Clues for Efficiency and Fast Impact in Relief Effort: Haiti Experience

Do not get me wrong. I have the utmost respect and appreciation for aid organizations and everyone trying to provide assistance to those who need it ihere.

It probably has nothing to do with the people or the institutions, as their intentions are good and they are doing enormous efforts.

It is the system, or lack of, or the resulting system that cripples initiative and the ability of individuals and individual organizations to be proactive and effectively help.

Or perhaps it has everything to do with the organizations, the top and middle management, the chain of command and those in charge.

Dunno for sure, dunno yet, for almost everyone I see and meet is busy or trying to get busy. But once this is done, I hope we can all work together and break the whole thing down and come up with proposals for improving immediate response in crisis situations.

I mean, lots of people are busy, but because of the inability of working together to achieve immediate impact, they are going to be able to become effective, late this week, early next week, a week and half or two weeks after the earthquake hit. By then, it is going to be too late to too many.

And by too late, I mean dead, crippled for life, losing an eye because there was no alcohol and cotton to swab a simple scratch on an eyebrow, to lose a leg, because a small cut on your feet got infected, again, things I have seen and that are taking place now.

Below is a collection of notes and thoughts from the limited but fast impact we were able to achieve through our participation as independent, proactive, self-controlled relief teams.

There might be a clue in the efficiency of small independent units: a split team of 3 (2 in Port-au-Prince and 1 in Fond Parisien), with distributed network of connections was able to overcome bureaucracy, get stuff shipped, picked up, delivered and installed. Again, the team had no budget and even no vehicle. The resources were "networked" throughout the afternoon in a matter of less than 3 hours through SMS and Twitter. It took them longer to deliver the stuff for us at the airport than what it took for us to get someone to find the stuff in Santo Domingo, ship it, fly it over to the airport and drive to pick up the 2 members receiving it.

Mite Nishio and his wife Raquel Tomé, Arturo López Valerio and his wife Aura Vargas, and Franklin Polanco and his wife Heidi, have been key in maintaining communications, arranging for resources, networking and finding solutions from Santo Domingo, in particular since we can not be online or available on the phones most of the time.

There is a clue there in support and continuous networking.

I tweet or SMS stuff needed from Haiti, they retweet it and get it in Santo Domingo.

Creo que esa es parte de la respuesta, una cadena en la que los eslabones no están preocupados por sus evaluaciones y reportes, ni en quedar bien o parecer bien.

Mite y Arturo resolvieron más rápido que si se les hubiera dado una orden. Erica, ayer, al desaparecerme yo y no dar respuesta del transporte, alquiló una camioneta con chofer por sus propios medios.

Cada uno de nosotros, ve una necesidad y la resuelve con iniciativa propia sin esperar que le manden o le digan qué hacer.

Our experience and any level of effectiveness we might have had was highly related to the use of SMS, mobile phones, tweets from the fields and messages retweeted and reposted in Facebook, use of Google Forms to gather volunteer contact info and Google Docs to gather patient data and start a medical registry.

I think part of the answer can be found in Mite's and Arturo's quick response to the firefighters transportation request I made which was solved in less than an hour. They responded faster than if what they had received was an order.

They are links in a chain where links are not worried by their evaluations and reports, or on how they will look and end up in the end. Also a chain where links have connections in multiple directions, not just up and down, and is willing to hook up to other chains.

Yesterday, when I was unable to provide an answer about transportation while I was out of reach at the airport, Erica rented a pick-up truck and a driver to get to Haiti by her own means. When we were back in contact, I had 2 doctors and professional community expert and communications and electricity engineer to join her.

Each one of us, sees a need and solves it with self initiative without waiting to be commanded or told what to do.