Record Disasters, Rapid Response

Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

Nancy Lindborg, president of Mercy Corps, takes a deep breath when she thinks about 2005. So far, to understate things just a little, it’s been a highly unusual year.

“You never want to say never,” Lindborg says. “But it does seem like we’re hitting on all cylinders right now in a way we rarely have. The tsunami set the stage for some all-hands-on-deck responses, and there’s really been no letup since.”

Indeed, the Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004’s calamitous closing act, prompted one of Mercy Corps’ most extensive emergency efforts ever. Then, an unfolding food crisis in Niger and boiling-point civil strife in Uganda created a two-headed emergency on either side of Africa. When Hurricane Katrina shattered the Gulf Coast, Mercy Corps embarked on its first-ever full-scale relief effort within the United States. The agency’s Guatemala staff leads international efforts to help areas devastated by floods and mudslides after Tropical Storm Stan swept through Central America. At almost the same time, the 7.6-magnitude earthquake in northern Pakistan monopolized international headlines.

As efforts to save quake survivors entered a second week, Mercy Corps doctors, sanitation specialists and relief organizers ventured into remote mountain valleys in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Meanwhile, Mercy Corps’ far-flung staff - from Portland to Scotland to Hong Kong - scrambled to keep a perpetual motion machine running: logistics, funding, planning, supplies, human resources, security, communications, media relations.

Most of the time, Mercy Corps programs take a practical, low-key, long-term approach to aid: repairing canals in ex-Soviet Georgia; providing micro-loans to Chinese farmers; organizing community forums in Serbia. Those efforts continue. The overlapping crises around the globe, however, make disaster response the agency’s most high-profile calling card. And they pose a challenge for an outfit that prides itself on providing efficient, innovative help to the world’s most vulnerable.

“I’d say people in the organization are really looking forward to some disaster-free time,” Lindborg says.

But according to Lindborg and other senior Mercy Corps staff, this extraordinary year has both sharpened the agency’s ability to work at top speed and underscored the strengths of its flexible, creative approach. In this recent chain of calamities, they see opportunities as well as crises.

“We used to talk a lot about a continuum,” says Neal Keny-Guyer, Mercy Corps’ CEO. “There was relief, then recovery, then development. We’ve learned that it’s not a continuum, or at least not necessarily a sequential one. You can do relief, recovery and development all at the same time.”

Crises Emerge in Africa

In hindsight, Randy Martin recognizes that no one really knew what Mercy Corps was in for when, this summer, the agency decided to dive into a pair of long-simmering African crises.

“Niger and Uganda are sort of like the opposite of a tsunami or an earthquake,” says Martin, Mercy Corps’ director of global emergency operations. “They’re slow-onset disasters, so to speak.”

In Uganda, a marauding rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army had forced 1.6 million from their homes, creating a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Sudan's Darfur region. Meanwhile, in Niger, locust swarms and persistent drought put millions at risk of starvation. Mercy Corps decided to dispatch an assessment team to each country.

Then came Hurricane Katrina, with Stan and the Pakistan earthquake close behind. To Martin, Mercy Corps’ ability to respond simultaneously to very different, very complex disasters in Africa, South Asia and the Americas has everything to do with flexibility. The D.C.-based emergency operations team he leads includes just four full-time responders. To handle any given emergency scenario - where a grasp of fast-changing facts on the ground and international coordination are equally vital - Mercy Corps pulls together resources from around the world.

“Other organizations that do this kind of work tend to have bigger dedicated emergency-response teams,” says Martin. “But basically, we leverage the whole organization. That allows us to punch above our weight, I guess you’d say.”

On most mornings following the Pakistan earthquake, for example, a telephone conference call buzzed with voices beamed in from Islamabad, Portland, D.C., Khartoum and Hong Kong. The calls galvanized agency specialists of all varieties to keep money, information and personnel flowing to the devastated region.

“Our culture really lends itself to this kind of response,” Nancy Lindborg says. “People don’t stand on ‘it’s not my job’-type thinking. And we’ve built up a reservoir of talent that allows us to, for example, put people who’ve worked in Iraq and Kosovo into the middle of our Hurricane Katrina response.”

According to Martin, Mercy Corps' on-the-ground response - bolstered by the “reservoir of talent” Lindborg talks about - scales up quickly as cash on hand increases.

“When the Pakistan earthquake happened, we were scratching our chins, saying how can we make this work?” Martin says. “So we put in a budget of $20,000. Pretty quickly, we were able to increase that to $50,000. And within a few days, it was up to $1.5 million. There’s a real clear connection between donations and what we’re able to do on the ground.”

Choosing Strategic Interventions

There is a difference, of course, between the mad dash in the immediate aftermath of a disaster and the comprehensive, long-term work to build more functional and peaceful societies that Mercy Corps traditionally emphasizes. Across the organization, there’s a clear sense that a fast-moving disaster response must also be carefully considered and strategic. Its ultimate aims must go beyond providing tents, emergency rations, clean water and triage-level medicine.

“There’s definitely a wrong way to do this, and you see it all the time,” Martin says. “You’ve seen it in Pakistan: the helicopter hovering above a crowd of people, throwing boxes of aid down. Or the truck that simply opens its doors and lets people fight for aid. What happens in those situations is that the youngest and strongest are the only ones who get anything."

Mercy Corps weaves planning for the future into the very earliest stages of its emergency operations: identifying local leaders and community organizations; establishing cash-for-work programs that pay survivors for their efforts in recovery work; strategizing on underlying, persistent problems.

“In all our work, we look for places that are in transition,” Lindborg says. “It’s in those moments of change and upheaval that you can move into solutions to some longer-term issues.”

Aceh, Indonesia seems to be the example on everyone’s mind as the situations in Pakistan, Guatemala, Africa and America’s own Gulf Coast unfold. After the tsunami, Mercy Corps’ efforts in Aceh transitioned quickly from rapid emergency response to restoring schools, setting up small businesses and providing micro-loans to local entrepreneurs.

“You don’t plan for something like a tsunami,” says Neal Keny-Guyer. “But in that situation, we knew our added value would come in getting people back to their homes in ways that laid foundations for progress in other areas. And along with that, we try to keep in mind that the people affected are always the best agents of their own recovery.”

To Keny-Guyer, Mercy Corps’ emergency-response successes grow out of that latter conviction - and from an organizational spirit that lends itself to thinking and working fast.

"No matter how successful we are in our work, there will always be disasters in this world, and an immediate need to help the survivors," he says. "It's our job to assemble an organization that can respond quickly, smartly and strategically when those occur, and in ways that reestablish the groundwork for peaceful, productive communities."