Contributor: Zach Dundas

John Stephens is one of four Mercy Corps program officers who focus on South Asia — a part of the world that is, as Stephens laughingly conceded, "action-packed." His frequent travels to South Asia give him a unique perspective on the successes and challenges of rebuilding earthquake-ravaged northern Pakistan, one year later.

Q: First of all, take us back one year. What's your memory of the quake and the days that followed?
John Stephens: I was in Pakistan when the quake happened, but I was down in Quetta, which wasn't really affected. We went up to the quake zone a few days afterward. Mercy Corps had health programs in Pakistan already, so we had a lot of doctors on staff and were able to form a response team pretty quickly.

So we go up, and it's just pure mayhem. You would hear wildly fluctuating stories and reports. We found a military base, and the army flew us in an old Russian helicopter over the landslides and the high valleys that had really seen the worst of the destruction. We set up our first mobile hospital. I think we've now done six.

When we were initially in Balakot, the most heavily destroyed city, there was literally nothing standing—not a park bench, not a light post.

How do you deal with a situation like that? How do you mobilize people?
When we would go into villages, we'd say elect someone to represent you and tell us what your priorities are, then we'll try to take on the top one or two. In one area, bridges over rivers that had connected some villages had been knocked down, so we helped them rebuild. And when I went back, people were very happy about that, and also a bit surprised. I mean, people go up into these areas all the time and say they're going to do things. I'm sure that every political season, they have people come in and promise all sorts of things. So to have a bunch of internationals — and Mercy Corps' South Asia team is very international; there are Brits and Poles and Afghans and all sorts of people — come in and actually get something done I think pleased people very much.

John Stephens encountered a level of destruction in Pakistan that required "talking not about rebuilding individual homes, but reconstructing entire cities." Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

You were in Pakistan again this spring. What did you see that you took as evidence of positive change?
The schools we established are in tents, but they're getting a level of attention, support and resources from government and international agencies they didn't have before. The teachers are getting their salaries. The kind of community organization we did is what really lasts — you get that kind of democratic, grassroots activity going on, and it sticks with people. I think that was what really delighted people about the bridge reconstruction I just mentioned. It was one of their first experiences with a real, transparent, concrete political process.

On the other hand, there have obviously been delays in things like housing reconstruction, and it sounds like some of those problems are due to bureaucracy more than anything else. Is that true?
It's similar to what I saw after the tsunami in India, where the government played a central role in the reconstruction. In India, the government designed temporary housing that was inappropriate and ultimately was widely rejected by the communities it was built to serve. It wasn't quite that bad in Pakistan, but the government did try to impose some things that, in the end, didn't work and slowed things down.

The level of destruction was such that you're really talking not about rebuilding individual homes, but reconstructing entire cities. It's similar to the complications you've seen in the wake of Katrina. It's just a much harder, more complex thing to do.

Pakistan's politics always sound like they're pretty complex. Have the country's internal issues affected Mercy Corps operations?
We would hear things, from time to time, about conservative clerics being upset, for example, that women — foreign women — were playing such an active role. To have a woman come in and lead a community meeting really rocks some people's worlds. But in these kind of situations, what people really want is for their communities to be rebuilt. So those conservative voices don't really have much traction at a time like that.

What about the broader regional and international politics that are so enmeshed with that part of the world?
I think if you'd gone up there before the quake and asked people for their opinion of the United States, you would have gotten some negative responses—though I certainly don't think people in that region support Al Qaeda or anything like that. They would be reacting to what they see in the news, which is unpopular wars and rhetoric. But after the quake, the presence of Americans was actually welcomed pretty enthusiastically. People thought it was great. The goodwill generated by a little bit of help is unbelievable.

Obviously, this reconstruction will be an on-going process for a long time, but what can you say you've learned at this point?
For Mercy Corps, it's pretty important to realize that the physical reconstruction is just going to move at it's own pace. Meanwhile, the most useful thing for us to do is work on community organization, education and economic development. If you get cash into people's hands, in most cases they can take care of themselves. The rebuilding is really happening at the community level, not the individual level, so imparting the skills to communities that let them help themselves is really what makes the most sense for us as an organization. It's what we do.

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Mercy Corps is known for its work around the world - for community-based economic development, conflict resolution and its support for civil society in far-flung countries.

