Nothing is Simple
I had a long, interesting conversation yesterday with the other American who is here volunteering. He is ex-Air Force and ex-Peace Corps (several years in both) but had been traveling around the world for several years helping people on his own before arriving recently in Nepal. We spent many hours discussing issues related to helping people, the worries about paternalism, what obligations people and countries have towards each other, and other issues that come up when providing assistance to people in other countries.
He has much more experience than I do and it was really enlightening to hear his views. During his time with the Peace Corps he saw a lot of problems involving NGOs and their lack of follow-through with aid over time. The Peace Corps, specifically, will dedicate years to education and building infrastructure improvements but will then leave and not come back to see how well those efforts worked over time or assess whether more effort is needed. Much more often than not, all that was built will crumble within a few years and revert to how things were before all of that energy and money was spent. These sorts of problems can be very disheartening and are part of what influenced this caring individual to forgo working with organized aid groups and do work on his own.
Dealing with complex problems in disaster situations in foreign countries is unbelievably hard. The global system of NGO and governmental entities that cooperate to address these problems suffer from some significant problems though. Coordination, cooperation, mobilization, and follow-through are just some of the issues that stand out at first glance. The questions now are about the causes of these problems and how to start to fix them.
