Mitch Remembered: Hurricane Inspired Change

By Sara Fajardo

At the time Hurricane Mitch struck, Chris Tucker was working as Catholic Relief Services' regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. She helped to shape an innovative approach to disaster relief in response to the devastation left in Mitch's wake. Chris joined CRS in 1980. Her first placement was in Colombia where she worked at monitoring and evaluating agricultural production and small-enterprise development projects. While at CRS, Ms. Tucker has worked throughout Latin America, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Currently at our Baltimore-based world headquarters, Chris Tucker is the regional director for the mid-Atlantic region and acting interim executive vice president for U.S. Operations.

Sara Fajardo:

Where were you when Hurricane Mitch struck?

Chris Tucker was the CRS regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean when Hurricane Mitch struck. Photo by Richard Anderson for CRS

Chris Tucker:

At the time I was regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. I visited each country every year and it was my time to visit Bolivia. I heard the news when I returned that evening to the hotel in La Paz. We had known several days earlier that the storm was going to strike, but we didn't know how strong it was going to be. When I received the phone call from headquarters and began to hear more about the news, my mind started thinking of all the things that needed to happen, what staff we had in Bolivia and in the neighboring countries, what needed to be in place to move forward quickly on our response and what opportunities might exist.

Fajardo:

What was your initial reaction to all of the devastation?

Tucker:

Whenever there is a big emergency, the people the most affected by it are the ones working on the ground, those who live in the area. You immediately become concerned for the safety of your own staff and the people we serve overseas. One of the complicating factors was that Catholic Relief Services was also keeping an eye on escalating violence in Kosovo and it wasn't clear how emergencies on two fronts might affect our ability to mobilize staff or financial resources.

We had the folks in country, not only in Honduras, but Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. It became clear early on that it had to be a regional response rather than limited to one country. There is always the question in the early days after a disaster about how soon travel from outside should take place. On the one hand, there is a strong desire to go to show solidarity; on the other hand, there is a lot of work being done that could easily be disrupted. I chose to not go to the region immediately for several reasons. We had good communication with each country representative, so we knew what was going on in the field. At the same time, since Mitch affected several countries, it was easier to communicate with all of the affected countries from Baltimore than, say, from Tegucigalpa.

The first couple of weeks also involve personal dimensions of an emergency, aid workers in the field are also sorting out their own lives, answering questions such as: Do I have a home? Do I have a job? Are my kids safe? At the same time, the professional part is going on: getting teams out to the affected areas to assess needs, talking with our partners and local governments about what resources are available, sorting out what the CRS response should be. I knew that this is what each of the country programs was going to be doing in the short term.

Fajardo:

What lessons did we learn from Hurricane Mitch?

Tucker:

When I went down to Honduras, the initial groundwork had begun and we could start thinking about our overall response. This is where Hurricane Mitch has really important lessons. It was the first time CRS looked at responding to an emergency through the "justice lens."

Before this, the agency response would normally focus almost exclusively on the overseas activities related to relief and recovery and on the headquarters activities related to fundraising. Those are things that happen in any emergency. In the case of Mitch, the relief response and fundraising had begun immediately.

But the impact of working through the social justice lens was that we were very mindful that without a broader perspective coming from justice, in some ways we could be rebuilding the poverty that existed before. We wanted to go beyond relief and development to look at the structures that existed before Mitch that had kept those most affected in continuing poverty and vulnerability. We knew this would happen again unless relationships were fundamentally changed.

We asked ourselves what relationships had the most impact on the poor and what we would have to do to make things better in the long run to have a more hopeful outcome. Obviously there were important relationships at the local and municipal levels, but also important were relationships between the United States and Central America and the relationships between the Catholic Church in the United States and in Central America.

Fajardo:

What form did this new justice lens approach to emergencies take?

Tucker:

We weren't sure initially what form it would take. All of the CRS country representatives from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua came to Baltimore and asked ourselves what relationships are we talking about if we are not going to simply rebuild the pre-existing poverty.

CRS had never had anything like Bailey bridges in our previous responses to emergencies, nor the expertise. Yet we decided to help facilitate the efforts. Photo by CRS staff

Local relationships were extremely important because of the added vulnerability of the poor particularly in emergency situations. We therefore stressed that the local responses should be developed by community groups and institutions themselves in conjunction with local officials. Working through our partners, these communities were organized and made important decisions about who in the community was most affected and what development activities were most critical. Our local responses were guided largely by these plans.

The relationship with Central America and the United States was a critical relationship to look at, because it was going to affect our response overseas one way or another, either positively or negatively. We realized we needed to do advocacy work with the U.S. government in three areas: to increase the level of assistance from the U.S. government being sent to Central America, to forgive debt from the countries most affected, and to stop—at least temporarily—the deportation of people back to those countries. This was very new for us. We had done some advocacy work before but had never connected this work to emergency situations. Yet we knew that all three areas would profoundly affect our ability to deliver effective responses overseas both in the short term and in the long term.

A third component that came out of that meeting at CRS headquarters was also very different. Going back to the idea of the justice lens, we looked at another level of relationship—the Church in the United States and the Church in Central America. We wanted the Church in the United States to see its role in a new light. Certainly, fundraising and material supplies were absolutely important (we would say today "mission critical") and we were grateful. At the same time, we wanted something deeper, something that would last beyond the short-term immediacy of the crisis. So we began to talk with bishops and dioceses, particularly in the Southwest, about a more long-term relationship with the local Church through Catholic Relief Services. The Texas and Oklahoma bishops were particularly interested. Some even asked why it took us so long to think of this. It is striking that some of these relationships are still ongoing after 10 years.

There was another example from farther away: the Archdiocese of Boston. Because we had this strategy of connecting people with Central America, people in the archdiocese came up with something innovative. They had engineers and connections with local government officials who had access to equipment and bridges.

Because of the number of bridges that had been wiped out in Central America, isolating entire poor communities, they had decided that they wanted to contribute portable, prefabricated truss bridges called Bailey bridges. This was unprecedented. CRS had never had anything like Bailey bridges in our previous responses to emergencies, nor the expertise. Yet we decided to help facilitate the efforts.

The Boston archdiocese provided the bridges. They got the engineers down there. They paid for the transportation. We worked to make it happen. In total, 23 bridges were shipped and constructed. What was important here was that we didn't limit our thinking to what had been done in the past, but we created the space for people to be creative in their responses. Together, we met critical needs that we would never have been able to meet if we relied only on our usual fundraising.

Fajardo:

Looking back now, 10 years after Hurricane Mitch struck, how have things changed or not changed at CRS?

Tucker:

One of the many changes is that when emergencies happen, as an agency we now think of the role that U.S. Catholics can play in the relief effort. Giving is critical and always will be. But so are other opportunities that transform people's lives in the United States in other ways. In Hurricane Mitch we said, it's a terrible disaster, let's do what we can. Solidarity has many forms. Our message to pray, learn, act and give is timely during times of emergency as well as regular times.

I was very struck by the video done last year about the tsunami. One of the vignettes was of a little schoolgirl in the United States. When she heard about the tsunami, she wanted to help. She glued beads onto pens to sell them for the tsunami relief. In the end, the impact wasn't about the few hundred dollars she raised. It was about how her life was transformed through what she did. Before Hurricane Mitch, we weren't as aware of the broader dimensions of solidarity. This little girl typifies for me just what it can mean.

Sara Fajardo works as a communications officer for CRS and is based in Baltimore, MD.