American Red Cross squandered aid after Haiti earthquake, report alleges

Despite raising nearly half a billion dollars and allocating $170m to ‘shelter relief’, the aid organization built only six permanent homes, an investigation has found

The Guardian, Alan Yuhus, 4 June 2015

An undated American Red Cross handout photo of the aftermath of the earthquake
shows the devastation to homes in Haiti. Photograph: Matt Marek/American
Red Cross/PA

Despite collecting nearly half a billion dollars for Haiti earthquake relief, the American Red Cross has built only six permanent homes and seemingly squandered millions in the country, according to a new report.

A joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR uncovered rampant mismanagement, high overhead costs and deeply rooted acrimony from Haitians toward the aid organization. Among the investigation’s findings was that although the Red Cross apportioned about $170m to the category of “shelter” relief, and although it at first planned to build some 700 houses, it only constructed six permanent homes.

The report charges the Red Cross with consistent misrepresentation of its projects, especially in housing. The authors cite promotional materials that say the Red Cross provided more than 130,000 people with homes, and then note that that total includes people in “transitional shelters”, recipients of short-term rent assistance, and people who had been “trained in proper construction techniques”.

The Red Cross disputes the report and asserts it has “helped build and operate eight hospitals and clinics” and “move more than 100,000 people out of make-shift tents into safe and improved housing”. In a statement, the organization said it is “disappointed” by the “lack of balance, context and accuracy” on the part of ProPublica and NPR.

A major problem for the organization was leadership and staffing, according to the report. Integral positions, including experts for health and shelter, were left vacant for months and sometimes years. The positions that were staffed were predominantly held by expats or by people flown in from the United States, many of whom could not speak French or Creole.

In one 2011 document, Red Cross official Judith St Ford notes that there are “serious program delays caused by internal issues that go unaddressed”, including for cholera relief.

“There is a clear lack of foresight and planning,” she wrote, and “the lack of leadership ability has contributed to poor morale in the field.”

She also urged her superiors to hire more Haitians: “the implication that talented, smart, competent Haitians cannot be found in Haiti has to be dispelled.”

In its statement the Red Cross says 90% of its current staff are Haitians; the organization did not break down the hierarchy or positions of its staff.

“If they were an organization that had a real history in Haiti I think this would’ve gone a lot better,” said Justin Elliott, one of the journalists who co-wrote the report. “The entire Haiti reconstruction effort has been really problematic, but the outside groups that have done better have roots there, have Haitian people working at high levels, have people who speak the language.”

In one 2013 email published by ProPublica, CEO Gail McGovern admitted a project had failed and that she did not know what to do with a $20m remainder. “Now that the Northern project is going bust and we are still holding $20 million of contingency, any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?” she asked, before mentioning a mysterious “wonderful helicopter idea”.

Without Haitians in leadership positions, the Red Cross was particularly ill-prepared to deal with Haiti’s land tenure rules, a system so tangled and unforgiving that it has intimidated USAid and Vatican relief efforts.

Residents of the Jean-Marie Vincent camp for people displaced by the 2010
earthquake, wait for customers outside their tent where they have set up a
stand to sell rice, oil and canned goods in Port-au-Prince on 9 January 2013.
Photograph: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP

“Land tenure is probably the biggest stumbling block,” said Jonathan M Katz, a freelance journalist and author of a book about the earthquake, The Big Truck That Went By. The system has stymied aid organizations for years, and Katz said that for years aid organizations have “thrown up their collective hands and said ‘we don’t really want to deal with this.’”

The Red Cross entangled itself in a web of other organizations, often paying them to do relief work, themselves struggling in Haiti. This outsourcing is commonplace in the international aid industry, Katz said, and leads to inevitable but not necessarily unreasonable overhead costs. But eager to better solicit donations, organizations often try to downplay these costs.

The report notes that overhead charges by the Red Cross and its contractors undermine McGovern’s claim that “minus the nine cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar will be going to Haiti.”

