Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (26 page)

The Sri Lankan coast was a tropical paradise by any standard. Men walked along the side of the road wearing colorful sarongs, which they tied like skirts around their waists. Women strolled together draped in bright, glittering saris. People on bikes casually rode through
lush hills past endless rows of palm trees. But reminders of the tsunami’s devastation were everywhere. Dotting the otherwise tranquil horizon were the brick foundations where buildings had once stood. Bridges were crooked and collapsing, their roadways dangling just feet above the water; roads were cracked, slabs of concrete smashed up against each other, resembling the shifting tectonic plates that caused this ruin. The water had pulled everything in its reach back out to sea, like a windshield wiper clearing a soaked window. Much of the remaining debris had been removed by the time I arrived and it wasn’t until I saw a barge that the sea had carried one mile inland that I could understand the magnitude of the wave.

Many children were orphaned, but many more died. As witnesses explained, the tsunami first pulled the sea back, away from the shore, exposing hundreds of fish flopping on the naked sand. Children raced in to catch them. They were jumping around with the fish when the first wave, like a boomerang, swept back in. “It’s strange,” a professor from graduate school said to me before I left. He had worked in Indonesia during the early days of the emergency, and I called him for advice. “You walk into these villages, and there are just no children.” I was used to children shouting “
Muzungu
” and “
Khawaja
”—white person—whenever our Land Cruiser entered a rural area. But for my professor, what he remembered from the days after the tsunami was the silence.

More men survived than women, not only because
they were more likely to know how to swim, or because they were stronger and could hold onto stationary objects—trees, roofs—tighter, but because the clothing women wore (saris in Sri Lanka, head scarves in Indonesia) got caught on floating debris and sucked them underwater. Some fishermen were far enough away from shore that they only felt the sea swell, their boats rising and falling with the current. They couldn’t know the destruction happening on land.

MAYBE IT WAS THE DUSTY
Darfur smell and the sand tucked into every crevice of my clothes or my notebooks filled with to-do lists from Al Salam that reminded me I had abandoned the camp. Maybe it was the constant travel along the coast of Sri Lanka and Indonesia—packing and unpacking, dragging bags down hotel hallways, lugging them into the backs of the vehicles. Mental checks: Do I have my wallet? Where’s my passport? Shit, I left my toothbrush. Or maybe it was walking along the remains of what was left after the tsunami raced onto the coast and swept back out to sea carrying children, women, men, houses, roads, schools, anything that its foamy fingers could reach. It must have been all of those things because the months I spent in Sri Lanka and Indonesia were hell.

I spent most of my time there in a daze. Even a nightly dose of Ambien couldn’t get me to sleep. Every morning, my eyes throbbed with exhaustion. I’d look
into the bathroom mirror at my pale face, raccoon circles around my eyes, the edges of my lips drawn down, my hair overgrown and knotted.
I don’t look like this. This isn’t me
. Only days ago, in Darfur, I had been dodging hedgehogs and using bottled water to bathe. In the capitals, I was now staying at five-star resorts with lavish buffets, poolside bars, overstuffed pillows, hundreds of television channels, and steaming showers with pressure that drilled into my neck and back. I should have enjoyed it, but the lingering shame of leaving Darfur still clung closely. Being pampered in my new surroundings only made it worse.

At the time, the tsunami response was the most generous and rapidly funded international humanitarian operation in history. By December 2005, a year after the tsunami struck, a total of $14 billion had been pledged or donated for emergency relief and reconstruction. About 40 percent, or $5.5 billion, came from the general public. For most humanitarian crises, that figure is usually around 15 percent. The outpouring of donations from the public was due to a number of circumstances: an enormous and blameless natural disaster, its timing (right after the Christmas holiday), the number of Western tourists who had been present, and the extensive media coverage.
The influx of money, of human resources, of gifts in kind—they were on a scale the aid world had never seen before.

And with hundreds of agencies running around trying to “build back better,” there was also an increased interest in analyzing what the aid community was doing. I had read plenty of background reports about the tsunami; they could be easily downloaded online. Hundreds of evaluations were going on, so many it sometimes seemed as if there were more evaluators
examining
the response to the tsunami than there were people actually
responding
to it. To me, all the ground appeared to be covered: how efficient agencies were, how effective their response was, and how well organizations coordinated and worked with local actors. Other evaluators had already scrutinized the response from a gender perspective, an environmental perspective, and inspected the financing instruments used, and whether the money got where it needed to be fast enough.

“This may be totally naive of me, but what else is there to say?” I asked our team leader, Toby, a chainsmoking chubby Brit in his midforties, as we rode together in the back of a rickshaw. It was my second day in Sri Lanka and we were on our way to speak with people from the Ministry of Education. We sat close together to avoid the raindrops seeping through the sides of the plastic panels that hung over the scooter.

“It’s a question I’ve asked, too,” he said. “This thing has been analyzed to death.”

I found myself comparing everything about the tsunami response to our work in Darfur. What would an evaluator say about Al Salam? There were agreed upon international standards and benchmarks: twenty people to a latrine, 15 liters of water per person per day, minimum surface area of 45 square meters (or about 484 square feet) for each person in the camp. Our initial plans for Al Salam followed the standards closely. But nothing about aid really ever went according to design. With new people coming each day, the pace at which we could get in materials, the unexpected rainstorm or militia attack, these standards became more aspirational than realistic. I reasoned that here, hopefully, with seemingly fewer constraints and so much more money, the aid community could do more.

