Relief - Fiasco

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Hurricane Mitch survivor Maria Sarviento, infant daughter slung on her hip, says she doesn't need any more donated clothes from America. "A pot for cooking," she would like. "Or maybe some medicine," she adds, indicating a nasty lesion on her baby's arm.

Sarviento and the long lines of wash snapping in the dusty wind blowing through her riverbank shantytown send a clear message: Hurricane Mitch survivors don't need clothes. Yet that's what generous Americans have sent them. By the garbage bag and bale. By the ton. By the seagoing container load, 40 feet long, 8 high and 8-and-a-half feet wide.

Some early gifts to Mitch survivors, like wheelbarrows and small generators, were so welcome Hondurans will never forget them. But there's a glut now, and not just of clothes. Stranded in and outside of Honduran warehouses are tons of unneeded bottled water, canned string beans, artichoke hearts and mushrooms, microwave popcorn, dog food, dental floss and countless other items.

At best, donations like these disappoint Hondurans. At worst, they get in the way of lifesaving relief or expose victims to new dangers. More generally, Hondurans are getting too much of what they don't need, not enough of what they do need, and, often, the right thing at the wrong time.

Abdou Dieng, a U.N. relief expediter, calls it "the disaster after the disaster." And it's hardly unique to the aftermath of Mitch's devastation. The overflow of misguided charity is painfully familiar to any community that's lived through calamity: the perishable food given before power was restored, the high heels offered when flood mud was everywhere and the pathetic old toys that made children given them cry.

Connie Sprynczynatyk, who scrounged warehouse space for unwanted donations to North Dakota victims of the 1997 Red River flood, calls them "the second flood to hit the state." They ended up a dispiriting mess, she recalls, "like a city-wide rummage sale."

It's been like this, disaster experts say, for maybe 15 years, ever since news of disasters started getting to Americans faster than anyone could figure out what the victims really needed. Scores of interviews in Honduras and in the United States and a review of hundreds of relief agency documents illustrate how the impulse to help disaster victims is often its own enemy.

While slow to fault America's generosity, disaster experts say that sorting and distributing unsolicited donations often occupies more than half of all volunteers. Illinois disaster official Tom Zimmerman proved the point during the 1993 Mississippi River flood when he squelched unsolicited donations. His decision, he says, freed up "tens of thousands" of volunteers to fill and stack sandbags at critical points along the rising river.

Unsolicited goods also often clog key relief-supply lines. For a month, clothes, bottled water and other unclaimed shipments jammed Puerto Cortes, Honduras' main port, impeding the delivery of pipes for water treatment plants and of food for Mitch victims living in shelters. "We could have at least doubled our effectiveness if we'd been able to get the appropriate relief in when people needed it," says Steve Kabick, disaster relief coordinator for World Relief, a humanitarian aid group that handled Miami's 100-ton-a-day stream of donations.

Unwanted medicine is another problem, says Dr. Claude de Ville, disaster relief director for the Pan American Health Organization. "When a transport arrives with 15 pallets of pharmaceuticals," he says, "three-quarters of them will turn out to be trash and one-quarter will be essential. The challenge is this: How to quickly find the medicines you need. It takes time and it is a serious problem: You are harming people as a doctor because you can't do your work well."

The sheer volume of unusable goods stuns the imagination. After the Red River flood, Sprynczynatyk recalls, donated clothing, piled and sorted using a front-end loader, filled a hangar at the Grand Forks airport to a height of 10 feet. After Hurricane Andrew, South Florida's unwanted clothes pile topped 17 feet. In strife-torn Bosnia, the international nonprofit medical team Doctors Without Borders estimates the quantity of unusable drugs accumulated between 1992 and 1996 totalled a staggering 18,000 tons.

"It's essentially good will run riot," says Andrew Feeney, deputy director of emergency management for New York state. "People nowadays see a disaster on TV and they want to go to their local market, buy a can of peas and give it somewhere to somebody who's helping the people who are suffering."

Some contributions can even do harm. Powerful new U.S. antibiotics were shipped to rural Honduran clinics without Spanish-language instructions to health care providers. Also shipped: infant formula that, if mixed with contaminated water, could kill a child from diarrhea in 24 hours. Says Nan Borton, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance: "Even if someone's good impulse has potentially disastrous implications, there's generally no one to stop it."

