating, they were able to dramatically reduce the cattle rustling.In the final year of the program, we published a series of papers to document our understanding of the borderlands. The most important of these publications are the following:
- The Haitian-Dominican Border in the Post-Earthquake Era: This report summerized all of our findings and was published in English, French, and Spanish.
- Sources of Conflict along and across the Haitian – Dominican border (Dr. Gerald Murray): In this study, Dr. Murray found that economic inequalities rather than cultural differences were the main source of conflict along and across the border.
- Dominican-Haitian Racial and Ethnic
Perceptions and Sentiments:Mutual adaptations,
mutual tensions, mutual anxieties (Dr. Gerald Murray): This study was done in parallel to the study on conflicts and focused on how Dominicans and Haitians view each other. He found that skin color was not a significant issue.
- Mutual
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Still Looking for a Good Book on the Haiti Earthquake
I seek out books on the Haiti earthquake in the hopes of
finding one that captures what I experienced and perhaps helps me to understand
it better. Instead, all of the books seem to describe a different event. Like
the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, one author talks
about the leg and another about the trunk. Perhaps all I know is the tail.I had high hopes for two books that just came out: Jonathon
Katz’ The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
and Amy Wilentz’ Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti. Each book captured
part of what I experienced, but they each described a world that I didn’t know.
Jonathon Katz was an AP reporter that had lived in Haiti for
a couple of years before the earthquake. His account of the actual earthquake
and the events of that night were the most powerful part of the book. I found
it to be especially spooky because Carolle and I had lived and been married in
the house that collapsed under him. I had hoped that his book would show a
strong understanding of Haiti and how the events unfolded. The best parts of
the book were his description of the night of the earthquake and then his quest
to find out the UN’s role in introducing cholera. Unfortunately, most of the
rest of the book felt superficial—more of a drive-by viewing of the disaster
response.
Amy Wilentz’ book was the opposite. Whereas Jonathon Katz
tried to tell a straight forward story of the disaster, Amy’s book seems to be
more her grappling with the earthquake and its aftermath. The book reads more
as a collection of thoughts than a coherent story. It is a very personal book
as she openly wrestles with her feelings towards Haiti and journalism—is she
helping Haiti by getting people’s stories out or is this just voyeurism? Her
first book had been on the epic struggle to get rid of Duvalier and of
Aristide’s rise to power. But Aristides’s presidencies were failures and
Duvalier is back in Haiti. Perhaps it wasn’t such an epic time after all. Her
book clearly reflects her personal struggle with the impact that she is having.Both books skewer the disaster response provided by the
international community. The subtitle of Katz’ book nicely sums up his view,
How the International Community Came to Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. Amy
Wilentz wrote “It’s fair to say that one of the biggest issues to rise from the
earthquake’s dust is whether aid agencies and international development
organizations can ever be trusted, either by the victim community or by the
donors who fund them. Are they honest—do they know how to be honest; can they
be honest and survive?” She goes on to complain that aid agencies are not
effective at working themselves out of a job.
Yes, it was confusing and there were some big mistakes made
(the construction of the Corail camp out in the middle of nowhere being
one—providing services in makeshift camps was another). Both lionize Sean Penn
for running a camp as well as the pros. But if the pros are running camps as
well as Sean Penn, doesn’t that mean that the “pros” were doing something
right, too?This is where both she and Jonathon Katz got it wrong. The
earthquake response that I saw was an exhausting slog against incredible
obstacles and through a bizarre maze. Although some of the early journalists
seemed to have believed that Port-au-Prince had been completely destroyed, that
was never true. Half of all the buildings in Port-au-Prince were not
significantly damaged. Although President Preval’s government seemed to
disappear in the first days after the earthquake, it soon reasserted
itself.The biggest complaint against the work that the NGOs did is
that we did not build a shiny new Haiti from the rubble of the earthquake. Yet
that was never our mandate. As weak as the Haitian government was, it was still
the national government. It was the only institution that could have declared
eminent domain to seize land to create camps, widen streets, or enforce a new
city wide master plan. Neither the NGOs nor the United Nations had this
authority. When the government was unwilling to take these steps, no one could.
But what’s the point in bashing the Preval Government? Its weaknesses were
quite well known and documented.I ran the earthquake response for the Pan American Development Foundation, one of the larger NGOs, from the
day after the earthquake until this past January. Of course I made mistakes—we
were trying to move as fast as we could in a very complex environment and using
whatever resources we could find. We passed out food and other goods that had
been collected in the States to help the poor Haitians. I would much rather
have received cash, but our local partners were happy to receive whatever we
could give them. I would much rather have purchased local rice rather than
receiving donations of fortified rice, but the imported rice was free and we
didn’t have much cash. Our first attempt at home repair in the Jacmel area fell
flat—we had budgeted too little money and the repairs were too isolated.We also had huge successes. We helped evaluate the safety of
over 400,000 structures throughout the earthquake impacted area. This gave
hundreds of thousands of people the confidence to return to their safe house
and provided a blueprint for the repairs that were needed. We trained hundreds
of engineers, masons, and contractors in improved construction techniques and
used them to repair 10,000 houses. We helped neighborhood committees come
together to determine how they wanted their neighborhood rebuilt. We helped scores of microentrepreneurs to
start small businesses.
In Dr. Farmer’s earthquake book, Haiti After the Earthquake
, he
seemed to believe that his organization was the only one to do a good job. I’ll
bet a lot of us feel this way. My organization did a great job. It’s too bad
that all the other organizations couldn’t do as well. Naturally some organizations
did better than others. Unfortunately, most people who donated, donated
blindly. They gave to the Red Cross because they always give to the Red Cross,
even though the Red Cross’ reputation as a slow bureaucracy is documented after
every disaster. They gave to Wyclef Jean because he is a famous Haitian, not
because they thought that he had a professional organization behind him. I wish
that more of the funds had gone to PADF and other organizations that were well
established in Haiti, but I thank God that people did give.Perhaps someday I’ll find a book that tells the story of the
earthquake as I saw it—the story of a hard struggle to have the greatest
possible impact as quickly as possible in an incredibly complex situation.Our work wasn't perfect, but it was the best that we could possibly do and Haiti is better off for it..
