In the wake of catastrophe, Rotarians are there for the long haul.
It could be a case of time passing, or it could just be that she is given to looking for comic relief, but one of the first things Bonnie Sirower recalls about the determined efforts of Rotarians after Hurricane Sandy is a moment of unintended humor.
Sirower, who was serving as governor of District 7490 (New Jersey) when Sandy ravaged the East Coast two years ago, knew that as soon as the torrential rains subsided, residents would need to start pumping floodwaters from their homes. At her first opportunity, and working in darkness, Sirower posted an urgent message on the Rotary District Governors Facebook page: “Desperately need pimps!” That, she says, prompted Kevin Hilgers, from Grande Prairie, Alta., to comment that he knew things were bad – he just didn’t realize how bad!
That anecdote became material for Sirower’s first stab at a comedy act earlier this year, at a Rotary Club of Paterson fundraising dinner. But the line that really stands out in her memory is something that she heard more than once, and from more than one of the Rotarians who dropped everything and stepped up to help in the wake of the storm: “This is why I joined Rotary.” Although providing assistance after natural disasters is not an official part of Rotary’s mission, anytime a disaster strikes anywhere in the world, Rotarians will be among the first to respond and the last to leave.
HAITI EARTHQUAKE
ON 12 JANUARY 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the Maryland-size country of Haiti, causing at least 230,000 deaths, injuring about 300,000 people, and initially displacing 1.5 million.
The response from Rotarians matched the natural disaster in its immediacy and, some might say, in its intensity. Within hours of the quake, Barry Rassin – a past RI director based in the Bahamas and past governor of District 7020, which covers parts of the Caribbean, including Haiti – had accepted the current district governor’s request to coordinate a disaster relief effort, and was in direct contact with assistant governors throughout the district. “All assistant governors in our two zones are equipped with satellite phones,” Rassin says. “That enabled us to communicate right away and find out what was needed.”
Those phone calls launched a campaign that brought in $18 million worth of supplies. Within days, 169 planeloads were dispatched from the Bahamas and Florida. Then 69 containers of essentials – water, canned food, and clothing – were shipped. Construction is nearing completion on a new school and orphanage, the final two rebuilding efforts in a disaster recovery plan that has included nearly 80 separate projects funded by Rotarians.
One of the first people Rassin talked to by satellite phone was Claude Surena, a Rotarian doctor who not only headed up the relief effort of all Rotary clubs in Haiti but also, as president of the Haitian Medical Association, was put in charge of disaster relief for the entire country. “Claude was the key contact for us, and he was the perfect person for that job,” Rassin says. “He and his wife, Yolene, had 100 people basically living in their house.” Surena downplays his role, instead noting “the support from Rotarians throughout the world” and the helpfulness of club disaster relief committees, which each club in the district had in place because of the region’s risk of hurricanes.
“Being prepared for hurricanes is one thing, but the earthquake was a shocker,” Rassin recalls. But he agrees that the district’s disaster plan helped in rapidly accessing and raising funds. In 2007, an initiative by Past District Governor Dick McCombe led to the creation of a Haiti Task Force to serve as a conduit for Rotary Foundation grant projects in the country. The task force also established ROTAH, a Rotary NGO in Haiti that allowed for the duty-free shipment of items into the country, with fewer delays at customs. Rassin relied on the task force and used a Rotary Foundation donor advised fund to quickly bring in contributions from Rotarians in 60 countries around the world.
Four years after the earthquake, Rassin pauses to catch his breath as he notes the sacrifices and contributions of Rotary members who played vital roles in the relief and recovery effort. “One Rotarian, dentist Ted Lazarre, lost his house and his business. He put his wife and child in a car, and once they were safe, went back to his community and started helping his neighbors.” Because the U.S. military had taken control of the Port-au-Prince airport and was turning flights away, Rassin says, Rotarians arranged for a supply plane to land on a grass airstrip owned by Guy Theodore, a Rotarian near Pignon. Each day, Rotarian Caleb Lucien would meet the plane, load supplies into his vehicle, and drive them to wherever they were needed.
Lucien, who founded Hosean International Ministries in Pignon in 1984, has been involved in building schools and orphanages, and is also focused on water and sanitation due to the ongoing cholera outbreak that began in October 2010.“Recovery will probably take another 10 years here,” he says. “You can’t do this overnight, especially in a place like Haiti, where the government is not as stable, and where there has been corruption. There are places that were hit really bad, where people are still living in tents. Communication throughout our district has been key, and will continue to be.” Rassin says he relied heavily on email for communication, and received 15,000 emails related to the earthquake.