Griff Samples, likewise, spent most of her career focusing on challenges faced by a diverse array of communities, particularly in Africa. She worked with international relief agencies Cameroon and war-torn Angola, and with a micro-finance organization dedicated to providing small loans to women in the developing world.

So how did Samples (and Mercy Corps) end up hip-deep in teddy bears, working with kids affected by tragedies inside the United States?

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Samples helped lead Mercy Corps' first-of-its-kind effort to provide social and psychological support kids traumatized by the event. By assembling "Comfort Kits" stocked with stuffed animals and age-appropriate materials explaining what happened, the organization helped thousands of children in and around New York. By providing training to parents and adult professionals, the Comfort for Kids program ensured that those kids would have better, more informed support through the years.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and large sections of the Gulf Coast, Comfort for Kids jumped back into the fray, reprising (and improving) Mercy Corps' outreach to American kids in distress.

We sat down with Griff Samples to find out more.

Q: Can you explain how Comfort for Kids first started?

Griff Samples: When September 11 hit, some Mercy Corps people went to New York and did an assessment, and decided there was room for us to do a program. It turned out there were no resources specifically targeting the indirectly affected - people who haven't experienced a death in the family, but yes, they've been displaced from their homes, yes, they've been traumatized, yes, their communities are in shambles.

So what do you do for those kids?

In New York, we did three main things. First, we provided 12,500 Comfort Kits for indirectly affected minority, immigrant, refugee and low-income kids. Second, we developed training materials for how to support at-risk kids. And the third part, really the core part, was to create materials that would have a longer-term value both for kids and people who work with them.

We started with a book called "What Happened to the World?" Then, a year later, we published a book called "How Are We Now?" Those publications deal with how to support kids who are at different ages and stages, particularly as time passes, as anniversaries come up, as their perspective and reactions change.

How did things unfold in New York?

We partnered with Bright Horizons, which is the largest workplace childcare provider in America, if not the world. Linda Mason from Bright Horizons is on our board. And Bright Horizons has a client relationship with JP Morgan Chase. They evacuated 15,000 people from the Financial District on 9/11. They also wanted to do something for communities that couldn't afford to do things themselves.

So it was a very unusual partnership, between two for-profits and Mercy Corps. We ultimately provided hundreds of training sessions - everything from macro organizations like the YWCA to very small neighborhood-level organizations. We trained firefighters on how to deal with affected kids. We trained 150 special-victims detectives from the NYPD.

And what did you tell them?

We wrapped the program around two messages: one, what are normal and abnormal reactions to trauma like this? Two, promoting respect and understanding of others. We used storytelling to promote better understanding of others.

This seems very different than most of what Mercy Corps does.

It was completely anomalous, actually. And - well, we had thousands of teddy bears sitting in the office, waiting to go into the Comfort Kits. It was a little strange. The story telling module was completely different than anything Mercy Corps had done.

Flash-forward to Hurricane Katrina. What happened then?

Well, we closed the program down after we ran out of money to work in New York. So Comfort For Kids completely went away for two and a half years. But the day after Katrina hit, we were talking about what we could do. We decided that what we'd done in New York worked. We decided to do 50,000 kits and work with Head Start to distribute them. We identified some key cities to work in: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Baton Rouge.

What's different this time around?

In New York, Mercy Corps ran the program. Here, if we had to set up offices in all those cities, it would cost a fortune. So we partnered locally with YWCA, which kind of gives them a core to hang their other programs of off. They're in the communities, they're well known and well-respected, so they're ideal. And we'll be able to do a clinical study on, for example, the workbook we've designed for older kids, and get some real data on how it impacts them.

As different as this is from most of what Mercy Corps does, how does it fit into the organization's larger mission?

If you think about the mission of Mercy Corps' mission in terms of building secure and just communities, how can you do that without giving kids the support they need in situations like this? If parents are worried about their kids they're not going to be building the economy or civil society. And if we can help parents understand how their kids deal with trauma - that a little regression is to be expected, that their kids are not ruined for life - that's extremely helpful to them.

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Michael Szporluk admits it: his career in international aid and development started by accident.

In the early ‘90s, he was teaching English in Prague. Even while the Czech capital became a world-renowned destination for free-spirited young people, war ripped apart the nearby republics of the former Yugoslavia. Through a friend, Szporluk started working with Bosnian refugees in camps in Croatia. He soon found himself hooked.

