23.5.15

The truth behind earthquake relief work

It looks romantic for doing relief work, but it actually consumes lots of time and energy.

 “I thought I would be driving into the disaster area with my motorbike like a hero, looking into the suffering of the earthquake victims and passing the relief materials directly into their hands.  But when we arrived, we found that the village had already got lots of supplies from different organizations.  At the end, we added the bag of rice and some medicines onto that piles of materials and left.”  My Colombian friend told me that he and his friend had hired a motorcycle and a taxi to deliver the relief materials after the earthquake.  And the above description was his romanticized image about earthquake relief work.

After doing relief work for three weeks in Nepal, I realized that many people had this kind of romanticism about relief work.  And what I want to say is, to do relief work, especially in Nepal is not romantic at all, it is even frustrated sometimes.

While carrying out the relief work for Light on Nepal, the goal of me and Edventure Nepal Children’s home is to give the victims relief, but not affecting their lives and living style.  Besides, we are also very cautious while carrying out our mission so as not to endanger the future development of Edventure Nepal.

The epicenter, Gorkha is a very big district, the distance from one house to another is very far.

Gorkha is our focus area (it is one of the 75 provinces of Nepal and its total area is 3,610sq. Km), as it is a remote mountain area, villages and houses scatter across different hills and slopes, it normally takes at least a few minutes to walk from one house to another.  The goal of our relief work is to locate the victims who need more support and deliver our aid.  In the situation of Gorkha, we depended on the locals heavily in giving us information.  Luckily, Edventure Nepal has got the help of the local social workers and other active villagers, otherwise, we would not be able to get the names of all the victims, as well as the damage situation of their houses.

Before we announced how to distribute the relief materials, the villagers had already crowded around our bus.

Usually, we would know beforehand how many families were there to get our relief materials.  Say for example, there would be 100 families, but every time when we arrived, we would find there were 100 extra families who came because the news spread from one village to another.  As we didn’t know anything about these extra families, we could not define they were the victims of earthquakes or just villagers in poverty.  And these extra families would usually cause chaos while we were distributing the relief materials because they would try all the methods to get the supplies.  This kind of situation often caused us headaches, because we didn't want them to return with empty hands.  However, as we didn't prepare enough supplies for them, we had to figure out a way to settle the situation.  Fortunately, we had always invited lots of volunteers from the same village, as well as two to three volunteer policemen with guns to keep the order.

Luckily, we got the volunteer policeman to keep everything in order.

In the beginning of this month, while we were distributing the relief materials in Uttamntari, the chairman of Edventure Nepal, Amrit had come up a way to distinguish villagers who were really in need of support.  He divided the original package of relief materials into one or two more parts, only people who were really desperate, could get all the items including a tent, a blanket and 14kg of food, otherwise they could only get either one or two items.  In order to distinguish them, Amrit and other volunteers from Edventure Nepal would ask the detailed situation of each family.  Sometimes, Amrit would find the family was very much self-sustainable, such as their family members were working abroad or they had their own general store business.  Or they would find some drunken villagers came to ask for relief materials.  In these cases, we would rather distribute the supplies to other families who were more in need of help.

Such as on the 16th of May, we were in Annapurna, Gorkha, we were planning to distribute relief materials to only 450 families, but at the end, there were more than 550 families gathering around us.  Luckily, we had kind of expected that, so even after giving all the packages of rice and lentils to the 450 families, we would still distribute boxes of dry noodles to the extra families.  So at the end, everyone was happy.

Therefore, please don’t assume that it is an easy task to distribute relief materials, it actually requires lots of procedures, and consumes lots of mental and physical strength.  And we also don’t want the villagers would rely on charitable organization like us in the long run.

Volunteers of Edventure Nepal were working diligently under the sun, writing down all the records of the victims.  And a lovely villager was sheltering him from the sun with an umbrella.

Further, there are lots of rules and regulations from the Nepal government.  For example, the Nepal government has restricted lots of charitable organizations to distribute relief materials to the victims directly, they would ask them to put their supplies into the government’s store houses for centralizing and make the distribution work more efficient.  However, at the end, how many supplies would really fall into the hands of the victims?  I really don’t know.

As a result, in order to really deliver the supplies directly into the hands of the victims without any administrative costs, we had to do lots of documentations and paper work in the request of the government.  Most importantly, we got the contacts from the local villagers who help us to coordinate with the local government bodies.  This is the reason why we could arrive and distribute the supplies easily and we were not restricted by the government.  We were cautious because we didn’t want the government would have any excuses to give any kinds of troubles to Edventure Nepal in the future.

Amrit was discussing how to distribute the supplies with the local social worker and the representative from the local government.

After doing volunteer work in Nepal for so many years, I still don’t understand the attitude of the Nepal government towards charitable organizations.   The government would actually regard this kind of charitable campaigns, especially earthquake relief work as a rare occasion to do big business.  Moreover, many people would think children’s homes such as Edventure Nepal has subsidies from the government.  I thought so too in the beginning.  But ironically, not only the government would not give them subsidies, they would waste more money in setting up different regulatory bodies and employing more people to control all the charitable organizations.  What for?  The motive behind is very clear, which is to “earn some money” in the names of carrying out rules and regulations.  Therefore, all the funds for local charities are always self-raised.

All in all, although there is a lot of bureaucracy while carrying out our relief work (I have to really thank Amrit for all of his dedication and help) which makes us sometimes frustrated, we really felt worthwhile once we saw the smiles of the victims and felt the warmth of the villagers.

An innocent kid from Gorkha.
While his mom was so busy taking the relief materials, this little baby boy was very busy doing all the mischief.
A sincere thank you from the victim of Gorkha.
I was so touched by the act of a very friendly villager from Annapurna, Gorkha who came to shelter me with her umbrella.
Thanks for all the board members of Edventure Nepal to be the volunteers of our relief work.

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