For Delivering Aid, Smaller Does It Faster

It took almost a week after the tsunami hit the Sri Lankan coast for many international aid agencies to begin delivering food, medicine and tents to devastated villages and refugee camps. Impakt, an ad hoc group of locals and expatriates, had handed out its first boxes within 24 hours and dispatched a four-truck convoy into some of the worst-hit areas within 48 hours.

Even as the big nongovernmental relief agencies lumbered into position with their assessment teams, warehouses and well-paid experts, fleet-footed local volunteer groups were able to circumvent hurdles and build on their grass-roots knowledge to make a difference in the early hours when the need was greatest.

At the Impakt office, 30 backpackers, tourists, locals and resident expatriates pack boxes, load trucks and work the phones, hitting up contacts for supplies, funding and government approvals. Small impromptu meetings ebb and flow, often little more than two people leaning against a pillar.

Seventy miles south, an art gallery at 71 Peddler Street in the hard-hit fort city of Galle has seen a similar transformation. Amid the save-the-rain-forest postcards, high-priced paintings and “Do not disturb, yoga class in progress” signs, a small army of volunteers that now calls itself Project Galle 2005 distributes aid to several dozen refugee camps in the area, often in partnership with Impakt.

Cindy Caron, a sociologist and specialist in Sri Lankan ethnic integration, is among the dozens of others engaged in smaller efforts. She received several thousand dollars from academics back in the U.S. after news spread of the devastation. With their support, she’s been making swings through the southern and eastern parts of the country delivering aid herself.

Chanakya Jayadeb, a lawyer and radio broadcaster, is trying to get his own civic group started to raise money for what he sees as the most important medium-term priority: building housing for day laborers and shopkeepers once the world’s eyes and cameras grow tired of the disaster and move on to fresher headlines.

These ad hoc volunteers say their approach offers several advantages, and some disadvantages. A big plus is speed. Impakt, a real estate and modeling firm run by a Canadian couple living in Colombo, the capital, before the tsunami hit, didn’t plan to suspend its operations and get into the aid business. The couple offered large nongovernmental organizations the use of their office, only to be rebuffed. “So we decided to go independent,” said Jerry Porodo, half the husband-and-wife team. “We’ve shut down our basic business until further notice.”

Sociologist Caron said she was able to move quickly because her friends in the U.S. gave her full authority to spend their money as she saw fit, obviating the need to fill out forms or convene distribution committee meetings.

Through the wonders of personal banking, the funds arrived almost immediately, with her friends depositing the money in her U.S. account, allowing her to withdraw it with an ATM card in Colombo.

“It couldn’t be easier,” she said. “Hooray for globalization.”

That said, leaders of most of the smaller groups became aware of how quickly money issues could become complicated. Sizable contributions routed their way have led to jealousy from better-connected civic groups, some say, although ad hoc volunteer groups have faced accusations that funds have been misappropriated.

Some have navigated these potential pitfalls by turning down cash, instead giving donors a shopping list of what is most needed at a particular time. Others send donors receipts, often in Sinhalese. Still others are thinking about registering themselves as civic groups with the Sri Lankan government to give donors more peace of mind and ease bureaucratic impediments.

Adopt-a-family programs, used effectively in other crisis areas to personalize donations for overseas contributors, tend not to work very well in Sri Lanka because they can result in jealousy in the nation’s tight-knit communities, some groups said. With residents crammed together in refugee camps or in partially surviving buildings, families quickly notice if one gets more than another. As a result, volunteer groups are asking donors to pay for 55 pots, or 100 plates, enough for everyone in an area to get an equal share.

Another advantage small groups say they have is flexibility. Recently, Caron got to a refugee camp in the south and found that it had ample amounts of food, in fact almost too much, but that residents were being attacked by mosquitoes. That placed children at risk of malaria and made life miserable for the entire population. Within a few hours, she had located a store that sold mosquito coils, bought 25 boxes and returned to the camp, to the relief of the displaced villagers.

Elsewhere, small aid groups say they’ve been able to complement the efforts of the government and large civic groups by contributing supplies that haven’t otherwise arrived or are in short supply, including milk, diapers and supplements for mothers who are weak and not producing enough milk, having seen their traditional diet of rice and dal interrupted.

