Natural disasters seem to target the poorest communities in the Third World
December 28, 2004 Edition 1
Sue Arnold
London: Surrounded as most of us probably are by the excesses, the detritus and the general aftermath of Christmas, it's impossible to imagine what the survivors of the world's most powerful earthquake for 40 years must be going through right now.
The top news story on Boxing Day was supposed to be the re-run of the elections in Ukraine, not a re-run of the earthquake that left 26 000 people dead and 70 000 homeless in the Iranian city of Bam on December 26 last year.
It's still too early to say how many people died in the quake that hit the Indonesian state of Aceh on Sunday or in those countries - Sri Lanka, Thailand, India and the Maldives - fringing the Indian Ocean that was subsequently battered by a massive tsunami.
The chances are we'll never know since many of the coastal settlements close to the Oceanic epicentre were completely destroyed, leaving no survivors to furnish us with tidy statistics.
The difference between human and natural disasters is that the first are avoidable, whereas the second we can do absolutely nothing about unless, of course, we live in the First World and have a lot of money.
Think of all those millionaires in Los Angeles with their luxury earthquake-proof homes slap on top of the San Andreas Fault. True to what I have always considered to be the curiously un-Christian parable of the sower, Matthew 12 verse 13:
"To him that hath, even more shall be given and he shall have an abundance. To him that hath not, even that which he hath will be taken away."
Natural disasters always seem to dump on the poorest communities of the Third World.
OK, there was a freak hurricane in France just before Christmas which had people missing planes and ferries and thousands of households without electricity for a few hours, but that was a mere dot in the big disaster picture.
Every year thousands of Bangladeshis, whose average income is less than a dollar a week, are swamp-ed by typhoons and tidal waves.
To make their homes flood-proof, by erecting low walls made of concrete blocks containing a specially design-ed reinforcing agent, would cost less than $10 a family, but the government simply can't afford it.
It's at times like this when all I can do is feel helpless, listen to the latest news updates from the disaster zone and think that I envy an engineer called David Charlesworth who I met about 10 years ago.
As I write this he's probably on a plane heading for Jakarta with his bag of tools.
Charlesworth works for a charity called the Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief (REDR). They are the unsung heroes of natural disasters.
They don't have the glamour of doctors saving the lives of small children in field hospitals or the photo opportunity value of Red Cross drivers distributing food in refugee camps.
REDR members are the low-profile operators who rebuild the roads and bridges and improvise airstrips to make it possible for the doctors and drivers to get to the disaster areas.
When I met Charlesworth he had just come back from an assignment to the Ascension Islands during the Falklands War. The RAF needed an additional airstrip, for which local contractors wanted a small fortune to build. REDR did it for peanuts.
Charlesworth rang me after reading a piece I'd written about Caledonian MacBrayne Ferries threatening to stop their service to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull because the pier was disintegrating.
The islanders couldn't afford the £250 000 they'd been told it would cost to repair. "Nonsense," said Charlesworth, he could do it for £20 000.
No-frills practicality is the aid worker's key word. A friend who went out to Gujarat after the Indian earthquake in 1998 told me that international aid agencies often miss the basics because they get carried away by headline-catching projects.
In Gujarat the American NGOs were dead keen on the "adopt a village" idea, which made great television.
They spent days driving around looking for a suitable candidate with preferably an articulate photogenic headman. In
her experience, said my Christian Aid friend dryly, the neediest people in disasters are not necessarily the most vocal.
Instead of a charismatic village headman, they'd have been better off getting in touch with the local Sangam or women's group. Every Indian village has one. They are the people who really know where the help is needed.
A year after Bam, President Mohammad Khatami is claiming that only £17 million of the £1 billion worth of international aid promised has been delivered; 16 years after the Armenian quake, only 50 of the 256 houses destroyed in the village of Saramej have been rebuilt. Families there are still living in railway carriages and container trucks.
With so many foreign tourists among the casualties, Sunday's tsunami victims can expect masses of international aid, but how much of it will filter through to tiny rural communities?
Natural disasters are often referred to, particularly by insurance companies, as acts of God. Was there ever a more cogent argument for becoming an atheist?
This is the first Christmas I didn't go to midnight mass. With the benefit of hindsight, would there really have been much point?
