Into the Breach

Three stories. One goal. Bringing relief to a devastated region.

By Tom Nugent and Andrew Barker

Charlie MacCormack '63 strides into an enormous Save the Children warehouse on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. He takes a quick look around. The shelves are stacked floor to ceiling with emergency kits, containing everything from small stoves to blankets. MacCormack is the president and CEO of Save the Children, and right now he's telling himself: "Good. The truck convoys are already on their way. We're loaded and ready. It's time to go to work."

Carol Holmes Shattuck '67 is bouncing around in a battered, old Russian Antonov-12 cargo plane, 15,000 feet above rural Bulgaria. As chief administrative officer of the AmeriCares relief agency, she's riding herd tonight on 15 tons of medical supplies and water-purification gear, en route to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Shattuck hasn't slept much during the past few days, and she's doing her best to catch a few minutes of shut-eye, as the giant cargo plane lumbers toward the tsunami disaster-zone.

Mike Rea '91, the founder and managing director of the Give2Asia charitable foundation, has just hung up the phone in San Francisco. After several 18-hour days spent trying to nail down contributions for Give2Asia's newly launched Tsunami Recovery Fund, Rea has landed a $1 million gift from WQHT Radio in New York City.

In the days that followed last December's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Asia, these three Middlebury grads found themselves caught up in a desperate race against time. With 300,000 dead in half a dozen countries, and with several million survivors in imminent danger of disease and starvation, this would be the largest and most complicated rescue mission in all of recorded history.—TN

Horror and Redemption

Ask Charlie MacCormack '63 to describe the scenes of appalling destruction he recently witnessed in tsunami-wracked Indonesia, and the president of Save the Children will surprise you with a story that contains a happy ending.

"It's true that the coast of Aceh Province was a wasteland," says the 63-year-old director of the world's largest children's-relief organization. "In many areas, the land itself had been washed away, along with everything else. But everywhere I went, I also saw people helping each other, and I saw children being rescued.

"The tidal wave caused an immense tragedy, of course. And yet many of the stories I heard during my visit in January were good-news stories, with the kinds of happy outcomes that can motivate a relief worker for years at a time."

One of those amazing sagas began in the now-devastated city of Banda Aceh, says MacCormack, where a professional truck driver named Mustafa Kamal set out on the morning of the disaster for the nearby town of Medan. When he learned that the killer wave had annihilated his hometown, the terrified Kamal made a quick U-turn and raced toward home.

Plunged into an agony of suspense, Mustafa fought his way through mountains of splintered wreckage only to discover that his wife and five-year-old daughter were among the thousands of missing. He had no way of knowing that his daughter, Rina, had survived and would soon be registered as a "separated or unaccompanied" child by Save the Children (STC) volunteers at a temporary camp.

Frantic, the grieving trucker eventually discovered his daughter's name on a list published by the relief organization. When he finally located her in one of the STC camps for survivors, he dropped quickly to his knees. Holding her close, the amazed Mustafa cried out again and again: "Rina! Rina! By the grace of God! I knew you were alive, and I did not give up. I kept on looking!"

For MacCormack, who's been running the nonprofit Save the Children Federation, Inc., as president and CEO since 1993, Rina Kamal's saga speaks volumes about the long-term mission—and also the passionate commitment—that defines one of the world's best-known relief agencies.

"I feel very fortunate to be doing this kind of work," he says, "because everywhere I go, I see the good side of people. I see volunteers working without compensation to improve the health and education of children all over the world. I see staff people risking their lives to help kids recover from earthquakes and famines and civil wars and floods. I think I'm extremely lucky, because most of the time I'm privileged to see humanity at its best."

After describing the "unforgettable horror" of Aceh, where more than 50,000 children and 100,000 adults (including several STC employees) perished within a matter of minutes, the incurably optimistic "Charlie Mac" says he was encouraged by all the positive things he witnessed as the massive recovery operation got underway.

