After the Flood

With disease looming, the world launches a massive relief effort. Will the aid reach the victims in time?

  • KEMAL JUFRI / POLARIS FOR TIME

    Survivors fight for their share of water and noodles distributed in boxes in Indonesia two days after the tsunami hit

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    Coordinating the global relief effort unfolding in South Asia is less a matter of technology than it is of bureaucracy. Getting a vast array of relief charities--from local faith-based organizations to large multinational NGOs like Doctors Without Borders--to work toward the same goals is never easy. The U.N. is playing the key role in sorting out who will do what as the relief effort gains traction. The U.N. Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) "helps us figure out who is going to manage the medical clinics, who is going to provide food and who is going to run water and sanitation," says Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. This order of battle in the relief wars has emerged through bitter experience. A decade ago, during the genocide in Rwanda, he says, not only was there limited coordination between the U.N. and NGOs, but there was also confusion among U.N. agencies: UNICEF did not know what WHO was doing and vice versa. "Rwanda was a nightmare," Offenheiser says. "We had these large refugee camps, and you would find lots of agencies milling around trying to do things large and small, duplicating efforts left and right. What you get is a lot of waste and a lot of anarchy." In the decade since then, Offenheiser and other NGO members say, cooperation within the U.N. system has improved, in part because Secretary-General Kofi Annan saw to it that OCHA's coordinating role was strengthened.

    Though governments, charities and concerned individuals may have the understandable urge to offer immediate assistance, experienced aid workers know that patience is a virtue. With a calamity of this size, says Brian Grogan, a spokesman for OCHA, "it takes a long time to do the assessments and get everybody singing from the same song sheet." The U.N. has called for contributions of $130 million so far, and a much larger appeal will be made after Jan. 6, when its agencies have a better understanding of how many people have been affected, what their needs are and how much relief will cost.

    In this age of constant media coverage, the images of death and destruction that horrify us can be fleeting. But the region wrecked by the tsunami will need hundreds of millions--perhaps even billions--of dollars for recovery efforts. That is why U.N. and NGO officials alike last week stressed that the rebuilding just starting will be a long-term project. Oxfam's Offenheiser says it will take years--and a lot more cash--to rebuild the communities and local economies destroyed by the disaster. "People think, when you've got the bodies off the beach, the job is over," he says. "But the job has just begun." --With reporting by Aravind Adiga/Dodanduwa, Neil Gough and Hanna Kite/ Hong Kong, James Graff/ Paris, Zamira Loebis/ Banda Aceh, Carolina A. Miranda and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York, Alex Perry/ Tamil Nadu and Baghwan Singh/ Madras, India

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