In one case, Elliott and his co-author, NPR’S Laura Sullivan, found that the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) exacted $1.56m in overhead from the American Red Cross’s payment of $6m, all to help give Haitians rental subsidies so they could leave tent camps. The IFRC said the costs were related to “administration, finance, human resources”.

In another case, the Red Cross commissioned Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies to upgrade shelters, but still took 24% of the money for the project in additional overhead costs, according to the report.

Where exactly the $488m of the American Red Cross’s Haiti budget has gone is unclear, Elliott said, since “the whole international aid sector is pretty opaque in general. And the spending of the American Red Cross is incredible opaque. You can tell hardly anything from their disclosures.”

He said that the issue of money was particularly sensitive to Haitians who had coordinated with the Red Cross.

“They were furious basically over broken promises,” Elliott said. “About three years ago, the Red Cross told people they were going to build hundreds of new homes in this very hard-hit area, and this thing was just stalled. Over the next two years they had meetings with the community, handed out juice boxes and so on, and nothing happened for a long time.”

The Red Cross is now helping build a road and install solar lights in the area.

Katz said that the problems of the American Red Cross are “typical of the aid industry in general. The Red Cross is sort of the biggest kid on the block. Because they make way more money than anybody else, what they do is magnified.”

The interconnected NGOs and aid organizations of the world, ranging from the many satellites of the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders to the Clinton Foundation, Katz said, should deserve more skepticism from the public. Reports have traced the 2011 cholera epidemic to United Nations relief efforts, he noted, adding that many organizations operate more like businesses than anything else.

“Even when an aid group is pulling off a project well,” he said, “if it isn’t going to be there forever, if it isn’t going to be accountable for successes and failures, if it isn’t leaving something behind that’s permanent, then it’s still capable of doing damage.”

Last year the Red Cross similarly took issue with another ProPublica report that said the organization had disastrously mismanaged aid relief after hurricane Sandy.

Did U.N. troops cause cholera outbreak in Haiti?

Yahoo News, By Zachary Roth, Thu Nov 4, 12:43 pm ET

An outbreak of cholera has killed at least 442 people in Haiti over the last few weeks. Some public health experts are asking whether U.N. peacekeepers are responsible.

(Photo of a girl with cholera symptoms resting in a
Haitian hospital last month: AP/Ramon Espinosa)

Last week, hundreds of Haitians denounced the peacekeepers at a protest. They suspected that a Nepalese U.N. peacekeeping base, located on a tributary to the infected Arbonite River, could have been the source of the outbreak.

Some preliminary evidence supports that suspicion. The strain matches strains found in Southeast Asia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Paul Farmer, an expert on poverty and medicine and the U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, told the Associated Press that authorities should investigate further. "Knowing where the point source is -- or source, or sources -- would seem to be a good enterprise in terms of public health."

John Mekalanos, a cholera expert at Harvard University, agreed, saying the evidence does suggest that Nepalese soldiers brought the disease to Haiti after an outbreak in Nepal. "The organism that is causing the disease is very uncharacteristic of [Haiti and the Caribbean], and is quite characteristic of the region from where the soldiers in the base came," Mekalanos told the AP. "I don't see there is any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably accidental introduction of the organism occurred."

But the CDC officials have said it's impossible to pinpoint the source more closely--and that doing so would distract from efforts to fight the outbreak.

A World Health Organization spokesman said finding the cause is "not important right now."

Since 2004, about 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers have been stationed in Haiti to provide security. But some Haitians oppose their presence, and some leaders are seeking to capitalize on the cholera issue to stoke anti-U.N. sentiment.

The cholera outbreak has led to the hospitalization of more than 6,742 Haitians with fever, diarrhea and vomiting.

