COLUMN ONE : Burnout Hits Relief Network : Too many catastrophes abroad and too many burdens at home are blamed for lackluster public response to appeals for help.

Frustration was high as delegates from nearly 130 nationwide relief organizations met in Washington to consider a world ravaged by calamity.

In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, the Kurds needed help. A cholera epidemic was spreading death across Peru. Meanwhile, massive earthquakes had struck Costa Rica and Soviet Georgia. A worsening famine in east Africa was threatening 27 million residents in six countries.

Not only was the devastation widespread, but the American public, drained by the recession and the Gulf War, seemed unusually reluctant to help. Too many catastrophes and too many burdens at home had produced a kind of burnout.

“We were . . . going around the room, saying, ‘How many millions of people are affected by all these things? And the public is flat,’ ” said Richard Walden, president of the Los Angeles-based relief group Operation USA, who attended the conference on Tuesday. “And in the middle of the meeting, literally, the news came into the room that the cyclone had struck Bangladesh.”

The Bangladesh storm, which has killed nearly 100,000, has put further strain on a nationwide relief network that raises more than $250 million each year for natural disasters and political crises in foreign lands. Private humanitarian organizations in the United States provide a disproportionate share of the emergency aid needed each year worldwide, bolstering the relief efforts of U.S. and European governments to help the Third World.

Yet in recent months, a flare-up of global crises that Walden described as “biblical in proportion” has left many such nonprofit organizations running desperately low on money and supplies. A few organizations, such as Operation USA, report that donations have dropped significantly. Others, including chapters of the American Red Cross and World Vision, say that donations are comparable to past years’ levels or even markedly higher.

Regardless, nearly every organization seems to be struggling, unable to keep up with the demands of world events.

Blankets and weatherproofing materials so urgently needed in Bangladesh are scarcer than ever--they have already gone to help the Kurds fleeing Iraq. Medical supplies, notably intravenous solutions, that Bangladesh requires are also in short supply; crates already have been shipped to Peru, where the cholera epidemic so far has struck 165,000 people, killing 1,200.

Other commodities, including food, water-purification tablets, flashlights and water-storage containers, are scattered all too thinly between famine-stricken African republics and hard-hit earthquake zones.

“People that have been doing this for a long time are hard-pressed to recall a time in history where things have been so dramatic,” said Tom Drahman, CARE’s manager for Asia. “It seems there is a disaster, not only of the week, but of the day. It has to stretch (our) finite resources.”

Especially since the end of the Gulf War, many organizations say that their fund-raising efforts have lagged, suggesting that the public may simply be tapped out. Relief workers call the phenomenon “donor fatigue.”

“It has been really difficult for the agencies,” said disaster program officer Lisa Mullins of InterAction, a New York-based coalition representing the 130 relief groups that gathered this week in Washington. “It’s difficult to get the public’s attention. The public’s been run dry by the Persian Gulf situation . . . and there has been a confluence of these disasters.

“It’s left us all reeling a little bit.”

Although Mullins does not compile revenue figures for member groups, individual agencies said they are either lagging behind prior years’ fund-raising totals or struggling to carry out their work because of the escalating demand.

In Africa, the notion of donor fatigue is nothing new; as political conflict in the Sudan, Mozambique, Ethiopia and elsewhere has contributed to turning a long drought into a crushing famine, fund-raising efforts have withered, too. After the halcyon years of the mid-1980s, when African famine relief was the vogue, the public shows signs of wearying of the troubled continent, fund-raisers say.

Now, other parts of the world are also demanding attention. In Bangladesh, relief organizations expressed an especially dire need for cash contributions because of the difficulty getting supplies into the flood-soaked country. “We don’t need material goods; we don’t need food,” said John Hammock, executive director of Oxfam-America. “We need cash contributions. Then we can acquire what we need locally at much lower cost.”