"I walked into one of our warehouses in Sumatra, and it was packed to the ceiling with tens of thousands of these [survival] kits," MacCormack says. "I mean, these things are the size of a desk, and they contain 40 or 50 items . . . things like cooking stoves and pots and pans and clothing and water-purification equipment, you name it.

"Well, I stood there for a minute or so, just thinking about the fact that at that moment we had convoys of trucks delivering those kits by the thousands all over the region." He pauses for a moment. "After you've walked through a warehouse like that one in Indonesia and thought about the impact of those supplies on the lives of desperate children . . ."

Since taking the helm at STC in January of 1993, MacCormack has directed a vast, worldwide enterprise that now includes 250,000 volunteers, 4,500 full-time staffers, and a yearly budget of more than $365 million. Along with the Red Cross and UNICEF, MacCormack's organization operates wide-ranging relief and assistance efforts for struggling kids in more than 40 countries all across the globe. Whether they're feeding hungry youngsters in strife-torn Darfur (the scene of a vicious outbreak of ethnic cleansing that has created thousands of desperate refugees in recent years) or operating a literacy program in the dusty villages of poverty-stricken sections of Sri Lanka, the volunteers and professional staffers at STC invariably describe themselves as "totally committed" to making life better for the world's estimated two billion children.

In the days that followed the Asian tsunami, STC staffers in half a dozen countries found themselves working around the clock to coordinate a relief effort of unprecedented complexity. "As soon as we saw the scope of the disaster, we knew we were going to be tested as never before," says MacCormack. "But our people on the ground have been through years of training for this kind of catastrophe, so we felt confident that we'd be up to the challenge."

MacCormack arrived in Jakarta in mid-January, embarking on a two-week odyssey through the heart of the disaster zone, where he worked 18-hour days and met with about 50 local STC staffers scattered across Indonesia and Sri Lanka. "It was pretty grueling for all of us, but we were encouraged every day by the sight of thousands of children playing and resting peacefully in the safe zones—areas our rescue teams established in the temporary camps," he says. "In spite of the devastation all around us, our people kept their focus and their sense of hope.

It was a privilege for me to step in and help wherever I could."

Two months after the nightmare of the Asian tsunami, the Westport, Connecticut-based STC was still working 24 hours a day in what MacCormack describes as "the largest and most complicated relief effort in the history of our organization." While raising a staggering $200 million in only six weeks for the flood victims, the agency has also moved dozens of highly mobile rescue teams into position throughout tsunami-stricken regions of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India.

"The tsunami disaster was a catastrophe," he says quietly, "and its negative effects will be felt for generations to come. But the overall trend for all of the people in that region—including the children of Indonesia and Sri Lanka—is still very much upwards, and I also remain more hopeful than ever about the future for children everywhere.

 "You know, when I was at Middlebury, 80 percent of the world's population lived in absolute poverty. They lived with hunger and disease and illiteracy and hopelessness. And when you realize that only 40 years later, that figure is down to 20 percent—why, just in my lifetime, we've seen 60 percent of the world's population move out of poverty. The bottom line is that the number of people who live in that kind of misery has been going down every year—and Save the Children has played an important part in that trend. How can you get more positive than that? We're not talking about pie in the sky here; these are the actual facts. Only a hundred years ago, life for so many people in the world was 'nasty, brutish, and short.' But we've made enormous gains since then, and we're going to go right on making enormous gains—which is why I come to work each day with a feeling of overwhelming hope."—TN

First Aide

In the middle of the night on December 29, 2004, Carol Shattuck '67 stared out the small window of a cargo plane into the vast darkness of the evening sky. The constant, heavy drone of the plane's propellers filled the air and sent a vibration through the frame of the airplane. She saw nothing. No stars, no lights, no line of horizon to make out in the distance. But somewhere between fatigue and anticipation, she couldn't sleep. "It was like a cocoon," she remembers. "I was trying to get my head around what we were doing and what we were carrying and the horrific disaster that we were responding to."