Mekalanos suggested that political considerations are behind the unwillingness to get to the bottom of the issue. "I think that it is an attempt to maybe do the politically right thing and leave some agencies a way out of this embarrassment," he said. "But they should understand that ... there is a bigger picture here."

He added: "It's a threat to the whole region."

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Most countries fail to deliver on Haiti aid pledges

CNN News, From Joe Johns and MaryAnne Fox, July 14, 2010

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• International donors promised $5.3 billion to Haiti after the earthquake
• Only four countries have delivered any money at all
• Less than 2 percent of the money that's been promised has been delivered
• U.S. and Venezuela pledged more than $1 billion each and have delivered nothing

(CNN) -- Six months after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, most governments that promised money to help rebuild the country have not delivered any funds at all, a CNN investigation has found.

Haiti's rebuilding process has been slow
and aid has been slow in coming.

Donors promised $5.3 billion at an aid conference in March, about two months after the earthquake -- but less than 2 percent of that money has been handed over so far.

Only four countries have paid anything at all: Brazil, Norway, Estonia and Australia.

The United States pledged $1.15 billion. It has paid nothing, with the money tied up in the congressional appropriations process.

Venezuela promised even more -- $1.32 billion. It has also paid nothing, although it has written off some of Haiti's debt.

Former President Bill Clinton, a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, said he plans to put pressure on governments that have been slow to deliver on their promises.

"I'm going to call all those governments and say, the ones who said they'll give money to support the Haitian government, I want to try to get them to give the money, and I'm trying to get the others to give me a schedule for when they'll release it," Clinton told CNN's Anderson Cooper earlier this week.

"I think that they're all having economic trouble, and they want to hold their money as long as possible," Clinton said.

Altogether, about $506 million has been disbursed to Haiti since the January earthquake, said Jehane Sedky of the U.N. Development Program.

Most of it was sent before the donors' conference and the establishment of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. That commission has collected about $90 million since the conference, Sedky said.

CNN compiled the information for this report by reviewing commission figures and surveying the donors that had made pledges to determine the disposition of those pledges.

Spain, France and Canada are also among the countries that have not yet followed through on their pledges, CNN found.

No countries told CNN they do not plan to deliver the money eventually.

The pledges are for fiscal year 2010-2011, so the donors have until the middle of next year to get the funds to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, Sedky said.

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said Wednesday that aid delivery to Haiti is going relatively well compared to other disaster relief efforts the world body has been involved in.

"Compared with other disasters, coordination systems in Haiti have actually functioned reasonably well," he said, adding that there was no requirement for aid efforts to work within systems.

"But within that constraint, what we've been trying to do is coordinate the aid responses as best as we can, and we are trying to provide food as quickly as possible," he said.

Some charities, meanwhile, are spending money as fast as they get it, while others are planning long-term projects.

Doctors Without Borders -- primarily a disaster-relief organization -- has received $112 million and spent $65 million, it says. The group plans to spend more than $109 million by the end of the year, spokesman Michael Goldfarb told CNN.

The Red Cross has spent $148 million of the $468 million it has taken in, and is holding some money in reserve for more permanent projects such as shelter and water.

Private money has also come in from the Clinton Foundation, from Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim Helu and Canadian mining investor Frank Giustra, but that's not part of the $5.3 billion pledged by countries at the conference in March.

The January 12 quake left more than 220,000 dead, 300,000-plus injured and more than 1 million homeless. According to recent U.N. reports, the quake destroyed 60 percent of government infrastructure and left more than 180,000 homes uninhabitable.

Six months later, more than 1.5 million remain in overcrowded displacement camps.

According to the United Nations, 1,300 camping sites and 11,000 latrines have been built, and thousands of kilos of food and humanitarian resources have been delivered to those in need.

CNN'S Richard Roth at the United Nations contributed to this report.