He acknowledged, however, that “relief agencies are stretched thin because we have had to spend our resources in other crises, particularly the Kurds, but also in Africa. Our capacity to respond is not as much as we would like it to be.”

Diane Thomas, a financial officer with the American Red Cross, said the organization’s Los Angeles chapter raised about $7 million in private disaster-relief donations in 1989-90, mostly to help domestic victims of the Bay Area earthquake and Hurricane Hugo. That extraordinary haul compares to just $1.8 million in the past 10 months. Most of this year’s donations have been earmarked for the Persian Gulf region.

“We have seen a flattening of the dollars coming in over the last few months,” Thomas said. “We’re getting very little response for the cholera epidemic in Peru and the African famine. There’s just very little.”

Still, she said, the $1.8 million is substantially more than the Los Angeles chapter has raised in other years, when $1 million in contributions was common. In some respects, she said, Americans have been unusually generous this year, and yet typically the money has flowed in mostly for highly publicized problems such as the Gulf War.

The difficulty recently, Thomas said, has stemmed from so many problems in faraway places, seemingly out of the public’s consciousness.

Fund-raisers are watching the trends carefully and struggling to call attention to parts of the world that some Americans can scarcely pronounce.

Monrovia-based World Vision, one of the nation’s largest relief organizations, with staff members and volunteers in more than 90 countries, has dipped into its reserve to commit $100,000 in aid for Bangladesh. The organization is counting on the public’s generosity to offset the expense later, said Craig Hammond, World Vision’s vice president of development for foreign projects.

“We are committed to respond every time . . . any kind of crisis or disaster occurs,” Hammond said, describing the past months as especially difficult because of prior relief efforts that have “pretty much exhausted our financial resources.

“We are having to respond with faith that somehow people will understand and provide the financial resources (later),” he said. “We can’t expect the people of Bangladesh to sit around and wait three weeks to see how much we can raise or how many resources we can gather.”

Unlike some other organizations, however, World Vision has seen no actual decline in private donations, partly because of its size and large donor network. The organization spent $11.6 million in foreign disaster relief last year and is expected to nearly equal that total this year.

“You worry about donor fatigue, you worry about staff fatigue and you worry about your own ability to respond (to problems),” Hammond said. “The good news is that Americans, typically, if they are presented with a problem, and if they believe that it’s real, and if they see that they can make a meaningful difference by giving, they always do it.”

Hammond said World Vision’s 220-member staff in Bangladesh will help it begin providing shelter and medical aid more readily than in some countries, where the organization must hurriedly coordinate with the government and other relief groups. Typically, relief groups devote hundreds--or thousands--of hours to determining what a stricken region needs and how to get it there.

Donated food and material supplies must be flown in by plane, if the urgency justifies the expense, or shipped by boat, Walden said. Operation USA, which plans to ship many of the supplies needed by homeless Bangladesh residents in months ahead, is trying to contend with the fact that the harbor is blocked by a sunken ship, he said.

“Everybody is playing catch-up,” Walden said. “We found out this morning from our friends at CARE that there’s been a cholera outbreak in northern Bangladesh, where there’s actually been a drought. And they’re scared that the cholera from the north will spread to the south, whose infrastructure has now been wiped out.”

The Salvation Army, which was asked by the White House to conduct a drive to collect blankets for Kurdish refugees, met its goal of 100,000, said spokeswoman Beverly Ventriss of the Southern California Divisional Headquarters. But the task was much more difficult than expected; the expected outpouring of compassion never materialized.

“We thought we were really going to get inundated,” she said. “We were a little puzzled as to why we weren’t being swamped. Ten days after that, we had the Costa Rican earthquake. I think the public is a bit overwhelmed at this point.”

Walden, whose 12-year-old Operation USA is one of the smaller fund-raising groups, with five paid staff members at its Los Angeles office, described a typical year’s haul as $750,000 in cash donations and $3 million to $5 million in supplies. This year, cash contributions have dwindled to about half that, and donated supplies have fallen to $2.5 million or so.