"I could have gone back to Prague," he says now, "but I realized it would be disrespectful not to stay involved in that part of the world. It had become a part of me."

After years of work in the Balkans and elsewhere, Szporluk joined Mercy Corps in February 2005. His immediate responsibility: to support a pair of programs aimed at strengthening non-governmental organizations in Guatemala and Mongolia. His wider task: to help Mercy Corps bolster "civil society."

And what exactly is "civil society"? We sat down with Szporluk to find out about this vital but - to a layman - vague-sounding concept.

Q: Okay, "civil society." Huh?

Michael Szporluk: Part of the problem with understanding civil society is that there are numerous different definitions of what civil society means. In our view, civil society essentially consists of groups and individuals in the non-governmental, non-business sectors of a community - these could be organizations, associations, trade unions or youth groups - that join together to express their interests and promote their common goals and values.

Where does the concept fit into what Mercy Corps does?

Civil society has been a cornerstone of Mercy Corps' programming for a long time. We started a Human Rights Desk back in 1989. Over the years our conception of civil society has evolved into a larger framework. The core principles are participation, accountability and peaceful change. The precise working definition has undergone several iterations - it's being revised again right now - but the primary emphasis has been on respect for rights, building relationships and ensuring that the work we do is sustainable.

You're involved in projects in both Mongolia and Guatemala - can you give us an example of what aspects of civil society you're talking about in those places?

Sure. The objectives of the Training Advocacy and Networking program, in both countries, are to increase civic participation, strengthen organizations and foster better relations with government. Now, even though the objectives are the same, given the two very different contexts, the programs are on two different tracks.

Yes, it would seem, at first glance, like those two countries have very little in common. What are some of the distinctive characteristics the projects encounter?

In Mongolia, the level of engagement in public affairs is very low. So we look at the needs in particular neighborhoods and do outreach to try to engage people to identify their concerns and think of ways in which those concerns can be heard by the appropriate public institutions.

And what has that process led to?

The neighborhood meetings in both regions we work in were extremely popular. In one of the two regions, Dundgobi, we had contracted a local organization, the Free Youth Association, to be responsible for leading this process. The neighborhood identified the need to have a community center. FYA then organized meetings with the local elected leaders to gain their support. Their efforts paid off - as the local governor's office has supplied architects and financial support to renovate a space to be used as community center.

So besides neighborhood meetings and new community centers, how do you measure something that sounds as nebulous as "civil society"?

There are all kinds of proxy indicators. How many people vote? Do they do anything beyond voting to participate in political processes? There are ways to measure attitudes in a community - how much trust do people have in the elected officials? Is government transparent and accountable? Do people have access to information through media outlets? Are there forums for discussion, public debate and dissent? Who is excluded and who is included in the social, economic and political arenas? Are people able to manage change through peaceful means?

And what about places where there hasn't been, as you say, a democratic transition? How would a civil society approach work there?

Even in places where conditions are challenging, you can work on discrete projects to improve specific services. It might be language instruction, or it might be working on relationships between different institutions. You might build a new school or make an old school wheelchair accessible.

The impact of that kind of project is measurable - does school attendance increase? Do people have different attitudes about people with disabilities? Are the disabled themselves able to articulate their needs and advocate for themselves? At the end of the day, when Mercy Corps leaves, it's important that people feel like our work and those relationships have had some tangible results.

This all sounds more relationship-driven and, in some ways, intangible than what I would think of as conventional aid, like providing food or equipment.

It is. In Mongolia, for example, we're trying to encourage more social entrepreneurship - to get more people starting initiatives on their own for the benefit of the wider community. That sort of thing is far more important than any kind of physical aid or money we could simply give. In fact, the latter can sometimes be counter-productive. I don't know how many times I've heard people say, ‘Oh, if we only had a computer. If we only had a truck, then we could get work done.'

But in many instances what's really helpful is not a new computer or a truck, it's the organizational skills to put them to use for the community. If you just give physical things, it continues a pattern of paternalism and dependency. There are plenty of things that can be done with a minimum of technical support.

What are the big challenges you face in this line of work?

One of the big ones is, what happens after your two-year or five-year program is over? What's the best way to insure stability after you're gone? It happens all the time - an organization will develop, say, a teacher-training program, then the funding runs dry. The community just reverts back to what it had before. In the grand scheme of things, the period of time you're working there is very short.

