Supporter: Jenny Bussey Vaughan

Villagers in Uganda from the Kotido District in Karamoja region, who attended a meeting to create a peace committee that would be responsible for monitoring and mediating local conflicts. The Mercy Corps program is called "Building Bridges to Peace." Photo: Jenny Vaughan/Mercy Corps

In an unpredictable world characterized by increasing social, economic and political complexity, good intentions are not enough to ensure sustainable peace and development. Effective, locally appropriate programming must be based on a clear understanding of the causal mechanisms behind peaceful change and a rigorous analysis of the impact of different interventions. As a relatively young discipline, the field of conflict management is still struggling to determine the best way to define goals and objectives, to measure impact, to articulate theories of change that describe why a particular program will lead to its expected outcome, and, ultimately, to identify success.

In July 2009, Mercy Corps began an 18-month, USAID-funded research project designed to strengthen our ability to evaluate the impact of programs that aim to promote stability through peacebuilding and economic development. Through comparative case studies of three country programs — Uganda, Ethiopia, and Indonesia — we will develop a set of field-tested measures of program impact and locally appropriate data collection tools, while promoting cross-community learning and problem-solving through a cooperative learning network.

This research will also allow us to examine several "theories of change" that underlie many of Mercy Corps' conflict management and poverty alleviation programs, including the theories that building economic relationships across lines of division or reducing competition for scarce resources will promote stability.

The Building Bridges for Peace (BBP) program in Uganda is an ideal testing ground for tools designed to evaluate programs that promote stability through both peacebuilding and economic development. Based on the theory that strengthening livelihoods opportunities for high-risk populations will promote stability by reducing competition for scarce economic resources, this 24-month program aims to address the key causes of conflict in northern Karamoja by engaging agro-pastoralist communities in joint livelihoods projects that build cooperation and promote reconciliation. These livelihoods projects will increase access to water and farmland through the construction of water tanks and dams and through joint farming of previously insecure areas.

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Photo: Jenny Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Today we distributed food to 300 patients and their family members at the General Hospital. The distribution was a day late: after waiting at the hospital most of yesterday for the World Food Program truck to arrive with the food, the delivery was cancelled due to lack of available transportation and security personnel to accompany the truck. The UN wasn’t able to tell us what time the truck would arrive today, so I went to the hospital early in the morning to receive it when it arrived. I waited five hours, knotted up with frustration, furious at the traffic that can stretch a 15 minute drive into a two hour trip, at the lack of trucks to transport food and water to hungry and thirsty survivors, at the crippled cell phone service that makes it so hard to get information. We’re here to help, but the logistical constraints make it so difficult to do so as rapidly as we need to.

I was elated when the truck finally arrived and we were at last able to execute the plan we had put together over the past two days to securely distribute the food. The kitchen staff rapidly unloaded the boxes of high energy biscuits into the kitchen, and then were organized into teams of five to carry the boxes to each ward, where they gave every patient 15 biscuits – one day’s ration for the patient and the two family members caring for them. In some locations, food distributions have turned into near riots, with desperately hungry people brandishing weapons in order to get a hold of some food. But the hospital is full of American military, and I think their presence – even though they were not involved in handing out any food – helped prevent the distribution from turning into a free for all.

It felt great to be able to give something to the patients. Although some hospital buildings are empty due to damage caused by the earthquake, others are full of patients, and the hospital courtyard is crowded with beds and shaded with a patchwork of tarps. Although most of the patients staying outside are out of immediate danger, they are still horrifically injured – truncated limbs end in bandages, skin is scraped off, pins holding broken bone together jut out of legs, arms and faces are swollen. Many patients have no place to go. In spite of their injuries, most patients greeted us with a smile and carefully wrapped up the food we gave them to save for later. There are still so many people to help, but at least today I can be happy that we were able to help a few.

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I’m exhausted tonight – but triumphant! After running around all day between the general hospital and the UN compound, we’ve succeeded in organizing a distribution of food to the hospital’s patients and their families Wednesday morning.

Our role was to connect supply to demand, and under ordinary circumstances, arranging this would be relatively straightforward. Under conditions of limited transportation and unreliable cell phones, however, this was a daylong process. While my colleague staked out the UN compound to identify sources of food, I shadowed an employee of our partner organization Partners in Health, asking her about the needs of their clinics as she drove to their warehouse to pick up medical supplies and rushed into the hospital with boxes of alcohol and bandages.

We met with a doctor at the hospital to discuss logistics. How could we ensure that each patient received some food? How could we make sure some people didn’t collect rations twice, taking food meant for other people? Where could we distribute the food securely, without being mobbed or having it stolen by hungry people who have become aggressive with desperation? Late in the afternoon, we finally received confirmation that the UN’s World Food Program would be able to transport 2.5 metric tons of high energy biscuits to the general hospital tomorrow afternoon. We were ecstatic. Tomorrow we’ll distribute food to 5,000 people.