“The last nine months, our fund raising has been the worst in memory,” he said. “And if you scale that up to most of the big groups, they’ve had drops similar or a little bit less. . . . The problem is, the public’s on overload.”

Los Angeles, with its affluent Westsiders, cause-conscious entertainers and large immigrant population, is an especially important city to nationwide fund-raising efforts, with both the means and the emotional ties to foreign lands to step in when necessary, Walden said. In hopes of better tapping those groups, Operation USA is trying to put together an advertising campaign for Bangladesh relief that is expected to include a radio spot by actress Julie Andrews, a board member.

In addition, the organization approached the Los Angeles Unified School District board on Thursday in hopes of organizing a fund-raising drive among schoolchildren. A similar drive in 1985 raised $300,000, Walden said.

“We’re trying to say there must be something . . . that the children can learn about giving,” he said. “You’ve got every ethnic group in Los Angeles; you’ve got African-Americans, and there’s an African famine; you’ve got Latins . . . (and) Costa Rican victims of the quake and Peruvian victims from the cholera; you have Asians looking at (what’s happening in) Bangladesh; you have Middle Easterners looking at the Kurds and Shiites and Muslims; you have Eastern Europeans looking at Soviet Georgia. . . .”

Several fund-raisers said they wished there were some magic to resurrect the successes of the mid-1980s, when $300 million poured in to aid victims of a famine in east Africa that was far less severe than the one existing today. In those days, promotions and assistance groups such as “Live Aid” and “U.S. Aid for Africa” made the effort a national cause, most notably in the entertainment industry.

It seems that those days will be hard to recapture, Walden said. But he also expressed some hope; in the days following the Bangladesh storm, as the death toll mounted, the long-silent phones at the Operation USA offices began ringing.

While no money has come in, he said, “We’re very hopeful. Literally, for the first time in nine months, our phone has been ringing consistently.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this story.

WHERE TO SEND HELP

Here are some charitable groups that are accepting donations to aid victims of the Bangladesh cyclone: Adventist Development and Relief Agency International, 12501 Columbia Pike, Silver Spring, Md. 20904, (301) 680-6380

American Friends Service Committee, 980 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, Calif. 91103 (818) 791-1978

American Network for Service and Relief, 3010 Wilshire Blvd. 217, Los Angeles, 90010, (213) 383-2717

American Red Cross, Los Angeles chapter, 2700 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90057, (213) 739-5200

Bangladesh Society Inc., 89-50 164th St., Suite 2A, Jamaica, N.Y. 11432

B’nai B’rith International, 1640 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036-3278, (202) 857-6582

CARE, 660 1st Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016, (212) 686-3110

Catholic Relief Services, P.O. Box 17220, Baltimore, Md., 21297-0304, attn: Bangladesh Relief, (800) SEND-HOPE

Caritas International Inc., Bangladesh Emergency Fund, P.O. Box 10-0179, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11210, (718) 252-3684

Church World Service & Witness, Box 968, Elkhart, Ind. 46515, (219) 264-3102

Lutheran World Relief, 390 Park Ave. South, New York, N.Y. 10016, (212) 532-6350

Operation USA, 7615 1/2 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90046, (213) 658-8876

Oxfam America, 115 Broadway, Boston, Mass. 02116, (617) 482-1211

Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief--Episcopal Church, 815 2nd Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017, (212) 867-8400

Salvation Army World Service, 799 Bloomfield Ave., Verona, N.J. 07044, (201) 239-0606

Save the Children, Bangladesh Emergency Fund, Dept. BG, 54 Wilton Road, Westport, Conn. 06881, (800) 243-5075

World Relief Corp., Box WRC, Wheaton, Ill. 60189, (708) 665-0235

World Vision, Pasadena, Calif. 91131, (800) 874-3681

YMCA of the USA, 101 North Wacker Drive, Chicago, Ill. 60606, (312) 977-0031