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Michelle Obama Makes Unannounced Visit to Haiti

The New York Times, by MARC LACEY, April 13, 2010

Michelle Obama, with President René Préval of Haiti, his wife, Elisabeth Debrosse, and Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday. (Photo: Brennan Linsley/Associated Press)

MEXICO CITY — In her first solo trip overseas as first lady, Michelle Obama made an unannounced visit to Haiti on Tuesday, flying over the earthquake-damaged capital in an Army helicopter, meeting with Haiti’s president and first lady in the ravaged National Palace and dancing with young children whose homes were destroyed.

“It’s powerful,” Mrs. Obama said after surveying the wreckage left by the Jan. 12 earthquake from above. “The devastation is definitely powerful.”

Accompanied by Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, Mrs. Obama entered a play area set aside to provide therapy to children now living in a giant squatter camp on the Champs de Mars.

“We are glad to see you,” the children sang out in Creole. The Haitian first lady, Elisabeth Préval, who attended school in the United States, served as Mrs. Obama’s translator.

Mrs. Obama was due to arrive in Mexico City on Tuesday night to kick off a trip that aides said will open her efforts to inspire and engage children around the world.

Presidential aides said security concerns prompted the stopover in Haiti to be kept secret until she landed. The visit, a White House statement said, was meant “to underscore to the Haitian people and the Haitian government the enduring U.S. commitment to help Haiti recover and rebuild, especially as we enter the rainy and hurricane seasons.”

Mrs. Obama was also scheduled to offer thanks to the many aid workers from around the world who have helped rebuild Haiti over the last three months.

Mrs. Obama is one of many high-profile visitors to Haiti in recent days. Others include Shakira, Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. Numerous world leaders have also visited since the earthquake, prompting some Haitians to openly wonder when President Obama, who is extremely popular in their country, will visit.

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In blueprint for Haiti, U.S. takes new approach to aid

By Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, March 30, 2010; 6:28 PM

Haiti’s damaged National Palace.

An internal Obama administration assessment concludes that the U.S. government has provided $4 billion in aid to Haiti since 1990 but "struggled to demonstrate lasting impact," according to a summary of the review, which has not been publicly released.

On Wednesday, at an international donor conference, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to outline U.S. plans to spend an additional $1 billion or so to rebuild the earthquake-devastated nation.

This time, U.S. officials say, they will do things differently.

The most dramatic change is an effort to build up Haiti's fragile government, instead of working around it. In an emergency spending request sent to Congress last week, the administration says it will help reconstruct the Haitian government, paying for new ministry offices. More broadly, the goal is to develop the framework of a modern state -- spending money to help Haiti create building codes, regulatory systems and anticorruption standards. U.S. funds would be used to train and pay Haitian officials.

"We are completely focused on how to build the capacity of the Haitian government effectively," said Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff. "That is something everyone has recognized as being one of the failures of aid in the past."

For the U.S. government, which has spent billions of dollars on nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Haiti presents a new and complex test. Even before the earthquake, the country's government was dysfunctional and notoriously corrupt. Now, all but one of its ministries are in ruins. Nearly 17 percent of Haiti's civil servants died in the disaster, including many senior managers, according to the aid request to Congress.

The Obama administration insists that its plan will help the Haitian government with its own priorities -- not impose a U.S. vision. The plan, however, allots $48 million to housing and offices for up to 300 short- and long-term U.S. personnel.

Meanwhile, former president Bill Clinton is expected to co-chair a commission of Haitian officials and donors that will oversee the spending of billions of dollars in foreign aid. Clinton is the U.N. special envoy to Haiti.

"The U.S. government is playing a leading role. It's not by accident Mr. Clinton is down there," said Ciro de Falco, head of the Haiti task force established by the Inter-American Development Bank. "They are committed to seeing this earthquake turn into an opportunity."

Under the emerging plans, U.S. aid would be part of a vast international effort to rebuild parts of the Haitian state. Canada and France, for example, would help reconstruct the school system, officials said.

Congressional aides briefed on the new plan praised the emphasis on good governance, but still worried about waste.