Instead, unwanted donations become the victims' problem.

In Hurricane Andrew's wake, at least 5 acres of used clothing was buried or incinerated. Tons of donated house paint, thinner, solder and other hazardous waste was dumped into a landfill at a Homestead, Fla., airbase. Recently, the state sued the Air Force demanding its cleanup.

Often, unwanted donations hurt local economies. In Honduras today, free used clothing is killing a substantial segment of the retail trade: used clothing stores. "It's awful. I just sit around all day talking to my friends," says Manuel Rodriguez, 21, tending his parents' outlet in Puerto Cortes. Rodriguez says young men have offered him 100-pound bales of clothes that he presumes were heisted from relief shipments. With no customers, he can only shake his head.

Also at risk are the livelihoods of thousands of Honduran women who, before Mitch, had borrowed money from nonprofit development agencies to start small businesses. Most sell apparel, explains World Relief's Kabick, whose agency is bankrolling many of them. "By sending free used clothes," he fears, "we shoot ourselves in the foot."

The result of all this chaotic relief is simultaneous feast and famine. While Honduras is afloat in bottled water, help with building supplies is scarce. For reopening schools, there are few donated books. And, despite widespread fear of mosquito-borne diseases, there's little donated repellant.

Although disasters probably are happening no more frequently, Americans are responding to more of them. One reason is faster TV, satellite phone, Web site and e-mail communication. In addition, while the Soviet Union once cared for its own, disasters in former republics like Armenia and Azerbaijan now are among the West's worries. So are refugees from such strife-torn regions as Bosnia and Rwanda.

And America's traditional empty-out-the-pantry-and-closets response - apt when victims were neighbors - is proving ill-suited to disasters whose victims are from foreign cultures. And how foreign is Honduras? So foreign that before sending canned goods to Mitch's real victims, Americans should have sent can openers.

When donors ignore cultural differences, they guarantee the inefficiency of what they give. And that mistake, according to Richard Walden, president of Operation USA, a Los Angeles-based relief agency, suggests that U.S. contributions often are driven "not by the needs of the people in Central America, but by the unfocused compassion of people up here who want to help."

There are solutions to these problems. Even some simple ones. But it really helps to understand why disaster relief tends to be out of control right from the start.

Hurricane Mitch trapped Don Dyer halfway home to Tegucigalpa. The road ahead was out. So was the road behind him. He ended up stuck for five days in a town too small to have a name.

"But my satellite phone was working," recalls Dyer, who directs Honduras operations for a U.S. humanitarian aid group, Friends of the Americas. "So I started calling churches that are part of my network, telling them it was going to be a huge disaster and they should start collecting aid."

At the time, Dyer could barely see a hundred yards through the streaming rain, let alone tell donors what Honduras would need when Mitch subsided.

Six days after Mitch finished with Honduras, the initial report was apocalyptic. "There are corpses everywhere," President Carlos Flores said in a Nov. 2 speech aired internationally. "We have before us a panorama of death, desolation and ruin. . . . Our whole nation cries out."

So began the biggest outpouring of private foreign aid in U.S. history. The American Red Cross logged an unprecedented 92,000 calls in the next seven days. The Honduran embassy in Washington got a thousand calls a day.

In retrospect, what little advice most donation collectors got was often inadequate, conflicting or wrong, and their sense of alarm probably was exaggerated. (One indicator: Honduras' initial estimated death toll of 9,000 ultimately subsided by more than a third to 5,657.)

In all these respects, Mitch was a typical disaster. America's response was predictable, too, as old rituals of neighborly concern broke out across the country like baseball in spring.

"At this time, someone needs help more than you do," teacher Tracy McFadden told second-graders at Florence J. Chester Elementary School, on the rim of a harsh New Orleans housing project. "So go home and ask your mother for a can of food and something out of the closet." The poor, proud school filled 13 brimming boxes.

