Life in the front line of the Haiti Earthquake

It all changed in an instant

Last Monday, my job was to run a small cross-border conflict program. Today, I am running a relief program for the largest disaster to hit the Americas. Last week, I was actively looking for a non-profit that I could direct.  Now I don't know what I want to do. It is hard to remember life before the earthquake.

I have worked a number of disasters, but mainly floods and hurricanes. Earthquakes are much harder. They come without warning and change everything. I'm not ready to write about the impact on people. It is just amazing that everyone's life was changed in an instant.

I don't know where we will go from here. I don't know how Haiti will change. I don't know what will happen next. I do know that everything can change in an instant.

 

A personal account of the response to the earthquake in Haiti.

Every now and then, life hands you a chance to make a difference. I am fortunate to be in the right place at the right time  I used to run the Pan American Development's Haiti disaster program before I moved to the Dominican Republic to run the border program. Therefore, when the earthquake hit, I was already in place to respond. With all telephone communication cut off in Haiti, we had no idea what had happened to our staff. Wednesday morning, I was able to get some cash and supplies together and drove from Santo Domingo to Haiti.

It is a seven hour drive and I spent the whole drive talking on the phone and getting updates on the situation. We received a message from our office that our staff was safe, but we were unable to talk directly with anyone. I crossed the border around 6pm and made to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince around 7pm. As I drove into town, I began seeing the first impacts--a cinder block wall that fell here or a damaged wall there. A bit further in, I saw whole walls down, then began seeing collapsed roofs. We made it to our safe house around 7:30pm and settled in for the night.

Everyone in the area was still very shaken. Even though the house was completely intact, the Haitians were sleeping outside in fear of another quake. During the night I felt two strong aftershocks.

In the morning, we headed into town. The damage was amazing. I didn't go near the epicenter, but the damage was everywhere. Many of the buildings that were damaged had been badly built, but others seemed quite solid. We touched base with the Direction de Protection Civile (the Haitian government agency charged with managing the disaster). They had no resources and were beyond swamped. We found some of our staff and began organizing our office again. By this point, I had distributed all of the resources that I had brought and used up a third a tank of gas--their is little fuel available and I knew I could not run out. With no means of communication, I headed back to the Dominican Republic to get more supplies and to get back in touch with my Dominican and Washington offices.

It is a crazy time. We are getting lots of support (www.panamericanrelief.org) both in cash and in supplies. However logistics are such a mess that it is hard to do much. Tomorrow I hope to get our office in Haiti up and running to make it easier to provide supplies. There is so much to be done that the little that we can do seems insignificant. Yet, everyone needs to do their part.

I try to avoid thinking of reconstruction. So little was done after the four hurricanes hit Haiti in 2007. So little was done after the hurricane hit Gonaives in 2005. How will Haiti ever get back on its feet.

 

How to keep your New Year's Resolution to travel more without breaking your budget

How much would it cost to visit every country in the world?

Earlier this year, I met a very remarkable person who is out to visit all 192 countries. Perhaps even more remarkably, Chris Guillebeau is doing it without corporate sponsorship or a trust fund. Although my travel goals are far more modest, I have been a regular reader of both his blog and his "Unconventional Guides" in which he shares his secrets to creating a micro-business, using the social web, and traveling cheaply.

The newest of these guides is the Frequent Flyer Master. I purchased this guide the first day that it was available, based on how much I liked his previous guides. I was also intrigued by his guarantee--that if you don't earn enough miles in your first year, that he will buy the book back from you. At $49, I wanted to be sure that the purchase was worth the investment. Sure enough, within  a day of reading the book, I had signed up to receive 50,000 miles plus elite status with a car rental company. However, the add-ons would be worth the $49 price. Based on what I had learned through the report of Priceline booking (the name your own price hotel website), I was able to book a 3+ star hotel in downtown NYC for $99/night. This guide has saved me hundreds of dollars already. I highly recommend it.

 
Chris also writes a wonderful blog and has two free ebooks: "279 Days to Overnight Success," and  "A Brief Guide to World Domination." All three are excellent resources and and should keep you motivated to travel the world regardless of your budget.