"It's an overwhelming sort of venture. This is a lot of money. And you've got to make sure it's used the right way," said one senior aide, who was not authorized to comment.

Foreign donors have tried to lift Haiti from poverty before, with paltry results. Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, which shattered the economy, about three-quarters of the people in the Maryland-sized island country lived on less than $2 a day.

Haiti has remained in poverty partly because of a history of brutal rulers, foreign intervention and natural disasters. Equally important, the country's economic and political elite have monopolized the resources of the government.

"It becomes a large cookie jar for people to benefit themselves. It doesn't have this real sense of delivering public services," said Terry F. Buss, author of "Haiti in the Balance," a book about the failure of foreign assistance.

After large sums of aid money disappeared under dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier in the 1980s, foreign countries shifted their assistance to nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. That approach has backfired, development experts say. Haiti has become known as the "Republic of NGOs," with an atrophied central government and up to 10,000 private groups doling out medicine, food and services.

U.S. aid has gone to large contractors that manage budgets bigger than those of Haitian ministries -- but they have produced "mixed results," according to a summary of the U.S. policy review, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

In an interview, Mills, who led the review, said that past U.S. assistance to Haiti was dispersed over too many areas to have impact, and that no strategy was in place to transition to Haitian control.

In contrast, the new U.S. plan focuses on four areas: health; agriculture; governance and security; and infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on energy. In each one, "we anticipate making investments that would strengthen the ministries," Mills said.

In the security area, for example, the U.S. government would help Haiti's justice ministry "develop and execute a post-earthquake justice strategy," according to the aid request. It would assist the Haitians in revising their criminal and civil codes. The United States would help fund ministry buildings, a national magistrate training school and a network of justice centers. U.S. funds would help pay salaries for regional judicial and police task forces, according to the plan.

The roughly $1 billion reconstruction blueprint is part of a $2.8 billion package that also would cover immediate post-earthquake needs such as food and tents. It would support the Haitian government's goal of decentralizing services and jobs away from the overcrowded capital.

The plan includes several measures to keep aid from being wasted. It requests $1.5 million for an inspector general. And the U.S. government would funnel some of the money through the proposed Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, made up of Haitian authorities and representatives of donor countries and international institutions. Its projects would be overseen by an international accounting firm.

Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank, said that the government of President René Préval had made enough progress fighting corruption in recent years that the bank had tripled its direct assistance to Haiti.

De Falco, of the bank's Haiti task force, said that officials could monitor foreign aid to prevent it from being stolen. But whether it produces real development depends on the Haitian government, he said.

"You can go into a country, build all the roads, electricity," de Falco said, but "if the institutional framework is not there, the rules of the game are not clear, you're not going to get the bang for the buck."

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Out of Aceh's experience, hope for rebuilding Haiti

The Washington Post, by Joachim von Amsberg, Friday, January 29, 2010

Haiti’s damaged National Palace.

The official death toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti is more than 110,000. That tens of thousands more may have been killed puts this tragedy on par with that wrought by the tsunami that struck South Asia in December 2004, killing about 200,000 people and displacing more than half a million just in Indonesia's Aceh province. There are other parallels between these disasters. Haiti is a poor country long plagued by governance issues. Even though Indonesia is a well-functioning state, Aceh at that time had been ravaged by decades of conflict between the Indonesian government and Acehnese groups fighting for independence. Whatever government had existed in Aceh was severely diminished by the tsunami.

Yet Aceh today is a vibrant place where families live in houses and communities, children attend school and farmers tend to their fields. Its reconstruction is widely recognized as a success, and that work could offer a silver lining for Haiti.

In Aceh, about 140,000 houses have been rebuilt, 2,500 miles of roads have been constructed, and 200,000 small and medium-size businesses have been supported. Indonesia concluded an agreement seven months after the tsunami with the independence fighters that gave important autonomies to Aceh in return for a peace that has lasted. That pact laid the foundation for the investment and economic development that have taken place.