You can make a big difference during the project, but then what happens next? What that challenge tells me is that you need to have local involvement. Every agency will say that in their promotional materials, but in reality it is a very difficult transition to manage.

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Nearly a decade ago, Pam Eser was an unsatisfied investment banker on vacation in Vietnam.

"I didn't feel like my career was very fulfilling," she says now. She knew the money industry, but wanted to do something to help people who don't have much money.

During that trip to Vietnam, Eser found the solution to her dilemma when she met a woman who worked in the fast-growing, innovative field of "microfinance." A relatively new factor in the world of international development, microfinance initiatives provide small-scale loans, grants and other services to entrepreneurs in the developing world.

"It matched my skill set," says Eser. "I started doing some research. Eight and a half years later, here I am."

From her home base in Sweden, Eser directs Mercy Corps' microfinance and economic development programs around the world. From kick-starting grassroots tourism businesses in Lebanon to helping rural Chinese farmers buy pigs, Mercy Corps' small-scale economic programs help make communities financially stronger.

Eser explained some of microfinance's ins and outs in a telephone interview.

Q: For starters, Pam, just what is microfinance?

Pam Eser: Essentially, providing financial services in a sustainable manner to those who don't have access to them - everything that you and I, in developed countries, have access to. Those could be loans, they could be savings or mortgage services. There are lots of products and programs, and lots of purposes.

Maybe someone is looking to expand a business, or start a business. Maybe a community lacks a way to save. People may have to rely on buying animals to save, or jewelry - methods that aren't very flexible or secure. So microfinance has grown into a large industry, with the purpose to provide a wide range of financial services that meet the needs of poor families.

Is this a new thing?

You could say that moneylending has been going on since the beginning of time. But in a modern sense, microfinance really began in the 1970s in Bangladesh and Latin America.

Mercy Corps' programs started in 1997 in Kazahkstan and Bosnia - those were our first attempts to set up structures that would continue to function after we pulled out. An important aspect of microfinance is sustainability - you're trying to develop institutions that can continue to operate without external support, be it human resources or grant funding.

How "micro" is micro?

Well, of course it depends on the country. In Bosnia, you're in Europe and costs are higher. So naturally the loans have to be bigger, so borrowers can do something productive.

In Latin America or Bangladesh, you sometimes see loans of $30 to $50, with repayment periods of just a few weeks to a few months. Some of our programs issue loans up to a few thousand dollars. In any case, we're generally talking about amounts that seem small, but which can make big differences in poor, developing communities.

How so?

In post-conflict scenarios like Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as in disaster-afflicted areas like Indonesia and Sri Lanka, our target populations lost housing, savings, assets, businesses, jobs - everything. Access to loans allows them to rebuild small businesses, which in turn spurs the rebuilding of infrastructure and society at large. In China, if you help a family buy a pig to raise and sell, they can double their income in two loan cycles. The investment in dollars is very small but the relative payoff is huge.

Humanitarian concerns aside, how is this good business for the lender?

Microfinance is sustainable and long term. The lender covers costs and makes a profit, which can then be plowed back into the organization, to reach more clients, increase loan sizes for clients whose businesses are growing and diversify into other services as demand grows.

Across the board, we're working on deepening the infrastructure that's available in developing areas, and also on showing the existing infrastructure - the banks and other institutions that are already there - that poorer people can be reached and reached profitably.

When I apply for a credit card, the company issuing the card can look at my credit history and figure out if I'm worth the risk. How does it work for people who have never had dealings with a financial institution?

If a program is operating in an area where clients wouldn't have any history with taking credit from someone other than moneylenders or family and friends, the most likely thing for the program to do would be to offer what we call solidarity group loans. Five to seven people who know each other together and promise to repay each other's loans. They guarantee each other, allowing an institution to make a loan without ‘hard' collateral.

If one member of the group can't make a payment - for example, due to funeral expenses that month - the others make it for him or her. Then that person pays the group back when they can. Using this methodology, you can make lots of small loans, but you don't have to monitor each and every one of them.

We're used to thinking of aid in terms of food or maybe education. Why is this as important?

Without these services, you really can't expand your income potential. Imagine life in a U.S. city if no one could ever get a small business loan, or if no one could save safely or get insurance.

Also, another aspect of this is, if I'm going to give you seeds or give you food or give you clothes, that's somewhat paternalistic. I'm deciding what you need. On the other hand, if I give you cash, you can decide what you need. Maybe you want to buy food that day, or maybe you can use the money to grow whatever business you're in.