I found out that someone who went to my graduate school was killed in the earthquake. She graduated some 10 years before me, and I never knew her, but I knew of her. And I feel a kinship with her. She shared my love of travel, my intellectual interests, my desire to leave a mark of goodness on the world, my job. Knowing that she was killed breaks the illusion of “It can’t happen to me.”

Last night, I lay on the floor in my tent and thought about her, wondering what it would have been like to be her. I think about that every time I drive past a building that has collapsed like a house of cards, the walls blown out, the floors stacked right on top of each other like a layer cake. What would it have been like to be the person inside that house? What would it have been like to see my house crumble around me? I think about that when I drive past buildings that look like they have been cut in half, leaving half of the building still standing, pictures on the wall and chairs arranged around a table, while the other half lies crumbled on the ground. What would it have been like to watch half of the building falling away, people and furniture disappearing in a cloud of dust, the interior suddenly open to the sky?

What would it have been like? I can’t imagine it, but I can’t stop trying.

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Communications and access are extremely limited after any earthquake, and this one is no exception. Text messaging is the most reliable form of communication, and we’ve been able to connect with a few people that way. We're doing our best to collect vast quantities of information, synthesize disparate reports and arrange logistics in an unfamiliar location under these conditions.

We got a good look at the earthquake’s destruction yesterday on the way to our current location — a meeting room inside a building owned by Voila, a local cell phone company and a subsidiary of Trilogy, a Seattle-based telecommunications company. (A colleague flew in last night on a military helicopter and has been camping on the crowded U.S. Embassy grounds with a number of search and rescue teams.)

The roads are passable, but there is a lot of rubble. Many buildings are flattened, and many more are dangerously unsound. In residential areas, people sleep on one side of the street at night while cars pass on the other. Other people who have lost their homes have set up rudimentary shelters with tarps and blankets in public areas. We’re told that some food is available, but all the banks are closed so people are running out of cash. Clean water is in short supply.

Although the dead have been cleared from the streets, many people remain buried in collapsed buildings. The streets are crowded with pedestrians, a large number of them wearing face masks or clutching rags to their nose and mouth. A man told me that you could hear people crying out for help in the collapsed buildings for the first 48 hours after the quake. Now there’s just silence.

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Greetings from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Richard and I arrived here late Friday night, about 2am (Saturday, really). We had just sat down to dinner at our hotel in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (the city we had flown into, since the Port-au-Prince airport wasn't an option) when we got a call from the U.S. Embassy that a military flight was leaving for Port au Prince NOW.

We hurriedly grabbed our bags and some water bottles and granola bars that Gene and I bought in the afternoon in preparation for an eventual departure. Then we raced to the airport (and I wished I had taken a shower more recently than the previous night, because we're not going to see water for a while), where we boarded a U.S. Coast Guard cargo plane along with a large group of search and rescue workers from Costa Rica and their dogs and a few other aid workers.

We arrived in Port-au-Prince about an hour and a half later. The airport is still standing, with no immediately visible damage, and lights were blazing. And it was LOUD — you had to shout to be heard over the roar of the 6 or 7 large planes parked in front of the airport. Richard and I weren't exactly sure where to go. We had been told that we could expect no logistical support once we had arrived, but I had heard that aid agencies were pitching their tents at the far end of the tarmac next to the military barracks.

We headed down the tarmac, lugging our bags past impromptu TV studios where reporters were standing in front of cameras, sitting slouched on the curb, or somehow sleeping in spite of the noise under mosquito nets, as well as past a group of locals waiting to evacuate.

We couldn't find the aid agency encampment in the dark, so we just pitched a tent on the grass next to a mango tree where another TV crew was also camping. We didn't have any air mattresses or sleeping bags, so I just spread out a blanket (another purchase from the afternoon) and somehow managed to fall asleep after dining on a cereal bar.

Planes continued to come and go all night long. We got up about 6am this morning as it was getting light. We're waiting for another member of our team, Cassandra Nelson, to arrive, and we've arranged for a vehicle to come pick us up.

So we're sitting on the tarmac, watching uniformed search and rescue teams from Russia, Iceland, the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico march past and watching a continuous stream of planes land and take off. The airport is currently being controlled by the U.S. military, so there are lots of American military folks walking around and loading and unloading pallets of supplies. Mercy Corps headquarters has connected us with a locally-based organization, and we'll be heading to their compound to stay, where they have electricity, communications and space for us.

The aid agencies camped right next to the airport are primarily search and rescue groups, so I'll head over to the MINUSTAH (UN mission in Haiti) as soon as I can to learn what other relief and development organizations are doing so that we can coordinate our efforts with theirs.

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