Pastor Angel Rodriguez couldn't reach the door of his Adventist church in Jackson Heights, N.Y., after a local radio station declared it a donation drop-off point. "A lot of it was bottled water," Rodriguez recalls. "The Hondurans wanted bottled water and the community really responded."

Dr. Anthony Byrd of the Baptist Medical and Dental Mission International in Petal, Miss., initially thought he might collect three containers of aid. To date, he's sent 67, including tons of rice, beans and corn bought in bulk. "People's hearts all over the United States were opened up by this disaster," says Byrd.

What opens them, disaster specialists say, are dramatic statements like President Flores' and compelling news media reports. Sometimes they're overstated, too. Three days after Mitch, for example, ABC's "Nightline" devoted its entire broadcast to the hurricane and reported from Honduras that "Thousands of bridges have been washed away." (A subsequent U.S. military survey counted 170.) On the island of Guanaja, "Nightline" reported, "hundreds of islanders simply disappeared." (Only eight deaths ever were confirmed there.)

"The farms that feed Honduras," "Nightline" continued, "have been wiped out." (According to a later State Department report, exports like bananas, which are grown on river floodplains, suffered heavily. But staple crops grown on higher ground "were relatively undamaged and there is an ample supply of local food on the market.")

"In the early stages of any disaster, accurate information is hard to come by," says "Nightline" spokeswoman Su-Lin Nichols. ABC's reporting, she adds, "was based on the best information available at the time."

Accurate or not, initial media impressions from disasters rarely are updated as conditions improve, says Nan Borton, the former U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance director. That helps explain, she says, why donors persist in sending emergency aid like water, clothing and medicine long after disaster victims need them. Generally, Borton says, disaster survivors are back on their feet three to five times faster than U.S. private donors expect.

Donors also are quite suggestible. Consider the fear that Mitch might spark a cholera epidemic. Though conditions were hardly favorable for an outbreak, the concern quickly caught worldwide attention. And though public education, isolating victims and chlorine tablets are the rule for fighting cholera, Americans flew in bottled water by the ton on C-5 and C-130 military aircraft.

It wasn't the Defense Department's idea or the preferred solution of federal disaster managers. Rather, such lawmakers as Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., insisted on airlifts at the behest of forceful donors like the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. ("We were responding to requests by the charity to what, at the time, was generally described as a horrific situation," responds James Manley, a Kennedy spokesman.)

Although access to potable water was restored by mid-November, Defense Department logs show airlifts through the Christmas holidays of tons of bottled water intended for them. Some water still awaits shipment. The air freight cost, based on Pentagon figures, is about $7.60 a gallon, about 25 times the cost of shipping by sea.

But guiding donors is tricky. Take, for example, a flaw in shipping instructions issued by the Honduran consul to the United States. Omitted was the need for the full names, addresses and phone numbers of recipients in Honduras. "We were just moving so fast we couldn't stop to think," winces Benjamin Zapata, charge d'affaires for the Honduran embassy.

It was a significant omission. From his paneled office overlooking the docks of Puerto Cortes, Marco Hepburn, Honduras' seriously harassed port director, reads from the paperwork submitted with containers he can’t get rid of. "Jorge Gomez," he bellows. "Do you know how many Jorge Gomezes there are in Honduras? Lions Club. Which one? Where? Who? Rural Program. What's that?"

His folder of orphan shipments, 5 inches high, represents more than a hundred trailer truck-sized deliveries of U.S. donations. At least 400 more containers of donations have been granted temporary warehouse space elsewhere by shippers helping Hepburn unclog his port.

Recently, Honduran newspapers began running multi-page lists of unclaimed donations, saying they'd be turned over to the Maria Foundation, the Honduran first lady's charity, if no claimant comes forward. Among shipments already diverted to it are the 13 boxes sent by McFadden's elementary school in New Orleans.

The reason they were derailed is a common one: Many U.S. donors shipped goods to Puerto Cortes without money to truck them on to needy communities. That can cost up to $6 a mile, a daunting sum for Honduran churches whose Sunday offerings may not top $30. Honduras' guidelines didn't mention these transportation costs either.