When it comes to disaster recovery, Rassin says, people should be mindful that “you are not only rebuilding the infrastructure, you are rebuilding the economy.” During a disaster in the 1990s, he says, so many people sent free rice to Haiti that it put the country’s rice farmers out of business. After the 2010 earthquake, “we tried to buy everything we possibly could in Haiti,” he says. “It’s important to keep everything local, and work with local governments to make sure that building codes are not only met but stepped up a level.”
Robert Léger, a Rotarian in Haiti who has helped with repairing and rebuilding schools, praises the work of Rassin and the other three account holders of the donor advised fund set up to finance recovery efforts: Past RI Vice President Eric Adamson and Past RI Directors John Smarge and Bob Stuart. He recalls how a local Rotary club had requested funding to repair a school: “After analyzing the situation, these four leaders asked to talk to the parents. They said the school would be rebuilt. You should have seen the parents’ faces.”
EAST COAST HURRICANE
WHEN HURRICAN SANDY BATTERED the New York metropolitan area in October 2012, Rotarians there found themselves in an unfamiliar dual role: needing help as well as providing it. About a third of the 27 members of the Rotary Club of Point Pleasant Beach, along the New Jersey shore, were forced to move from their homes, including Sheila Vinton, who was governor-elect of District 7500 when the storm hit. She considered stepping down, but the next person in line, the district governor-nominee, also was displaced. Vinton estimates that two-thirds of the 1,200 Rotarians in the district were affected by the storm initially, and that 100 are still recovering. She is one of them, as she awaits the completion of work on her house, which had to be rebuilt. Immediately after the storm, Vinton says, local Rotarians were directly involved in relief efforts. People whose homes weren’t damaged helped others with gutting and tearing out drywall and sorting through personal belongings to see what could be salvaged. Rotary clubs outside New Jersey sent truckloads of food, water, clothing, and supplies. Individual clubs in the district soon came up with creative ways to provide assistance.
As part of the recovery, “one of our clubs used a district grant to create a tool-lending library,” Vinton says. “Another created pop-up stores where residents could go to ‘shop’ for donated supplies. We received financial contributions from Rotarians around the world. We used these to replace basic appliances for people’s homes, as well as to buy Sheetrock and building supplies. We were able to do a few projects, such as helping to create a handicapped-accessible bathroom in a relief center and restoring a community center to working order.
“I would estimate the Rotary impact to be more than $3 million in District 7500 in terms of service, money, and goods that we have provided,” Vinton says. That is an “impressive” amount, she notes, but “it’s a drop in the bucket compared with the billions of dollars in damage that occurred.” Although Vinton says Foundation grants can help with recovery projects, she advises clubs and districts to get creative and look for other sources of support as well, given the high cost of repairing and rebuilding in the United States.
In neighboring District 7490, Sirower tried to coordinate Rotary’s relief effort while “camped out” at the home of the district secretary. (Sirower didn’t have an Internet connection in her own home for three weeks.) When she was able to use her mobile phone, she recalls, she discovered another kind of flood: 253 new messages.
Sirower, whose disaster relief work earned her the nickname “the Energizer Bonnie,” swears by the three c’s: communicate, collect, collaborate. One week after the storm, she attended the annual Rotary-UN Day and conveyed the urgency of the situation directly to other district governors and Rotary leaders. Working with Peter Wells, the district’s disaster relief coordinator, she arranged for CBS Radio in New York to donate $10,000 in advertising time. Two months after the storm struck, the website for Rotary in New York and New Jersey had recorded 8,400 hits, donations totaled $730,000, and the district had rounded up more than 300 volunteers. “I could not have done it without Peter,” Sirower says.
“The smartest thing we did was to join the local VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster),” she notes. That group was headed by Janet Sharma, a member of the Rotary Club of Englewood, N.J., and executive director of the Volunteer Center of Bergen County, who facilitated conference calls that included 50 organizations.
Sharma says that while Rotary as an organization is better structured to aid in long-term disaster recovery, Rotarians played a critical role in the early relief effort. They were “essential at the beginning, helping us get launched,” she explains. She notes that Rotarians provided funding for communications equipment and start-up fees at the volunteer center that was set up to coordinate the activities of the VOAD.
After the emergency phase of the disaster, Sirower says, she and Wells focused the district’s attention and funding on “things that would benefit the most people.” Rotarians helped rebuild a senior center and restored a firehouse and playground.
“It was the worst of times, but it was also the best of times, because it brought out the best in people,” she says. But she notes that the best of intentions can sometimes create an unintended “disaster in a disaster”: an avalanche of unusable donated goods. Sirower’s neighbor to the south, Vinton, recalls a coordinator who received a phone call from someone who had just sent 15 used mattresses. The reply: “Send them back!”
