Coming to Haiti's aid (From Dudley News)

Coming to Haiti's aid

7:00am Saturday 6th February 2010

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As the clear-up operation after the Haiti earthquake continues, we speak to a woman aid worker who not only lost relatives in the tragedy, but who was on holiday in Sri Lanka when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004. Oenone Chadburn gives her personal and professional takes on the current crisis, and relates her experiences of the tsunami and the subsequent disaster management that she led for the Tearfund relief agency.

By Lisa Salmon.

The Haiti earthquake sent tremors through Oenone Chadburn's London house after she heard that her relatives' homes had been destroyed, an aunt buried in the rubble, and an uncle was dead.

Aid worker Oenone's first instinct was to rush out to the stricken country to try to help her husband's family and others involved in the tragedy.

But the mother-of-one and her half-Haitian husband Jean-Marc couldn't leave their young son, so they opted to stay in the UK where Oenone is managing disaster aid to Haiti for the relief agency Tearfund.

While her job means Oenone, 39, frequently witnesses the terrible results of natural disasters, she admits dealing with the earthquake on both a personal and a professional level has been tough.

"The earthquake became very personal and quite emotional early on," she says.

"And for me the added angst was that I wanted to get on the plane and go out there and do my thing, but it wasn't appropriate."

Amazingly, she's been through such a personal and professional double whammy before - she was in Sri Lanka, where Jean-Marc was then living, when the Boxing Day tsunami struck in 2004.

Because she was safely inland when the tsunami hit, she was able to rush straight into relief mode over there too.

She says: "These have been obscure, freak situations, and we just can't believe that there's been this kind of impact on our family over the last five years.

"But when it comes to being professional, while you have to process the fact that places and maybe even people you know have been destroyed, you can't let that affect you.

"You've got to say 'I'm far better use to people as the professional I'm trained to be'."

Within a day of the Haiti earthquake, Oenone and Jean-Marc knew that his uncle and godfather Gerald had been killed when his home in Port-au-Prince collapsed.

His wife Ginette had been pulled from the rubble alive, and suffered comparatively minor injuries of broken ribs and severe bruising.

"Family members pulled Ginette out, and she was taken to hospital by her daughter.

"Then relatives arrived to tell them that Gerald had been found dead under the rubble," Oenone explains sadly.

"We were extremely lucky overall though, and we're so grateful that we didn't lose more family.

"It's not that houses weren't damaged, but people were in the right places at the right time."

After deciding they couldn't rush to Haiti immediately, Oenone got stuck into her role as Tearfund's head of disaster management, co-ordinating with the relief agency's 12 fellow members of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), and managing staffing and relief.

The couple plan to go out to Haiti with their two-year-old son Xavier when the situation is calmer.

One thing that has particularly struck a chord with Oenone is that as Jean-Marc's aunt was lying under the ruins of her home, she gained strength from thinking about Jean-Marc and Oenone surviving the tsunami.

"What really hit us was when she said that as she was lying there under the rubble she was thinking of Jean-Marc and me, and thinking this must have been what it was like for us in the tsunami.

"That was a bit heavy to contemplate - the fact that might have helped her emotionally or inspired her.

"We weren't washed away in the tsunami - we were slightly inland and were able to do response work.

"But it seems to have helped her knowing we were involved."

The couple were in Sri Lanka together at Christmas 2004, and had been on the beach the day before the tsunami which killed more than 200,000 people.

Fortunately they had moved further inland when it struck the next day, and their lives weren't threatened.

Half-Sri Lankan Jean-Marc was director designate of the Sri Lankan tourist board in the UK at the time, and immediately started trying to find out what had happened to hotels in the disaster area, and fielding calls from international tour operators and relatives of holidaymakers.

Oenone was almost immediately seconded to work for one of the Tearfund's partner organisations distributing relief.

She says: "Those 10 days are a bit of a blur - it was very long hours, we didn't really know what day it was."

Despite the couple having family and many friends in Sri Lanka, none were killed in the tsunami. However, Oenone admits dealing with that disaster and the Haiti earthquake on both a personal and professional level has been hard.

She says that last week she was "feeling affected" by what had happened in Haiti, and took a little time off.

"I hit the same wall in Sri Lanka on about day six or seven, and again it was important to stop and reflect, and regroup emotionally because you're no use to anyone if you don't let your emotions have an outlet.

"Most aid workers do have a point where they stop and retreat into themselves and cry.

"We're motivated by humanitarian compassion or just a love for other people, and occasionally people don't recognise that they need to respect what's going on inside us in order to make us the most effective we can be on the ground."

Oenone recounts how one of her fellow aid workers was washed away for about a mile in the tsunami, and managed to hold on to a tree until the water subsided.

"Then she just dusted herself off, walked straight back to her office, and went straight into relief mode."

About three months later the experience took its toll on the woman, and she was forced by her managers to take leave.

"Because she'd been so directly affected, I think she found it difficult to let go. But she needed to stop.

"Aid work is a very passionate, adrenalin-filled business. Managing people well at these times is a key part of any response set-up."

As far as the current response set-up in Haiti goes, Oenone insists that while there are questions that need answering, now is not the time.

"I think we need to be open and honest that it's very difficult and it's a bit of a circus, and to get people to talk to each other appropriately and to be positioned in the right place at the right time is hard.

"Every disaster has its own particular sting in the tail, and this one is that the earthquake hit a capital city and demolished the infrastructure."

Because this means vital information and key people from the UN and the Government were lost, she stresses: "I'm not surprised there's been increasing difficulties and increasing criticism.

"I would probably ask for more grace and understanding on the wider exceptional circumstances.

"The leadership of the aid effort issue is a key question to ask, but perhaps right now is not the time to be asking those questions because we need to get the relief out of the door."

While admitting that both she and her husband are "up and down" emotionally about what's happened in Haiti, Oenone is happy to joke about her uncanny link with disasters.

"I was in Islamabad two days before the Kashmir earthquake, and in Bangladesh four days before Cyclone Sidr, so I've got quite a bad reputation!"

One thing she is loathe to do, however, is compare the impact of the earthquake with the tsunami.

"There are definitely a lot of similarities," she says, "but every disaster has its own unique aspects.

"With the tsunami, the scale of destruction was phenomenal - Banda Aceh was wiped out, and the rubble was pushed to one side. But with Haiti, there's blocked road access.

"It's difficult to compare in terms of mortality and in terms of impact, because the context is so different.

"It's important to keep them separate and respect them both for the huge devastation that they caused in their own rights.

"I think humanitarian efforts in Haiti will have to learn a huge amount from what happened in the tsunami."

She says that while the scale of the destruction may be different, important recovery and reconstruction lessons were learned after the tsunami which may help in Haiti.

But she adds: "If you say one is bigger than the other, I don't think it's appropriate.

"To compare them would almost be unfair on the grief and devastation."

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