While the memories of the tragedy linger, what can be rebuilt has been rebuilt. In numerous trips to Aceh over the past 2 1/2 years, I have seen enough redevelopment and spoken to enough local people to know that Aceh has been built back better than it was before the tsunami. Today, Aceh has functioning local and provincial governments that work together with the national government to provide services for its people. There is a functioning state in Aceh. By no means is it flawless, but it holds promise for more social and economic progress and development.

Aceh's experience provides hope that at least the physical and economic damage from natural disasters can be overcome. Hope that out of the desperation of disaster can come the desire for reconciliation after conflict and for establishing an effective state or nation that can address the challenge of rebuilding. No two disasters are the same, but a few keys to success from the Aceh tsunami reconstruction experience should be kept in mind as international support is channeled to Haiti:

• First, local and national leadership count. While Aceh's local government was decimated, Indonesia's national government led the recovery and reconstruction efforts. The president appointed a personally trusted, experienced leader to manage the reconstruction and created an agency with overarching powers to coordinate billions of dollars of investments by 350 organizations in 12,500 projects. International partners may have to take the lead in Haiti during a transition period, but there is no substitute for national leadership in the long run.
  
  
• Second, empowering people is key. In Aceh, strong top-down leadership was complemented by the empowerment of the people and communities. Victims became development workers. Aid recipients and former combatants became community facilitators. Displaced families became workers who rebuilt their houses. By channeling a large share of reconstruction funds directly to communities, the people of Aceh's problems were transformed as they became part of the solution. Their hard work meant that houses were built faster, at a lower cost, and better met the needs of the people.
  
  
• Third, coordinating global aid is critical. International development partners supported reconstruction through coordinated approaches that were aligned behind government leadership and Aceh's priorities. Fifteen donor countries and donor organizations pooled $700 million in a multi-donor fund administered by the World Bank. Instead of 15 separate housing and road projects with different procedures and criteria, which would have overstretched the limited capacity of local institutions, one well-coordinated program was implemented by communities, government and U.N. agencies, and respected nongovernmental organizations.
  
  

There are, of course, many differences between Haiti today and Aceh five years ago. But as we found in Aceh, recovery is possible. The first priority, as it was after the tsunami, is the vast humanitarian task that is underway. But if the international community comes together, aligns its efforts and coordinates support that prioritizes the interests of the people affected by disaster and puts them in the driver's seat, Haiti's future can look much brighter than its past ever did.

Joachim von Amsberg, the World Bank's country director for Indonesia since 2007, oversees the bank's management of the Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias.

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Haiti survivors facing disease outbreaks

Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 29 January 2010 - 9:07pm

Survivors of Haiti's earthquake are facing outbreaks of diarrhoea, measles and tetanus, according to the World Health Organisation.

The WHO says medical teams have been reporting a growing number of cases of the diseases over the past few days. Cases have also been reported in the resettlement camps, where many of those who have lost their homes are now sheltering. UN agencies and the Haitian government are planning to launch a vaccination campaign next week. The authorities are also warning of soaring crime after 7,000 inmates escaped from prison on the day of the quake. The country's police chief, Mario Andresol, says there has been a growing number of violent assaults and rape cases.

US envoy praises Indonesia for sending aid to Haiti

Antara News, Monday, January 25, 2010 13:28 WIB

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - US Ambassador to Indonesia Cameron R. Hume has praised the Indonesian government for sending aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti.

"Yet this week Indonesia is making generous contributions to the people of Haiti in their greatest need. Indonesia`s extended hand is not a mere gesture. It is a significant act of leadership," Ambassador Cameron said in his statement published on the official website of the US embassy in Jakarta, Monday.

The aid for Haiti, in many ways, was similar to Indonesia`s pledge to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a pledge that triggered positive promises from other governments, he said.

"Indonesia is playing a key role in creating a world community ready to respond to the challenges of the 21st century," he said.

