In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

Haiti people was claimed as one of the worsts enemies of Haiti.

A lot of projects were stopped for months by bureaucracy. Some volunteers even claimed to had been menaced with a trial if they dare to move a single rock blocking the street without papers (that often never arrived). Volunteers and doctors did what they can, and it was a lot (thousands or probably hundreds of expensive chirurgical interventions). Finally, tired to sit and wait for months, volunteers spend their last pennies and started returning to their homes and former lives. Other big disasters with hundreds of lifes in danger occur, and Haitians just lost traction and their opportunity to use all those talented people.

Red Cross provides information about how spends the money and pass external audits from independent companies. Each year. In all countries. Local finances are published in red cross bulletins that are available each six months to all people supporting the red cross with their money or time. Maybe this periodist just didn't knew how to use google:

http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m4...

Or maybe some of the promised money from donors was just this, a nice promise, and now they need a scapegoat.

I've decided to post the original here just so that people can read what was originally there, even though it wasn't very good.

Original Below

OH man this infuriates me. I spent about three months on the ground in Haiti about 6 months after the earthquake. Ii was both in Port Au Prince and Cap Hatien. I am no expert on how to make donations and aid help in a long term manner, but I have seen two different attempts at this.

1) My time before Haiti and in Haiti, American's were telling Haitians how to fix things. They were thinking without consulting their "customers" and doing so in a very authoritarian way. I saw one project, where they came up with compressed board houses that they could live in permanently. When we showed the result of 100s of man hours to the Haitians you know what they said? We want a permanent house.

2) In Bolivia the nuns were given American teachers to teach the students instead of requiring them to pay Bolivians. But the GOAL of this program was to remove the teachers over time. My sister was at the same site about 2 or 3 years after inception. She taught Biology, Math, Science, Etc to all of the High school age kids. There were 4-6 volunteers. When I went there 10 years later we were teaching middle school kids English and traveling out to the boonies (because Okinawa Numero Uno was no longer the boonies) to teach, and play with the kids to give the parents a break.

2 years later they shut down the program. It was the sadest and happiest moment I've had regarding missionary work. They no longer needed American teachers. This community had grown with a culture of calling white people "Teacher" even the adults and now there were no more Teachers going there.

What was the difference? Customer buy in. Just like a successful company, in Bolivia they worked for and with the nuns(and people), in Haiti they worked on the nuns and people.

It appears that the red cross did the same thing by not hiring Haitians to higher positions of power and giving them control over their own lives. If you read Mountains Beyond Mountains, written about Paul Farmer you'll see someone who went and worked with his customers to an extreme level.

I would like to recommend watsi: https://watsi.org/

You can donate to concrete people and, they give you an accurate report, after the fact, of what happened. I think we need more charities like them. Maybe something with education?

Disclaimer: I'm not related except as a donator.

My take-away from that is that I would never, ever donate a dime to that organization. The people in the local chapters who were the first to respond immediately after the disaster were fantastic. But when the national org eventually came in (and brought layers of on-site bureaucracy with them) it was a train wreck, and they started throwing their weight around cluelessly and got in the way of everyone and everything. If the full-time, paid staff of the Red Cross had just left things entirely in the hands of the local volunteers and had stayed out of the area entirely, things would have gone much more smoothly.

Private companies did so much more than many of the relief orgs. Sprint, for instance, gave us free event phones for the shelter residents to use to try to contact family. No worries about billing, or even if they'd get the phones back. Home Depot's efforts in the aftermath have been well-documented. And I believe it was IBM (my memory may be faulty) who donated thousands in computer equipment to the shelters where I was working, which the shelter residents used to track down friends and family who they'd been separated from by the storm.

I don't know if I'll ever have another experience like talking to some lower-level person at a big company, telling them that I'm there from a Katrina shelter where I just showed up to volunteer and have no formal association with any org, then immediately being escalated all the way up the chain to someone who makes decisions and that person says, "just tell us what you need from us and we'll do it. Don't worry about any cost or billing issues. Tell us what and when and where." That was awesome.

It was also a stark contrast, to be totally empowered by the likes of Sprint and IBM on the one hand, and then ignored and pushed aside by the Red Cross on the other. Pretty crazy.

The Salvation Army was maybe the one aid org that had their act together. Red Cross national staff and FEMA were worthless. Anyway, I regret that I didn't write all this down after it happened. Between my wife and I there's a great book -- or at least a really long magazine article -- in there somewhere.