Rassin encountered a similar problem in Haiti: “People should not just send things they want to get rid of,” he says. “As one Haitian Rotarian put it, ‘Please don’t send clothing that you wouldn’t put on your own kids.’” Sirower, Vinton, and Rassin agree on a simple guideline: Before sending anything, find out what the needs are.
To that end, Rassin says he would like to see Rotary establish “an organization-wide arm that is a conduit of information, so those who want to donate after a disaster know what is needed – to make sure the right things get sent to the right place at the right time.” Although he understands that disaster relief is not an official focus of Rotary, Rassin notes that districts and clubs will always provide support after disasters, and that “we need to come up with more structure so that Rotary can help the clubs do that.”
SRI LANKA TSUNAMI
FEW PEOPLE HAVE GREATER APPRECIATION for what Rotarians can bring to a region ravaged by disaster than RI President-elect K.R. “Ravi” Ravindran. Nearly 10 years have passed since his country, Sri Lanka, was devastated by what may have been the most destructive tsunami of all time. The tsunami, which also affected 10 other nations, was triggered by a 9.0-magnitude quake under the Indian Ocean that the U.S. Geological Survey estimates was equal to the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs.
“That marked one of the darkest days in the history of our country,” Ravindran says. The disaster killed nearly 38,000 people in Sri Lanka and destroyed two-thirds of the nation’s coastline. “Rotarians responded immediately, rushing food, water, clothing, bedding, medicines, and shelter to all corners of the country,” Ravindran says. After that first phase of emergency relief, Rotary Sri Lanka launched the Schools Reawaken project, a bold undertaking in which District 3220 raised more than $12 million to rebuild 25 schools, $2 million of which came from the Foundation.
“We resolved to turn tragedy into opportunity,” Ravindran says. “We completed the entire project in five years, even though there was a war raging in some parts of the country. Now more than 12,000 children are in schools with all the modern technology to support their education: well-ventilated classrooms, state-of-the-art computer labs, fully equipped libraries and sports facilities. When we embarked on the project, we did not have one dollar – we had only our dream, and we began to live it,” he says.
A key aspect of the initiative, Ravindran says, was “a dynamic website that had every little detail of the project – every cent that was received and from whom, every cent that was spent and on which item or school. Donors knew exactly where their money was going.
“We have to rely on clubs and districts to form their own project committees,” he continues. “The Rotary Foundation, with its support base around the world, is ready to step in and help, provided we can demonstrate our ability to respond to the situation. But we don’t have any programs tailored toward disaster recovery per se. Perhaps we need to look at that more seriously.”
Rassin would welcome that idea. “The reality is that when a disaster hits, we are going to help our friends. It’s as simple as that,” he says. “Rotary International can’t do that, but districts and clubs are always going to help. When there is a crisis, Rotarians are the first ones in to start the helping process, and they stick with it the longest.”
THE ROTARY FOUNDATION & DISASTER RECOVERY
ALTHOUGH THE funding structure that supported disaster relief and recovery efforts after the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake has changed, The Rotary Foundation still has a role to play in long-term disaster recovery.
John Osterlund, the Foundation’s general manager, says that after much discussion, “Rotary as an organization has finally reached the consensus that we are not and should never be a first-response organization.” But, he says, “given our grant programs, there is a nice opportunity for The Rotary Foundation to play a longer-term role in disaster recovery.” And he points out that some clubs and districts have established their own foundations that can fund disaster recovery projects.
“I think we’re at the place where the staff and volunteer leadership, for the first time in a long while, have clarity on what our role is,” Osterlund says. “Separate from the Foundation, there is an incredible amount of organized club-to-club activity that takes place after a disaster. We in Evanston are outside of that, almost completely.”
Although global grant projects must fall within the Foundation’s six areas of focus and meet a sustainability requirement, Osterlund says, “there is a lot of latitude with regard to the specific need that is addressed.” For example, he says, building schools can fit within literacy and education. A review of global grants approved after the new grant-making guidelines went into effect worldwide last year shows 17 disaster-recovery grants in the Philippines in the areas of maternal and child health, literacy and education, water and sanitation, and disease prevention. There also were five grants to Indonesia in those areas, and one to Japan.
“If you accept that we are not a first-response organization and understand that our role is one of longer-term recovery, you gain some time to assess the needs of a community in the wake of a disaster,” Osterlund says. “You are better informed in putting a grant application together. The benefit of time enables you to do it right.” — Paul Engleman