Earthquake: The Long Road Back : ‘Old Home Week’ for a Worldwide Relief Worker

Two months ago he was half-way around the world trying to get food and supplies to 50,000 Bosnian refugees living in Slovenia.

Now, only miles from his home in Oak View, American Red Cross delegate Francois (Pancho) de la Roche is supervising the distribution of food and supplies to earthquake victims in Fillmore and Simi Valley.

But whether it’s Ecuador or Ojai, Armenia or Oxnard, the 42-year-old international relief coordinator still enjoys the rewards of working a disaster, namely, the personal satisfaction of helping someone in need.

“It’s sort of like old home week,” de la Roche said of his return to the Ventura County chapter of the Red Cross, where he was assistant director for 11 years.

“The first time I ever worked for the Red Cross I was a senior in high school and I was in Ojai for the ‘68-’69 floods and I sandbagged,” de la Roche said. “Then we got taken to a Red Cross shelter and I remember getting some real good sandwiches and some hot cocoa!”

That was the beginning, he said while gnawing on another Red Cross sandwich, of a five-year adventure across Africa and Europe working with various international relief organizations.

In 1989 de la Roche left the county chapter to become the logistics officer for CARE in Khartoum, Sudan, a job that was eventually terminated by the outbreak of the Gulf War.

Shortly thereafter, he was appointed head of the American Red Cross operation in Armenia and subsequently the Red Cross delegate to the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies, which was building and staffing a hospital to treat Armenian earthquake victims with spinal cord injuries.

While in Armenia, de la Roche was sent to neighboring Georgia to simultaneously head relief efforts after a devastating earthquake in the Caucasus Mountains.

Then it was off to direct relief operations in Guinea in West Africa, where he lived about a mile away from the Liberian war zone.

And that’s how life has been for de la Roche--moving from one disaster to the next.

On Dec. 17 he left Slovenia and returned to Ventura County to spend Christmas with his family and find a new job. Exactly one month after his arrival home, de la Roche was in the midst of another disaster.

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On Monday, Jan. 17, de la Roche called the county Red Cross office and volunteered his services. He was immediately made mass care supervisor, responsible for the county’s shelters and food and supplies distribution--”things I know how to do,” de la Roche said with a grin.

While his years of experience have been valuable in managing this relief effort, which is the chapter’s largest and most expensive, de la Roche said no two disasters are alike and each new situation demands different measures.

“Here you’re working very quickly because you have the supplies and equipment to prevent a loss of life and injury--you’ve got the resources. You go up into North Africa and you’re running a relief operation--it’s a whole different ballgame. No matter how fast you have food going out, you have people dying on you,” he said.

“The job on this is fairly complex,” he said of the Red Cross’s response to last week’s earthquake, pointing to the loss of transportation in some areas, the initial communication problems and the number of people affected.

Being a longtime resident of Ventura County, de la Roche said one of the differences between this and other disaster sites is “here I’m helping my neighbors; there I’m helping strangers.”

De la Roche spent 10 months in Slovenia aiding Bosnian refugees before returning to his home in Oak View, where his wife and two daughters live. Although he said it was one of his favorite missions, it wasn’t an easy one.

“Basically they have lost all hope of returning to their homes,” he said of the Bosnian refugees. “The news gets to them. They hear the shelling that is going on and what we see on CNN--Sarajevo and all these other places that are going down--they hear that so they’ve pretty much lost hope. Anything we can do to keep their spirits up is real important and that’s become a very important aspect of our operation.”

De la Roche said one of the high points of his assignment in Slovenia was seeing the excitement of the refugees when the International Federation was able to bring them oranges from Spain and wheat flour from America--delicacies no longer accessible in their war-torn native country.

Being able to help people in need and bring them even a little joy, like an orange or a bag of flour, is the reason de la Roche has made disaster relief his career.

“I can wake up and look at myself in the mirror and say I’m really happy with who I am,” he said.

“There are people who thrive on this stuff. I have friends who are now in Bosnia who served in southern Sudan, Somalia, who even served some time in Angola during the civil war, and they like the shooting and all that. I’ve got other friends who go the opposite way and find a nice quiet little development project in a Third World country, no political turmoil, no nothing,” he said.

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And where does he fall? “Sort of in between.”

De la Roche has witnessed several coup d’etats, slept mere miles from active war zones and wrestled with the bureaucratic politics of numerous nations. But in the end, it is being able to provide people assistance in a professional manner that keeps drawing him back to the world’s disaster hot spots.

“When disaster comes in here you tend to sacrifice your time with your family, your friends. Then you go back to your regular work, etc. That is the way I would prefer to deal with it. Be ready, when you’re done, get doing other things that need to be done.”