CARE staff: Making tough decisions
during times of emergency, crisis

By Gretchen Hemes

ATLANTA (October 2000) -- Paul Giannone's lesson to CARE staff members about managing an emergency situation is simple: make decisions. As deputy director of CARE's Emergency group Giannone is responsible for preparedness, planning and training.

Giannone

"You have to make decisions that affect people's lives," Giannone says. "It's not easy. Those decisions need to be grounded in experience, skills and knowledge but there's always some risk in disaster operations. At the end of the day, if you were 60 to 70 percent correct, you had a good day. But the worst thing you can do is not make decisions."

It is Giannone's job to help the CARE's staff understand that even the best plans have a tendency to get snarled in an emergency situation, and this is when you have to think on your feet.

Giannone, was part of a CARE International team that developed and now instructs CARE's Foundations of Disaster Response Course (FDR). The course is designed to give staff members the most realistic simulation of an emergency situation possible, as Giannone says, everything but the heat and the smell.

Giannone is dwarfed by a CARE amphibious vehicle at a crisis site in Angola.

FDR is an eight-day training exercise and includes a daylong disaster response simulation. In the context of this mock crisis, participants identify critical decisions that must be made, chose leaders, deal with human rights issues, build teams, coordinate efforts among various organizations, brief media representatives and confront the unexpected.

"It can be quite harrowing," Giannone says. "People really get into it, and we throw them a lot of curve balls. It really gives perspective on what goes on in those situations and why people make the choices they do. Sitting at headquarters you might think things are going to go A-B-C-D. In a disaster operation, you have to work with what you've got, and sometimes it goes A-D-C-B."

Some response course participants have realized they would prefer not to deploy to a disaster situation, after all, Giannone says. "This is an important and valid realization," he says, "and a key reason CARE developed the course."

Giannone stands before unexploded ordinance, a danger in many parts of the world.

The course is designed to help CARE identify its strengths, focus on the tasks that serve beneficiaries best and unify CARE International partners, he says. Participants, whether they are based on CARE's Atlanta headquarters or in the field, graduate from the course knowing how they can support a disaster response operation.

While it is important and necessary to have an organizational foundation for disaster response, nothing is carved in stone at a relief camp, Giannone says.

"You've got more than you can possibly do, and then someone gives you just a little bit more," he says. "Those who excel at this are the ones who can handle the impossible. They need to take it seriously, but also laugh and take the punches as they come."

Giannone is one of those people who rolls with the punches. His experience as an Army medic in Vietnam taught him to handle hectic situations that require quick decisions. He learned to ad lib when faced with the unexpected, and he decided helping others through crisis would be his life's work.

Giannone representing CARE in the field.

Giannone has a 7-year-old daughter who recently became aware that her father sometimes does dangerous work. She knows what a "war zone" is and knows that her father sometimes works in them. Seeing his work through his daughter's eyes reminded Giannone how unpredictable it can be. But when he responds to a crisis and sees children there, he knows he will continue.

"I see my daughter in these kids, and it actually drives me more to be out there and do something. Because I think I can do some good."