Climbing Mountains

I’ve noticed that I always end up with issues if I’m away from home for awhile. Today’s issues are an upset stomach from a great cookout last night at the local project management team’s place here in Montagne Noire and a persistent leak from my bathroom’s toilet which has slowly crept in other people’s sleeping areas. In essence my living situation has started to evolve into The Real World: Haiti. I should have been wary of choosing the room with the great view.

We spent a good deal of time on Monday going over the growth and structure of the new organization chart for the local program and what it means for the current staff and future staff that may come from around the world as well as from Haiti. From my point of view there was nothing shocking or surprising with the new model – I was just surprised to see my name on it. I think the local staff here are still a bit unsure on how this will all play out (which I totally understand) but I hope that over time the outsiders will be eased out and their responsibilities will be passed on to Haitians currently living here or abroad so that they have a full opportunity to be a part of the efforts to rebuild their country. Hopefully this rebuilding will not be like others but it will be a steep climb for all of us. As for me I believe that my role here is on an interim basis but I hope to get some clarity on it soon. I joked with one person after our meeting and told him that if I were to move down here I would need one ticket instead of three (meaning my wife would be more likely to move to Hanover than Haiti.)

Other updates: I was successful in watching the game here on Sunday, my streak of breaking cameras seems to have continued, and I found out Sprint would be happy to give me free wireless calls from Haiti if I owned one of 4 phones they support on their network that will work down here (which I don’t own now.)  

Pwochèn jouk tan…orevwa.

Is it Saturday?

There are no days off after a disaster if you're working on the ground. The only way I would know its Saturday is the lag time in hearing back from folks via email or phone call that normally doesn't happen during the workweek. Today is a good day for me to catch up on messages that came to me while I spend most of the day out in Cabaret.

Cabaret sits about 20 miles north of Port-au-Prince and was originally built as a testament to the will of the Duvalier regime here in Haiti (some maps still show it as Duvalierville - not a good thing for them due to the issues around the last Duvalier in power here.) This community was still reeling from flooding after multiple storms in 2008 when the earthquake hit and damaged more than 9000 homes there. We had a chance to see some of the homes we built there and only some of them sustained damage. All but a few of those were repairable.

 

We met with the local CCPC (civil protection committee) and talked about how we could help there by providing structural engineers (and other engineers that had been properly trained) that could go through homes and tell families whether or not their home was safe to stay in and what kinds of repairs they would need. This would help address the many tents that we saw sitting outside of homes in perfect condition after earthquake. We would also later work on building about 400 transitional homes there.

 

On the way back from Cabaret we hit a massive traffic jam near the airport in the early evening. Despite the traffic we had a chance to joke around with some of the UN, US military, other NGOs, and doctors passing by us since there wasn't much we could do about the cars in front of us. Lesson learned: try to avoid bringing stuff into Port-au-Prince on Friday.

Turning Down the Pressure

It seems like its been a long time since I've written in this space but a lot has happened since my last posting (obviously). I am now sitting in an apartment in Pétionville, just to the east of Port-au-Prince, trying to catch up on things back home as well as evening messages for work.

The irony I noted earlier via Twitter (or an earlier post here) is that I don't necessarily spend time keeping up with some of the news coming out of Haiti and would only know it if I happened to catch it while looking for something else on the Internet or overheard it. I've talked and wrote back to a lot of people that have more language and cultural expertise that could be put t use here that I need to prove myself worthy of the opportunity to be a part of the solution. Maybe I'm just kidding myself though.

It is stunning to see so many people sleeping out on the street here not knowing if there house is safe enough to stay in at night or because they just don't have a house any more. Many people fear that there will be more quakes soon and they could be right on the money with that prediction. I've been working with others here on a big push to get engineers organized to at least be able to give families some sort of assurance on their home so they know what they're dealing with. We hope to bring local and international engineers together soon to start this. That should help lift some of the burden on the caregivers until the rains start.

