In Haiti, Aiding the Aid Workers

For a small nonprofit seeking to assist disaster recovery efforts in Haiti, where do you start? With 200,000 tents needed, rampant sanitation issues and 460,000 people living in makeshift camps, the prospect of setting a spade down anywhere can seem overwhelming.

That's why the nonprofit HELP seeks to target its efforts on one group that's frequently mentioned in the news, but whose needs are less-talked about: aid workers. As director Randy Roberson tells Change.org, "In disasters, the immediate victims aren't the only ones. By helping relief teams sustain their efforts for greater periods of time, we can support efforts to provide more aid to everyone."

After working on the ground in Haiti for two weeks, Roberson says he's seen workers easily fall prey to their environment. Members of the Mexican relief team who had to be aerovaced back home, for example -- victims, he says, of the trauma that they'd experienced after spending days digging bodies out of the rubble. He also describes relief teams whose efforts are jeopardized by lack of food and resources, as well as extreme dehydration. "Conditions are terribly harsh -- it's very hot and humid, and some teams aren't used to that. There's the challenge of contaminated water, which makes dehydration worse. And because people are working in large amounts of wreckage, without antibiotics, even a relatively small wound can become life-threatening pretty quickly."

To support these workers, HELP has been working to provide tetanus shots to aid workers, as well as supplies and the ability to easily make calls home through solar-powered communication equipment. They've also been working to provide counseling to try and stem the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Roberson calls "one of the single greatest needs in disasters that overall goes unaided."

"In relief circles, it's so easy to say we need to be tough, and hunker down and bear it," he says. "But it's important that people talk about what they're going through, and not just internalize it."

Having worked in disaster zones for the past 12 years, Roberson says he's responded to earthquakes of greater magnitude than that which hit Haiti, including an 8.0 earthquake in Turkey in 1999. He's also worked in post-earthquake zones in Armenia, Colombia and El Salvador, but says that the crisis in Haiti has "really redefined the term ‘disaster'" for him. The fallout of the earthquake, he reports, is worse than anything he's ever seen.

Still, though, even as relief efforts rightfully focus on shelter, water and treatment for earthquake survivors, Roberson says he wants to be sure that the international community doesn't forget the needs of the aid workers -- psychological and otherwise -- who make those efforts possible, too.

Photo Credit: zoriah