Although I purchased each of these guides, I have since become an affiliate for Chris. This means that if you click on the links above and purchase any of these products, I will receive a commission.  However, I am not blogging to make money. As long as I am in my current position, I will donate 100% of the money that I receive from this blog to the my current non-profit. If you are not comfortable with this arrangement, feel free to Google "Chris Guillebeau ." He is easy to find!

The Art of Finding the Perfect Job

Seth's blog today is on the difference between quickly filling a vacancy (hiring) and the art of finding the perfect person and convincing her to quit her job and join your team (recruiting). I believe the same holds true for finding a job. There is always lots of work available--it might not be what we want to do and it might not pay well, but there are jobs. The art of finding the perfect job may be in convincing an organization that you are so valuable that they cannot live without you--even if they did not know that they needed you. Every now and then, I have found someone who struck me as so remarkable that I knew I had to create a position to hire him. I've also had employees so good that I created positions so that I could promote them.

I'm hoping that through this blog ("Your Next Executive Director"), I will be able convince an organization with the potential to be amazing that they need me--even if I am more qualified or differently qualified than the person that they had originally envisioned.

It seems to me that the Art of Finding the Perfect Job is as much about being remarkable and creating demand as it is about being in the right place at the right time.

The 5 lessons that I learned in my first year blogging

I began blogging a year ago because I wanted to see if I had something to say. I consider myself to be a bright, interesting person. I had been reading a number of blogs and wanted to see if I could do it. It seemed simple enough--Seth Godin just writes a few lines each day with little formatting and no pictures and thousands of people read. How hard could that be? 

I also started blogging because I saw it as an important tool that my organization could use to reach out to a broader audience. We had been working along the Haitian-Dominican border for many years and knew the region quite well. I had encouraged others to write about the border, most notably Elizabeth Roebling,yet we had written very little. 

Last November, I took the plunge and starting blogging. I worked hard on my own blog for six months and then started a blog for my project and let this one go quiet. I certainly did not have "279 Days to an Overnight Success." I did learn a lot and will continue blogging. The five biggest lessons that I learned are the following:

1. Having a blog is fun: I love my blog. I love referring to it ("I wrote a piece on that subject on my blog--can I send you the link?"). I love thinking about what I will write. I love seeing that people read what I write.
2. Writing a blog is a lot of work: I can't jot down a quick thought and hit "publish."  A quick post for me takes an hour. The longer posts on the Our Border site or the early posts on poverty on this site took at least several hours to pull together and I sometimes agonize for days over them.
3. Getting readers is harder than writing:  There is so much great, free content available, it is hard to attract readers' attention. Writing interesting material is essential, but it is not enough. Instead, all the blogging gurus highlight the importance of actively recruiting an audience through commenting on other blogs, participating in forums, guest blogging, and using your networks (email contacts, facebook, twitter, etc.). Recruiting readers can take more time than writing!
4. Making money off a blog is even harder: I read the emails that I get from the blogging money gurus like Jeremy Shoemaker and Eben Pagan, but I have never followed their advice. I would be happy to earn lots of money doing little work, however I don't see myself running operations like theirs. Instead, I opt for Chris G's Authority Blogger model. I blog to share knowledge and attract attention rather than to directly earn money. The donations that come in through the Our Border blog don't cover the hosting cost of the blog. However, the blog is our best calling card. When people read our blog, they know that we are the experts on cross-border development. I'm hoping that this blog will land me the perfect job as the Executive Director of an exciting organization.
5. Blogging is fun: I love the new interactions that I have because of my blogs. I love it when I get comments on my articles and I love the challenge of developing interesting content and attracting new readers. Blogging has made me more thoughtful and has brought me in touch with lots of people that have helped me improve my work. Despite all the hassles and frustrations, I can't imagine ever giving up blogging!

Back when I was first considering blogging, the best advice that I received was to just do it. Don't worry about the quality of your writing--no one will read it in the beginning and it will improve with practice. If you're not willing to pay the small fee that typepad charges, there are lots of free options. The only way to learn how to blog is to start blogging.

Hire me as your next Executive Director!

I've spent the last 20+ years running projects and country offices throughout the world. I have worked on making things better in some of the most difficult corners of the world: Haiti, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and many more. I am ready to return to North America and take up a new challenge. I'm looking for an organization that needs a remarkable leader, one that wants to take on greater challenges.

