Incidentally, I’m a Red Cross volunteer, and I do Disaster Assessment – which is morphing into a broader Situational Awareness activity – on Disaster Relief Operations. These DRO’s are the ones that make the papers, and that is as it should be I suppose, but we’ve only had 157 of those in 2015 while we’ve responded to more than 41,942 home fires. I digress.
Here’s the thing: we say that all responses begin and end as local responses because the first people on the job are the folks from the local chapter, and after all the out-of-town help and the cameras have gone away the local chapter will dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” and see their clients and community through to recovery. We know this rationally, but sometimes we get called to a community where they don’t have a brilliant response manager, or a lot of local resources, and sometimes the people who come in from out of town to help don’t do things the way we’ve always done them or they may rub the local folks the wrong way. When that happens and we’re working 12-15 hour days 6 days a week we can get a bit out of sorts, and when that happens we can lose sight of what we’re there for and let it become about us. I find that to be kind of sad.
I don’t believe anyone goes out on a disaster response to fuck things up; I just don’t. There may be prima donnas who like being big-deal shot callers – I may be one – but I can’t imagine that, with the living and working conditions on these jobs, people are going to go so far out of their way to make a disaster worse. I think those people are going to sit at home and write articles about how we’re doing everything wrong.
I really like doing what I do on these jobs. It is my privilege that people ask me how many homes have been impacted, how many people displaced, is it safe to go out on those roads or in that weather. I feel a little guilty that I feel as good as I do after I come off a job like this because it was so freaking awful for the clients. I can’t imagine losing everything I’ve spent my adult life working for.
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At the end of this last job I came home feeling that I’d done my job, trained a few highly-motivated and committed local volunteers in skills that will help them and their community on their next job, and maybe made a few friends. It pains me that at least a few folks came off that job not feeling that, especially the ones I saw giving it every bit as much as I did.
People do irk me from time to time. We have procedures and standards, but we’re responding to disasters that don’t always conform to our standards and where our procedures don’t always work flawlessly so I adapt where some folks might not, and conversely I will sometimes resist an adaptation that I feel is uncalled for.
Anyway, it isn’t about me. It’s about the clients, their recovery, and getting everybody ready for the next one. There’s always a next one.
Interesting and a part of the disasters that we know little about until we are in the middle of one ourselves.