People don't want hand-outs. With a hand-out, you're a beneficiary. With a loan, you get dignity, and the respect that comes when someone is willing to make an investment in you, to trust that you will repay.

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Of the wide array of issues Mercy Corps tackles around the globe, hunger and nutrition may be the one most familiar to Americans. Nearly everyone has heard appeals to feed far-off, famine-stricken countries and the less fortunate closer to home.

But what about the complexities and subtleties of the issue? Mercy Corps nutrition programs - whether providing emergency food aid to famine-threatened Niger or helping Nicaraguan coffee farmers diversify their crops - look to go much deeper than simply distributing boxes of grain. In places where civil society isn't functioning, getting food to people is just one part of the puzzle.

We talked to Tom Ewert, Mercy Corps' most recent director of food resources, about hunger's hidden dimensions.

Q: Almost everyone with a television has heard Sally Struthers say that for pennies a day, they can feed a hungry child. So how much of what people think they know about hunger issues is true, and what are some misconceptions?

Tom Ewert: Well, a lot of it is true, but there are also a lot of misconceptions. Mercy Corps does some direct food distribution, but our main emphasis is on combining food into a broader approach. If families have jobs, if communities have clean water and some economic development, then a lot of these food issues are solved. So when we do food distribution, it's generally going to be short-term.

We're more likely to hire people to clear roads or paint schools or other things that benefit their communities in exchange for food assistance. We do maternal-childhood education programs, and try to attach lessons about growth monitoring and hygiene, so it's part of a whole package. If farmers have land but are having a hard time getting, say, tomato seedlings, or selling their surplus milk products, we'll help set up a nursery or a dairy-processing facility.

It sounds like the issue is a lot more intricate and complicated than most Westerners appreciate.

There's something very appealing about giving food to kids, no doubt about it. But we try to work with nutrition, the economy and the infrastructure to address things on a longer-term basis.

‘Sustainability' is such a big buzzword among many Americans who are concerned about agriculture issues. Where does it fit into Mercy Corps' approach to food?

It is a big buzzword, and frankly it doesn't mean too much. To go to a farmer and tell him that he has to do certain things to be "sustainable" is not very helpful. In Kansas, farmers have to go buy seed every year, and they can go to a bank to get a loan, and they can get their equipment repaired. In places like Afghanistan, none of those systems work.

So how do we help give a farmer a break - help him get seeds or get modern equipment? I once had a long discussion with someone who wanted us to be giving farmers in Zimbabwe corn that wasn't hybridized. Well, that's a system that farmers in the U.S. dropped 50 years ago, and farmers in Zimbabwe dropped 20 years ago. So how can you try to impose that on them?

Let's talk briefly about the situation in Niger, which is a place where Mercy Corps is doing direct food distribution.

The sad story is that because of Hurricane Katrina, funding for Niger dried up. We have a small program operating there, helping UNICEF with supplemental feeding programs for kids, growth-monitoring and some other things. We've put a lot of Mercy Corps money in, but we need more - there's much more need than we can address. It's one of the saddest places, really, because there's so much we could do, but very little money to support what needs to be done.

Does Mercy Corps do anything specifically designed to prevent famine and food crisis?

We are tuned into and participate in local, regional, national, international networks for information about responding to famine and food crisis. This effort is stronger in countries where we have well-established programs, such as Indonesia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan. Generally, I believe that Mercy Corps feels that by doing good development with a civil society focus, we will be aware of and respond to the hunger needs as (and hopefully before) they become apparent.

What are the best examples of success?

Eritrea is on the edge of famine all the time. All the time. We have a biscuit program that gives school kids a biscuit every day. And sure, it's just a biscuit, but it has 600 calories and 20 milligrams of protein. We've been doing it for awhile, and we're in the midst of turning it over to the Ministry of Education - that's always a great measure of success, when you can develop a program to the point where governments or people can do it themselves.

A lot of these schools are just tin roofs under a tree. There's no kitchen - you can't cook a soup. A lot of the schools don't have running water, and if a school doesn't have running water, a community probably doesn't have it.

Afghanistan is a great story, too - we've been able to help farmers grow wheat and grapes and other crops that there's demand for in the country. These are things they can grow in surplus and sell. That's the kind of help that lasts for a long time.

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