Can I help you to change the world?

Learn more about me, click on one of the buttons below: 

or read more of my blog.

If you are interested, contact me by telephone at 809 224-8307 or through email or via Linkedin by clicking the links to the right.

Does the Harlem Children's Zone hold the key to revolutionalizing the world?

My kids class

I recently reread Jared Diamond's excellent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is an excellent overview of how a variety of factors gave some geographic regions the natural advantages that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. He beautifully shows that, up until fairly recently, where you were born, rather than your lineage or "race" determines how rich your society would be. However, now that the world is flat and everyone has access to the same guns, germs, and steel; why have the differences continued? Why aren't African kids competing on par with European kids?

The question became even more intriguing after I read Malcom Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He looks at successful people from Mozart to Bill Gates and concludes that these people became so successful by spending the 10,000 hours required to master a skill and then being in the right time and place to take advantage of the mastery. This was the case with Bill Gates who, as a high school student, had nearly unlimited access to a mainframe computer when few computer professors did. It was also the case of Mozart, the son of a composer, who was forced to put in his ten thousand hours while still a young child. 

The beauty of putting together the thoughts outlined in these two books is that they make the case that anyone in the world could succeed if they put in the time to master the skill. Except it doesn't work that way. With a few rare exceptions, Africa does not produce many "Outliers."

The best answer that I have found lies in the story behind the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ). As described in the This American Life episode, the HCZ CEO, Geoffrey Canada, was raising his second family in the 1990s are realized that the thinking about childrearing had dramatically changed from his first try at it. The new thinking was that parents had to be involved with their kids from even before the kids was born--eating the right foods, singing to the womb. Once the baby was born, there was a whole new philosophy of discipline and care. He encouraged his social workers to go out into their neighborhoods so see if this new thinking had caught on in Harlem. They found that it had not. Geoffrey then reworked the HCZ strategy to focus on helping the children by creating a "conveyor belt" to take them (and their parents) from baby college to college. The HCZ helps parents to care for their kids and prepare their kids for success. By not waiting until the children are reach the traditional school age, they are able to impact the children when they are easiest to touch.

The results that the HCZ has achieved are nothing short of amazing. They have transformed the neighborhood from one of underachieving kids to overachieving ones. They are proving that it is possible to transform education. The Obama administration is looking to duplicate the success through "Promise Neighborhoods."

What if we could take this idea global? What if we could launch baby colleges and develop conveyor belts to take kids to college? Could this be the missing key that would allow children from poor families from all over the world to finally be able to compete in this global economy? Is the biggest mistake that we make in education that we wait too long to begin educating our kids and thereby deny them the chance to achieve mastery?

Seth's mad at the "non-profits" and the situation is worse than he thinks

Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear all change.

I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's excellent online document depository to foster learning.

I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.

The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started--not the number that have succeeded.  In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.

What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?

How much Clout do you have?

Fareed Manjoo wrote in Slate that Tweeting a protest against a company has more success when you have more followers and are therefore perceived as having more clout. However, the number of followers is less important than who the followers are--the President's Daily Brief is written for a select audience, but one with a lot of clout.

Seth Godin points out that the "web" knows how much "clout" we have and how much are followers have. It knows if our tweets are retweeted, if our followers have lots of followers, and which of our ideas are amplified. Each of these bits of information is hidden in a different place, but they could be aggregated together. Whether we like it or not, someone is going to figure out how to do this. 

Are you ready to have your clout measured? Would you pay to have that information on your followers? What about your competitors?

A new, excellent primer on poverty

A friend of mine, Rahul Deodhar, has just put out an excellent primer on poverty. He explains beautifully the concepts that I touched on in one of my early posts "The New Thinking on Poverty." The basic idea is that people move in and out of poverty based on what Rahul calls "Snakes" (pitfalls and bad habits that pull them down) and ladders (good habits and actions that pull them out). Rahul provides clear illustrations of how people can cycle in and out of poverty and the high cost of being poor. It's a free ebook and well worth the read. You can learn more about Rahul through his website: http://www.rahuldeodhar.com/