Red Cross Blogs

Order amidst chaos in Haiti and Chile

By Sarah Oughton
March 5, 2010 at 6:11 pm

I was at a dinner party in Copenhagen when I heard about the earthquake in Chile. After my initial disbelief and shock that another huge disaster was happening so soon after Haiti I  immediately wanted to jump on a computer and do my job, which involves writing all the copy for our website when we launch an appeal.

But I was on holiday and it would have been a bit rude to abandon my friend’s party and despite my itching fingers I knew my colleagues would have the appeal covered.

Instead, I stayed and enjoyed my dinner and fielded a whole host of questions from my friends about how the Red Cross works. One of them had donated to the Red Cross after the Haiti quake and she wanted to find out what I knew about the situation and how effective I thought the Red Cross was in responding to disasters.

So – and feel free to accuse me of having fallen for the party line pretty much hook, line and sinker here – I set about explaining that what makes the Red Cross really unique when it comes to responding to disasters is that it is the biggest humanitarian organisation in the world with a Red Cross National Society in 186 countries. And since there are 196 countries in the world it means there’s rarely going to be a disaster where the Red Cross is not already present and able to respond. Call me a Red Cross geek, but I’m pretty impressed by that.

So it’s not surprising that, in Haiti, it was stunned local Red Cross workers who were some of the first to get the message out.

When I got to the office the morning after the quake, I already had emails with reports from Red Cross people in Port-au-Prince. And throughout the day the picture began to unfold. They said that amid crying and wailing, people were spending the night outside, frightened of further aftershocks. But even as they comforted people in the streets and treated the injured, it was clear they knew surviving the quake would be just the beginning of the ordeal. Their message was clear: we need help, send everything you’ve got.

We’ve all seen the extensive media coverage of this catastrophic disaster – a city completely decimated and millions of lives devastated. International assistance has poured into Port-au-Prince, but a few reports have implied that the response is chaotic with aid agencies being competitive and uncoordinated.

And it’s true that it is a crazy chaotic situation. But there are two sides to every story.

What I want to explain is that amidst the chaos there is in fact a systematic approach to provide the most effective and timely help possible.

There are more than 700 aid agencies currently working in Haiti, and to ensure the operation is as effective as possible, the United Nations is co-ordinating the response through its ‘cluster system’.

This works by bringing agencies into a ‘cluster’ according to the sector in which they specialise. For example, the World Health Organisation co-ordinates agencies specialising in health and the World Food Programme leads on logistics. The only cluster not co-ordinated by a UN organisation is shelter, which is led by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Each cluster of agencies works to ensure efforts are not being duplicated and gaps are being filled. Unicef – who leads on water, sanitation and hygiene – has brought together the main agencies working in this field and divided up Port-au-Prince. Each district is assigned an aid agency lead, who co-ordinates the response in that area.

I know there are some frustrations that aid isn’t getting out to everyone fast enough and that’s understandable, but disasters on this scale can’t be sorted out within a few weeks. What’s important initially is search and rescue, providing medical aid then basic food and water – in that order.

And as I explained at the dinner party last weekend, I think search and rescue teams did a good job and it’s only after this that the pressing needs of helping people restart household living can be started, so people can cook their own food and have a tarpaulin to rig up shelter. It’s all important but it comes next.

Right now, we are focusing on sanitation and shelter. We need to innovate to meet the huge needs. Water and sanitation teams are currently doing a phenomenal job and the Red Cross is now distributing clean drinking water to 320,000 people a day. We have also distributed shelter materials to thousands of people.

The rainy season has already started and the hurricane season is due in a couple of months. Sanitation conditions are a high concern. With rain and poor sanitation there’s a very real risk of cholera, diarrhoea and malarial increase.

Having blurted all this out over dinner, I eventually shut up realising I may have ‘over-shared’.

But then one of my friends piped up with another question, ‘But what about Chile? If there are all these needs in Haiti what will happen to the people in Chile?’

It’s true that there is a massive response in Haiti with more than 600 Red Cross workers. But as a global organisation we still have many more resources to draw on to help people in Chile.

Whenever a natural disaster happens, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies co-ordinates the emergency response of all 186 Red Cross National Societies from around the world.

I know that many of the Red Cross National Societies in Latin America have already offered assistance and the Spanish Red Cross has deployed its basic health care unit. You can find out more on the Federation’s website.

You can also donate to our appeal for Chile on our website.

Images © Claudia Janke/BRC

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Tags: aid, Chile, clusters, co-ordination, disaster, earthquake, emergency aid, Haiti, shelter, UN, water and sanitation

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Emergencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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