For three days, Shattuck had been focused on little else. As a senior vice president at AmeriCares, an international humanitarian organization based in Stamford, Connecticut, she was on call over the Christmas weekend when the tsunami hit Southeast Asia. News of the disaster pulled her immediately into the office, where she started making phone calls to the Indonesian, Indian, and Sri Lankan embassies in Washington, D.C. It soon became clear that relief needs in all three countries were tremendous, and AmeriCares's expertise in delivering medical and water-purification supplies could make a difference.
Shattuck was assigned to a team responsible for coordinating AmeriCares's relief efforts in Sri Lanka, where the tsunami swept more than 30,000 people to their deaths, injured 15,000, and displaced 800,000. "It was unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime," she says. Whole towns were washed away by the giant waves, leaving much of a nation uprooted, mourning, in shock.

In consultation with organizations on the ground, her team made arrangements to send a major airlift with 15 tons of supplies from AmeriCares's warehouse in Amsterdam to the capital city of Colombo. On Monday, an advance team flew out to prepare for the airlift's arrival in Sri Lanka, and Shattuck was the logical candidate to accompany the airlift. "It just made sense for me to go," she says matter-of-factly. "I was working that week anyway."

On Tuesday, she flew overnight to Amsterdam, where she met the chartered transport plane, a four-propeller, Russian-designed, 1960s-era Antonov-12—"the kind with the glass nose where the navigator sits," she remembers. The plane's cargo was already loaded when she wedged herself into a space behind the cockpit with a CNN correspondent, three members of the cargo crew, and an AmeriCares volunteer physician. She settled in for the longest flight of her life.

For 20 hours, the plane lumbered towards the southeast, its noisy propellers making even simple conversation difficult. The cockpit's lights were too dim for reading, the space too cramped to lie down. "You couldn't really do anything," she remembers.

The plane landed at tiny airports in Bulgaria and the United Arab Emirates to refuel, giving the passengers a welcome opportunity to stretch their legs in the dark. Finally, the plane flew into the dawn, and at midday on Thursday, December 30, it touched down safely in Colombo.

Shattuck had been to Sri Lanka before. As a 10-year-old girl, she had visited the island then known as Ceylon on one of her family's many trips during the years when her father, C. John Holmes '36, was in the U.S. Foreign Service. Though her memories of that trip are faded now, all the years of living in such places as Germany, Thailand, Korea, and Japan had left their mark. As an adult, Shattuck has rarely passed up a chance to travel, and she and husband Jim Shattuck '62 even lived in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia for a time. "The international world is very much a part of my life," she says.

Since joining AmeriCares three years ago, Shattuck has played a key role in managing the organization's growth, helping to add staff and relocate the offices to Stamford. And in an organization with only 85 employees, she knows she is never far from the front lines of an emergency relief effort. In recent years, operations have taken her to the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. "All of us are essentially ready to go when needed," she says. And so, on December 29, Shattuck went to Sri Lanka.

From the moment the plane landed, the challenge of participating in such a massive relief operation became clear. The Colombo airport was packed with relief planes, and the unloading process was painfully slow. For two hours, the AmeriCares plane sat on the tarmac awaiting attention from ground crews; then it took nearly 24 hours to unload the cargo and clear customs. Reunited briefly with her advance team, Shattuck did not wait for the last boxes to be loaded onto trucks to be transported to the coast. Instead, she peeled off her winter clothes and turned her attention to the capital, where she would help direct AmeriCares's operations in Sri Lanka for the next week.

In Colombo, the Sri Lankan government had established a Center for National Operations in the Office of the Presidential Secretariat, an old, columned, stone building dating to the country's days as a British colony. There, swarms of representatives from the Sri Lankan government, aid organizations, foreign governments, and the United Nations gathered daily for briefings, meetings, and consultations on relief efforts.

At one desk, officials offered information on displaced persons and conferred with aid organizations on providing food and temporary shelter. Elsewhere, officials shared health data and negotiated with aid organizations for the delivery of antibiotics, pain-relief medicines, and emergency health workers.

