Outreach, Relief

May 14, 2008

If you listen to "Message for the Queen," from the "300" soundtrack, you will understand what my mood was for the past couple days. It started on Monday, with an early morning text message that Save the Children’s cargo plane of relief supplies was being impounded at the airport by the government, because the waybill said the recipient was "Save the Children" instead of "UN." Suddenly, some dam inside me broke, and I was at the mercy of a huge, roiling tide of despair and frustration. Then more and more bad news and scary rumors started piling up and all got the better of me. Fortunately, some of the worst rumors have turned out to be untrue, and good news has also been coming in.

No matter what you hear, please believe that local people are still able to get out to the Delta areas and provide direct assistance to survivors of the cyclone. Doing so isn’t always easy, and it isn’t without disappointments, but groups do get out, do get to take supplies with them and do get to provide assistance directly to affected people in both central locations, as well as in more remote communities.

We continue spending our days helping connect local volunteers and local organizations with financial, material and technical resources to keep the relative trickle of relief supplies flowing. We know many more people here who are doing the same or are able to put their own staff directly out into areas where they can provide relief. It’s an inadequate amount and we all know that. On top of that, few of us are trained to work in disaster settings. But we already have visas to be in Myanmar and connections with local people. That makes us responsible to do the best we can in this situation where others, who might be more qualified, can’t get access.

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One of our partners, a highly placed monk with his own development foundation, is willing and eager to use his influence and moral authority to lead convoys of relief supplies, thus making it more likely to reach both small Buddhist and Christian communities where those medical teams are working, in the hard-hit villages south of Bogalay. It turns out that there are not as many people working in this area as there are in some other areas of the Delta. The monk is hastily making arrangements so the convoys won’t be stopped, while others of us are pulling together the supplies for the convoys. Convoys will leave late Wednesday and Thursday. What we learn from this experience, we’ll use to pull together future shipments. Yesterday we also helped send the third set of re-supply loads for the medical teams, who have now been out for more than a week. So far, all these supplies are finding their way through to their intended destinations and recipients. We are not aware of anything being confiscated at this point, although we realize that could change.

One of the main things we at HOPE are trying to encourage and facilitate is for our partners from different backgrounds and perspectives to use this opportunity to work together and learn to trust and rely on one another. We are also encouraging them to see it as their responsibility to provide assistance to all people in need, and not only to those who share their same backgrounds. We are pleased to see some of our partners grasping that opportunity.

Some big barriers right now seem to be the availability of actual Myanmar kyat cash, reliable vehicles that can handle the very difficult roads and conditions, and communications. Many organizations have large commitments of money from generous donations flowing in from all over the world. However, the actual cash isn’t yet in country. We now have a couple of avenues open to us to get the cash from outside to inside without having to exchange huge amounts of foreign currency all the time.

Also, since Myanmar has severely limited the import of new vehicles for many years, its not easy for organizations to have vehicles on hand which can be used to transport the goods. We can help our partners pay to lease or rent vehicles, but finding good condition vehicles available for hire can be a problem. The roads are becoming worse and worse with the advent of the monsoon rains, and it is now common to hear of trucks breaking down on the roads into the Delta.

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Another barrier is lack of bamboo! You may envision bamboo growing like weeds in Myanmar, and in some areas you’d be right. It is normally plentiful, so people here rely on bamboo for many, many things. But now there isn’t much undamaged bamboo available in the Delta, and so we have to transport bamboo from Yangon! We are trying to put together "kits" of simple water harvesting materials from tarp material with strategically placed grommets, bamboo and nylon rope. People can’t spend a lot of time and don’t have the resources to make this framing material on their own, so it is best to send it all as a kit and just help people learn how to put them together. Some of our staff are trying to figure out how to design and package the "kits" while I write this. It’s going to require bamboo!

Several days ago, a couple of our partners got up the courage to tell us that their lack of ability to communicate easily and quickly is hampering them from being effective in the Delta. They hesitantly asked us whether we’d be willing to help them get cell phones. We believe that is a completely legitimate and urgent need at this point. So our administration and logistics wizard here at HOPE managed to identify 5 cell phones for sale (a small thing anywhere else, but huge and expensive here, plus these are a certain type of phone that can be used outside of the main cities). We will buy them and distribute them to our partners, to enhance their safety and their ability to work, communicate and coordinate within their own organization and with others.

UNDP was getting overwhelmed with people from international agencies coming in to use their internet, so UNDP is now going to stop providing that service. There are several internet cafes open in town, so we may shift to using one of those. That will change the nature of what I write about. We have no idea how long before our office and home phone and internet connections will be reestablished. We hear that the phone linemen have come to our office condo building today, but as is always the case, they will work on the apartments of those who pay the most or have the most social clout first. We are cellar-dwellers on the social clout list, so it will probably be awhile before the phone linemen get to us. It’ll be nice to have that all up and running again – someday.