Disasters, and What we Can and Can't Do About Them

I've written before on this blog about some of the disaster zones I've been in (9/11, Hurricane Ike, the earthquake in Southern Peru). But I have a feeling these are all small potatoes compared to the truly big ones: the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and now Haiti.

My experiences are enough to give me an idea, maybe, of the sheer scale of a disaster rendering insurance, or gov't aid, or even an outpouring of support from around the world, "nice" but somewhat impotent. I think of the firefighters and volunteers who poured into Ground Zero after 9/11, the hospitals and ambulances ready to leap into action. Even in one of the biggest and most well-resourced cities in the world, not a single survivor was rescued from the smoking ruins. Just cleaning up the debris took over a year, and cost many of the workers their health in the process. A reminder of how small we are in the face of something truly big.

Being part of a relief effort after the earthquake in Peru was more encouraging because we got to DO something, however small it was. The missionaries and folks we worked with in Peru had it right - yes, take up an offering right away and use some of it to send down some blankets and food immediately, but then after a while, when everyone inevitably begins to forget about the victims (called "damnificados" in Spanish - talk about a vivid word!), use the rest of the money to figure out what reconstruction looks like, and what part you can realistically play in it. (We ended up providing some very basic sheet metal roofing to over 1000 families - in most cases a step up from what they had before the earthquake.)

In fact, when I came back from Peru, I thought about getting a job in faith-based development or disaster relief. I even applied to a position at World Relief in Baltimore, but I was clearly underqualified - disaster relief jobs all seemed to require lots of experience in gov't agencies. Maybe it's my personal experience, or just the chance to use my organizational skills to help people who need it the most, but I would like to try it someday... surely we need more than lifelong bureaucrats running these things!

Anyway, this has turned out to be a rather introspective and self-absorbed blog. But my prayers are with Haiti, and I am confident from what I am seeing and hearing in the news that there are lots of good people on the ground trying to deliver aid - not nearly enough to meet the demand, of course, but then that would be impossible.


Final Note: Much has been made of the comments that Haiti is being "judged" somehow for its voodooism. From what I understand, what the Bible actually says about misfortune is very close to what we observe in reality - ie it can result from our own actions, or from injustice/mistreatment at the hands of others, or for reasons that we just can't see at all. I guess you could say in Haiti's case it's all of the above (the "fault" lying with a gov't which I'm told was pretty terrible).

I was really upset when people jumped to call 9/11 a "judgment" on New York's "sins"; many of those who died were firefighters who rushed IN to a towering inferno to save people's lives, and many more were working-class people who were not exactly robber-barons.