The devastation in Haiti, is by all accounts near total, with the Presidential Palace, and many government ministries reduced to rubble. The UN Headquarters there was destroyed killing the UN Head of Mission. Oxfam’s office was devastated, the main sea port is heavily damaged, and the country’s meagre road network, is all but non-functional. In short the government, and any organisation which might have been capable of taking over the workings of government have been almost completely incapacitated.
Very quickly, emergency funds were released by the UN and rescue teams from countries including the UK began arriving began to arrive. But media coverage – which rightly stressed the urgency of the situation – included suggestions that bureaucracy was to blame for aid arriving slowly. In fact it seems that it was the lack of bureaucracy that was the initial problem.
People, medicine, food and water can’t get to those in dire need without basic planning and organisation on the ground. Someone to organise distribution, to maintain order, to ensure the healthcare system remains functional and most importantly of all to rebuild the road network so the aid that is arriving can get to where it is needed. Speed is vital as one aid worker put it ‘you can’t send food and water by helicopter unless there is someone there to get it to those who need it’.
All the planeloads of aid were going into an airport that was geared up for a maximum of three flights a day, and it wasn’t just goods that were needed but basic systems of planning and organisation – what we call bureaucracy. Of course it need to be the right sort or bureaucracy – but the delays arose from the tragedy that “government was destroyed at the same time as the buildings.
To criticise the relief effort at this point for being too burdensome and bureaucratic, is to tragically misunderstand the consequences of an event of this nature. The world’s response will never be perfect but we learnt from Indian Ocean Tsunami, we learnt from the earthquake in Pakistan and we must learn from this too. In an age when text messages were received from inside the rubble of an earthquake and workers drowned in Morecambe bay were able to telephone goodbye to their families in china organization of the physical world still remains beyond our grasp – and that is a reality.
Please call 0370 60 60 900 or go to www.dec.org.uk if you would like to donate money to the relief effort.