Happy birthday dear tragedy

We in the aid business are getting very good at marking the anniversaries of massive tragedies. Heck, we even win awards for it. Tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes - you can rely on the aid agencies to bring out any number of glossy publications and e-products to mark the first month, second month, third month, six months, nine months, one year, two years… five.. ten.. even 25 (yes, the Chernobyl disaster happened 24 years ago, look out for the reports next year).

Our commemorations generally have an “x months (or years) after the storm/quake/eruption/outbreak/flood life is slowly getting back to normal for villagers in etc and so on”. When it isn’t. Or when “normal” means abject poverty. (photo credit to 12 year old Zhao Lei who entered the photo as part of a Red Cross competition to document life 2 years after the Sichuan quake in China, You can read her story about the photo here and view more entries from this youth photo project here).

Why do we do it? What impact does it have? Of course we have to show the sunny side, otherwise it means we have failed, that years after a disaster people are still living without shelter, clean water, food security, education, infrastructure - much like they were before the disaster, in fact.

We also do it in solidarity but even there I’ve something of a bad taste in my mouth. With the technology we have we ought to be able to let the affected communities plan the commemoration themselves, and tell it like it is, for them. If they want to, of course.

But how critical are we of what we did, of how we spent the money? The media is, finally, nipping at our heels like Jack Russels (maybe we need Rottweilers?), sometimes completely missing the point of course, but at the same time waking us up, copping us on.

And how critical are we of each other? Of the communities themselves and the governments who have the first duty to react and care?

Look at the disasters we responded to in the 80s, or the 90s. How much has changed for the pastoralists of Ethiopia, the children of Somalia? How have we failed to improve living conditions in sub-Saharan Africa? In rural Asia? In the remoter parts of the ex-USSR (where life expectancy is falling - actually it’s falling all over, even in the cities due to poor health, alcohol and drug abuse, violence).

What could be done better?

A release on the wonderful Alernet Expresso tells me: “Aid workers have expressed concern that recovery work in cyclone-affected Myanmar may be hampered by the disbandment of a coordinating group set up to oversee aid efforts.”

There’s the problem for you. All we can really do is express concern, because outrage, shock, disgust, despair, vitriol, sorrow, scorn, spleen and so on and so forth would have us out of the country as quick as you can say “the road to Mandalay”.

I’ve had issues (and pints) with John O’Shea from GOAL at times but I watched him with relish on an Al Jazeera report when he was venting about access to Haiti. 

He was advocating one single leader (actually Obama, a non-starter and he knows it) to go in and take charge. While he was in full flight the anchor wailed “bu..but..what about political sensitivities?” O’Shea barely suppressed a mischievous grin and gave a bitchslap of an answer. “I’m sorry, I’m only a rank  and file  journalist and aid worker. I don’t understand words like political sensitivities when two million people need help.”

Granted, being unaware of sensitivities is a recipe for disaster, but you can be sure O’Shea is well aware of them, despite his protests.

So what to do? Fight the good fight, keep up the work, but ask questions all the time. Use the aid to get the access to ask the questions. Use the access to get the aid in, ask the questions. Keep asking the questions, like Bob Geldof did. “Why hasn’t that man got any food” he repeatedly asked an official in Ethiopia, back in the day. And while it’s a cute trick, it’s still a good strategy.

Don’t put up with bad standards, don’t accept “we can’t do any more”, don’t accept it when our team is working a turnkey operation. Get out there and change things. That’s why we’re doing this job.

Isn’t it? 


/JL

Cyclone Diary: Nargis remembered

12 months ago Cyclone Nargis made landfall leaving 84,500 people dead in its wake and up to 53,800 people missing, presumed dead. About 2.4 million people were left to deal with the devastation. With a storm surge of between 3.5 and 7 metres high careening towards Myanmar at wind speeds of up to 194 kph, the cyclone has been rated as one of the deadliest in the North Indian Ocean Basin. The cyclone went inland to devastate and rearrange 35 kilometres of Myanmar’s topography. Joe Lowry, our very own Head Down Eyes Opener, was there at the time and this is what he wrote in the eye of the storm.

Last Tuesday fortnight, and I'm in my regular job as Red Cross rep in Ukraine. I nip home for a quick lunch with the excuse of bringing home some sample jars for the kids' medical exams (Maya is 18 months old and Polly three months).

The news is on, and Cyclone Nargis has become a serious disaster. Over a thousand dead, and the figure soaring.

The worst affected areas haven't even been included in that tally. Five months back this was my patch as information delegate for the International Red Cross in Southeast Asia.

My wife, Lena, a former Red Cross employee herself, reads my thoughts before I'm even aware I'm thinking them, the way women do, bless them. "You want to go, don't you?"

She doesn't even know that I've spent the entire morning dodging planning a work trip to neighbouring Moldova, mooted for the next day, 7 May. I've been "on the skype" with colleagues in Geneva, London, Sri Lanka and New Zealand trying to find out who of the main Red Cross info people is going "in" to cover the story.

