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Tsunami Relief Report 4
Dear Friends,
It is now just over one and a half months since the Tsunami hit – seems
like a year has passed by. It is a good time to quickly review what we
have done do far before looking at future plans.
The First Week – Tsunami hits the AID office !
The first couple of days were spent rushing into immediate
relief and organizing ourselves quickly to handle the scale of relief
efforts – both at the field level and at the state level relief
coordination. The three big questions at that time were:
- There was so much to do in each village and the
destruction was spread out over 200 villages. How do we scale up our
relief efforts?
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Will the public support match up? Will we get sufficient help from people? Money, materials and volunteers?
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How do we organize to reach this support most efficiently and quickly to the field areas?
The second question was answered first - Answered with a very
big YES! A large number of people began to turn up spontaneously and
offered all forms of help. With this encouragement, we began to work on
the other two questions. We quickly developed a cluster based relief
approach. We began to concentrate volunteers and supplies in specific
cluster centers and started work in 5-10 villages around the cluster.
While this cluster approach was being practically worked out on the
field, our team in Chennai began to gear up for the huge response that
followed. They split into teams to handle supplies, donations, loading
trucks, volunteer work allocation, reporting and managed to handle
hundreds of different forms in which help arrived. Every day about
100-150 new volunteers turned up at the office and were allocated work
in Chennai or sent to the cluster centers to help on the field.
It was as if a very different kind of Tsunami had hit the AID
office! But by the end of the first week, people had recovered from
this and began to smoothly organize the relief response.
On the field we had begun the immediate relief with whatever
local groups we could identify – DYFI, PSF, TNSF, Vidyarambam, Sneha,
Malar, etc. The focus was relief distribution, removal of dead bodies
and preventive health work. The needs on the ground were changing every
day – from clothes to blankets to inner garments to cooked food to dry
rations. We set up a daily coordination systems to assess field needs
and to collect and buy materials accordingly.
By the end of the first week we had about 200 volunteers in all the
centers put together – both from software companies in Chennai and
Bangalore and from nearby villages and districts – working from the
cluster centers. Each center had about 40 volunteers.
The Second Week – Really scaling up
The second week is best described as the volunteer-management-week.
The huge inflow of new volunteers began to build up and EACH cluster
center now had about 100 volunteers with another 150-200 volunteers
working in the AID office in Chennai! Assigning tasks and smoothly
getting things done was the priority. Most people coordinating at the
cluster had never seen something like this – they learnt on the job! We
expanded the kind of activities and the number of villages. We began to
work in more than 50 villages. The activities expanded from debris
clearing and relief distribution and preventive health to also include
shifting into community kitchens, health camps, household surveys,
damage assessment, tuition centers for 10th and 12th std students,
temporary toilet construction, etc.
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