Shattuck learned that the tsunami had destroyed more than 40 hospitals and medical clinics, and tens of thousands of people in coastal areas still needed immediate medical care; possibly millions more were at risk of epidemics that could spread quickly without access to clean water.

Working closely with officials from the Ministry of Health, she committed AmeriCares to two more airlifts of medicine and water-purification supplies, and made arrangements for their delivery to disaster-hit areas. She also laid the groundwork for an AmeriCares partnership with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to purchase and set up 2,500 units of temporary shelter for families whose houses had been destroyed. And with an eye on the longer term, Shattuck helped launch AmeriCares into a clean-water initiative with the Sri Lankan government to provide communities and camps with systems to deliver safe drinking water well into the future.

Since her return from Asia, Shattuck says the pace of her work has hardly slackened. From Connecticut, she is still the primary communication link with the AmeriCares staff, who continue their efforts in Sri Lanka to provide shelter, clean water, and medical services to those in need. And as proud as she is of her organization's work, she is quick to applaud the donations of time and money from people around the world in response to the crisis. "We had 1,500 people volunteer to help, manning our phones to take donations into the night," she says. "The Web site was absolutely inundated, raising $14 million in two weeks. We had to keep adding capacity to meet the need."

By March, AmeriCares had raised more than $40 million, all of which will go directly to relief efforts. The organization has already sent a total of seven airlifts to the region, and it continues to support ongoing operations in Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka that will help to rebuild the health care infrastructure, provide clean water, and fight malaria. "We will be there for a long time," Shattuck says.

Meanwhile, AmeriCares forges ahead with relief efforts in more than 40 countries around the world, training doctors in Kosovo, providing medical supplies to Haiti, and responding to a deadly viral outbreak in El Salvador. "We're not taking our eye off the needs of the rest of the world," Shattuck insists. And she's ready for the next crisis that could come at any time. "We don't have an emergency every day, thank goodness," she says. "But it's energizing work. You make a unique connection with people when you can bring help that is really needed." —AB

Call and Response

When Mike Rea '91 heard the news of the tsunami, it wasn't clear to him at first how to respond. As the founder and managing director of Give2Asia, a nonprofit philanthropic organization in San Francisco, he had spent the last four years finding ways to help American donors to make charitable contributions to indigenous organizations in Asia. With strong support from the Asia Foundation, Give2Asia's founding organization, he had matched more than 800 donors with hundreds of projects from China to Afghanistan, facilitating over $12 million of transnational philanthropy.

But Give2Asia's model had not yet been tested by a major humanitarian crisis. Rea had consciously built the organization with a focus on personalized donor services, addressing a niche that few other organizations could. Working closely with one donor at a time, he kept the organization committed to a "program-neutral" stance, meaning Give2Asia did not have programmatic goals to achieve in Asia; it took its cue from the wishes of donors.

"I like to think of our work as transnational philanthropy," Rea says. "We help to create a loop of philanthropy across the Pacific." With reasonable fees and a reputation for excellent service, the donor-centric model allowed Give2Asia to double the value of its efforts every year since its inception.

But the tsunami disaster presented an entirely different challenge. When Rea stepped into his office on December 27, e-mails and phone calls began to pour in from donors and community foundations looking to Give2Asia for guidance. Here was an unprecedented international crisis that demanded an emergency response, and huge numbers of donors were yearning to help. Soon calls began to come from Asian partners and the Asia Foundation reps in the field, as well, asking for aid. "We knew we had to do something, and we knew we had to do something quickly," Rea says.

There was a catch: Give2Asia's model of personalized donor services couldn't possibly keep up with the crush of needs—or the generosity of donors—stirred by the tsunami. "There was no way we were going to negotiate with a thousand donors," Rea says. "We simply didn't have the time to develop project proposals and then say to all of these interested people, 'Do you like the project? Here's a budget. Will you fund it?' "

And so Give2Asia dove into what Rea calls "normal nonprofit land" to meet the challenge of the tsunami. For him personally, it was the most consuming entrepreneurial experience of his life: essentially, growing a new philanthropic arm of Give2Asia in the middle of an international emergency. After an intense couple of days, Give2Asia launched its Tsunami Recovery Fund on December 29, its first-ever themed fund, with a focus on medium- and long-term reconstruction in tsunami-affected areas.