Fate and geography make Indonesia uniquely vulnerable to natural disasters. The Aceh tsunami of five years ago made an indelible impression on the entire world, but other events as recent as last year`s earthquakes in western Java and Padang reminded the people of Indonesia`s vulnerability, Hume said.

"First, why is Haiti important? Despite its favorable location in the Caribbean, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest countries in the world," Hume said.

Its people suffer from disease, malnutrition, wretched public services, and lack of economic opportunity. But they also have a proud history of being the second country to fight for and win their independence from colonialism, and they have a rich artistic culture. But for the past century development has passed Haiti by. There must be a way to turn around that decline, according to the US ambassador.

"Second, what does Indonesia have to offer? Quite a lot that is in greatest need, especially skill and experience: 30 doctors with a field hospital and medicine, 25 communication workers, 10 electricians, plus supplies and food. Indonesia knows how to respond to a natural disaster, and it knows that human solidarity counts. Anyone who has watched the extensive television reports from Haiti would know that Indonesia will be helping to meet Haiti`s most urgent needs," he stated.

"Third, why can`t others meet these needs? My own country, like others, has been quick to dispatch rescue workers, medical teams, and supplies - but we know that acting alone cannot be adequate. Isn`t it likely that the resourceful Indonesian who brought emergency cell phone service back to Padang might have just the skills most needed?," he said

The US ambassador said that Haiti lacked basic infrastructure even before the earthquake.

The roads, port, electricity grid, water and sanitation service, and communications are broken or destroyed by the earthquake.

"Little wonder that delivering assistance the last meter to a victim is so hard," he said.

The United Nations, including its Brazilian-led peace-keeping force, is at the center of international efforts to help Haiti. The organization has its own reasons to grieve the loss of so many able and dedicated staff.

Hedi Annabi, the Secretary-General`s special representative, died in the rubble of the UN headquarters last week.

"He was a remarkable man -- calm in crises, straightforward in discussions, dedicated to doing the good he could, able to appreciate irony, but never cynical. Others now need to step forward," Hume said.

According to the envoy, Indonesians should be proud of their government`s actions to help Haiti.

"Although Haiti is a small, poor country on the other side of the world, our future depends on leadership that brings together global responses to what might appear as local needs. Indonesia is playing its part to provide that kind of leadership, both on the ground in Haiti and at the conference tables of the climate change talks, the G-20, and elsewhere. Indonesia`s leadership makes it an important partner for the United States," he said.

`Men anpil, chay pa lou` is a Haitian proverb which means, with many hands, the burden is light. "Indonesia is lending an impressive hand to the Haitian relief effort," he added.

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New Online Tools Aid Haiti Relief Effort

Jakarta Globe, January 20, 2010

US President Barack Obama uses an employee's desktop computer to send a Twitter post during his visit to the Red Cross Disaster Operation Center in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Hundreds of tech volunteers spurred to action by Haiti's killer quake are adding a new dimension to disaster relief, developing new tools and services for first responders and the public in an unprecedented effort.

``It really is amazing the change in the way crisis response can be done now,'' said Noel Dickover, a Washington, D.C.-based organizer of the CrisisCamp tech volunteer movement, which is central to the Haiti effort. ``Developers, crisis mappers and even Internet-savvy folks can actually make a difference.''

Volunteers have built and refined software for tracking missing people, mapping the disaster area and enabling urgent cell phone text messaging. Organizations including the International Red Cross, the United Nations, the World Bank and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency have put the systems to use.

Tim Schwartz, a 28-year-old artist and programmer in San Diego, feared upon learning of the disaster that, with an array of social-networking sites active, crucial information about Haitian quake victims would ``go everywhere on the Internet and it would be very hard to actually find people _ and get back to their loved ones,'' he said. So Schwartz quickly e-mailed ``all the developers I'd ever worked with.''

