ATLANTA, United States (January 11, 2005) - The following editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2005; Page B8.
I was in Gloucester, Mass., visiting my 90-year-old father over the Christmas holiday when I heard the first news reports on the tsunami.
Like the rest of the world, I was only beginning to understand what had happened and initially believed that only Sri Lanka and Thailand had
been badly hit. CARE had 300 staff working in those countries, and I feared for their safety. Two weeks later, we are still quantifying the
full scope of the tragedy in the hardest hit areas, particularly in Indonesia.
Working for an international aid organization demands readiness for emergencies, and CARE's staff began to assist tsunami victims
immediately. Through constant phone contact with staff at the heart of the disaster in Sri Lanka, I learned that on day one, CARE staff had taken supplies from our warehouses to distribute; that we had used our trucks to ferry the injured and the dead to hospitals; and that staff
had joined assessment teams to reach the stranded.
CARE has operated programs in the worst-affected countries for decades, beginning in India in 1950 and Sri Lanka in 1956, positioning
us well to respond. But even seasoned personnel like CARE's country directors and me — who have worked in relief efforts after disasters
including the Orissa cyclone in 1999 and the Gujarat earthquake in 2001 — were left stunned by the severity of the devastation and depth of the loss. We knew our country offices needed reinforcements. We identified emergency personnel to send to the region and a food
logistics expert for Sri Lanka, where, as in Indonesia, the reality of long-running civil conflict adds particular sensitivities.
At CARE USA's headquarters in Atlanta and throughout the international CARE family, the enormous task of coordinating the receipt and delivery of aid in tandem with planning for the future has required us to expand capacity and find new strength. The public has responded with an outpouring of generosity and understanding, which has allowed us to provide relief for hundreds of thousands of people right away (for example, we are supplying clean water for half a million
people in temporary camps in Indonesia). But the support also puts us in position for the long-term rebuilding of communities and livelihoods.
One of my profound concerns was that our heavy, necessary focus on the devastation in Southeast Asia would drain attention and resources from other places of unfathomable suffering — the hellish camps of Darfur, Sudan; Haitians still struggling to recover from the mudslides
of Tropical Storm Jeanne; and the legions of AIDS-ravaged villages throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. After I spoke about this with
two private donors who contacted me after the tsunami, they agreed to lend their support to other crises as well.
Humanitarian organizations like CARE are committed to keeping the public informed and to employing donor funds honorably, efficiently,
effectively, and exactly as the donors request their dollars be used. This tacit understanding and our long-established reputation has
contributed to the outpouring of gifts to CARE. It also requires additional effort from us to ensure that systems for accounting and communicating keep up with demand. We are committed to meeting these
awesome and welcomed challenges.
We have heard from schoolchildren in Atlanta and New York who raised hundreds of dollars with their classmates; stars like Willie Nelson who
offered to perform a benefit concert for CARE; the Atlanta Falcons, who plan to collect donations at a home game; and the Seattle Sonics and
Storm, who will match up to $50,000 in donations made by fans for relief specifically to Sri Lanka. Each day, we receive calls from corporations like Delta, Ford, General Motors, the Home Depot,
Microsoft, Pfizer, Starbucks and Verizon, with offers of cash contributions or employee partnerships; and from groups like the
Annenberg and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations to help CARE in its immediate and long-term response.
CARE staff keep track of donor wishes, resource allocations, political sensitivities and priorities in the respective countries, and
coordination with the U.S. government in its crucial deployment of military helicopters and trucks.
And we deal with our own personal losses. In Sri Lanka, staff lost friends, loved ones, and homes. And the entire CARE family mourns the
death of Robin Needham, our country director for Nepal who drowned in the tsunami while vacationing in Thailand. As you read this, I will be in Katmandu with Robin's grieving family before heading to Sri Lanka to see our ongoing work toward restoring normalcy to survivors' lives.
Simply bringing populations back to where they were before the disaster hit is not enough, however. Extreme poverty is what makes
communities more vulnerable to natural disasters, as well as to disease, malnutrition and other scourges. We want to sustain the empathy and engagement, and the bond of humanity that this tragedy has elevated, to help create a world-wide movement that would end global poverty.
In so doing, we hope to work ourselves out of business, toward a time when extreme poverty and loss of this magnitude are distant memories. Thousands of people contacted CARE after being emotionally moved by this tragedy. Each of their contributions Mdash; no matter how
large or small — helps to relieve suffering and could bring us closer to achieving that goal.