By contrast, the U.S. government offers lots of advice; it ‘s just confusing. The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, for example, discourages sending used clothes. But the U.S. Agency for International Development says on its Web site that there's a "priority need" in Honduras for "unused, cleaned and sorted clothing." Laura Gross, an AID spokeswoman, says donors were so insistent on sending used clothes that stipulating their good condition had merit.

According to AID's Web site, canned goods are another "priority need." This would amuse Hondurans, who typically live onduraon the three basic dried foods _ beans, rice and corn. But even knowing that might not be adequate. Dr. Byrd's Baptist medical missionary group ground several containers of corn in Mississippi before sending them to Honduras. Hondurans, who soak dried corn in water before they grind it, rejected Byrd's pre-ground corn, saying it was unacceptably bitter.

A U.S. donation of 25,000 pounds of pinto beans also earned disdain. "The soup is not good," says relief worker Jose Mondragon. "We like the small red beans."

That may sound picky, says Suzanne Brooks, who for 10 years has fielded an AID-funded hot line for disaster donors. "But if the people of Africa sent you sorghum or said 'Here, have some millet,' how would you feel about that?"

More to the point, unwanted food is no incentive in crucial food-for-work programs aimed at rebuilding Honduran roads and schools. The same applies generally to items such as powdered detergents for women who wash their clothes in streams, or mattresses for dwellers in shacks so small and crowded _ not to mention hot _ that hammocks make more sense. 

Donor groups might have been more careful had they been paying normal shipping costs of $2,500 to $3,500 per 40-foot container. But "free" military airlift _ whose costs are included in President Clinton's proposed $956 million relief package for Mitch victims _ lifted that restraint. So did the willingness of Chiquita Brands of Cincinnati and Dole Food Co. of Westlake Village, Calif., to ship more than 1,700 containers of donated goods to Honduras from U.S. ports free.

"Many times we just gave churches and community groups containers and let them load them up with anything they could," says Dole vice president Gino Scialdone (CQ).

Jeff Brown, Chiquita's vice president for operations, did the same. After calling federal agencies and big nonprofits, he concluded: "There was no guidance to tell us what to do or how to do it right. Nor could we find any international organization tracking what other donors and shippers were doing."

Roy Williams, head of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, is sympathetic. "We certainly have the capacity to generate donated material on a huge scale in the United States," Williams says. "But we don't have the means or ability to distribute that volume of goods at the other end. It's also extremely difficult for anyone to be in a position to say no to a particular donation and make it stick, or to say to donors - either individuals or groups - 'Enough.'"

Giving wisely is a challenge for the world's richest nation.

Some people, like J.C. Morgan, have the knack. Morgan, a bandy-legged fishing guide on the Honduran island of Guanaja, went home to Tennessee and raised $10,000. Back on Guanaja, where families in his village were spending every penny on recovery, he escorted children to school and paid their spring semester tuition of $45 apiece.

Honduras Outreach Inc., a Georgia-based nonprofit, intended to give 600 hammers, 600 shovels and 200 wheelbarrows to individual Mitch victims. A Honduran employee suggested they give them to communities instead to establish "libraries of tools" available to everyone.

Great ideas like these depend on local knowledge, however, and most Americans don't have it. What can they do?

Giving to charities long active in a disaster-stricken region is a good substitute. The Red Cross and CARE typically fill the bill, as do groups like the Salvation Army, Catholic Relief Services and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. Some groups, such as the Mennonite Disaster Service, which builds schools and basic housing, have the added advantage of starting work after needs are clear.

Certainly, giving cash buys the most help. In the right hands, cash delivers exactly what's needed. Spent in a disaster-stricken community, it speeds economic recovery. The donation is tax-deductible and has no shipping or warehousing costs.

Bottom line: A pound of rice costs about a dollar in the United States. In Honduran markets, locally produced rice costs 32 cents. Bought in bulk there, as charities buy it, Honduran rice costs 17-and-a-half cents a pound. The same principle holds for schoolbooks, corrugated roofing tin, banana seedlings and most of the rest of what Hondurans need now.

The math underscores a point donor counselor Suzanne Brooks has been making for years: "If you really listen to the victims of disasters, you can really make a difference."

(Researcher Tish Wells contributed to this story.)

03-10-99
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Reprinted with permission of Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.