I've only been to one cluster meeting so far but it seems like the UN cluster system has some distinct advantages over the way we do things in the states. I think one of the good things that can come out of this event is the exposure of the international response arena to our friends in federal government.

I think I'll stop there for now and try to bring you some interesting maps next time. Orevwa.

15 Days in Haiti

I've been getting the usual questions from folks that I know ever since the earthquake happened in Haiti. Are you going down there? Are you working on it? I can usually answer these pretty quickly (#1 -No and #2 - Yes). I have only been on one international trip since I began working in this field (India) and that was right after I moved over to the team exclusively handling disaster response in our organization. I've never shied away from accepting overseas assignments (whether its support or ground work) but I have tried to specialize in domestic work since there was so much potential for our group in doing more in that arena. The rest of my group focuses primarily on international response work so I've been able to wear both hats from time to time.

On Thursday I was asked to make my second trip outside the US. It will be quite different than my trip to India - I have no doubt of that. I was given some latitude to check with my wife before committing to it and I definitely appreciated that since my wife isn't too fond of my extended travels. I know the next few days will be hard for her but I have complete trust in her support and ability to watch our 2 little grown folks while I'm gone.

My assignment on the ground will be working on the logistics side of the response, in particular the transport and distribution of shelter items. I won't be going in alone on this and my involvement in some of the early planning on the stateside piece is helpful as well. Originally this task was going to go to someone else but visa issues have held him up and I'm coming in as a short-term solution. Better to be option B than option D I say.

So what does this mean for this space in the next few weeks? Hard to say. I'd like to think that I can find some time to post daily updates in this space but I expect to be working longer hours (this always seems to happen wherever I travel for work) with limited internet access from time to time. I'm leery of turning this site into a diary of sorts as well (although it can come close to that from time to time depending on the topic I'm dealing with.) Twitter seems like an easier venue for me to deal with right now...but I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of my sleep and sanity to keep this space current too. My final verdict would be to encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site and see what happens. I also hope my 2 or 3 regular readers (if I believe the site statistics) will continue to stop by and hit me with a comment or email...

Haiti Earthquake: Crunching the Numbers

Today is Tuesday, January 25th, 14 days after the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti and sparked a massive disruption in the lives of Haitians in their home nation and abroad. Let's look at few moments to take a look at some of the numbers so far:

• 3,000,000: Estimate of Haitian population affected by the earthquake reported by USAID.
  
• 591: Estimate of makeshift camps in the Port-au-Prince area housing earthquake survivors.
  
• 235,916: Number of Haitians that have left Port-au-Prince since Jan 12 according to the Haitian Government.
• 75,000: Average number of Haitians that moved to Port-au-Prince from rural areas in the last 3 decades prior to the Jan 2010 earthquake.
  
• $29 million: Funds raised by the American Red Cross via text-message gifts (a record).
• 5%: Percentage of Red Cross text-message donors that have opted-in to future messages from the Red Cross.
• 90%: Probability of one or more aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater over the next 26 days according to the United States Geological Survey.

The stories and commentary behind these numbers are more important than the numbers themselves when it comes to finding long-term solutions to Haiti's problems. As events continue to unfold in Haiti it will be interesting to see just how well the government of Haiti, the UN and foreign governments can work together to bring security and aid to the affected communities. Hopefully the ongoing recovery efforts will continue to be covered as vigorously as the first 2 weeks were following the disaster. That being said, there hasn't been much in the news lately about the last tsunami we've seen in the news or the last major earthquake (although to its credit Indonesia has a bit more awareness and resilience for this type of threat.)

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Photo courtesy of du.schultz via Flickr.


Note: Looks like CNN was in a number crunching mood today as well - I guess that's to be expected as we hit the 2 week mark.

Movin' on Down to the East Side

It's a bit of a challenge these days for me to find time to keep up with general news circulating around the Internet but I have noticed some references to a new report released by the Brookings Institute that I think are worthwhile noting here. We'll take a break from the Haiti earthquake coverage here for a moment and spend some time on this topic.