I shuffled through meetings with government ministers, UN and NGO staff, police, community leaders, mothers, and teachers, all along the coast of Sri Lanka. We then flew to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, to do the same. I asked a lot of questions about the agency’s work: How fast did they react? What did their programs do? What was the quality of their response? Were the affected populations consulted in the process? The final report would be read by not only the responding agencies but also people at headquarters and large government donors who paid for multimillion-dollar programs and who wanted to see how their dollars were spent.

I also interviewed people from other agencies to hear what they had to say about the overall response. People kept complaining: “There’s actually too much
money.” At first, I dismissed this kind of statement; it seemed like an aberration. But after six weeks of countless interviews, I realized that I hadn’t just heard it once, but again and again.

In Darfur, we stretched our budget to the limit. We turned the generator off at 10 p.m. every night and suffered through the immovable heat to cut fuel costs. The office I wanted to build for the committee, with multiple meeting rooms, had to be scaled back to a single room because we didn’t have the budget to build extra walls. But aid money is lumpy. People are mesmerized by the images of suffering that come out of a disaster like the tsunami. The chronic emergencies—the northern Ugandas, the Darfurs, the Congos, and the Somalias—don’t have simple, iconic images and can’t be summarized in easy-to-digest sound bites. Yet those crises slowly kill as many people or more than the tsunami did. Estimates put the number of people displaced as a result of violence in northern Uganda at 2 million, and the International Rescue Committee has calculated that roughly 5.4 million people died in the Congo between the time war broke out in 1998 and 2007. But these tragedies never get the same kind of attention or funding. Still, I didn’t understand. How could too much money ever be a problem?

Aid funding after an emergency like the tsunami is one big feeding frenzy. To stay in business, agencies must appeal to funders. The largest donations to the UN and NGOs are from Western governments’ foreign assistance budgets (USAID, for example, is the
US government’s international assistance branch that doles out millions of dollars each year to aid organizations, the Brits have their own federal aid branch, as do most other wealthy nations), large foundations (such as the Ford Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), and more recently, private companies (such as Google or Ikea) and the foundations they endow. Agencies compete with each other for this money. Their employees write proposals about projects they envision—how many tents they can distribute, how many clinics they will set up, how many schools they’re going to rebuild—and how efficiently they’ll execute these plans. The donors award grants to the most persuasive agencies, the ones best at convincing benefactors they can deliver. With this influx of cash, agencies get to work. Humanitarian responders gear up, parachute in, and provide lifesaving assistance—water, food, and rudimentary shelter—as quickly as possible.

Over the years, I’d learn that disasters are actually good for aid organizations. They present opportunities for agencies to attract more funds, garner greater publicity, and essentially grow global empires. After any emergency, I’d imagine PR teams giving each other the thumbs-up after presenting colorful spreadsheets showcasing the number of times the agency was named in the press, or the number of new hits to the agency’s website—because that’s when the money starts pouring in. Sure, the UN and NGOs use those contributions to respond to emergencies, and they need the funding
to do their work, but this good-hearted profession is an industry just like any other. It needs dollars, and lots of them, to survive. With such huge surpluses coming into post-tsunami Asia, no agency was going to struggle to survive.

Only MSF stopped collecting donations once they’d received as much money as they thought they could use. They did so less than a week after the tsunami hit, that’s how fast the money was coming. The other ones just let the tap run on full blast, accepting check after check, until they realized that there was no way that they could actually spend the tens of millions of dollars in the six-month time frames demanded. Getting necessary materials into the country, reaching affected areas and finding out what they needed, working on construction plans, and hiring people to see them through—it took time to do it all right.

BUT NOBODY HAD THE TIME
. With so much funding, so much media attention, organizations were under extreme pressure to get things done quickly. Why hasn’t the money been spent yet? Why hasn’t rebuilding started yet? This was the resounding cry from donors and the general public. They wanted to see their funds going to use; they wanted an immediate response to the dreadful images they were seeing on TV. Get it out and get it done fast became the operating mantra from inside the agencies. Those who got their tents up the quickest or were the first to have their pictures in the
press were the successes. They’d take a photo to accompany the reports, whose breathless text revealed a measure of relief, at having gotten the thing done: “Here! Phew! We got the center up. We distributed the supplies. We set up a clinic, a school, a child-friendly space.” Check. Check. Check. And if tents went unused, because people knew they would blow over if you sneezed on them, or a newly built community didn’t have a water source or connection to electricity—well, at least you could tick the box that you had built the damn things. But the quality of these items, and the consequences for beneficiaries—for actual human beings—seemed like afterthoughts. I had read somewhere in graduate school that aid was the world’s largest unregulated industry. Here it was clear: NGOs were implementing their programs but there were few mechanisms in place to measure program effectiveness that would enable donors to hold actors accountable for their successes and failures. This was where our team came in: we were there to assess how things had gone, this time around, and draw lessons for the future—and hope that someone listened to them.

TOO MUCH MONEY ALSO MEANT
hundreds of organizations had the funds to come into the countries, set up shop, and offer assistance. The space became so congested that people were literally scrambling to put a stake in the ground before someone else did. Once, my team and I passed a flattened area where a school would
be built. Flagpoles with banners reading “GOAL” marked the area. Construction hadn’t begun and nobody knew when it would, but this was GOAL’s territory, and other relief providers had better stay away. It was like watching a dog pee to mark his territory. Benefactors made sure that their logos were stamped onto everything they funded, and before a donor visit, agency employees would scurry around making sure that all the distributed tents had the donor’s logo on it, too. Both the agencies and their patrons wanted credit and they needed something visible—some easy photo to deliver to the press and the people back home.