We've an agreement with Reuters to share photos with them in the event of a big emergency, and Russell Boyce, chief photographer for Asia, has been bending my arm to get some images to them sharpish.

I look at Lena, babby on the breast and another happily munching cornflakes straight out of the box, and utter my best platitude: "Ah, sure, no, love, my place is here with you and the kids." I swear. My exact words.

Women, bless them, they know us better than we know our sorry selves. "Go," she says. "Go. We'll manage. Mrs Mop will stay over." It cracks me up how she says it, in her gorgeous Belarus accent, still with a little bit of Cork after doing her studies in "the real capital of Ireland".

A minute later John Sparrow, a veteran aid communicator, calls from Kuala Lumpur. I tell him what Lena's just said. "Do you want to come? Set it up, man," his cultured Norfolk tones buzz like honey bees in the hive of my ear.

Sixteen hours more and I'm in Bangkok via Dubai. Into the pungent hurly-burly of the land of smiles and the old Red Cross team I so loved for the year I worked in "Bangers". There's that crackle of kinetic energy that comes from a solid team already knackered from the enormity of four days working flat out.

I begin the round of interviews. BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, Kiwi tv, Polish Radio, Radio 4, Prime Time. Standing on a box 16 floors above the Chao Praya river, the wind rattling the floodlights and my vertigo.

Then precisely 80 minutes sleep between a late-night trip to the studios to do RTE and hopping on a plane for Myanmar. Visas on arrival have been arranged through the Myanmar Red Cross, and - compared with other organizations - we sail through immigration to kisses and hugs from Bridget Gardener, our representative in Myanmar, an ebullient Aussie.

The first step outside the arrival doors reveals a cool modern-art sculpture - a swirling aluminium corkscrew 20 metres long, with jagged edges, swaying in the breeze above the traffic. I slowly realise that it's a billboard, rolled over and over on itself by Cyclone Nargis. A metaphor for my life over the next few days.

I seem stuck in a spiral of interviews, half-meetings on stairways and in the backs of cars, rare trips to the storm-hit locations on the edge of battered Yangon, late-night beers in a weirdly well-functioning hotel.

So much is happening, but the story is the paucity of aid. Our relief planes arrive one by one, then four in one day. The Myanmar Red Cross HQ by the port in Yangon is frenetic from dawn to dusk with hundreds of volunteers loading relief supplies onto trucks.

I hit a nadir on Saturday morning. A Dane tells me, "We have some terrible bitches here". I smile, thinking he's complaining about some dispute he's had. He repeats himself: "We have some terrible pictures." Journalistic instinct takes over and I watch the pics unload on his screen.

Now, days later. When I blink I still see them, the seven little girls in their pretty dresses lying side-by-side like sleeping beauties on the mud by the river. The father displaying his lifeless baby to the camera. A naked woman's corpse, clothes ripped off by the storm. A leg dangling from a bridge. Bodies skewered on treetops. And chubby toddler, the same age as my Maya, whose fate I can't even write.

I go onto the balcony in the warm rain and cry, and cry, and cry. Times passes. A boat laden with Red Cross supplies sinks. Our boss becomes the first expat to visit the disaster zone in the delta with government approval. Both events are big news and we do CNN and BBC live within minutes of her return.

Journalists start to arrive on tourist visas. Even though I have the media liaison role I have to tell them I can't talk to them, they are not "here". I can talk to their head offices, but not to them. And the question on everyone's lips changes from "Why can't you get aid in?" to "Why won't they let you get aid in?" How to answer? Everything is being monitored and a word out of place might place colleagues and our hard-won aid operation in peril.

Aid is arriving, I say - fourteen flights in six days, tonnes and tonnes of shelter materials, mozzie nets, massive water purification units that can produce a million litres of clean water per day. So why can't you get it to the people in need? We can, we do. Thousands of Red Cross volunteers are involved.

Listen and listen carefully: Volunteers who lost their homes and their loved ones are setting up wayside first aid stations, swabbing the excoriated flesh of people who were literally sandblasted in the storm. They are rushing out on bikes to find blood donors. And they are coordinating distributions under the most straightened of circumstances. It's their duty, they say. "We are Red Cross." Bridget calls them humanitarian heroes.

The moment of departure is delayed again and again. Work, like the weather, becomes grey and ominous. We hear so much we cannot say, we preserve our neutrality. I know I am at a dangerous low ebb with too much inside. My job is done. New brain and brawn needed. How many interviews have I done? Fifty? A hundred?

The backs of my eyes ache for my family. The bones in my fingers, the muscles in my arms miss holding my girls. I rehearse the moment of reunion over and over - will I kiss Lena first, or grab Maya, smother her in tears and kisses and squeeze her plump little arms? Or like Bono with his offspring, place my nose on Polly's scalp and inhale that intoxicating perfume: "Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head."

I will arise and go now. A fire is in my head. Let hope be the last casualty. Let humanity prevail.

Joe originally wrote this piece for our very good friends at Reuters Alertnet. For more information visit our special page dedicated to the ongoing recovery work being carried out in Myanmar.

/JL