In a few hours, he and 10 others had built www.haitianquake.com, an online lost-and-found to help Haitians in and out of the country locate missing relatives.

The database, which anyone can update, was online less than 24 hours after the quake struck, with more than 6,000 entries because Schwartz and his colleagues wrote an ``scraper'' that gathered data from a Red Cross site.

The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and others launched similar efforts. And two days later, Google had a similar tool running, PersonFinder, that the State Department promoted on its own Web site and Twitter. PersonFinder grew out of missing-persons technology developed after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005.

Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advocated online for consolidating all such tools into the Google version so the information wouldn't be stuck in competing projects.

He considers PersonFinder, which can be embedded in any Web site and as of Tuesday had more than 32,000 records, a triumph because it ``greatly increases the chances that Haitians in Haiti and abroad will be able to find each other.''

Schwartz agreed and folded his database into PersonFinder, which he thinks will become ``THE application for missing people for this disaster and all disasters in the future.''

The site has received several hundred thousand visits, said Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo. She had no data on how many people had found loved ones using the tool.

Another volunteer project forged in the quake's aftermath is a cell phone text-messaging system that has helped the U.N., Red Cross and other relief groups dispatch rescuers, food and water. Haitians needing help can send free text messages from phones on the nation's Digicel service to the number 4636.

``At least 20 people so far have been able to use this program to tell their families in the U.S. that they're OK,'' said Katie Stanton, a former Google employee working in the State Department's Office of Innovation.

The text messages are translated, categorized and ``geotagged'' by volunteers including Haitian-American members of the New York City-based Service Employees International Union. The service is being promoted on Haitian radio stations and the service has handled more than 1,000 messages since it began Saturday, said Josh Nesbit, a co-creator. He put together a similar system for hospitals in Malawi, Africa, while at Stanford University.

Chief executive Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD, a small humanitarian nonprofit that helped develop it, said by phone from the tarmac of Haiti's airport Tuesday that U.N. search-and-rescue dispatchers were at that moment mobilizing to locate a woman eight months pregnant in distress with an infection who had sent an SOS message using the system.

In another collaborative effort, the OpenStreetMap ``crisis mapping'' project, volunteers layer up-to-the-minute data (such as the location of new field hospitals and downed bridges) onto post-quake satellite imagery that companies including GeoEye and DigitalGlobe have made freely available. The digital cartography _ informed by everything from Twitter feeds to eyewitness reports _ has helped aid workers speed food, water and medicine to where it's needed most.

One Colombian rescue team leader uploaded the maps to his crew's portable GPS units before the team arrived on the scene last week, developers said. Another volunteer, Talbot Brooks of Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss., converts the maps into letter-sized documents that aid workers have been printing out before traveling to the quake zone.

``We have already been using their data in our initial post-disaster needs assessment,'' said Stuart Gill of the World Bank.

Internet social networks have helped volunteers organize intense work sessions.

CrisisCamp drew some 400 people in six cities including Washington, London and Mountain View, Calif., over the weekend to meet-ups where they devised, built and helped refine tools. Among them: a basic Creole-English dictionary for the iPhone that was delivered to Apple on Monday night for its approval.

``There was no break for lunch and people barely used the bathroom,'' said Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation, the government transparency-promoting tech nonprofit that hosted the 130 participants in the Washington session. U.N., State Department and World Bank representatives attended.

Johnson also is the coordinator for ``We Have, We Need,'' a project that was hatched in the CrisisCamp session and is about to be launched. It seeks to pair private-sector offers with needs identified by aid workers. For example, a Haitian Internet provider needs networking engineers to restore connectivity. Any volunteers willing to spend a few weeks in Port-au-Prince?

More CrisisCamps are planned this weekend in Northern California, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, Atlanta, Brooklyn, N.Y., Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles.

A week after the quake, many tech relief volunteers are still working full steam.

``These people have been awake for days,'' Csikszentmihalyi said.

AP

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