"The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008" highlights trends that  I hope a lot of folks (community development professionals, social service providers, planners, politicians, etc.) have already had a suspicion of or are paying attention to today. If 1/3 of all poor people in the United States live in the suburbs of large metro areas as this report indicates then we need to make sure that our fellow citizens that fall in this category have sufficient access to the things they need to help them break the poverty cycle regardless of where they live. That means they need low-cost but extensive transportation networks, multiple health care facility options, and access to jobs that pay decent wages. I can't help but think that one of a number of factors at play in these shifting trends was the large availability of affordable housing in the suburbs that the nation cranked out in the '90's.

One of the authors of the report (Elizabeth Kneebone) had this to say in regards to how the current recession has affected these trends:

The first year of the recession has already translated into significant poverty increases nationally, with suburbs once again showing the fastest growth rate in the number of poor. Looking at the unemployment numbers for 2009, we can expect even greater poverty increases to materialize in metro areas across the board. We have also seen unemployment grow at a faster pace in suburbs than cities over this time period, and more suburbanized industries—like real estate, retail, construction, and manufacturing—have borne some of the greatest job losses during the downturn. Taken together, these factors suggest that the trend of suburbanizing poverty is likely only to continue, if not accelerate, in coming years.

Other folks have put forth some good observation on this research so I will stop here for now and recommend that you check out their sage commentary:

• Spreading Far and Wide by Financial Armageddon
• Post-Post Racial: Cities, Regions, and a 21st Century American Dream by theurbanbriefcase

Leadership in a Crisis (plus other Crises just for kicks)

After an extended weekend bogged down with a pesky stomach bug, work carried over from a hectic workweek, and the usual weekend activities it seemed natural for me to spend a bit of time today talking about leadership in a crisis. Especially since some people had a much harder weekend than I did. As a side note I did find out why Twitter is referred to as a microblogging site - you had a better shot of hearing from me via that venue then on this one the last few days.

Why leadership in a crisis? I believe anyone can be a leader at some point in their lives (Caveat: I don't write books on leadership so give me a break for a little while as I get going on this one.) but its the rare group of individuals that can do so in a crisis. Even fewer can do so "successfully" in a crisis. I spent a good bit of my college years in the Army Reserves and ROTC so I've always had an appreciation for the way the military approaches this concept and I believe the American public in general has confirmed that over the history of our country. Leaders can be taught and trained to be better leaders but it still takes something extra to do it well when the bullets start flying at you (literally and figuratively speaking.)

Today President Barack Obama has a whole lot of crises circling "Chocolate City" (no offense intended - just wanted to pull off a semi-relevant reference to "Talk to Me", the Bootsy Collins "Unsung" episode, and the Obama/MLK Day interview in a 24 hour span on TVOne). Let's rattle off just a few:

1. Health care/Social Security reform
2. Iraq/Afganhistan/Where in the World is Osama bin Laden
3. The Recession (with a capital R)
4. ...and now we've added Haiti.

Could we handle those crises if we were in those shoes? It's easy for us to play Monday Morning Quarterback with our favorite sports teams but when lives are at stake its much harder to look ourselves in the mirror and say we can do better. If I'm right very few could do so and be honest with themselves. The closest some of us will come is to be in a position similar to this exercise I wrote about in an earlier post.

My point here is not to defend the actions that the US government is taking in Haiti this point - they've done some good things and not so good things so far and they'll probably do more of the same over the next few weeks. My point is that at least we are in a position to ask and hold our leaders accountable for this crisis (while other crises eat up some of our time and energy) - imagine what it would be like if we didn't have any decent candidates to fill those shoes?

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Let me know what you think in the Comments section. Also, if you haven't done so and are able please do what you can to support Haiti. You can go here to donate to one of the groups you favor most or click on the earthquake response banner that's now up on the right side of the blog.

Image courtesy of US Navy