The Haiti Earthquake Response: A view from the trenches

Completing my work in Haiti

I drove away from Haiti yesterday, having finally been relieved of my role as the Acting Country Director. I chose to make the five-hour drive to give myself time to reflect on the last four months. I am both wonderfully relieved to be done and sad to leave my team. In my farewell speech the day before, I had stressed how proud I was of everyone. It was the hardest four months of my life. We had great successes--reopening the office within days of the earthquake, developing a logistics chain that delivered 50 containers of supplies to our most needy partners, restarting and accelerating all our programs so that we could help as many people as quickly as possible. 

I also stressed how sorry I was for my failures. In an earlier post, I had said that I knew that I had to act quickly and to take decisions. I said that I figured if I was right 7 out of 10 times, then I was doing well. However, those wrong decisions have consequences. In many cases, someone helped me to catch the mistake and correct it. In others, it was too late. Those mistakes hurt.

The hardest are the failures where I didn't act. I busted my butt and worked as hard as I could. When I was in Haiti, I worked 12 to 14 hour days. I spent nearly half my weekends in Haiti since January 12th. Yet, I could not focus on every problem. Four people quit in my last week. They each quit because of different unresolved problems. I sometimes felt that my attention was like a searchlight. I could shine it on a problem and push that issue towards resolution. However, i couldn't do anything about what was in the dark on either side of the searchlight. If I moved my attention too soon, the problem would not be fixed.

What hurt most was the knowledge that so much of the impact of the disaster was avoidable. Many of the buildings that collapsed were poorly built or on unsafe land. The Haitian leaders should not have allowed people to build so poorly. The same lack of leadership can be seen throughout Haiti. decisions to avoid short term pain led to disastrous impacts.

I saw that within my own short tenure in Haiti. Overall, I was very blunt and honest--far more so than I have ever been in my life. However, I sometimes slipped up. I would skip over a problem because it seemed too hard or fail to comment on someone's behavior because it seemed too awkward. Those problems seemed inevitably to come back and bite me. 

As I drove home, I resolved that this is what I would strive to change. I would help other leaders to have the courage to confront problems honestly rather than to allow them to fester. I don't yet know how I will do this. I might stay with my current organization and continue working in Haiti. I might move to Missoula, Montana and start fresh. In any case, I still have a couple of months to wrap up our work along the Haitian-Dominican border. 

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.