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. 

Signs of Progress in Haiti

 
I had a rare chance to get out today and see the good work that my team is doing. It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hassles of managing that I lose sight of the great changes that are happening around me. 

Five weeks ago, I visited the Delmas 32 neighborhood. It was a tough visit. the area had been hard hit by the earthquake and still looked bad. Many of the roads were impassable and the area looked unlivable. I noticed a fire burning inside one of the buildings and made the mistake of asking what it was. I was told there was a body that they could not recover and were burning it. We put together a proposal to do demolish the buildings that were falling into the street and to remove the rubble from the roads. We were given a couple of grants to put 1,300 people to work in this neighborhood. We began working just over two weeks ago.

A month after the earthquake, the streets in Delmas 32 were still blocked by debris.

The change that I saw today was incredible. The streets were filled with yellow and green shirted workers that were working hard to remove the debris. many sections of the streets were already cleared and many of the partially collapsed buildings had already been demolished. However, the most impressive change was in the people. As the workers moved through the neighborhoods, street vendors set up stalls and life returned to the neighborhood. 

Today's visit reminded me that we are making progress. Sure, we might end up rebuilding the chaos, Haiti might not have elections this year, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. But we are working hard to recover from the worst disaster to ever hit the Americas. We might not have the answers, we are making life better. Petit à petit l'oiseau fait son nid--Little by little, the bird builds its nest

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: 

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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.

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?