Even so, volunteers say, well-intentioned governmental lists of needed items aren’t always accurate. Impakt sent out an urgent plea to donors after the government called for 10 million tablets of amoxicillin, an antibiotic. The group acquired 1 million tablets, only to discover that although the government liked to stock this general antibiotic, the doctors really needed a range of medicines in their fight against disease. “Now we don’t go ahead with anything until we speak to the doctors and hospitals first,” said Pam Porodo, co-head of Impakt.

Another advantage local groups have is their strong links to the community. Hazel Gallagher, a Briton teaching English in Thalpe, is working with the Rotary Club channeling supplies to local residents. She used her students to quietly identify the families most in need, then quietly channeled essentials to them without a big fuss. This contrasts with the mass scrums and near fistfights commonly seen along Sri Lanka’s roads or in front of its refugee camps whenever an aid truck pulls up.

“The aid is too slow, it’s very slow,” said W. Titus, a 32-year-old laborer who lost his house and several family members. “And it’s not being divided well. The stronger people get more than the weaker.”

Because they know the area, groups like Project Galle 2005 discover ad hoc refugee camps while driving around that aren’t on governmental lists.

“Every time we turn around, we find another disused school that’s become a camp,” said Rebecca Hayes, a volunteer working as a massage therapist in Unawatuna before the tsunami hit. “It’s been left up to unregistered aid groups like us to use our money and get aid to them.”

The atmosphere at the volunteer centers is often chaotic, but it ultimately seems to work.

Over by the bathroom of Impakt’s office in Colombo, 5-foot-high stacks of boxes filled with medicine, most repackaged in instant noodle or Ceylon tea boxes, are slapped with labels identifying the contents: “Antibiotics -- to be distributed only under doctor’s supervision.”

Downstairs, several more volunteers load packages of rice, biscuits and water onto trucks. The vehicles have been scrounged from friends who run small garment factories and have donated their time. Phones ring incessantly.

Tourist Sam Klebanov, a Swedish film distributor who came to Sri Lanka for a holiday Dec. 26 and devoted his vacation to helping out, fell into it by accident. “We saw the sign, came in and started working,” he said.

Others, such as Ali Potia, 26, wearing a McGill University T-shirt, went looking for a way to help after recovering from the shock of seeing Sri Lanka so devastated. “I took Sunday and Monday to get my head around it,” he said.

As a convoy left Colombo for the south a few days into the crisis, there were reports that bands of thieves had been hijacking trucks. So Impakt decided to split the contents up.

“We’ll have one with medicine, one with food,” said one of the instant coordinators directing the show at that particular minute. “If anything happens, at least one will get through. Don’t break the convoy whatever you do. When they stop, you stop. Work together.”

At the former gallery premises of Project Galle 2005, three nearby residents have donated the use of their homes to serve as warehouses. A map on the wall advises people: “If you have nothing to do, don’t do it here -- ‘tis the time to share and care.”

All the workers are unpaid, and many have donated significant amounts of their own money. Still, many of the volunteers who started as wide-eyed idealists acknowledge that their more established big professional counterparts have some clear advantages.

“We’re not professionals,” said Erik Coleman, 31, an English tourist who was in Unawatuna when the waves hit, then stayed on to help others. “That’s both a problem and an opportunity.”

One problem is labor. The number of volunteers has started to drop off as people who took time off from work or those who extended holidays started drifting back to their jobs and regular lives. Another problem is training. Turnover has often been so high that someone just gets the hang of a job, then leaves, forcing the few volunteer organizers to constantly retrain people.

As time goes on, the advantages of larger, professional aid groups also become more evident, including the ability to raise funds in a more systematic way, deploy resources, bring well-trained people to bear on a problem and leverage contacts with governments and multilateral groups.

Impakt has recently set up a website, www.impaktaid.com, to better coordinate with people overseas. It’s corralled British backpacker and photographer Paul Sullivan, 32, to make a database of volunteers and translators. And it’s put 28-year-old teacher Michelle Cornman, a volunteer living in Sri Lanka, to work setting up an inventory system so the group can keep track of all the boxes flying around and where they’re going.

“If we don’t have a good information network, we can’t say we have it already and don’t need to buy more,” Cornman said.

But there’s also the danger of becoming more like the big civic groups.

“We know we’re doing the right thing. We only have to answer to the face in the mirror -- whether there’s time to wash it or not is another question,” Pam Porodo said. “We’re going to keep at it for the meantime. A bit of a bad pun, but I think we can make an impact.”