The fund caught the interest of several major donors, which suddenly put Give2Asia in the spotlight. Software giant McAfee Inc. jumped in with a contribution of $250,000. A week later, the Tiger Woods Foundation pledged $100,000, which the Professional Golfers' Association agreed to match. Internet auction company eBay collaborated with Give2Asia on a $100,000 donation to India. Articles mentioned Give2Asia in the Wall Street Journal and San Francisco Chronicle, and the fund took off.

One of the strangest—and largest—donations came in February, when WQHT-FM in New York City announced that it would contribute $1 million to the fund. In a bizarre moment of poor judgment, a WQHT producer had aired a song that mocked victims of the tsunami, prompting an immediate public outcry. In an act of contrition, the station's owners fired two staff members, suspended three others, and wrote a check to Give2Asia that represents the fund's single largest gift to date.

In all, Rea says he expects the Tsunami Recovery Fund will collect about $4 million. For some aid organizations, it's a drop in the bucket. But considering that it represents about half of all the philanthropy handled by Give2Asia last year, Rea sees the total as a milestone. "In some ways, it has stretched us in new directions, and in some ways, it has validated our position, our niche, our need," he says. "It's a coming of age for us."

Now that the immediate relief needs have been addressed, Give2Asia is beginning to focus on a range of other issues affecting the region's economic, social, and ecological recovery.

In some ways, it's a return to Give2Asia's traditional strength: building relationships with local groups in Asia who will leverage aid money to improve the lives of the people there.
In Sri Lanka, for example, Give2Asia will disburse $52,000 to two organizations that will help 3,500 high school students get back on track to take "A-level" examinations this spring—tests they must pass in order to continue their education. A large component of the grant will fund the distribution of study notes to students who lost all of their belongings.

Rea is especially excited about several "cross-sectoral partnerships" identified by Asia Foundation reps. In Indonesia, Give2Asia has agreed to fund a grassroots effort by an Acehnese women's organization, True Partner of Indonesian Women, to ensure women's inclusion in the national dialogue on reconstruction. Meanwhile, in Thailand, Give2Asia has committed to funding a variety of projects that will assist the Ministry of Justice in "triage legal aid." A $95,000 grant will pay for legal assistance for tsunami survivors and help to replace essential legal paperwork that was destroyed in the disaster.

The list of other project proposals on Rea's desk is long and impressive: providing recapitalization grants for small businesses; accessing post-traumatic stress counseling for children; rebuilding public marketplaces; restoring tourist resources; rebuilding docks and piers with more environmentally sustainable designs; re-equipping shrimp fisherman with turtle-excluding nets. It's a list he looks forward to tackling in the weeks and months to come, as Give2Asia puts all of its tsunami fund to work.

Rea isn't sanguine about the challenges ahead in tsunami-hit areas of Asia. "Most of these places have suffered in poverty for a long time. A tidal wave and a lot of resources aren't going to make these tensions go away," he observes. But at the same time, he has plenty of reason for hope. "We are going to give local folks the resources to effect the change they want for their own communities," he says. "They might not get all the way there. They might make strides and suffer setbacks. But there is still a window of opportunity, because we have some assets to play with right now."

As for Rea himself, the last two months have been a quite a ride, and they have satisfied every ounce of his entrepreneurial appetite. "This was our first experience with having to respond to an external natural disaster, but it was something that was just out there as a priority in the world," he says. "I'm glad we found a way to respond when so many people turned to us and said, 'Give us a way to help.'"—AB

 
Freelance writer Tom Nugent has profiled news makers for a number of publications, including the New York Times, theWashington Post,The Nation, Mother Jones,and theBaltimore Sun.

Andrew Barker is a freelance writer and correspondent for the
Burlington Free PressandMontpelier Times Argus.